BA Social Anthropology

What is anthropology about and what do anthropologists do? This module gives an introduction to social anthropology as both an academic discipline and a practice. Students are introduced to anthropology through a number of particular themes, such as modes of production and livelihood, exchange relations, explanations of witchcraft, power relations, kinship and marriage, class, gender, and race.

This course provides an insight into how society has been conceived of in different places and times.You will read a broad range of classic texts of social theory from ancient China and classical Greece to eighteen century Enlightenment and onwards to the birth of anthropology and sociology as academic disciplines. You will attain a sense of the long conversation of social thought that preceded and produced the discipline of social anthropology. And you will be introduced to the art and skill of interpretation.

In this course we explore social thought between, roughly, 1900 and 1960. We do so by studying a sample of the writings of influential social thinkers hailing from Europe, the Caribbean and China, and by situating these in their social, intellectual, and wider historical contexts. The age we look at was one of extremes - of imperialist domination and struggles for national liberation, of free-market capitalism, the Great Depression and protectionism, of communist revolutions, world wars, fascism and genocides, and of women’s suffrage, workers’ rights and the rise of the welfare state.

101B Anthropology in and of the World is the second term of our introduction to social anthropology, open only to students who have taken 101A. This module introduces a critical framework for understanding the production of anthropological theory/knowledge in relation to changing social, political, economic, and ethnographic circumstances. It helps students develop the skills necessary for a close and critical reading of ethnographies. And offers an introduction to the kinds of practical uses anthropological thinking and methods can be put to in everyday life.

This module introduces students to social/cultural anthropology as it is taught, researched, and practiced by SOAS anthropologists. Throughout each term, members of the department visit the class to share their current research and talk with students about the larger significance of their work for the discipline and the world at large. Through these guest lectures, in-depth discussions led by the module convenors, and close reading of contemporary anthropological texts, students gain an understanding of the breadth and range of anthropological research undertaken at SOAS today.

This module introduces students to social/cultural anthropology as it is taught, researched, and practiced by SOAS anthropologists. Throughout each term, members of the department visit the class to share their current research and talk with students about the larger significance of their work for the discipline and the world at large. Through these guest lectures, in-depth discussions led by the module convenors, and close reading of contemporary anthropological texts, students gain an understanding of the breadth and range of anthropological research undertaken at SOAS today.

This module introduces students to key topics in global linguistic diversity, enabling students to put into a global context the language, region or culture that their degree programme focuses on.

This course introduces selected popular music cultures of the world, examining case studies from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as diasporic and globalised styles. Each lecture will introduce: representative musical styles with their characteristic sounds, instruments and forms; the cultural contexts within which they have developed; relationships between music and global and local forces including political power structures, gender, nationalism, tourism and globalisation; the roles of musicians and those working in music industries; circumstances surrounding musical performance, recording and dissemination of music.

This module offers practical guidance and analytical tools for making your way through your first year of studies and beyond, using anthropological methods to understand the many factors that shape students' intellectual and social life at university. Through weekly workshops, we will explore and develop independent perspectives on and approaches to multiple aspects of higher education: relationships and institutions that make up the contemporary university; education as a form of empowerment; stresses and strains of student life; factors that can encourage or limit a sense of belonging; student and staff activism. the purpose of higher education itself; and much more.

Each year, the Anthropology Department offers at least one small seminar exclusively for Year 1 single honours students. This option module provides an insider's view of contemporary anthropology in a small group setting, through reading and discussion on a particular topic or issue related to the tutor's current research. Topics will vary from year to year. As an inaugural journey into the world of anthropological research and writing, the Year 1 seminar encourages class participation, student collaboration, and active research.

What is the basis of anthropological knowledge? How is anthropological research conducted? How has the nature of ‘the field’ changed over time? What is anthropological ‘data’? What is the relationship between ethnographic research and ethnographic writing? This module introduces students to the methods of social/cultural anthropology, past and present, and the practicalities of doing ethnographic field research today. Students will learn to read ethnographic texts with a critical mind, asking whether and how scholars make their methods and interpretive process explicit in their writing. Over the course of the term, each student will develop and carry out a small-scale field research project.

This module provides a social history of anthropology - as an academic discipline, a profession, and a body of scholarship - as it has developed and evolved over the past century, both in 'the West' and worldwide. Topics can vary from year to year, but may include, for example, the relationship between anthropological scholarship and socio-political change; the emergence of national 'schools' of anthropological thought and application; entanglements of anthropology with nationalism and colonialism; the role of anthropology in left-wing social movements; and the popular translation of anthropological concepts into contemporary debates, from race, gender and sexuality to cultural property, heritage and appropriation.

his module introduces and critically examines a series of fundamental changes in anthropological theorising from the 1970s to the present, contextualised in both theoretical and historical terms. Major topics include interpretive, postmodern, and post structural perspectives, as well as technologies of power, especially politics of numbers and data (plus other less-obvious workings of power). The second half of term turns to some fairly recent currents of anthropological thought, whose development has relied on explicit conversations with other fields of inquiry, such as biomedical studies, postcolonial studies, and interspecies studies.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This module provides final-year Anthropology students the opportunity to conduct ethnographic and/or literature-based research and to produce a 10,000-word dissertation on a topic of their choice. The production of a dissertation requires not only keen interest in a particular topic and strong self-motivation, but also a solid foundation in relevant topical areas of inquiry and a firm grasp of anthropological theory and methods. In preparation, Ethnography in Practice (compulsory for single-honours students in Year 2) is strongly recommended for joint-honours students wishing to do an ISP.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This module explores these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

This module introduces students to fundamental concepts and approaches in the study of the links between language and society. Using numerous examples, students will learn about the interplay of language with social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity and age, including how language varies and changes.

The course is designed to equip students with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to the study of museums. It examines the strategies and practices by which museums interpret, organise and display objects – especially non-Western objects – within diverse cultural contexts.

The Music Business.

This module will examine a range of genres and forms, and aims to provide students with an insight into motif and interpretation of love and loss by looking at specific selection of texts in English translation (in poetry and prose) by different authors from across the regions of Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, from the ancient times to the present day.

This module provides an introduction to both classical and recent approaches in economic anthropology. Moving away from narrow understandings of economy, it will explore how economic life is embedded in social relations, cultural transformations and political action. This includes vital topics such as money and commodities, the gendering/racialising of labour, cultures of consumption, informal economies, indebtedness and finance. Finally, it will investigate how anthropologists are envisaging the future of economic life and alternatives to neoliberal austerity, and how an engaged anthropology can contribute to shaping alternatives.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This advanced module offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in cutting-edge literature and thought on a theme/topic in contemporary anthropology, with the focus varying from year to year to reflect current staff research interests and regional expertise. Indicative areas may include, but are not limited to, self and personhood; religious movements and networks; anthropology of 'big stuff'; cultural politics of food; corporate social responsibility; refugees, displacement and trauma.

This final-year module offers students an advanced exploration of contemporary theoretical concepts and perspectives in anthropology and neighbouring disciplines. Recent topics on 401A have included ‘Anthropology Beyond the Human’ and ‘The Anthropology of the Nationstate and the National Economy

This final-year module offers students an advanced exploration of contemporary theoretical concepts and perspectives in anthropology and neighbouring disciplines. Recent topics on 401B have included ‘The Anthropology of Liberalism’ and ‘Critical Life Studies in Anthropology.

The purpose of this module is to familiarise students with the main debates in gender and development and to introduce new ways of conceptualising the field, critiquing the concept of gender as generally applied in development, and also development itself. We will study issues relevant to gender and development not usually included within the development paradigm, like the coloniality of gender. We will also discuss how the gender binaries came to be so pervasive globally. Gender here is viewed as a set of normative behavioural prescriptions that apply to men as much as to women and men and masculinities will be treated as an integral part of the field alongside women and femininities. Gender is also understood not simply as an issue of individual male-female relationships but as inherently political.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This module explores these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times.

Students will engage with the central theoretical and ethical debates relating to anthropologies of climate change, and consider how these have developed in relation to key social movements and moments from the twentieth century to the present. Topics including temporality, political economy, development, justice, ethics, distress, activism and more-than-human ecologies of care are explored, with students encouraged to consider how they might approach crafting their own anthropologies of climate change. Whilst attention is given to historical antecedents and the development of climate as an object of concern, both within and outside the academy, the course looks at contemporary developments and encourages students to think about how they might engage with and shape emergent anthropologies of the anthropocene. In this, the intersection between anthropology and activism is explored, as we ask not only how we can write anthropologies of a warming planet, but also how anthropologies of the anthropocene can help us collectively navigate uncertain planetary futures.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This module provides final-year Anthropology students the opportunity to conduct ethnographic and/or literature-based research and to produce a 10,000-word dissertation on a topic of their choice. The production of a dissertation requires not only keen interest in a particular topic and strong self-motivation, but also a solid foundation in relevant topical areas of inquiry and a firm grasp of anthropological theory and methods. In preparation, Ethnography in Practice (compulsory for single-honours students in Year 2) is strongly recommended for joint-honours students wishing to do an ISP.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This module explores these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

This module introduces students to fundamental concepts and approaches in the study of the links between language and society. Using numerous examples, students will learn about the interplay of language with social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity and age, including how language varies and changes.

The course is designed to equip students with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to the study of museums. It examines the strategies and practices by which museums interpret, organise and display objects – especially non-Western objects – within diverse cultural contexts.

The Music Business.

This module will examine a range of genres and forms, and aims to provide students with an insight into motif and interpretation of love and loss by looking at specific selection of texts in English translation (in poetry and prose) by different authors from across the regions of Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, from the ancient times to the present day.

This module provides an introduction to both classical and recent approaches in economic anthropology. Moving away from narrow understandings of economy, it will explore how economic life is embedded in social relations, cultural transformations and political action. This includes vital topics such as money and commodities, the gendering/racialising of labour, cultures of consumption, informal economies, indebtedness and finance. Finally, it will investigate how anthropologists are envisaging the future of economic life and alternatives to neoliberal austerity, and how an engaged anthropology can contribute to shaping alternatives.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This module introduces students to the ethnographic study of a particular region, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. Drawing on the Anthropology Department's rich expertise in social and cultural phenomena across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas, each term provides the opportunity to explore a different set of classic and contemporary anthropological themes, including, amongst others, social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, and identity politics, as they take shape in specific locales. The module also encourages students to consider how anthropological and historical understandings help us to recognize the fundamentally interconnected and global nature of any region or area, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

This advanced module offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in cutting-edge literature and thought on a theme/topic in contemporary anthropology, with the focus varying from year to year to reflect current staff research interests and regional expertise. Indicative areas may include, but are not limited to, self and personhood; religious movements and networks; anthropology of 'big stuff'; cultural politics of food; corporate social responsibility; refugees, displacement and trauma.