About Us

Anthropology is devoted to the study of human beings and human societies as they exist across time and space. It is distinct from other social sciences in encompassing both the full span of human history and the full range of human societies and cultures, including those located in historically marginalized areas of the world. As a result, anthropology is especially attuned to questions of social, cultural, and biological diversity and to issues of power, identity, and inequality. Education in Anthropology provides excellent preparation for living and working in a multicultural and globally-interconnected world.  It equips students for careers in a wide range of fields, including law, medicine, business, public service, environmental sustainability, and resource management. Students may pursue degrees in Anthropology at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels.

The Department of Anthropology offers a wide range of approaches to the topics and area studies within the field, including archaeology, ecology, environmental anthropology, evolution, linguistics, medical anthropology, political economy, science and technology studies, and sociocultural anthropology. Methodologies for the study of micro- and macro-social processes are taught through the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The department provides students with excellent training in theory and methods to enable them to pursue graduate study in any of the above mentioned subfields of Anthropology.

Mission Statement

Anthropology is the study of human experience, action and imagination in all its breadth and diversity. It is distinct from other social sciences in encompassing both the full span of human history and the full range of human societies and cultures, including those located in historically marginalized areas of the world. As a result, anthropology is especially attuned to questions of social, cultural, and biological diversity and to issues of power, identity, and inequality. Anthropology is comparative and global in its scope and ambition but understands social ties, institutions, moral convictions, cultural frames and beliefs to be situated in specific historical, economic and regional contexts.

The Department of Anthropology at Stanford approaches the rich legacy and ambitious scope of Anthropology through a shared commitment to long-term and embedded ethnographic, historical and empirical studies of societies, communities and mobile networks of people, things and ideas. Our faculty and students engage large questions that are of critical importance to people in many parts of the contemporary world – climate change, the legacy of the deep past, self- determination, economic inequalities, dependencies, health and affliction, racial discrimination, historical memory, public violence, the power of objects, inheritance and kinship, genetics and science, social segregation, urban aesthetics, and much more.

We are committed to a deep engagement of social theory, rigorous fieldwork and field methodologies, and to a rich historical understanding of social and political action, shared beliefs and cultural memory within the communities and societies we study. We are all generalists but also area specialists because we believe that the human condition can only be properly understood in its specific cultural and historical manifestations.

The Department of Anthropology offers a wide range of approaches to the topics and area studies within the field, including archaeology, ecology, environmental anthropology, linguistics, medical anthropology, political economy, science and technology studies, and sociocultural anthropology. The department provides students with excellent training in theory and methods to enable them to pursue graduate study in any of the subfields of Anthropology.

Diversity Statement

Stanford’s Department of Anthropology is committed to promoting an inclusive and respectful culture among students, faculty and staff. We aim to be supportive of diversity in all its manifestations, fostering a spirit of open inquiry and dialogue that engages with and respects difference, including race, ethnicity, color, class, national or ethnic origin, language, citizenship, diaspora, sex, age, embodiment, disability, religion, sexual orientation or identity, gender identity or expression, and veteran status. We believe that anthropology as a discipline and as a practice can be an effective medium through which we can launch inquiries into the pressing questions of our time. We stress the need to investigate and challenge structures of privilege and power, both within and beyond the classroom and our research domains. As a department we are committed to continually transforming ourselves as teachers, learners, and researchers in order to better understand and effectively respond to the world in which we live.