The sociocultural track SCA introduces students to a wide range of scholarship on cultural meaning-making and changes in societies around the globe. Courses in the medical anthropology track MedAnth focus on global health, different cultural notions of psychological and physical wellbeing, and science and technology studies e. Students in this track will also learn about the biological aspects of human evolution, as well as the impact of culture and the environment on human growth, development, and disease.
The law, politics, and economics track LPE introduces students to cross-cultural studies of customary and case law, governance, systems of exchange, and debt. For Anthropology majors , regardless of track, our courses are designed to provide students with a broad understanding of the discipline through courses on foundational concepts, fundamental methods, and the history of ideas.
In addition, special topic courses offer students significant opportunities to craft individualized programs in consultation with their advisers. For non-majors , our department welcomes students from all disciplines to learn how anthropological theory and methods can be helpful and, indeed, critical for making sense of today's complex world. The flows of people who move temporarily between countries have expanded dramatically and have led to intensified contact: Businesspeople, development workers and tourists travel from rich to poor countries.
At the same time as people from affluent countries visit other parts of the world in growing numbers and under new circumstances, the opposite movement is also taking place, though often not for the same reasons.
Largely because of the substantial differences in standards of living and life opportunities between rich and poor countries, millions of people from non-Western countries have settled in Europe, North America and other wealthy parts of the world.
These movements have introduced new ways of acting, being and thinking into Western lives. A generation ago, it might have been necessary for an inhabitant in a Western city to travel to the Indian subcontinent in order to savour the fragrances and sounds of South Asian cuisine and music.
As a result, curiosity about others has been stimulated, and it has also become necessary, for political reasons, to understand what cultural variation entails. Contemporary Europe is today rocked by controversies over multiculturalism, such as religious minority rights, headscarves, language instruction in schools and calls for affirmative action to counter alleged ethnic discrimination in the labour market.
These and many other topical issues testify to an urgent need to deal sensibly with cultural differences. The current refugee situation in Europe is also a reminder, if at times cruel and dramatic, of the increased connectedness of people and peoples, as well as being a reminder of the growing importance of anthropological knowledge.
The world is shrinking in other ways as well. For better and for worse, satellite television, cellphone networks and the internet have created conditions for instantaneous and friction-free communications. At the same time, individuals have a larger palette of information to choose from than they previously did. The economy is also increasingly globally integrated. In the last decades, transnational companies have grown exponentially in numbers, size and economic importance.
The capitalist mode of production and monetary economies in general, which were globally dominant throughout the 20th century, have become nearly universal in the 21st century. In politics as well, global issues increasingly dominate the agenda. Issues of war and peace, the environment and poverty are all of such a scope, and involve so many transnational linkages that they cannot be handled satisfactorily by single states alone. Pandemics and international terrorism are also transnational problems which can only be understood and addressed through international coordination.
This ever tighter interweaving of formerly relatively separate sociocultural environments can lead to a growing recognition of the fact that we are all in the same boat: that humanity, divided as it is by class, culture, geography and opportunities, is fundamentally one. Culture changes at a more rapid pace than ever before in our era, and this can be noticed nearly everywhere. In the West, the typical ways of life are certainly being transformed. The stable nuclear family is no longer the only socially acceptable way of life.
Youth culture and trends in fashion and music change so fast that older people have difficulties following their twists and turns; food habits are changing before our eyes, leading to greater diversity within many countries; secularism is rapidly changing the role of religion in society and vice versa; and media consumption is thoroughly transnational. Finally, recent decades have seen the rise of an unprecedented interest in cultural identity, which is increasingly seen as an asset.
Many feel that the local uniqueness that they used to count on is being threatened by globalisation, indirect colonialism and other forces from the outside. To return here, you must click the "back" button on your browser program. All of the completely isolated societies of the past have long since been drawn into the global economy and heavily influenced by the dominant cultures of the large nations. Many other cultural traditions will be lost as well. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists have worked diligently to study and understand this diversity that is being lost.
Linguistic Anthropology. An example of nonverbal communication in modern American culture. What do you think the chief petty officer in khaki is communicating non-verbally to the sailor in this scene? Linguistic anthropologists study t he human communication process. They focus their research on understanding such phenomena as the physiology of speech, the structure and function of languages, social and cultural influences on speech and writing, nonverbal communication , how languages developed over time, and how they differ from each other.
This is very different from what goes on in an English or a foreign language class. Linguists are not language teachers or professional translators. Most anthropological linguistic research has been focused on unwritten, non-European languages.
Linguists usually begin their study of such a language by learning first hand from native speakers what its rules are for making sounds and meaning from those sounds, including the rules for sentence construction. Linguists also learn about different regional and social dialects as well as the social conventions of speaking the language in different situations.
A hotly debated question in linguistic anthropology since the early 20th century centers on whether or not our languages predispose us to see the environment in specific ways. In other words, are languages filters for reality? For instance, if a language does not have a word for the color orange, can its speakers distinguish orange from red and yellow?
The answer to this question is not as simple as it initially seems. Archaeologists are interested in recovering the prehistory and early history of societies and their cultures. They systematically uncover the evidence by excavating, dating, and analyzing the material remains left by people in the past. Archaeologists are essentially detectives who search through many thousands of pieces of fragmentary pots and other artifacts as well as environmental data in order to reconstruct ancient life ways.
In a sense, this makes archaeology the cultural anthropology of the past. Archaeology is also related to biological anthropology in its use of the same methods in excavating and analyzing human skeletal remains found in archaeological sites. Archaeologists are in a unique position to understand the development of human societies and cultures from those of our distant hunter gatherer ancestors through the ancient civilizations on up to the present.
Texas State offers coursework in a number of these biological anthropology specializations. Cultural anthropology deals primarily with all aspects of cultural variation in the present or recent past. Through a variety of theoretical approaches and research methods, anthropologists today study the cultures of people all over the world, including social, political, economic, and ideological facets of cultures.
Linguistic anthropology is an area of study within cultural anthropology that examines language structure, the use of language in given societies and social contexts, and the historical relationships of languages to one another.
Texas State offers coursework on a variety of cultural and linguistic topics, including medical anthropology, sociolinguistics, gender studies, speech sounds, and economic anthropology. Back Main Menu.
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