About

Two people sitting beneath a tree talking to each other

Anthropologists study global human experience and socialities among other related beings, combining social, cultural, biological, archaeological, and linguistic approaches within a single discipline. Our questions and topics are diverse. In our courses, students examine (for example) the relationship between culture and human rights, the globalization of childhood, concepts of animal life in industrial farming, place making in global cities, the political shaping of gender, how human bodies relate to their environments, questions of cultural ownership in art, new uses of social media, indigenous rights in contexts of environmental destruction, nationalist uses of archaeology, and the intersection of transnational diasporas with US notions of "race."

Our embrace of both qualitative and scientific research gives our methods flexibility, depth, and analytical rigor. Ethnography, cultural anthropology's signature set of research methods, is in demand in medicine, communication, design, consulting, technology, marketing, human services, and other fields. Ethnographic techniques such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and participant photojournaling help researchers view cultural practices and social interactions with new eyes, find implicit patterns and meanings, and see the actual workings of technologies and institutions in practice. For anthropologists, however, ethnography is more than a tool: it is a practice that generates critical thinking and ethical awareness.

Anthropology at Tufts gives students opportunities for ethnographic research through our Fieldwork Lab (Anth 161), several upper-level seminars (Anth 162 and over), internships (Anth 99), and independent research projects (Anth 197 and 199). Our students can present their research and engage with others through the Spring Student Anthropology Symposium (SSAS). This combination of hands-on research, disciplinary breadth, global and local understanding, and intellectual community makes Anthropology a strong major and an excellent preparation for a wide range of careers.

Department Chair

Amahl Bishara

Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology

Media, journalism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, ethnography of place My research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Through ethnographies of protest as well as of more everyday forms of expression, I analyze the barriers to these two groups speaking to and with each other. I argues that speech is always an embodied and emplaced act. My second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. It examines how Palestinians in this refugee camp strive to resist three authorities, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority administration, and the United Nations Relief Works Agency through struggles over land, water, bodies, and expression. My first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism. In addition to academic writing, I also regularly write for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. I have produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. Finally, I have been involved with the production of bilingual Arabic and English children's books about refugee lives, including The Boy and the Wall.