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Combining Anthropology with a major in Human Development

IF YOU HAVE some familiarity with the Human Development major, you will see that it has much in common with anthropology and that the two areas can complement each other well in a major/minor combination. Human Development is concerned with people as they move through the life cycle from birth to death. Anthropology has always had similar interests in family structure and in childrearing. A minor in Anthropology combined with a major in Human Development provides a way of looking at the life cycle in broad cross-cultural perspective and against the backdrop of social and cultural institutions in a variety of societies. It will also help you sort out nature/nurture questions with respect to human society. The anthropological perspective helps us understand our own society better, because we learn to see it as only one kind of human nature, not as the only kind. This allows us to ask more sharply focused questions about the institutions like families, communities, and work groups through which we pass during our individual life-spans. If we can understand the cultural patterns that surround the life cycle in Mexico, or in the Trobriand Islands, we can, through comparison, understand the North American life cycle through more clearly seeing how our culture has affected us.

A major in Human Development and a minor in Anthropology will give you a particularly strong liberal arts undergraduate program. This would be good preparation for graduate school in anthropology, or for further study in areas such as social work and other human services, or counseling at the masters degree level, cross-cultural psychology, and international studies.

This rapidly changing world frequently brings populations that were formerly totally unfamiliar with one another into close contact. Consider the experience of human service providers with the growing Hmong and Lao refugee populations in Northeastern Wisconsin. Social workers, counsellors and teachers in Green Bay and other local cities who never dreamed of working with people from highly different cultural backgrounds, have had to develop new understandings about such things as family and kinship systems. Often they could not have developed such understandings without acquiring some background in anthropology. Indeed, those with no exposure to anthropology may lack the perspectives needed to understand cultures that differ from their own and can stumble in well-meaning efforts to provide services to members of such cultures. America is quickly becoming a more multicultural society. Human service providers in many parts of the country will no longer be able to rely solely upon their own cultural experiences in performing their roles.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT EMPHASES

Any profession that calls for dealing with people across cultural boundaries benefits from a dose of anthropological understanding. Many students who elect the PRECLINICAL/PRECOUNSELING EMPHASIS in Human Development could therefore profit from a minor in Anthropology (perhaps together with another minor in Psychology). Anthropology has long focused upon how people in different cultures understand their troubles and what to do about them. The counselor or therapist who must help people coming from different cultural backgrounds is better off if he or she has some idea about how other cultures might see questions of individual suffering and adjustment to society. As a counselor, consider what you would do if a client from rural Latin America told you that his luck had run out and he had started drinking because he had been bewitched. How would you come to understand what he meant by that and how it might reflect his position in his family or community? Or would you wrongly assume that he was mentally ill, because your culture does not admit the idea of witchcraft as an explanation of misfortune? Here is where a dose of anthropological understanding would be invaluable. Indeed, cross-cultural counseling has gained recognition as a domain within the counseling profession.

FAMILY STUDIES is another obvious combination with an Anthropology minor. Families and kinship systems have long been at the core of cultural anthropological interests, and their study is highly developed within the discipline, as is the question of gender roles. (The Family Studies emphasis already has two courses in common with the Anthropology minor, by the way.) There are many kinds of families around the world, and many different ways to classify and interact with relatives. Did you know, for instance, that among the world’s societies it is more common for people to consider themselves related to people only on the father’s side of the family? In Northeastern Wisconsin, Hmong kinship is organized this way, as was the traditional kinship system of the Menomini. When we step back and look at family and kinship systems in cross-cultural perspective, we can see how they are affected by changes in other aspects of society such as economic patterns and values systems. With a broader perspective, we can, as social scientists, better understand changing American family and kinship patterns.

It is also possible to tailor an INDIVIDUALIZED EMPHASIS within Human Development. A Human Development advisor would be happy to work out such a plan together with your anthropology minor. For more information contact:

JILL WHITE, ASSISTANT PROFESSOER (465-2569)

Geographical areas: Mexico and Green Bay area. Interests in adolescence, immigration, and identity construction.

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