Social Anthropology – (M.Sc.)

Social anthropology uses very practical, empirical methods to investigate some quite philosophical-looking problems about the nature of human life in society. How far can we generalize about the forms of social life that we find around us, or in the historical record, and the part these forms play in consciousness, knowledge, and the quality of personal and interpersonal experience? By `social forms´, we have traditionally focused on a wide range of the world´s distinctive, often small-scale patterns of social life.

These typically have included concepts of family, gender, and kinship organization; the production and circulation of necessities and luxuries; moral and religious ideas and ritual practices; notions of the human person and of health and illness; cosmological ideas about space, time, the relation between human, animal, and spiritual existence; the life course and rites of passage; and the role of the creative arts in social life.

We have asked, and still ask, questions of the major theorists in the social sciences (such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) as to the connection between these domains of social life, as reflected in the widest possible set of ethnographic comparisons. We have also developed some distinctive theoretical approaches within social anthropology, many of which arose in response to original field investigations in parts of the world scarcely written about before the early twentieth century (for example, those by Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss).

We amassed a large body of field-work based literature on the social and cultural life of peoples within the former European empires and this work remains an important source of ideas for today´s anthropology.

The degree programmes in Social Anthropology aim:

* to provide a strong background in analytical and methodological issues in Social Anthropology, and practice in the critical evaluation of its sources, both in the library and in the context of fieldwork;
* to prepare high-quality students from the UK, EU and overseas either for further research in the discipline or for employment in fields where sensitivity to cross-cultural variability is required;
* to teach all aspects of the course by taking into account the recent significant advances in techniques, information and ideas at the forefront of current research and to integrate these within a general anthropological perspective; and
* to provide a range of generic research skills relevant not only to this discipline, but to several neighbouring fields where students might eventually be given responsibility for research or the administration or application of research.