Cultural anthropology focuses on the study of cultures around the world.
Understanding and living with diversity is one of today's urgent challenges.
Our planet has grown much more interconnected. Yet people everywhere continue
to maintain different languages and customs, from places as diverse as Pakistan
and Zimbabwe to Kansas and New York. Cultural anthropology is the discipline
that studies how people create and define these distinct ways of living.
Today is an exciting time in cultural anthropology. The discipline no longer
limits itself only to "primitive" lifeways, having expanded to encompass
the study of both non-Western and Western societies. Topics of study now range
from ethnic and race relations to gender, sexuality, nationalism, law, medicine,
and popular culture. New methods and theories have arisen to understand these
complex phenomena, influenced by such currents of thought as feminism, postmodernism,
political economy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. Among the broad
concerns of cultural anthropology today are:
* Under what conditions is culture invented?
* Under what conditions do cultural understandings gain force, persist, and spread?
* How does culture intersect with history, economics, and politics?
The undergraduate program at Duke encourages an international perspective
to the examination of such key questions with course offerings on diverse
areas of the world. Through the study of cultural anthropology, students gain
valuable tools to analyze and solve problems in an increasingly global society.
The Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke has a deep commitment to its
undergraduate majors. The nineteen members of the faculty have research interests
in a variety of issues spanning across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle
East, and the United States. All are leading national and international experts
in their fields and two Cultural Anthropology professors have recently won
the prestigious Trinity College Awards for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching.
The size of most courses is small, and majors receive personal attention from
their faculty advisors in selecting courses and developing career plans.
Mission Statement
Our program is based on the commitment to developing the intellectual skills, cross-cultural fluency, and sense of civic and moral engagement of our students that defines the broader mission of Trinity College.
All our courses promote independent thinking, and prioritize giving students the critical tools and skills to make sense of culture and politics in the contemporary world. We introduce students -- and allow them to explore – key debates in anthropology and social theory about the interpretation of culture.
As much as any discipline, our program also emphasizes the importance of cross-cultural understanding. Our courses focus on both the United States, and cultures everywhere around the world. They underscore that human behavior is always shaped by cultural background. Cultural Anthropology examines how globalization has made the world into an evermore interconnected place, and yet also the processes that lead to the persistence and sometimes sharpening of differences in values, politics, and culture across the planet.
Our program also encourages students to consider the themes of civic and moral engagement. Many Cultural Anthropology classes examine the questions of social inequality and efforts at change, and the more specific challenges of understanding global poverty, democracy and authoritarianism, and social movements and political activism.
By focusing on global interconnections, they also examine the varied dimensions of mutual responsibility and interaction, and our shared fate as common inhabitants of the planet.
Educational Objectives
Our central objective for Cultural Anthropology majors is to help them develop their intellectual skills, cross-cultural fluency, and sense of civic and moral engagement.
1) Intellectual Development: Our majors will leave the program with greater analytical and critical skills, and to think with greater depth about the world. As part of this, every major will gain knowledge of the most important theories and debates about globalization and its effects, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, mass culture and mass media, and class inequality and conflict, among others.
2) Cross-cultural Knowledge: Our majors also gain a qualitatively better knowledge of key issues in different parts of the world, both of societies in the northern hemisphere and those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This means understanding how cultural beliefs and social structures vary from place to place and over time. The objective is for students both to better understand the culture and society around them and those worldwide in their connections, similarities, and contrasts, a truly global view.
3) Social Awareness Majors will also come away with a greater awareness of the challenges of social change and civic engagement. Although we do not want our students to imagine that there are any simple or neatly agreed upon solutions, Cultural Anthropology does encourage greater knowledge and critical thinking about the world to which we belong. It emphasizes the need to recognize injustices and patterns of inequality of all kinds and a sense of shared planetary citizenship.
Assessment Measures
The Cultural Anthropology department uses the following indirect and direct measures to measure progress towards its broad learning objectives:
1)Indirect Measures:
a) Course evaluations: The departmental chair reviews course evaluations to assess the effectiveness of faculty in the classroom, with special attention both to the overall quality of each class and to student feedback in relation to the departmental learning objectives.
b) Number of students in honors thesis program: the number of students may fluctuate from year to year, but a steady or increasing number reflects the health of program and commitment especially to the further development of intellectual skills required to carry out an independent research project and to the cross-cultural knowledge gained in the process.
c) Faculty year-end retreat: undergraduate education is an important part of the discussion at the year-end faculty retreat and evaluation process. Here faculty discuss success at achieving learning objectives and make adjustments in curriculum and course content based on these exchanges of experiences and ideas
2)Direct Measures
a)Entry/Exit Survey: majors typically declare towards the end of their sophomore year, and are then assigned a faculty advisor. Upon declaring, each new major is asked to take a half hour on-line survey aimed at gauging their level in Cultural Anthropology; this survey is multiple choice and contains a series of questions especially designed to gauge the intellectual and critical skills in cultural analysis, the cross-cultural knowledge, and the social awareness, in other words the three interrelated learning objectives of the department. At the end of their senior year just before graduation, majors will be once again required to take the on-line survey; the questions will be different, but at the same level so as to provide a view of the progress made towards the learning objectives in the course of the major.
The department will carry out its first set of entry surveys with majors declaring in the spring of 2009. The first round of exit surveys of graduating seniors will occur in Spring of 2011 as these first majors to have been surveyed leave the program. At that time, we will assess the results of both surveys, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure their effectiveness in measuring our learning objectives. The department expects that 90 percent of graduating majors will show improvement in each of the three main objectives. If, after the first two years of obtaining results from graduating seniors, it does not reach this benchmark, we will reevaluate our curriculum and the structure of the major to better ensure the achievement of our learning objectives.