Overview of the Department
Anthropology examines the rooted concepts and everyday practices that provide frames for the ways people think, act and make sense of the world. Where those frames came from and what forms of life they enable or disable is central to the constitution and disbursement of power in our world. Anthropology interrogates this constitution by examining how other societies, differently located in space or time, have thought and acted and what possibilities this offers for other ways of thinking the world.
At Columbia anthropology our students and faculty explore these issues through an engagement with ordinary life. Rather than being divided into different fields, our department operates collectively, drawing on a series of archives – ethnographic, historical, archaeological, linguistic, medial – to pursue larger interdisciplinary questions. Faculty and student research interests span the range of the domains most critical to contemporary anthropology, including continental philosophy, law, political anthropology, semiotics and post- semiotics, ecology and ecocriticsm, science and technology studies, critical native studies, aesthetics, affect theory, visual cultures, moving image, and sound studies.
