Master in Anthropology

The most important characteristics of our program include the following: The Department maintains a commitment to a four-field approach to graduate training despite an apparent national trend towards increasing specialization at earlier levels of graduate training. We feel that a substantial background in sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, anthropological archaeology, and linguistics is essential to student training irrespective of sub-disciplinary specialization.

Current theoretical approaches to problems of anthropological interest increasingly blur the traditional distinctions between sub-disciplines. Students with only minimal cross-quadrant training will be equally limited in their choice of future research topics. Further, in an increasingly difficult job market, there is growing pressure for a more generalized competency. As anthropology PhDs increasingly find employment in smaller institutions and outside academia, the drawbacks of highly specialized, wholly thesis-focused graduate programs become more serious. We feel that a student with a solid four-field background can readily opt to specialize, while one-talent specialists are hard to retrain as generalists.

The Department maintains stringent degree requirements such that students who complete the program have reached a level of training equivalent to, if not superior to virtually any other anthropology Master's program in the country.