Unlike other social sciences, anthropology focuses primarily on human variation in all of its ramifications and expressions. We are concerned with how human groups have made their livings and organized their lives over the past 50,000 years and why these things show such striking similarities and equally striking differences over time and in different regions of the world. We are concerned with the remarkable variety in the ways that different human communities construct reality, even in things that would seem most obvious to us, such as who is your mother and who is your mother and who isn't or in the relationship between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. The central organizing concept we use to address all of these concerns is culture , the human propensity to confer meaning arbitrarily on things, on people, on ideas, and on the relationship between all of these. If there is a universal tendency of human nature that we can discern from what we know about the human variation, it is that people everywhere tend to shape their thought, their actions, and their talk in accordance with the meanings arbitrarily conferred on the world around them.
Human biology evolves in large measure as the development of the capacity for culture.
Yet, in an apparent paradox, racial variations between human groups seem to develop totally independent of the contents of the group's system of meanings. This seeming paradox cries for explanation. The development of systems of shared meanings can be seen in the remains of communities long extinct. Detailed information on each area of our undergraduate program can be found at the following links.