Welcome to the Department of Anthropology

A Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, an institution located on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish and Straits Salish peoples, whose primacy on the land we acknowledge.

Anthropologists have a saying that their work is "to make the strange seem familiar, and the familiar seem strange." Nowadays you are as likely to find an anthropologist studying the social dynamics of investment banking as the lifeways of a small-scale society. Indeed, as the recent collapse of the investment banking system has shown, analyzing the social dynamics of the bankers themselves is at least as revealing about the all-too human roots of the economic collapse as understanding the economic instruments that bankers created. So, by making the strange familiar, we encourage our students to create bridges of understanding across apparent divides of difference.

By making the familiar seem strange, we encourage our students to work to denaturalize their everyday surroundings. For example, who do we consider a family member or relative? How do we behave at a wedding, or a funeral? How do we experience and think about illness, and health? How, and why, do we create communities on campus, or on the internet? We also encourage our students to understand the familiar by reference to our long, and sometimes strange, histories as humans, our shared history with other primates, and the ebb and flow of cultural practice across the world, all of which shape "the familiar" of our everyday lives.

Anthropology reminds us that humans are equipped to live a thousand different lives, and the ones we end up living are shaped by the cultural contexts in which we grow up and live. At the same time, anthropology reminds us of what unifies our human existence–the joys and sorrows of life and death, the biological rhythms and ecological relations that shape our passage in the world, and our shared ancestry with other humans and our primate relatives.

In these challenging times of increasing globalization and multiculturalism, of anthropogenic environmental and ecological damage to the planet and its peoples, and of new media which enable the fracturing and suturing of new communities, recognition of our shared heritage of diversity and human resilience is more important than ever. We therefore believe that Anthropology provides an exceptional perspective for helping us to understand who we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

In this spirit, UVic Anthropology engages with the discipline's traditional breadth of perspectives and subjects, but we do so with a commitment to forging meaningful connections between the traditional subfields of Biological, Cultural, and Archaeological Anthropology. We are accomplishing this through integrative themes: Inequality, Culture, Health; Evolution and Ecology; Indigenous Peoples; and Visual Anthropology and Technology. These themes inform our teaching as well as our research, which is often practiced within community-based projects. Through these, our students will find innovative ways to approach questions of social justice, health, inequality, colonialism, the environment, technology, media and art in geographic contexts spanning the globe and case studies from the last two million years.

On behalf of our department's faculty, staff and current students, I invite you to explore our website and read about our exciting degree options and research programs. We look forward to you joining us and discovering for yourself how anthropology can provide you with a wealth of applicable knowledge and experience for life in the world today.

Ann Stahl
Chair, Department of Anthropology