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Major Cultures Requirement
General Information:
Office of the Dean
208 Hamilton
Phone: (212) 854-2441
Current List: http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/classes/mc.php
The Major Cultures component of the Core explores the globally influential and historically rooted cultures and civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. No part of the Core Curriculum assumes that boundaries between “West” and “non-West” have ever been clear, impermeable, or unchanging; or even that a distinction so rough and so simple is particularly useful for understanding the world. Nor does the Core assume that one civilization is “ours” and the rest are “others.” Whoever “we” are, we mistake the ancient Greeks if we think them just like us or claim them for our own, and we mistake the ancient Chinese (for example) if we think them alien or can find nothing in them of significance or interest to us. Indeed, the effect of the Core as a whole should be to reveal connections, influences, parallels, and blurry boundaries between cultures as much as to show their partial distinctness. But the Core requirements do recognize that cultures and civilizations in different parts of the world have developed across long periods as partly independent traditions with histories of their own, and that the wide variety of important things that have been thought, said, and written in the world, many of which still help shape human action in our own time, cannot be adequately understood or appreciated if torn from those traditions and histories. The Major Cultures requirement, founded on this recognition, promotes learning and thought about the variety of civilizations and the diversity of traditions that have formed the world and continue to interact in it today.
Major Cultures is divided into three tiers of courses. All are founded to an important degree on discussion of primary source materials.
List A: Broadly introductory, interdisciplinary, and temporally extensive courses on a specific major culture or civilization, List A courses usually trace the particular civilization across more than one present-day country or region and usually draw heavily on readings in primary texts.
List B: More advanced and more specialized, these second-tier courses on specific major cultures build on and often assume the work of corresponding List A courses.
List C:These courses address the manifestations in the United States of the major cultures of Lists A and B.
Students should note that while some Major Cultures courses are designed for students who are prepared for advanced work in a subject, certain Major Cultures List A courses—such as ASCE V2002,
ASCE V2003, AHUM V3999,
and AHUM V4000—are designed to parallel Literature
Humanities or Contemporary Civilization and
may be taken simultaneously with these courses.
All students must take two courses from the Major Cultures
List of Approved Courses for a letter grade.
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Students must begin the Major Cultures requirement with
a course chosen from List A.
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The second course, completing the requirement, may be chosen from List
A again or from List B or C.
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If the second course is from List A, it may be drawn from any of the five
civilizations.
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If the second course is from List B or C, it must be drawn from
the same civilization as the List A course.
A current and complete 
List
of Approved Courses is available in the Office of the Dean (208
Hamilton), the Dean of Student Affairs Office (403 Lerner), and the
advising center offices. Courses
used to satisfy the Major Cultures requirement may also be used to satisfy
major or concentration requirements.
NOTE: Courses that may be taken toward fulfillment of the Major Cultures
requirement are also marked (MC) in the course descriptions
of this bulletin.
Search for a Major Cultures Course! |
Search for a Course
To search for a major cultures course including integrated information
from the Bulletin and Directory of Classes, please see the Course
Search page. Alternately, a
downloadable
list is also available.
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