Reasons to Study Cultural Anthropology - Admission/Application Essay Example

Us Every field of study makes claims of its own nobility. Each life pursuit has its own proclaimed honor, and each seeks to place itself about the others. Physicians purport the value of saving lives. Physicists argue about complex equations. Engineers dream of space travel. I want nothing more than to study ourselves. Is anything as important to people as people The world is made up of cultures. Societies as wide and varied as the people that comprise them. I have developed a passion for learning about people from different social and cultural backgrounds, partly because of my own migration from India to the United States in April of 1984; the same year The Karate Kid was released, though that is probably unrelated.

My first-hand experience gradually acclimating to a foreign culture piqued my interest in a career in Cultural Anthropology. Since then, I have solidified my desires to pursue a PHD in the subject, and take my place among the world's academics, to proudly represent the anthropological world, and to gather and spread knowledge of ourselves. My research interest is to study and write about immigrant populations in the United States. I myself was an immigrant and so I have always found it fantastically interesting to learn about other immigrant groups and their experiences in America.

In America, there are members of nearly every ethnic group in the world, excepting maybe pygmies. America is the most interesting anthropological experiment in all of human history; the integration of all the cultures on the planet into one, roiling mass of flavor and experiences. Never has such an outlandish goal been realized so successfully. Any time I meet someone from India in the US, I get excited, because I know that they'll have as many stories as I do, and each one will be different.

I'm even more interested when I meet people from other ethnic groups, because they're not just demographics or statistics, they're people, with stories. And I want to make it my life's work to collect these stories and study them. I love talking. I could talk to anyone for hours. I love hearing the tales of their lives. We talk about customs and food, ritual practice and immigration. I feel lucky to live in a place like this, where so many different people come together and human history isn't written down in some dusty tome.

It comes to life and we're reminded that we are the world. Some people feel this way --obsessively interested in people like themselves-- and so they choose another field, one that they feel is more "useful." I, however, don't feel that knowledge should be sought for profit, or that it should be horded, and hidden away from the world. But. knowledge belongs to the world, so instead, I chose to gather knowledge of the world, and its inhabitants. So that's why I want to study anthropology. I want to learn about everyone I can.

I feel that Cultural Anthropology is where Philosophy, Psychology, and Art come together and fuse into a pursuit that amounts to no less than Humanity.