Professor Patricia Antoniello with students enrolled in her Global Health study abroad program in India.
Sociocultural Anthropology
Sociocultural anthropology studies how people in different places live and understand the world around them. Our goal as sociocultural anthropologists is to gain knowledge that can enrich human understanding. The field is interested in the diversity of human experience and the organization of power at the local and global level. We explore what people say is important and the rules they make about how people should interact with one another. Sociocultural anthropologists listen to all voices and viewpoints in order to understand commonalities and differences within and between societies and people. Even within one society, people may disagree about how they should dress, speak, or treat one another. Sociocultural anthropologists try to understand the perspectives, practices, and social organization of other groups whose values and lifeways may be very different from their own. In order to understand this array of human diversity, we find that the best way to learn about diverse people is to spend time living among them, what anthropologists call ethnographic fieldwork. For more information, visit the American Anthropological Association, from which this statement draws.
At Brooklyn College, we have five sociocultural anthropologists: Patricia Antoniello, Katherine (Katie Rose) Hejtmanek, Naomi Schiller, Meghan Ference, and Rhea Rahman. Professor Antoniello is a medical anthropologist who studies global health and is currently working on a project in rural India on primary health care and gender and caste inequality. Associate Professor Hejtmanek studies adolescent custodial psychiatry, race, and resistance strategies employed by African American boys in the United States by looking at the way youth institutionalized for mental disorders use frameworks of love and hip hop as part of their treatment process. Associate Professor Schiller studies the state, media production, ethnographic film, social movements, and politics in Latin America. Assistant Professor Ference studies transportation infrastructure, the anthropology of work and neoliberalism in Kenya. Assistant Professor Rahman studies global racial formations in relation to histories and enactments of Islamic practice and Muslim identity: asking what it means to 'do good', her research in Europe, Africa, and the U.S. employs an intersectional analysis of global Muslim humanitarianism. For more information, contact the professors directly. View a list of Brooklyn College courses in sociocultural anthropology.
