Department Philosophy
The Anthropology Department at Colorado College strives to provide students with an expansive outlook on human cultures through time and across space. We seek to fulfill the discipline's promise as one of the cornerstone subjects of a contemporary liberal arts education.

Colorado College's location and block plan format afford distinctive, unparalleled prospects for undergraduate anthropology students. We are able to expose students, anthropology majors and non-majors alike, to multiple opportunities for hands-on anthropological fieldwork, including field-based courses and lengthy field trips, during the regular academic calendar year. Together with creative pedagogy and rigorous expectations for reading, writing, and critical qualitative and quantitative analysis, we aim to provide a second-to-none undergraduate educational experience in anthropology.

For a small department at a liberal arts college, ours is also unusual in representing all four sub-fields of American anthropology: 1) archaeology, which focuses on the material cultures and peoples of the past; 2) biological anthropology, which concentrates on the relationships between culture and biology and how these affect the lives of humans and our evolutionary relatives; 3) linguistic anthropology, which addresses both the formal complexity of linguistic systems and the role that such systems play in the regulating and negotiating of social life; and 4) socio-cultural anthropology, which stresses contemporary peoples, combining ethnography and ethnology to portray variable human systems of value, practice and organization. In continuity with the original four-field American vision, our challenge is to demonstrate for students how dialogue across sub-fields allows anthropological perspectives to be unrivaled in their holism. Our curriculum reflects this commitment by requiring students to study all four sub-fields in introductory courses, and to pursue advanced-level courses in at least two sub-fields.

The Anthropology Department recognizes that its majors have quite varied interests, both personal and vocational. They aspire to careers in the arts, business, and varied professions and service agencies, as well as to careers as professional anthropologists; therefore, no single set of requirements for everyone is sufficient. Further, the curriculum is designed to serve the general college student as well as the anthropology major. The introductory and most intermediate (200-) level courses are open to all students, have no prerequisites, and generally satisfy certain all-college requirements in addition to requirements for the anthropology major. Courses at the intermediate level offer students a wide range of options for exploring anthropological perspectives on questions central to other academic disciplines. With appropriate prerequisites, most advanced courses are also open to non-majors.

In addition to formal coursework, advanced anthropology majors undertake research culminating in a senior paper. Students carry out independent research working closely with a faculty advisor and present their work in a public forum during the senior year.

This senior research presents an opportunity, difficult to achieve in regular block courses, for majors to work on a well-focused topic over a sustained period of time and to develop the expository skills to present it to their peers.

The Anthropology Department recognizes the college's historic role as an institution of learning in the liberal arts and sciences and, consequently, encourages its majors to work out a program of all-college study that complements their particular interests in anthropology.