UNIFYING THEMES

Although the Department's programs cover the traditional four subfields of anthropology (archaeological, biological, linguistic, sociocultural), research emphases have been grouped in thematic and unifying foci that bridge these subfield boundaries. The principal foci are political economy, critical anthropology, and ecological and biobehavioral anthropology. All subfields and all program foci assume a knowledge of ethnographic data in more than one area of the world.

The political economy focus is common to those faculty and graduate students who recognize the importance of the state level as it impinges on local level institutions and practices, and the contributions made by local institutions and practices to the reproduction of state and supra-state systems. Anthropology's contribution to the debates about mode of production, dependency, world economy, and the utility of class analysis are unique by virtue of their insisting on bottom-up perspectives and human agency, and the cultural component of human history. The political economy rubric unifies the research interests of several faculty members within the Department who work in a variety of field settings including sub-saharan Africa, North Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Southwest US and Mexico, and the Eastern US.

Critical anthropology focuses on the relationship between knowledge and power in human societies and their relationship to scholarly interpretation and identity. It begins with the premise that the anthropologist's production of knowledge in "texts" (ethnographic descriptions and analyses) must be examined more self-consciously and critically, taking into account: the many voices, in dialogue, that helped produce the text in the original situation of field work, with the anthropologist's voice only one of many; the fact that culture is not a unified corpus of symbols/meanings, but is fragmentary, contested, temporal, and emergent; and that power affects all field work relations, all ethnographic description and all anthropological interpretations. Therefore, more attention must be paid to the impact of discrepancies of power on gender, racial, and ethnic definitions and relations, and to the impact of the state and supra-state systems on anthropologists themselves and the peoples they study.

Within our department, themes of critical anthropology that are examined in research and teaching include the reinterpretation of tradition, the politics of racial, ethnic, class, gender, and language differences, structures of domination, the roles of language and material culture in the reproduction of power relations, the ethnographic encounter, international migration in a post-modern world, globalization processes and their relation to identity formation.

Ecological and biobehavioral anthropology recognizes the fact that humans are biological organisms living in relation to other species as resources. Ecology, adaptation, and evolution are the key concepts, and the most common unit of concern, the population. Biobehavioral processes require greater time depth than socio-cultural studies, and, in most cases, interdisciplinary cooperation. Long-term and interdisciplinary studies of human biology and behavior are carried out in a number of research programs within the Department, including human population biology, biomedical health outcome, evolution and adaptation, demography and genetics, the relationship between nutrition and food processing, and paleoanthropology. The human ecology of pastoral nomads in Kenya has engaged the research efforts of a cross-disciplinary team of researchers since the early 1980s.

These three areas do not adequately reflect the diverse research interests of the faculty and students, nor are they intended to collapse this diversity into sameness. A prospective applicant should inspect course offerings to ascertain the extent of this diversity. Of course, no department provides strength in all aspects of the field of anthropology, and qualified applicants may be rejected if their research interests appear to be mismatched with Department faculty strengths. These strengths are nevertheless more diverse than can be embraced by the rubrics of political economy, critical anthropology, and biobehavioral/ecological anthropology. For example, material culture is a nodal point through which technology, the psychology of its innovators, values, and worldviews interpenetrate. Graduate student research increasingly explores the unconventional areas spanning varieties of expertise that reach into disciplines beyond the Department - Geology, Biology, Art History, Cinema, as well as the other social sciences.

Other Strengths

Development Anthropology at Binghamton University is the political ecological study of how agrarian and urban populations of formerly colonial countries are incorporated into the peripheries of the world economic system. It examines how the processes of economic development, often supported by local elites, governments, multilateral financial institutions (such as the World Bank), and multinational businesses, create victims - differentiated by class, ethnicity, gender - as well as beneficiaries, and it considers the interrelationships between development and the environment. Above all, Development Anthropology seeks to enhance the discipline's contribution to social justice by exposing mechanisms of oppression and seeking socially and environmentally sustainable means for their eradication.

Development Anthropology does not constitute a separate program with its own degree and requirements. It is the approach of the Binghamton University faculty that Development Anthropology is a focus or an emphasis within the subdiscipline of Sociocultural Anthropology, and that the latter is a concentration within General Anthropology. All sociocultural students are exposed to two of the three other subdisciplines - linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology - and they are trained in sociocultural theory, methods, and empirical findings. Thus, all of the sociocultural anthropological faculty participate in the education of students interested in development.

Graduate students concentrating in this area are welcome to use the library and facilities of the independent Institute for Development Anthropology (IDA), located three miles east of the University in the City of Binghamton. A nonprofit research and educational institution, IDA seeks environmentally sustainable development through equitable economic growth and respect for human rights by applying the comparative and holistic methodologies and theories of anthropology to improving the conditions of the world's poor.

An additional unifying strength of the graduate program is in Cultural Resource Management the application of archaeological, historical, and anthropological research to serve the information and management needs of public agencies and non-governmental organizations dealing with cultural resources. The department has a long-standing leadership position in regional CRM projects and a national reputation in the development of policies and procedures. Graduate students have opportunities to add skills and competencies necessary for CRM professional employment through courses offered in the department and applied research projects of the Public Archaeology Facility. The department is known for having successfully combined the practical experience of an applied research facility with the academic excellence of its graduate programs to produce quality research and employable graduates at both the MA and PhD levels.

For further information about the Graduate Program in Anthropology, contact:
email the director of graduate studies (andym@binghamton.edu),

For specific information on the concentration in Development Anthropology within Sociocultural Anthropology and on the Institute for Developmental Anthropology, contact:
Thomas Wilson, Professor and Department Chair
Department of Anthropology
Binghamton University
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000

For specific information on the Public Archaeology Facility, contact:
Professor Nina M. Versaggi
Department of Anthropology
Public Archaeology Facility
Binghamton University
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000

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