The Department of Anthropology at NYU is one of the country’s leading programs for all four fields of our discipline: Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Linguistic Anthropology, taking students across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Anthropology asks broad questions concerning the origins and development of humans and their divergent systems of thought, belief, and social order. The faculty has a broad range of research interests that cover virtually every continent around the globe,. The Department houses an extensive film and video collection, as well as teaching and research labs Archaeology, Biology, and Linguistics. A regular colloquium series and an active Anthropology Undergraduate Student Association welcome your participation. Formal and informal cooperative arrangements with museums, zoos, and other institutions in the greater New York area place at students’ disposal a group of scholars and resources that are unparalleled in this country.
Among the four fields:
Archaeology studies the material remains of worlds gone by and draws on scientific methods to decipher how people lived, worked, and wrought social order across time and space. Special interests include the study of prehistoric hunters and gatherers and the development of more complex societies in Africa, Central Asia, North America, and Europe.
Biological Anthropology concentrates on the evolution, biology, and comparative behavior of human and non-human primates within the context of culture, society, and ecology. Faculty and students are currently doing research throughout Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia
Cultural Anthropology takes up the study of the how social order is constituted and meaning made across living worlds, with a particular attention to social difference and its many expressions, hierarchies, inequalities. By encompassing everything from art, architecture, economic life, gender, race, politics, religion, public heath, and social studies of science, it is among the most encompassing of the subfields, but is also driven by a single keystone method: fieldwork.
Linguistic Anthropology examines language as a key to understanding the social, symbolic and expressive lives of a wide swath of members of society. It studies language's impact on other aspects of cultural life, such as social organization, religion, and politics.