Zerrah asked:
This is to all anthropology or international relations majors, please list if you’re a undergraduate or graduate.
This is to all anthropology or international relations majors, please list if you’re a undergraduate or graduate.
What sort of jobs have you had and do you have now? How do you believe that this major has helped you in the field? If you’re an anthropology major, were you able to do any fieldwork?
Thank you. : )
Just because jobs seem available, sweetie, doesn’t mean they are. Please save your sarcastic comments for another question. Thanks!
Why would anyone seek a degree in a field, when they don’t know if or what careers are available?
I did a B.A. in Anthropology, and a M.Sc. in museum-oriented textile studies.
I’ve waited table, been an artist’s model, worked in libraries (for decades), computer programmer/analyst. My next-to-last job (for about a decade) was working as an administrative assistant for a university’s Anthropology Department. I watched that job for about a dozen years, until it became vacant, then jumped to apply for it. I heard it called “the most coveted job in town.” Ultimately, I was hired because, years ago, I’d volunteered to type a lot of boring lists for the Department’s administrative head! I didn’t want to leave it, because I could find no other even slightly like it, right across the country. (The last one was a contract to curate a museum exhibit.)
I’ve done fieldwork in a number of Latin American localities. That had a lot to do with 1st husband doing doctoral studies in Anthropology and 2nd husband being from Peru. And comparative textile studies took me to a number of places (my own energy and $$s).
Anthropology, as “the study of pre-industrial cultures”, is dying or dead. When people who still eat by killing wild animals also watch use cell phones, and watch satellite TV, “globalization” is reducing the splendid variety of human cultures into an almost-uniform sort of mush.
We are in strange, unique, uncharted and unanticipated times. What’s going to happen to “international relations” is anybody’s guess. I’d suggest your best course of action would be to study Arabic. (Chinese too, if you’ve got the capacity. If your linguistic skills are less strong, as the Latin America population increases, even Spanish would be helpful.)
The very great benefit I derived from studying Anthropology was learning that people have developed many different answers to the same questions. There is pleasure in “armchair anthropology”, reading travellers’, missionaries’ and anthropologists’ accounts of the many cultures which used to be. (I’d really recommend “The Golden Bough”, a classic of its kind.) I can imagine no better preventative/treatment for extremism, bigotry and nationalist arrogance.
(When to shoe-throwing incident took place, a bit of cross-cultural training would sure have helped Dubya from making such an ignorant fool of himself!)
P.S. There’s an old proverb that says “Learning is not a shovel”. Studying and learning may be valuable for its own sake.
(But if you’re seriously interested in employability, please check out Health Services. As the Boomers age, the need for all kinds of medical care is going to be explosive. My daughter’s a Public Health nurse, and trained & skilled to be easily employable just about anywhere, and useful to any community where she might go. )