Anthropology examines the nature and significance of human diversity in its biological, historical, and cultural forms. This examination is both a scientific and a humanistic undertaking, and, inevitably, students of anthropology apply what they learn to understand and ameliorate social conditions here and elsewhere, and to preserve and to interpret cultural resources from the past. Anthropology thus straddles the social sciences and human biology in its theories and methods and the interpretive traditions of the humanities as well. Anthropology challenges conventional views that regularly mystify, categorize, or essentialize human diversity by race, gender, language, nationality, and class.

An anthropological perspective on human nature and human diversity is avidly comparative and cross-cultural, relying on assessing the full range of human diversity now and in the past before making generalizations about what it means to be and to act human. By contrast to various popular efforts to reduce human nature to what are perceived to be biological imperatives or constants, anthropology is skeptical of such claims and insists on examining and interpreting the interplay of culture, history, biology, and identity formation.

The Department of Anthropology offers four overlapping subdivisions of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

In cultural anthropology the general focus is on the interplay of culture, history, and personal identity, both here in America, and in other social settings around the world. Cultural anthropologists produce ethnographies—richly developed written and/or filmed descriptions of real people in specific social, historical, and cultural settings. Courses in cultural anthropology emphasize the reading, viewing, and comparing of ethnographies to discern what is common and what is different among human groups, and then to account for both similarities and differences.

Archeology has a very similar objective, except that both the time frame and the kinds of evidence are different. Archaeologists interpret cultural change on the basis of what may be gleaned from the material remnants of human behaviors in the past—ecological changes, tools, settlements, and artistic and monumental productions, often laid bare through excavation. Archaeologists are acutely aware that there is no single authoritative interpretation of the past. As a consequence, they take special steps not only to be scientifically rigorous but also to attend to alternative explanations, especially those coming from the descendants of the ancestors whose lifeways are being investigated.

Biological anthropology examines both human origins and variability, and seeks to construct and interpret the processes of evolution and history. In addition, biological anthropologists aim to understand the factors that explain human biological diversity in the world at the present, whether in the way our bodies look and work, or in the ways they develop and change over the life span, or in how we exhibit health and disease.

Linguistic anthropology is a specialized branch of cultural anthropology with a singular focus on the most systematic domain of culture: language. Language is not only a medium of communication, but it also structures thought and the perception of reality. Moreover, language use defines social communities, whether differences lie at the level of language or dialect. Linguistic anthropologists describe languages now in use or used in the past, trace language change over time and space, and examine the social and political import of language usage.