For nearly a century, the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Minnesota
has been training professional
anthropologists and educating students.
We are one of the oldest anthropology
programs in the entire country.
We have 17 faculty members, about 60 graduate
students, and every year we educate about 
2,000 students in our classes.
Students who study at the University of Minnesota
have the opportunity to study with some
of the most advanced researchers in the
United States and, indeed, in the world.
In my research, I work both with archaeological and archival remains to look at past societies. I kind of view
that as looking at the two sides of the
way in which societies move forward...
Archival materials are things that we
keep because we want to remember them in
some fashion. Archaeological remains, very
often, are things that we throw away
either because they're no longer
important to us or because we want to forget them.
I think the movement
between those two things give us a
really good view of past society but also
how we remember what came of past societies.
Anthropology is not just a major where you
read and learn about what could be done
with the discipline. As much as possible,
our courses try to actually get students
into the position where there are doing
that research themselves. We try
to incorporate active learning into the
classroom as much as possible, and we have so
much material to work with that it's
actually quite easy.
I've been excavating for more than 15 years… Researching the earliest spread of humans
out of Africa.
The moment of discovery is really
interesting, but then there's also when you
discover things from crunching the
numbers in your computer later, acting
like Sherlock Holmes, trying to figure
out what happened
only it’s 1.8 million years ago. 
The students love that, and that's the
best part about teaching, I think, is when
the students are discovering those
things and they have that excitement too.
Anthropology is the only field in the University,
not just in the liberal arts,
that is at the same time part of the
humanities, part of the social sciences,
part of the biological sciences, and
actually part of the physical sciences as well.
In my research, where I’m looking at people who want to take humans to other parts of the of the cosmos and
begin new communities in space,
all of the kinds of questions that
apologists have about what it is to be human,
from the biological form, to
metaphysical questions, are thrown open.
Language, of course, is one of those
elements that we all imagine; or, we all
think about, as making us human—as making
us distinct as a species.
At the undergraduate level, I teach “Language, Culture, and Power,” which is a class I love teaching.
And many students tell me, years after in some
cases, that they can't have conversations
in the same way anymore after taking
this class because they are so attuned
to what it is that people are doing. 
That's the point I try and make:
We don't simply “represent” with
language. We “do things,” and that's always
what I ask people. “What is being done?”
We think that language represents the world.
I claim language makes the world.
What’s so interesting about how sociocultural anthropology trys to understand the world around it is its key focus on fieldwork
—on long-term immersion.
In order to understand a particular
community’s set of ideas, it’s values… 
It's crucial to be with and amongst the people
that you're actually trying to
understand. And part of, I think, the
strength of sociocultural anthropology is that it,
on the one hand, seeks to make
the familiar strange; and, on the other hand,
seeks to make the strange familiar.
There's a lot of taken for granted categories in
our world. In my work, some of the taken for granted
categories are "finance," "the market"… And
really trying to get at the cultural underpinnings.
What are the institutional
contexts, the historical underpinnings,
the individual biographies such that Wall-Streeters
get socialized into a world where they can
have undue influence on it.
Sociocultural Anthropology brings a
greater understanding of global
interconnection, of uneven development, and
gives us a way to think about the
production, or the perpetuation, of
inequality in a way that's culturally
grounded and in a way that we could actually
unpack our preconceptions so that we can
actually change them.
These are some of the reasons that we're so proud
of our department. We invite you to visit
us and to see what we have to offer to
you, to your family, and to the community.
