After a long period of low activity, one club is ready to make a big comeback. It’s the only department club where the members are also subjects.
The Anthropology Club is a club that, as the name suggests, is all about anthropology. With meetings being held weekly, each new gathering brings forth a new, exciting topic.
“It’s a very casual club,” said Emma Stachura, a third-year studying anthropology and biological sciences. “We’re a group of people who are all interested in the same thing just coming together and hanging out. We normally talk about different things every week. Sometimes, we’ll do activities based on physical anthropology or cultural anthropology. Towards the ends of the semester when finals are coming up, we’ll watch documentaries or movies as a way to relax.”
Overall, the group is very welcoming, with a variety of fun, stress-relieving activities.
“Some of my favorite moments that I’ve had with the club are the hands-on activities where you and the other members can relax and hang out, as well as talk about various topics,” said Taylor Nguyen, a fourth-year who is the club’s current secretary and a student studying science, technology and society as well as anthropology. “We will often debate on various subjects, which can be exciting.”
At each meeting, members discuss different aspects of anthropology, as well as go over trivia that relates to the topic of the week.
“Typically, at our meetings, we’ll play some sort of game, like trivia, or some other game related to anthropology, and we’ll annually make sugar skulls for Dia de los Muertos,” Nguyen said. “As for other events, we have previously gone on trips to visit Town Creek Indian Mound, and we’ve also been to the RACE exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. We have also volunteered in the past to help clean up the Oberlin Cemetery.”
Despite the club being very much anthropology-focused, students from other disciplines are welcome to come to meetings and join the club.
“You don’t have to be an anthropology major to be a part of our club,” Stachura said. “Anthropology is the study of people, and we are all people. We’re all humans. It’s very broad, and we’ve found that no matter what your major is, you can find some way to apply your interests to it. You can apply it to pretty much whatever you’re doing.”
Although the club has been dormant for some time, its members are looking to get the group back on its feet.
“We’re still getting back into the swing of things,” Stachura said. “Once a club has been dormant for a while, it’s hard to get the word back out there, especially with anthropology since it’s one of the smaller majors. Anthropology is definitely a very important field that can have an impact on other areas of interest. I’d like to see us get more people outside of CHASS involved, and I’d like to see us be able to do more service projects, find more things that would be relevant for us to participate in and then get to the point where we can eventually hold our own events.”
As more people come into the club, Nguyen hopes that the club will be able to expand its reach, so that it will be able to provide new, unique experiences for its members.
“I’d definitely like to get a bigger group of people who would give us more perspectives on what we could do together as a group,” Nguyen said. “I think we definitely need to bring in people who are open to new ideas, so it would definitely be cool so we could see more coming out of meetings. I think, if we had more people, we’d definitely be able to do more things.”
The group has visited multiple places in North Carolina in the past, although it has its sights set on longer, more intriguing trips.
“I think it would be really interesting if we could go to Washington D.C.,” Stachura said. “There’s just a ton of museums there. There’s a ton of history, and there’s so much of it that’s centered around people.”
More information about the Anthropology Club can be found on the group’s Get Involved page.
