Does SDSU Anthropology need a four-field approach?

by Barbara Quimby, Anthropology Graduate Student

Anthropology is the Madonna of social sciences, reinventing itself with the times while staying true to its roots. Aside from adopting a British accent, what that really means is keeping the four-field approach established over 100 years ago while adjusting each sub-discipline’s method and theoretical basis, as well as how they cross-pollenate, to match the current scientific knowledge and needs of modern inquiry.

Yet, some major universities have abandoned this classic approach. Stanford’s anthropology department has split between cultural and physical anthropology. Harvard has also recently chosen to divide human evolutionary biology from the more socially-focused anthropology department, though the two maintain connections. If these influential institutions have chosen to separate the sub-disciplines, does that mean SDSU should follow suit and abandon it’s unified approach? Especially when budgets are tight, should our department specialize and not try to do too much?

There are a few things to consider to answer this. First, institutions like Harvard and Stanford are somewhat biased towards post-doctoral research. Their institutional funding comes from private individuals and foundations who wish to contribute to the cutting edge of these fields, at the highest level of research. Although they are serving an undergraduate student body as well, they do not offer MA programs in anthropology except leading to the Doctorate. At SDSU, our mission and motivation is completely different: our department is funded primarily through undergraduate enrollment, and the graduate program focuses on the MA degree. So, from an academic standpoint, the department serves a different educational community, one that benefits more from the breadth of the program and provides the most complete picture of anthropology and its practical application for non-academic life. From a financial standpoint, a highly specialized department would attract less undergraduate students, not only for the anthropology degree but also new degrees like the cross-discipline sustainability major.

Putting aside the practical issues of funding, a holistic approach to the complexity and diversity of humanity is valuable, perhaps more than ever. There is much you can learn by separately investigating human culture or evolutionary biology, yet there is so much gained by understanding how to bring the pieces together. Breakthrough studies such as environmental anthropology, behavioral ecology, and medical anthropology are built within a cross-sub-discipline framework . As a graduate student, I see the advantage of the program’s diversity in providing multifaceted views of my research interests and a solid foundation for a career where I expect to teach Anthropology 101 at some point.

Our program is funded by students who will have careers both in and out of academic life, as well as in and out of anthropology. We need a program of quality, diversity, and unity to meet both the university’s mission and the students’ ambitions. Linguistics, archaeology, socio-cultural, and physical anthropology are all necessary components for a truly modern and relevant department of anthropology at San Diego State.