Social Anthropology

Social anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures across the full diversity of their forms, asking why people organise their lives as they do and what it means to live differently. It approaches that question through sustained engagement with how different communities understand kinship, exchange, religion, politics, the body, language, and the environment, developing a critical and comparative perspective on the assumptions that often feel most natural and inevitable within one's own culture. Social anthropology is a discipline that rewards imagination, rigour, and the willingness to take seriously ways of living and thinking that are radically different from one's own.

At the London School of Economics and Political Science, this BA programme is offered by a department of international standing with a long and distinguished tradition in the discipline. You will engage with both ethnographic methods and theoretical debates, learning to analyse social life through close observation and to situate that analysis within broader comparative and historical frameworks. The programme encourages you to ask difficult questions about power, inequality, identity, and belonging, drawing on a wide range of case studies and theoretical traditions.

The programme runs over three years and includes a year abroad, giving you the opportunity to study at a partner institution and encounter different scholarly traditions and social contexts, which enriches your comparative understanding and prepares you for the kind of fieldwork that is central to anthropological practice.

Graduates from social anthropology degrees move into a wide range of careers. The discipline's training in cross-cultural understanding, qualitative research, and critical analysis is valued in international development and NGOs, policy research, journalism, market research, healthcare, education, law, and the civil service. Many graduates also pursue postgraduate study in social anthropology, development studies, area studies, or related social sciences.

The degree's emphasis on understanding human difference and complexity is relevant wherever people with different backgrounds and perspectives need to work together or be understood.