Chair Message
This message reflects the views of Anthropology Chair Pascal Gagneux only.
Message from the Chair if the Anthropology Department.
Welcome to the Anthropology Department of UC San Diego. Our department takes diverse approaches to studying humans. These range from investigating our species’ evolution, deep prehistory and more recent history, how we communicate, develop and function as individuals, groups and societies, to how we experience health and disease. The department consists of four subfields: archeological, biological, psychological, and socio-cultural / linguistic anthropology.
There is much to be discovered about us humans. How did we become the global species we now are? How did we become conscious, self-aware beings possessing an almost limitless imagination and capable, at once, of both selfless altruism and unspeakable atrocities.? Humans now directly shape the earth’s biosphere and climate. Our species has existed for over
200 thousand years, is one of ~500 primate and one of over 6 thousand mammalian species. It took humans over 200 thousand years to reach a population of 1 billion but less than 200 years to reach 8 billion, with half of us now living in cities.
Sociocultural Anthropology investigates contemporary societies and human experiences in a time of major global challenges. These include climate change and the sixth mass extinction event on this planet, both directly caused by humans, as well as persistent inequity, injustice, and violent conflicts at both global and regional scales. It examines the ways groups of humans organize their societies, create and contest their practical systems of meaning, and mix remarkable forms of cooperation and competition in their orchestration of life on the planet.
Linguistic Anthropology examines what language can tell us about power and inequality in the contemporary world. It explores avenues towards change and social justice that language can help open. Insights into how people make their material and meaningful worlds, even as these real systems and logics have a way of deeply and unevenly shaping their authors, are key to better understanding humanity.
Anthropological Archaeology explores the deep histories and transformations of the social structures created by human groups across the world. It probes these by looking for physical evidence of past societies while also drawing on the written and oral histories when available. Methodologically, it relies on regional surveys and excavations, often employing remote sensing techniques and material science analyses for dating and characterizing human artefacts and biological remains with the aim of reconstructing past societies, their livelihoods, and the social and environmental ecosystems that structured them. While this has value in and of itself, a better understanding of how past societies thrived and failed also has great value for guiding current efforts to improve modern societies and addressing the pressing challenges of our day.
Psychological Anthropology examines the intersection of cultural, social, psychological, and political contexts of personal and collective experience.This includes developmental approaches to socialization of children and adolescents and their continuation over the course of life, psychoanalytic approaches that consider subconscious conflicts at personal and collective levels, cognitive approaches that study thought processes across cultures,phenomenological and psychopolitical approaches to self, emotion, and identity in lived experience. Psychological anthropology intersects medical anthropology in trying to
conceptualize cross-cultural differences and similarities in how mental illness is manifested, experienced, and treated. Additionally, medical anthropology explores human health and disease across time and space, comparing health care systems and the interaction of healing forms in practice. Thanks to technology, humans today have an average life expectancy that is twice that of what it was just 100 years ago, in other words, we each are benefitting from an extra “life”. However, life expectancy still differs by over 20 years between countries and by over 10 years across different populations in the United States. Access to and quality of health care still differ dramatically depending on where a person lives and how they are situated within their local society. We humans also directly contribute to health and disease by how we treat each other and by the social, political and economic structures that we inherit, maintain or change. All human societies have rich and diverse traditions of healing, which now coexist and/or clash with the global spread of western medical practices.
Last but not least, Biological Anthropology views individual humans as the temporary molecular assemblages they are. We are highly concentrated plant matter, given that we either eat plants directly or eat animals that have fed on plants. Humans embody the landscapes they inhabit via the food they consume during their lives. Unlike all other animals, humans develop, live, reproduce, and die in a pervasive socio-cultural environment. This landscape of ideas, norms, shared meanings and social structures in turn exerts profound influence on human biology and the countless species that humans have domesticated. Biological anthropology examines how humans have evolved from a small-brained, bipedal ape roaming the savannahs of Africa to become the “planet altering ape” of today. It also investigates how humans develop and how such development can be affected by genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors (both biotic and social). Particular interests of our department include human neuronal development and the molecular underpinnings of human health and disease.
Our faculty and students combine a wide range of interests, situated along the vast span of entities, ranging from global phenomena to local societies, their material cultures and social norms, to groups and individuals, their ideas and beliefs, to cells and molecules underlying life. Our research and teaching are crucially supported by our dedicated staff. I hope that you will find our work fascinating and worth exploring.