CULTURAL PROJECTS
Our students are required to get hands on experience in cultural anthropology by engaging in cultural projects in the local community (and beyond in some cases). We work with our students to get them to think like an anthropologist and become familiar with the method of participant observation. Seeing with a native eye requires immersion in the group under study by joining in the daily life of the people as much as possible. The major skills involved in participant observation are watching and listening, but the method is really more complex than that. What fieldwork is really about is being touched by a different reality.
Every fall semester we offer Field Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Anthropology 210). Each student is expected to complete an ethnography, the written representation of a culture. These research projects are the real thing with real people, real situations, and real consequences. At UNC we believe that the study of Anthropology can help us to better understand the complex nature of the human condition – ours and others’—especially in this rapidly shrinking world.
Recent ethnographies completed by our undergraduate majors and minors include the cultures of:
Mega-churches, Women’s Rugby, Tarot Card Readers, African Dance Troupes, Pagans, Narcotics Anonymous, Buddhist Centers, Fire Fighters, Motorcycle Clubs, Jazz and Theatre at UNC, Police, Bars, Race Car Drivers, Truckers, Fraternities, Sororities, Young Republicans, Female to Male Transsexuals, Unitarian Universalists, Dog Shows, well, you get the picture.