Foci

Anthropologists at UCR focus on how people living in a variety of settings participate in and adapt to processes of change and transformation, both historically and in the contemporary world. The faculty is committed to a unified concept of the discipline, viewing the traditional subfields--sociocultural, archaeology, linguistic, and biological--as crosscut by a series of foci. These foci articulate contemporary or emerging concerns within the discipline, and constitute both the strength and uniqueness of the program.

The most developed foci at the present are (1) the applied anthropology of transnational processes (inequality, migration) and the border and binational communities associated with globalization and the internalization of capital; (2) the archaeology of Mesoamerica and Western North America; (3) cultural and political ecology; and (4) Latin America.

Course offerings in both undergraduate and graduate programs reflect these foci. Diverse Research Facilities support projects by department faculty and students.