Social and cultural anthropology study human society in the present, using participant-observation, interviewing, and other techniques to understand the full round of life in a single culture, a subculture, or a multicultural system.

The Anthropology Department aims to produce in students a view of the world we call the anthropological perspective; seeing the varieties of humanity in holistic, worldwide terms, and an appreciation for the creativity and diversity of humankind. Toward that end the Anthropology curriculum offers a diversity of classes on peoples and cultures of the world, past and present.

The socio-cultural emphasis in the Department instructs students in current methods and theory of anthropology to provide them with the tools necessary to apply learned principles in whatever field they might embrace. We seek to instill in students the fundamental tenets and ethics of the discipline.

Anthropology seeks to document the nature of the human condition, among all cultures past and present. Anthropologists use theories to orient themselves regarding what they should look at and how to organize what they see. They use field methods to acquire and record data produced by organized life in particular places, both in the past (archaeology) and present (socio-cultural anthropology). From this data, anthropologists produce descriptions of the human condition and of human culture and behavior. They then use these descriptions of life to investigate whether the theories and methods they originally used to orient the description were or are adequate to the task. Of course, the theories fall short and therefore can be improved. Thus we deploy theory to organize methods of inspection that produce description and we deploy description to interrogate and improve the adequacy of theory and methods.