Anthropology cultivates the intellectual and practical agility required in a world in which understanding and negotiating international and cross-cultural difference is increasingly a part of everyday life.

The department provides students with an understanding of human social behavior, social systems, and cultures within an ever-changing global context. The major in anthropology provides unique insight into the diversity of the world’s life-ways and the reasons for their persistence and transformation. It examines the social and cultural forces that operate in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the South Pacific, as well as within American Society.

Since 2004, Anthropology graduates have been awarded eleven Fulbright Fellowships, two Watson Fellowships, a Beinecke Scholarship, a Rotary Global Grant, an International Scholarship at National Taiwan University for Advanced Mandarin Studies, fourteen Davis International Fellowships,and two Davis Projects for Peace Awards. The awards and fellowships that our students have earned have made their travel after graduation possible.

Anthropology majors at Wheaton conduct independent fieldwork projects to fulfill the senior seminar requirement.

For more information, please contact our chair Bruce Owens.