BA Anthropology

About this course

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human, in all the variety and complexity that phrase implies. It draws on fieldwork, comparative analysis, and theoretical reflection to investigate how people across cultures and historical periods have organised their social lives, built their economies, formed their beliefs, and related to the environments they inhabit. Anthropology developed as an academic discipline partly through engagement with societies that European scholarship had treated as peripheral, and it retains a critical commitment to challenging assumptions about what is natural, universal, or inevitable about human social arrangements. At Goldsmiths this part-time programme brings a distinctively interdisciplinary and politically engaged character to anthropological study. You will investigate the world from a new angle, drawing on anthropological theory alongside perspectives from sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies to approach issues including the environment, state power, migration, and the politics of refugee and asylum-seeker experience. Goldsmiths has a long tradition of critical social science and the arts, and the intellectual environment is one in which anthropological questions are pursued with genuine ambition and social awareness. Studying part-time allows you to connect your learning with your own professional and personal experience in ways that can enrich the analysis. Graduates of anthropology apply their skills and knowledge across a wide range of careers. Many work in international development, humanitarian organisations, public health, and social research, where anthropological methods and ways of thinking are directly valued. Others move into government, policy, education, museums, journalism, and the cultural sector. The discipline's emphasis on cross-cultural understanding, ethical engagement with difference, and critical analysis of power is particularly relevant to careers in global health, human rights, migration, and community work. Further study at Masters or doctoral level is a common path for those who want to pursue research or develop specialist expertise in a particular region, issue, or theoretical tradition.

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