Bachelor of Arts [B.A] [Anthropology] From University of South Alabama

Anthropology is the study of past and present humankind. Utilizing knowledge from the biological, social, and behavioral sciences, anthropology represents a holistic and humanistic discipline, bringing together a variety of perspectives to learn about ancient peoples and to solve modern problems.

Anthropologists take both a comparative and evolutionary perspective to more fully understand what it means to be human, and to explore human similarities and differences across geographic space and time.

Cultural anthropologists study societies in the contemporary world using the method of participant observation, in which researchers reside in a community, learn its language, observe social behavior, and conduct interviews of community members. Traditionally, anthropologists studied mostly small-scale indigenous societies, where they examined religion, kinship, production and exchange, political beliefs, food practices, and other aspects of social life.?

These remain an important focus of research, but increasingly cultural anthropologists have turned their attention to larger-scale developed societies. Participant observation in modern settings offers insights into many problems of contemporary social life, including religious and ethnic conflict, the effects of climate change, globalization, social inequality, health disparities, and addiction.

Language ? the ability to represent meaning through symbols and to communicate those meanings to other people ? is a hallmark of all human societies. Linguistic anthropologists study the social and cultural contexts of human communication. How does language symbolically represent our natural, supernatural, and social worlds? How does our day-to-day use of language reflect our social identities of region, social class, gender, and ethnicity? In addition, the comparison of distinct languages can offer evidence of their historical evolution and illuminate past and contemporary relationships between their speakers. By documenting indigenous vocabularies and grammars, linguistic anthropologists also contribute to the revitalization of endangered languages in the modern world.

Biological (or physical) anthropologists study human biological variation and adaptation in response to the natural and cultural environments of the past and present. They seek to understand what it means to be human by taking into account our unique evolutionary and individual life histories, in all their diversity. This broad discipline encompasses approaches ranging from comparative observations of non-human primates (primatology), physical variation and population genetics (human biology), hominid evolution (paleoanthropology), and the study of ancient human skeletal remains from the archaeological record (bioarchaeology). More recently, these methods have been applied to assist law enforcement with the forensic identification of modern human remains (forensic anthropology). By utilizing a biological perspective, these anthropologists seek to explore the dynamics of the human condition and our continued evolution into the future.