Culture and Society

The Culture and Society track invites students into the study of the full range of human societies and cultures, with particular attention to the transnational and global forces that increasingly draw these societies into contact, conflict, and exchange. Faculty and students in this track pursue questions that matter urgently in the contemporary world: migration and displacement, environmental crisis and dispossession, structural inequality, the politics of health and illness, the aftershocks of colonialism, and the shifting meanings of race, gender, and belonging in an interconnected age. This is anthropology as a mode of engaged inquiry—rigorous in its methods and unafraid of the complexity of lived experience, yet oriented toward the pressing problems that define our historical moment. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, our faculty bring a wide array of theoretical perspectives to bear on both enduring anthropological questions and emerging areas of concern, giving students the analytical tools to understand—and to responsibly intervene in—a rapidly changing world. Students who choose this track leave with more than a body of knowledge: they leave with a disciplined capacity to think critically and empathetically across cultural difference—a skill of growing consequence as artificial intelligence reshapes how societies communicate, govern, and understand themselves. The Culture and Society track is for students who want to sit with complexity rather than resolve it too quickly—and who want to understand the human stakes behind every global change. This is where that work begins.