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State University of New York Purchase College Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology
State University of New York Purchase College

State University of New York Purchase College

Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology

Purchase, USA

BA

English

On-Campus

Key Summary

    About: The Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology program offers a comprehensive exploration of human societies, cultures, and their development. Students engage in critical thinking and gain practical skills to analyze and understand diverse human experiences across different contexts.
    Career Outcomes: Graduates can pursue various career paths, including roles in social research, community development, education, cultural resource management, and non-profit organizations. With an emphasis on understanding cultural dynamics, this degree prepares students for meaningful work in diverse fields.

Anthropology is the study of culture and what it means to be human. We examine everyday life and ways of thinking that shape our identities. Most importantly, we look at the wide diversity of identities within and across cultures, globally.In no other field do you have the freedom to combine the mind-shifting experiences that come with deep immersion in a foreign culture with political action, philosophical meditation, creative writing, new exciting theories, video production, and music performances.

A Flexible Major

In what other major can you study Japanese anime, organized crime, social justice and activism, magic and witchcraft, gender politics in Nigeria, drag performance, noise music, urban violence, material culture, and drug addiction?Our anthropology courses focus on many of the topics that, even if they first appear exotic, are directly relevant to our everyday lives. In anthropology, we dig deep to find the concerns that are relevant to us all. These include capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization, science and technology, precarity, religion, activist politics, the arts, and the role that language plays in the ways that we think.

Methods That Get Your Hands Dirt

Anthropologists are compassionate: we study people face-to-face, and we are just as vulnerable as the people we study.Anthropology rsquo;s unique contribution to the social sciences is the methodology called ethnography. Ethnography, also known as fieldwork and participant-observation, means making long-term observations of life in a particular scene as it occurs mdash;and getting involved. Rather than surveys and statistics, ethnography means hanging out,participating, and finding your way within the full density and complexity of the scene you are studying.