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Anthropology Program Goals

Anthropology is the exploration of human diversity. Emphasizing the holistic approach in understanding human behavior, the program offers courses in cultural, physical, archaeological and linguistic anthropology. Students majoring in anthropology are equipped for employment in various fields of the non-profit, private, corporate and government sectors in addition to being prepared for graduate school. The program also offers an important service to non-majors through introductory and special topics courses. In response to an awareness that most of our students do not go on to graduate school, the program has been developing a more urban and applied emphasis in both the cultural and archaeological class offerings.

Specifically, there are four different goals for the different areas in anthropology:

1. Provide students with an awareness of the place of Denver, Colorado and the U.S. in their evolutionary and historical context. This includes comparative urban and comparative civilization studies. Courses in world archaeology, origins of civilization and prehistory provide such a context.
2. Meet the cultural needs directly related to Denver's past and future by exploring ideas related to preserving the cultural integrity of a multicultural urban environment. Change in any urban environment is inevitable. Applied anthropology works towards minimizing the social cost of change. To that end, the anthropology program incorporates two major community outreach programs: the Family Literacy Program and the College Assistance Migrant Program. These programs target the growing immigrant populations of the Denver metropolitan area and rural areas of Colorado to prepare them for a better future.
3. Continue to provide students with current baseline information on human evolution and adaptation to the environment. Physical anthropology, including the sub-discipline of medical forensics, is one of the few areas at MSCD that addresses human evolution in any depth. It utilizes human/primate biology, physiology, fossil evidence and population genetics to clarify the process and prepare students to fully understand human development.
4. Increase multicultural awareness to create an understanding of the variation within and between each particular culture. This is particularly relevant to all students as we live in a multicultural world and is the reason that students seeking majors in such diverse fields as business, nursing and teacher education are required to take anthropology courses.