Anthropology

The goal of the Anthropology Department is to prompt students to grapple with what it means to be human, through critical engagement with method and theory and the interplay between the two in original research.

About the Major

At Hamilton, anthropology is a holistic discipline. Students and faculty consider and deconstruct inference from language, behavior, material culture, and biological adaptations of humans. They trace how our questions, pursuits, and dilemmas have emerged in ways shaped by power and inequality. Through their coursework and research opportunities, Hamilton students develop the theoretical and methodological toolkits to better understand human diversity.

Students Will Learn To:

Identify disciplinary fundamentals from multiple sub-disciplinary perspectives
Interpret anthropological themes from a critical perspective
Combine practice and methodology through research design
Apply disciplinary theoretical perspective(s) in an original research project
Create anthropological knowledge for and with multiple communities

A Sampling of Courses

Anthropology of Food

This course examines how culturally variant practices of food and eating are actively involved in (1) creating and maintaining sociality, (2) constructing and reinforcing identity, and (3) in shaping global relations of power and inequalities. Through reading ethnographies, watching films, and discussing materials in class, this course will introduce you to other ways of viewing, experiencing, and understanding food. It will also provide an opportunity to inquire how our role as consumers reinforces certain global food-ways, impacting many people who remain unseen in the process.

Explore these select courses:

Archaeology offers the opportunity to examine social-ecological systems over long time scales. This course explores different ways of conceptualizing these systems and considers major topics such as: decreasing biodiversity, traditional ecological knowledge, human-environment interactions related to food production, social responses to natural disasters and climate change, and resilience and collapse of past societies. We’ll engage with discussions on sustainability and our ecological impact on the environment.

Human beings are a species in motion, and migration has defined our interactions with each other and the natural world. This course explores the social, organizational, and environmental consequences of migration in the past. Highlights the roles that migration has played in transformative changes in social, economic, and political organization in the human past. Examines the material consequences of migration using artifactual and human molecular evidence. Also explores the interplay between humans and the environment as people moved into previously unoccupied landscapes.

This course introduces students to the anthropology of social media, drawing on empirical and ethnographic accounts to explore how social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. We will also consider how social media research can be combined with more traditional ethnographic methods in order to understand how people live their lives both online and offline. Students will work together in small groups throughout the semester to design and produce a podcast that presents an ethnographic analysis of a social media topic of their choice.

When it comes to American schools and universities, race is everywhere. Schools are sites where many students learn what race is. This seminar examines how education is used to make the racial "other," and how educators and activists use education politically for equality and social justice. The course will also examine how contemporary educational practices continue to make and remake racial categories in the context of formal and non-formal education.

Explores the relationship between language variation and change, on the one hand, and the movement of sound and image in the wake of social and political economic processes variously identified as globalization, on the other hand. Of special concern are the ways in which processes of globalization are mediated by institutional and national forms.

All Courses Requirements

Meet Our Faculty

Chaise LaDousa

Chair, the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Anthropology; Director of Education Studies

cladousa@hamilton.edu

language and culture, particularly the ways in which institutions serve as loci for cultural production

Spencer Chen

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

scchen@hamilton.edu

Linguistic anthropology; cultural production, language ideologies, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis; audiovisual creativity, media, creative industries, voice acting/dubbing;Taiwan, Japan

Nathan Goodale

Professor of Anthropology, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs

ngoodale@hamilton.edu

complex hunter-gatherers in the interior Pacific Northwest; the forager/farmer transition in Southwest Asia; rural coastal adaptations in western Ireland

Ashley Hampton

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology

ahampton@hamilton.edu

Household archaeology, archaeology of hunter-gatherer-fishers, gender archaeology, inequality studies, agency and social identity, archaeogaming, spatial analysis

Hannah Lau

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

hxlau@hamilton.edu

Environmental archaeology, archaeology of Southwest Asia, and anthropology of food

Julie Starr

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

jstarr@hamilton.edu

China, East Asia, cultural anthropology; bodies, gender, race; food, urban ethnography, consumer culture, comparative ethnography, and history of anthropology

Chenyu Wang

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

cwang1@hamilton.edu

service-learning and volunteerism; international development and education; comparative education; critical pedagogy in global context; race and education in the American South; race theory

Explore Hamilton Stories

Hamilton Welcomes New Faculty for 2023-24

Forty-two new faculty members are joining Hamilton’s ranks, including 11 tenure-track professors in anthropology, computer science, economics, environmental studies, geosciences, physics, and sociology in addition to visiting professors, lecturers, and teaching fellows.

Students conduct archaeology dig in Clinton

Digging the Past

Students in a summer archaeological methods field course and summer science researchers agree that being out in the field digging for artifacts is far preferable to sitting in a classroom.

Archaeology Majors Present at SAA Annual Meeting

Five Hamilton archaeology majors had the opportunity to present their research at the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) 87th annual meeting.

Careers After Hamilton

Hamilton graduates who concentrated in anthropology are pursuing careers in a variety of fields, including:

Project Geologist, GEI Consultants
Physician, Jefferson General Medical & Pediatric Group
Exhibition Coordinator, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Vice President of Sales, Bayer Corp.
History Teacher, Hingham Public Schools
Attorney, Voices for Children
Staff Archaeologist, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Trial Preparation Assistant, New York County District Attorney’s Office
Professor, Brandeis University

Explore Our Spaces

The Kirner-Johnson Building, also known as KJ, houses the offices for faculty members in anthropology. The building features an atrium, team rooms for working on group projects, and five case-method classrooms with the latest technology to support teaching and learning.