The capstone seminar is a research seminar. Its purpose is to allow students to engage skills they have acquired to formulate an intellectual problem, gather and analyze data, and compose an original and synthetic work of scholarship relevant to their discipline. Projects may take a variety of forms, including library papers, fieldwork-based papers, group projects, or other alternatives, subject to the instructor's advice and consent. Students registered for the course will meet at least once prior to the commencement of Spring classes and are expected to begin the semester with a concrete research proposal in hand; senior majors writing honors theses join the seminar with projects already well underway. Class meetings thereafter will be devoted to the discussion and mutual critique of ongoing work; students will be required to present work in progress to the seminar at several points during the semester. A final grade will be assigned based on the quality of the research project and on the quality of the student's contributions to and critiques of classmates' work. Students who are not senior majors in anthropology or sociology are permitted to register for this course only with the instructor's permission. Requirements: major research project, class participation. Prerequisites: Anthropology and Sociology senior majors or with permission of instructor. Expected enrollment: 23. Students who are doing a thesis in Anthropology or Sociology are required to audit this course and should, therefore, make certain their schedules allow them to do so.