MRes Social Anthropology

The dissertation is a compulsory component of the MRes Social Anthropology, following on from the compulsory modules 801 Research Methods in Anthropology , 802 Research Training Seminar , a quantitative methods component and the option modules taken as part of the programme. Students enrolled on the module are assigned a dissertation supervisor early in the year with whom the topic will be agreed.

This course familiarises students with key debates about the status of anthropological research data and the conditions of its production. Topics include: anthropology, ethnography and the making of ethnographic methods; ethnographic fieldwork, participant-observation and the ‘tacit dimension’; interviewing, biography and life histories; visual and auditory methods in anthropological research; multi-sited research and the changing ethnographic ‘field’; research ethics; research design and proposal writing; reflexivity, home and away; ethnographic analysis – field notes, transcription, coding. The course includes various practical sessions (e.g., on interview technique) and short fieldwork assignments to generate critical awareness among students of their own observational and data recording processes.

This is a two-hour seminar course that has no formal lectures, but includes occasional guest discussants. Students will be introduced to: good writing practice, skills and techniques, ethics in anthropological research, decolonising anthropological research, audio-visual research methods and practice, how to construct a research proposal, funding bodies and applications and library orientation for research students. Other weeks across both terms will be focused on support for the student's own research proposal writing through tutor feedback and peer support and commentary.

This module is for students with no prior knowledge of quantitative methods used in social research. Students will learn basic quantitative techniques used in social research and conduct the corresponding analyses using the R statistical package, as well as recognise applications of basic quantitative methods in social science journal articles. The topics covered will be: descriptive statistics; graphs; hypothesis testing for sample means and proportions; two-way and three-way tables; simple linear regression; multiple linear regression; and binary logistic regression.

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? How might we understand the relationship between brain biology, adverse life experiences, and culturally experienced illness? How does social inequality, discrimination and abuse affect mental health? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions.

Special Theme (2024/25): The Cultural Politics of Chinese Food

We explore key themes in the anthropology of Chinese societies through the lens of food and its cultural politics. In China, food figures prominently in the formation and expression of cultural identities, majority-minority interactions, political power, gender, religious practice, and everyday social relations. Longstanding concerns about food security have increasingly given way to anxieties about food safety and dietary health and renewed interest in culinary tourism and heritage. Food also mediates the relationship between China and the world and shapes the experiences of Chinese in the diaspora. The course addresses current issues and debates surrounding food systems and food practices, as they pertain to Chinese societies and peoples. Topics covered include: food safety and social trust; the culture and politics of banqueting; cultural understandings of body, health and nutrition; food and urban space; food and diasporas; ethnicity and nationalism; meat production, consumption, and avoidance; and famine, memory and moral economies.

This module introduces students to ethnographic studies in and of a particular region in Sub-Saharan Africa, its resident populations, and its diasporas, viewed through a variety of interconnected topics that have been important in the anthropological literature. With a particular focus on West Africa, East Africa, or Southern Africa, students will have the opportunity to explore classic and contemporary anthropological themes such as social organization, political economy, religion, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, personhood, the body, consumption, labour and livelihoods, violence and justice, and social identities, as they take shape in particular 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 nation, subregion, or region, whose boundaries are often designated or shift as a result of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial social processes and power relations.

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 1960s onwards. Questions of temporality, political economy, development, justice, the concept of harm, emotion, activism and feminist ecologies of care are explored in the context of the anthropocene, 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 course explores the construction and lived realities of race in its intersection with gender, and its rootedness in colonialism and empire, both historically and in the present. It critically situates anthropological knowledge as central to both the perpetuation and the critical analysis and political critique of race" as a category of difference with social, political, and economic effects. Exploring the fluid, socially constructed, and powerfully effective nature of both gender and "race" the course explores the ways they intertwine in theory and in lived experience across diverse societies and political discourses. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. Also exploring social theory and other scholarship beyond anthropology, the course examines the diverse and interconnected understandings, experiences, and effects of “race”and gender as systems of meaning-making and power across spaces, places and historical times. "

This module combines theory and anthropological case studies to help students develop a critical knowledge of approaches to address contemporary global challenges in sustainability. It seeks to deepen students' awareness and understanding of how people around the world apprehend and deal with the pressing social and environmental challenges they face, and the range of concepts and practices enacted to deliver sustainable futures. The module invites students to grapple with the contested and culturally-situated nature of these paradigms, and how they are underpinned by forms of economic and political power.

This course offers an exploration of the formation of diasporas and their cultural politics. It looks at how diasporic subjectivities are formed through gendered aesthetic practices and performances, which can take on and signify religious, cultural, political meanings, which are in turn constantly negotiated, hybridised and re-fashioned across bodies, times and spaces.

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 course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

In this module we explore the complex and often paradoxical relationship between place, mobilities and food. We critically interrogate claims made about food system 'delocalisation', 'deskilling' and 'gastro-anomie'. We examine food markets, street foods and restaurants as sites of both cultural production and labour exploitation, of social interaction, cosmopolitanism and open debate, and of social control, surveillance and spatial cleansing. We explore contemporary forms of ethical food activism, including in the digital realm, and consider the complex role of food in migration.

This module deepens student understanding of key concepts in medical anthropology with a special focus on a) the materiality of bodies, substances, and practices, and b) science and technology studies that explore how knowledge comes into being, how it gains traction in the world, and how it shapes existing subjectivities and creates new ways of being and relating.

This module provides an introduction to the perspectives and practices of medical anthropology. It offers insights into the evolution of modern medicine and its key institutional, cultural, and ethical tenets as well as discourses and practices. The key aim is to engage in a cultural critique of biomedical assumptions, while also upholding a serious engagement with biomedical knowledge/mindsets in order to explore what they can offer anthropology. Notions of health and illness are shaped by social, cultural, political, and technological forces. Questions of health and illness are thus inextricably linked with questions of science, technology, modernity, power, religion, gender, colonialism, capitalism, and globalization. We will discuss key concepts such as the normal body, medicalization, social construction, subjectivity, and biopolitics; thus familiarizing students with scholarly and timely debates on how biotechnological developments have fundamentally transformed individuals and communities and the way they experience life and health. In other words, we ask how experience is shaped by systems of classification and intervention, and what epistemological and ethical issues arise from them.

Food and eating are fundamental to human life and health and play profound roles in the construction of social bodies, from families and kinship groups to religious groups and states. Further, food mediates our relationships with non-human beings and surroundings. In this module, we emphasise that our reliance on food for nutritional sustenance is inseperable from food's social, cultural and ecological dimensions. As such, the transformation of food habits and food systems are a central part of human experiences and world histories. We explore cultural diversities and historical change in food production and distribution, eating, cooking and sharing, recycling and wasting, and the classifying, celebrating and prohibiting of food and drink.

This module is a practical guide for engaging research and ideas in real-world settings. ‘How to change things’ is focused on advocacy, communication and learning to see how organisations work and ideas gain traction. Students will learn how to present research to different audiences, including parliamentary lobbying, report writing and social media. How to effectively put complex research ideas into engaging words, graphics, presentations? How to ensure that ideas are fed to the right audiences? The module encourages students to make a positive difference in the world building on their educational experience at SOAS as a resource. Students will explore how anthropology can be used to positively influence opinion, ways of working, thinking and institutions.

This module guides students through key concepts and theories that have underpinned the discipline of social/cultural anthropology over the last five decades, with particular attention to how theoretical concerns and orientations are continually rethought and retooled to address contemporary conditions. The module consciously departs from the conventional “canon” (i.e., the “founding fathers” approach) to offer a more inclusive and vibrant picture of the discipline’s (post-1960s) theoretical shifts. But it does so without overlooking the reverberations of anthropology’s past colonial entanglements, and without giving up its older core question: what does it mean to be human? Weekly class sessions and readings address a variety of topics across the anthropological spectrum, without diluting their analytical and empirical richness.

721 Ethnographic Encounters introduces MA Social Anthropology students to the research interests and regional/topical specialisms of members of the SOAS Anthropology Department, the variety of theoretical questions and field sites that make up contemporary anthropology, and the specifics of how anthropologists work, design projects, gather their data, and write about their findings. Through a series of conversational lectures/seminars with members of the Anthropology faculty, guided by the module convenor, students will be introduced to the research process behind each academic’s publications, shedding light on their methods and offering insight into the less-often discussed practicalities and peculiarities of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary world.

This module is open to all students interested in understanding major transitions in the conceptualisation of the social since the 1960s. Highlighting important currents in poststructuralist thought in anthropology and beyond, the module explores sources of new ideas and frameworks that are themselves of fundamental significance to all humanities and social science scholars. The module guides students to engage with and critically evaluate the theoretical underpinnings of social anthropology as a field of inquiry, and the ways these have been rethought in the face of recent historical and political shifts inclusive of decolonisation and neoliberalism. It introduces new vital concepts and currents, themselves the result of intense interdisciplinary encounters between anthropology on the one hand, and sociology, history, philosophy and political science, on the other.