Social Anthropology with Geography

Social anthropology with geography is a combination that brings together two disciplines deeply concerned with understanding human diversity and the environments, both natural and social, in which people live. Social anthropology explores the huge diversity of contemporary human experience through sustained ethnographic research, asking what makes human cultures, societies, and social arrangements similar to and different from each other, and developing the analytical tools to understand social life in all its complexity. Geography examines how physical landscapes, ecological systems, and spatial processes interact with human activity, adding the environmental and spatial dimensions to a social scientific understanding of the world.

At the University of St Andrews, this four-year full-time programme leads to an MA (Hons) and is built around St Andrews's considerable strengths in both social anthropology and geography. A year abroad is incorporated into the degree, giving you the opportunity to study at a partner institution overseas and to encounter both disciplines in a different academic and cultural context. You will develop the ethnographic and analytical methods of social anthropology alongside the fieldwork, quantitative, and spatial analysis methods of geography, building a versatile set of research skills applicable to questions that span both disciplines.

You will engage with topics such as development, human-environment relations, migration, indigenous knowledge, urban life, and the politics of land and resources, all of which draw on both anthropological and geographical perspectives.

Graduates go on to careers in international development, conservation, urban planning, social research, policy, the civil service, journalism, NGOs, and academic research. The combination of ethnographic depth and geographical breadth is particularly valued in organisations that work at the interface of human communities and natural environments. Postgraduate study in anthropology, geography, development studies, or environmental management is a natural continuation.