Anthropology

Anthropology is the comparative study of humanity, asking what it means to be human across the full range of cultures, societies, and historical moments that human beings have inhabited. It takes seriously the diversity of human life, rejecting the assumption that any single culture's way of organising society, understanding the world, or defining what matters is universal or natural. Anthropologists study kinship and family, religion and ritual, economics and exchange, politics and authority, art and aesthetics, and the ways in which people make sense of illness, death, and the sacred, across an extraordinary range of ethnographic contexts.

At Goldsmiths' College, this three-year, full-time degree reflects the college's distinctive intellectual culture, which has long been associated with critical, theoretically adventurous, and socially engaged scholarship. Goldsmiths' anthropology department is known for its engagement with visual and material culture, its interest in the anthropology of art and media, and its sustained attention to questions of race, migration, gender, and power. You will engage with ethnographic fieldwork as a method, developing the skills of participant observation and qualitative research that allow anthropologists to understand social life from within.

You will read classic and contemporary ethnographies, learning to evaluate them critically and to connect them to broader theoretical and comparative questions. A typical entry tariff of 120 UCAS points indicates the entry expectations for the programme.

Anthropology develops a distinctive way of seeing: the capacity to defamiliarise the familiar and to take seriously ways of living very different from your own. These capacities are genuinely valuable in a wide range of professional contexts.

Graduates work in international development, public health, education, journalism, social research, the charity sector, human rights, and the cultural industries. Many proceed to postgraduate study in anthropology, global health, development studies, or social research. The critical cultural literacy that anthropology provides is valued across many fields.