Undergraduate Study

Anthropology is the intensive study of human diversity across time and space. Anthropologists at the University of Chicago seek to study, theorize, and account for cultural realities, past and present, and the topics they study are as varied as human experience. Anthropology majors are sought after by NGOs and find careers in medicine, business, technology, museums, education, and government. Students also receive excellent training for continuing graduate study in the social sciences, humanities, and other fields.

At the undergraduate level, coursework in Anthropology trains students to:

• Recognize and track meaning and materiality in social life by analyzing the role of material objects, built environments, technologies, and media in shaping social relations; understanding sign systems, language ideologies, and/or communicative practices as central to cultural and political life; and examining how meaning is produced through ritual, performance, visual culture, and everyday practices.
• Compare social phenomena across different scales, contexts, and time periods through cross-cultural, ethnographic, and/or historical analyses, recognizing both the specificity of local patterns and their connection to broader regional, national, and global processes.
• Critically analyze how power operates through social structures, including institutions, discourses, and everyday practices across different cultural and historical contexts; how state formation, colonialism, capitalism, and social inequality shape societies and vice versa; and how categories of difference (race, gender, class, caste, etc.) are constructed and maintained.
• Engage with major anthropological theories and their historical development and apply anthropological frameworks to contemporary issues while making connections to related fields (e.g., linguistics, sociology, history, media studies, political science, etc.).
• Design and conduct research using diverse anthropological methods (e.g., participant observation, interviews, archival work, archaeological excavation, material analyses, and/or visual documentation) while maintaining ethical and reflexive awareness of one’s own positionality as researchers and its impact on knowledge production.