About the Major

A Holistic Overview of What Anthropology is:

Anthropologists study human beings from every time period, in every way possible, in all their complexity. Sociocultural anthropologists talk to and observe living people, often over long periods of time and through close participation in the communities they form, whether those are in modern biological labs, in globalizing villages throughout the world, or people joined only through the internet. Medical anthropologists study how disease, violence, and the development of the body are understood by contemporary people. Archaeologists interpret human social life in the past through the study of the things people made, used, and discarded and the traces of their impacts on the environment, whether their sites are 20th century buildings on the Berkeley campus, early colonial villages in the Pacific, or the campsites of Palaeolithic Europe. Biological anthropologists seek to understand the physical nature of human beings and how present-day aspects of human biology interact with current social and environmental conditions, including exploring the social ecology and biology of our close cousins the primates and distinctively human features of human brains, genetics, reproduction, aging, and disease, all considered from an evolutionary perspective.