anthropology

As a discipline, anthropology—”the study of the human condition”—began as a hybrid field, combining sociocultural analysis with linguistics, archeology, and the biological study of human history. But over the course of several decades of self-reflective debate and academic reorganization, the discipline has specified. At Columbia, this process has resulted in a department that is predominantly sociocultural, with strands of archeology, a new historical focus, and at this point, just a bit of biological anthropology.

Columbia's chronic space shortage was on display again this shopping period as Introduction to Language and Culture, a Barnard anthropology course, nearly had to cut half the registered students from the course because the classroom was too small.