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

Sarah Pinto

Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology

I am interested in histories and cultures of medicine, especially as they pertain to gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday intimacies, with a regional focus on South Asia. I am also interested in the ways knowledge about bodies and minds moves across time and place, and how, in such movements, colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial scientific imaginations seed critical genealogies, often counterintuitively. In the diverse ways people make use of medicine and science, I am drawn to the forms of creativity, imagination, and ethical world-making that emerge in the interstices of authority and power. My research has considered childbirth, infant mortality, and birth-work in Uttar Pradesh, India, noting the way reproductive health interventions reiterate caste and the marginalization of Dalit women; women's movement through psychiatric care settings in urban north India and the intersections of kinship dissolutions with crisis and care; and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia as they pertain to women's lives and gendered diagnoses, notably "hysteria" and its avatars.