Social Anthropology
Social Anthropology is the study of the many and often varied ways in which people around the world live and make sense of their lives. It is about human experience and social relations in the contemporary world, both in politically and economically central, as well as more remote regions. By studying different ways of life and of understanding the world, social anthropology students develop skills in understanding cultural difference and thinking in open-minded and flexible ways. These are vital skills in today’s fast-changing and multicultural world.
Social Anthropology at Manchester is recognised nationally and internationally as a leading centre for high-quality and wide-ranging teaching and research. It has a large and dynamic staff whose research interests cover an extensive range of parts of the world and topics. Staff have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in many of the countries of South and Central America, Africa, Europe, Melanesia, the Middle East, Central Eurasia, India and Japan. The range of topical areas is also broad, with particular strengths in questions of social and political inequalities and change; in different ways of knowing, communicating and organising knowledge; in understandings of how people locate themselves in the world in terms of borders, territories and in terms of environment more widely; in the diversity and organisation of sensory experience – vision, hearing, touch; in understandings of bodies, illness, sex, gender and how people are related to one another; in social and individual memory; and in the production of art and other cultural products. All of this allows us to offer a wide-ranging and up-to-date curriculum, which provides a core training in the central areas of social anthropological thought, as well as more specialist options and supervision.
Specialist facilities include the Manchester Museum, with its extensive collections of ethnographic objects, with which some students take the opportunity of conducting supervised study; and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, which houses our Film library with some 2,000 videos ranging from classic ethnographic film and contemporary documentary to cinema history and modern film. After graduation, some students go on to take the MA in Visual Anthropology, a hands-on postgraduate course on anthropological film making. Peer mentoring and the thriving, student-run, Anthropology Society ensure that our students are supported by each other, as well as by staff in the discipline area. Students are recruited from a wide variety of backgrounds, and the range of experience they bring with them also ensures a lively and enriching atmosphere.
In our undergraduate degree courses, in addition to our single honours degree in Social Anthropology, we also offer a joint degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, for students interested in focusing on both the diversity of social and cultural life in the past as well as in contemporary terms.
Our postgraduate degree courses offer a wide range of options, including Diploma and MA in Social Anthropology, the MA in Visual Anthropology mentioned above, MA in Anthropological Research, M.Phil. in Social Anthropology, M.Phil. in Ethnographic Documentary, PhD in Social Anthropology and PhD in Anthropology with Visual Media.