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EQUIREMENTS FOR THE MAJOR

COURSES

In addition to senior year comps (for which six credits are awarded), sixty regular course credits are required, of which thirty are accounted for by the following 5 required courses: 110, 111, 240, 330, and 331. You are free to choose the other thirty credits from among other SOAN offerings. Note that a maximum of 12 credits of SOAN courses taken off campus can be accepted toward major credit requirements. Use the record-keeping forms provided for your convenience.)

In keeping with our philosophy of comparative studies and commitment to understanding human societies other than the one we live in, we strongly encourage all majors to develop an in-depth study of a culture other than their own. Students can do this in a number of ways: regular courses in the major (generally, the area studies courses numbered 250 through 258), non-departmental courses, independent studies, writing research papers, and/or through off-campus study.

We cannot emphasize too much how important it is that every student majoring in SOAN gain a deep, integrated understanding of another culture, and, through this experience, also learn about the practical and philosophical obstacles that make achieving such understanding difficult. Doing an intensive study of some other culture is not easy; nor does it guarantee that you will actually understand that culture. But if you don't make the effort, you miss out on two crucial and distinctive aspects of sociology and anthropology: 1) the fight against ethnocentrism through both empathetic and intellectual understanding of other cultures; and 2) the practice of certain techniques for achieving such understanding.

An additional important reason for gaining such in-depth knowledge of other cultures is that you are then in a much better position to understand and critique theory and method in sociology and anthropology. Your own efforts to understand another culture should lead you to appreciate the illumination that theory can shed on features of human society that seem to resist all comprehension. At the same time, the very insight you achieve can point up the strengths and weaknesses of particular theories for answering questions of various types.

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