Course description
Course description
The general objective of the MA Social Anthropology is to enable you to develop an anthropologically-informed understanding of the lives of people in both Western and non-Western societies. Through confronting you with the diversity of human social and cultural experience, it encourages you to develop a critical approach to taken-for-granted assumptions and understandings. It also provides certain transferable academic skills, such as conducting bibliographic research, basic computing skills, using the internet as a research tool, making seminar presentations, and effective essay-writing etc.
This programme has been designed with several different constituencies of student in mind. The standard track is intended to bring students to an advanced level of knowledge in the discipline sufficient to proceed to a research-based degree course. This track provides a basic grounding in social anthropology and allows students to tackle certain specialist fields within the discipline. It is therefore particularly suited to those who have a first degree in another field. The research methods track is for those who, having some previous academic experience of social anthropology or a closely related field, specifically intend to pursue doctoral research in social anthropology.
This programme is also available with a pathway in Science, Technology and Medicine.
Module details
Students on the standard track are required to take eight 15-credit course units, including four core units. Typical compulsory course units include: Advanced Anthropology I and II; Ethnography Reading Seminar; and Images, Texts, Fieldwork. Typical optional course units include: Gender and Post-socialism; Anthropology, Globalization and Development; Black Identity and Culture in Latin America; Out of China; Bodies and Embodiment; Anthropology of Organisations; Visual Culture and Media I and II; and Screening Culture: Issues in Anthropology and Film.