By understanding our origins as a biological species, physical anthropology makes important contributions to improving human health, nutrition, and adaptation to diverse environments. This initiative brings together faculty and students from multiple anthropological sub-fields and other disciplines by establishing an urban focus in our teaching, research, and theoretical perspectives.
Although Anthropology of the City maintains a global perspective, Detroit serves as an important backdrop and training-ground for urban anthropology at Wayne State. Kirby St. Wayne State University. Warrior strong Login. Search: Search. Twitter Instagram Flickr YouTube. Jobs for applied anthropologists have shown strong growth in the recent past with more and more opportunities becoming available as demand grows for their valuable skill sets.
Visit the Careers page to learn more. While anthropologists devote much of their attention to what human groups share across time and space, they also study how these groups are different. Just as there is diversity in the ways people physically adapt to their environment, build and organize societies, and communicate, there are also many ways to do anthropology.
Unique approaches to anthropology developed in many countries around the world. For example, in some countries the four-field approach is not as strong as it is in others. Anthropologists from across the globe work together through international organizations to try and understand more about our lives as humans. The World Council of Anthropology Associations is a network of international and national anthropology associations that aims to promote worldwide communication and cooperation in anthropology.
Anthropologists are employed in a number of different sectors, from colleges and universities to government agencies, NGOs, businesses, and health and human services. Within the university, they teach undergraduate and graduate anthropology, and many offer anthropology courses in other departments and professional schools such as business, education, design, and public health.
Anthropologists contribute significantly to interdisciplinary fields such as international studies and ethnic and gender studies, and some work in academic research centers. Outside the university, anthropologists work in government agencies, private businesses, community organizations, museums, independent research institutes, service organizations, the media; and others work as independent consultants and research staff for agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.
More than half of all anthropologists now work in organizations outside the university. Their work may involve building research partnerships, assessing economic needs, evaluating policies, developing new educational programs, recording little-known community histories, providing health services, and other socially relevant activities.
You will find anthropologists addressing social and cultural consequences of natural disasters, equitable access to limited resources, and human rights at the global level. As you can see from the extensive list of sections within the American Anthropological Association, anthropologists have research interests that cut across academic and applied domains of scholarship.
These domains reflect the many significant issues and questions that anthropologists engage today, their areas of employment, the locations around the world where they do research, and their commitment to using research results to improve lives.
For biological anthropologists, these connections are found in both field and lab research. The discipline of anthropology has influenced other disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and in turn has been influenced by multidisciplinary approaches integrating these modes of inquiry.
Anthropologists are often in dialogue with historians, literary critics, psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and other specialists whose scholarship engages anthropological questions. Therefore, in addition to ethnographic methods, anthropologists will sometimes employ more quantitative social science methods such as surveys , natural science methods such as laboratory research , and methods associated with the humanities such as textual and visual studies. One of the qualities that makes anthropology distinct as an academic discipline is its insistently cross-cultural, or comparative, perspective.
By extending our vision beyond familiar social contexts and experiences, and drawing on knowledge and experience from all over the world, this perspective offers a productive counterweight to "culture bound" or ethnocentric ideas regarding human nature, values, and ways of life.
Anthropological theory emphasizes the importance of context and people's understandings of their own milieu and the world around them. Anthropology includes biological, linguistic and medical fields as well as social and cultural ones, and is as much about human ecology as it is about the 'ecology of mind', to recall the title of Gregory Bateson's classic work. I can remember when I was choosing what to study at University.
I loved languages, literature, history and art, and I yearned to travel. But I had never heard of anthropology. Many of my students tell me similar stories of how they discovered anthropology by accident, and when I tell them about the anthropology A-level they say they wish they could have taken it at their school. Rooted in older disciplines closer to the natural sciences, such as geography and biology, as well as in humanities and social sciences, anthropology is about human ecology, different ways of being in the physical world, and about sustainability - not just culture and identity.
It is good that the press has recently covered the well justified protests against the axing of the anthropology A-level before it has even been given a chance to take root most schools still do not have the capacity to offer it.
But the reports emphasise only the value of anthropology for understanding cultural difference. Yes, it is true that anthropology can help us to understand and relate to different cultures, different ways of being in the world.
It can certainly offer ways to educate people to become more tolerant of diversity. But anthropology is much more than this. In the face of a global ecological crisis which most of the press fails to take seriously, the discipline also has much to offer. Anthropologists are well known for documenting traditional livelihoods, which are often sustainable adaptations to environments which would be difficult to live in without rich bodies of traditional knowledge and practice to draw upon.
As The Ecologist frequently reports , many indigenous peoples have a wealth of traditional knowledge, which is embedded in complex sets of practices that are compatible with, and indeed founded upon, long term ecological relations. Anthropologists have been at the forefront of efforts to understand these practices and to bring them to the attention of the wider world. We show how people manipulate their environments to make them more productive, rather than depleting the resources that they find - examples of anthropogenic forest islands or dark earths are cases in point.
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