Department of Anthropology
O v e r v i e w
Photo:
Ana Schaller de la Cova
The Department of Anthropology, which was founded in 1978, has established itself as one of the nation's foremost programs. The department, with its biocultural focus, has set and kept the highest standards of research, teaching and service.
Anthropology is unique among academic departments in that our field of study is partly natural sciences, partly social sciences, and partly humanities. Just as many modern departments of psychology cut across the Natural Science and Social Science Divisions, and departments of government, political science, and history cut across the Social Science and Humanities Divisions, anthropology participates in the intellectual life of all three divisions. Because we do not have the resources here at Emory at present to cover all disciplines within anthropology, we have chosen to be a two field department covering thoroughly social and cultural anthropology on the one hand, and physical and biological anthropology on the other.
Anthropology is the only academic discipline that presents a unified conception of human nature and human experience. It is the only setting in which, for example, someone who understands the evolution, structure and function of the brain meets regularly with someone who is intimate with the variety of human languages and rituals; in which someone who measures economic decision making in primitive and modern agricultural settings meets with someone who has mastered the literature on food use and distribution in nonhuman primates; in which someone concerned about economic development in the underdeveloped world meets with someone who is familiar with current findings on the physiology of lactation in relation to fertility. Everyone who has experience of university life knows how difficult it is to promote such exchanges across departmental and divisional barriers; in our department they are an everyday occurrence. The value for students is inestimable as they face the challenge of the bewildering array of subjects that constitutes the liberal arts education. Anthropologists, more than any others in the university, help them to appreciate and to heed Emerson's warning, in his l830 essay "The American Scholar," that "we have had enough of fingers and thumbs, what we need is a whole hand."