1 Harvard University –United  States

Harvard College was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and was named for its first benefactor, John Harvard of Charlestown. Harvard is America's oldest institution of higher learning, founded 140 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. The University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 18,000 degree candidates, including undergraduates and students in 10 principal academic units. An additional 13,000 students are enrolled in one or more courses in the Harvard Extension School. Over 14,000 people work at Harvard, including more than 2, 000 faculties. There are also 7,000 faculty appointments in affiliated teaching hospitals. Our mission, to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge, has kept the University young. We strive to create an academic environment in which outstanding students and scholars from around the world are continually challenged and inspired to do their best possible work. It is Harvard's collective efforts that make this university such a vibrant place to live, to learn, to work, and to explore.

Social Anthropology Graduate Program Overview

The field of social/cultural anthropology is changing rapidly in response to economic and political developments in the post-Cold War world. Harvard's Social Anthropology Program is now focusing on issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies, "new" nationalisms, diaspora formation, transnationalism and local experience, medical anthropology, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace.

Faculty members have built ties to colleagues in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard's regional centers (e.g., Davis Center of Russian Studies, Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Asia Center), the Barker Center for Humanities, the Afro-American Studies program, and the professional schools (especially the Harvard Medical School).

Our graduate students (drawn from over 30 countries) expect to work in the worlds of academe, government, NGOs, law, medicine, and business.

Our mission during the next two decades is to develop new methodologies for an anthropology that tracks cultural developments in a global economy increasingly defined by the internet and related technologies.

Social Anthropology Program faculty are keenly aware that material culture is a key element in the study of globalism and the new world economy. Accordingly, we are cooperating with Peabody Museum staff who share our interests in redefining the study of popular culture, art, and the origins of industrial society. Research at the Peabody Museum also makes it possible for us to maintain close ties to our departmental colleagues in the Archaeology Program.

Anthropology brings a global and comparative perspective to the study of human beings, exploring a wide range of topics across space and time. The field is linked through its subdisciplines to many other fields in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.

The Anthropology Department offers specialized focus on Archaeology and Ancient Civilization; Cities, Urbanism, and Transnationalism, Culture; Ecology and Materiality; Economy, Markets, and Modernity; Gender and Sexuality; Health and Medicine; Historical Anthropology; Linguistic Anthropology; Political Anthropology; Race And Ethnicity; Religion; Science and Technology; Sensory Ethnography; Space and Landscapes; and State, Sovereignty, and The Law.

University of Oxford - U.K

2 University of Oxford – U.K Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world and lays claim to nine centuries of continuous existence. As an internationally renowned centre for teaching and research, Oxford attracts students and scholars from across the globe, with almost a quarter of our students from overseas. More than 130 nationalities are represented among a student population of over 18,000. Oxford is a collegiate university, with 39 self-governing colleges related to the University in a type of federal system. There are also seven Permanent Private Halls, founded by different Christian denominations. Thirty colleges and all halls admit students for both Oxford

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology: Dealing with Social and Cultural Diversity

Social and Cultural Anthropology considers people, through and through, as social beings. It learned to do this through an early interest with 'exotic' places. But the approach that it learned applies to all of us. It has forced the realisation that everything that all of us do, in whatever society or culture at whatever period of history, rests on assumptions, which usually are not stated but which are largely shared with our particular neighbours, kin, friends, or colleagues. Everything social is open to question, including solidly held beliefs and attitudes and ideas about causality, the self in society, and nature and culture. Learning to relate different versions of the world to each other is learning to be a Social Anthropologist. In turn, Social Anthropology has been described as 'empirical philosophy'.

Social Anthropologists are usually area experts, often spending a lot of time, when relevant, on language, literature and history. But they talk among themselves about general problems of how to understand the social world. Specialisation can be by topic (for example economics, politics, religion, medicine, migration, or the visual, material, and embodied), but the subject as a whole is not topic-based. Social Anthropology asks where the topics come from, what they reveal and what they conceal, and what light, if any, they throw on the deep assumptions that persons in society might share. In so far as it does that, it is happy to take as its subject matter whole other disciplines in academia, or whole institutionalised forms of knowledge, such as science, law, nationalism, or pyschoanalysis, just as it does other cultures or societies or forms of common sense. As a discipline, it represents a way of making sense of disparate lives, societies, and ideas of the world.

Originally established as the only centre in the UK specialising in postgraduate teaching and research within the discipline, it continues to supervise large numbers of graduate and research students

University of Cambridge - U.K

3The University of Cambridge 

Social Anthropology at Cambridge is a leading centre globally in anthropological teaching and research. Both in the UK and beyond, a large number anthropologists teaching in major university departments received their doctoral training here, and the current faulty members are engaged in some of the most innovative frontline research in the human and social sciences today.

Cambridge anthropologists have always been at the forefront of developments in the discipline. The foundations of modern anthropology were laid by such Cambridge figures as Henry Maine, James Frazer, Alfred Haddon, and William Rivers. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, as anthropology emerged as a coherent university discipline, it was Cambridge anthropologists such as Audrey Richards, Rio Fortune, Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach who pioneered innovations in the study of kinship, political systems and religious practice and symbolism. Jack Goody and Alan Macfarlane developed influential syntheses of comparative anthropology and large-scale history in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 90s, Ernest Gellner continued these interests, and was a major pioneer in the study of nationalism, as resurgent nationalist and ethnic identity movements rose to prominence across the globe. Both Gellner and Caroline Humphrey also helped found the anthropological study of socialist and then later post-socialist societies. Marilyn Strathern’s writings on Melanesia and on English kinship helped reshape the discipline, with new approaches to knowledge, relationality, and ethnographic description. In recent years our research has grouped around three broad themes: Moral Life and Change, which concerns how to understand ethnographically and theoretically how people relate to each other ethically and create new relationships in situations of social change; Citizenship and Political Life, which is concerned with charting changing forms of political association and diverse ways in which state power is manifest in social life; and The Environment, Time, and Resources, which looks at how local ideas and practices interact with national policies and planetary concerns in relation to the environment, including material and cultural resources.

We have a cosmopolitan body of teaching officers, each one at the forefront of his or her field. Their research ranges across the world and focuses on a broad range of topics. We are also fortunate to bring together an ever-changing group of extremely talented post-doctoral researchers, many of whom work on projects hosted in the Department, or hold research positions funded by research councils or at Cambridge colleges.

The Division of Social Anthropology is part of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Faculty of Human, Social and Political Science, which is also home to the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, with which we maintain close links. We also work closely with the Centres of African, Development, Gender, Latin American, and South Asian Studies, and with colleagues in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The Division is home to the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, a highly successful centre for research on Mongolia, Tibet and other parts of that region.

We maintain a strong tradition of broad-based undergraduate education, covering all the main core sub-disciplines in the subject. Our Undergraduate degree is part of the Tripos in Human, Social and Political Sciences (HSPS Tripos), an interdisciplinary programme that allows students to choose from a wide range of subjects - including those they may not have studied before - in the first year, and then to specialise in the second and third years, so that our graduates have the opportunity of gaining a mastery of the discipline that provides a basis for proceeding directly to front-line doctoral research. We also offer joint-honours degrees in Social Anthropology with Politics, Sociology, Archaeology, or Biological Anthropology.

At graduate level, we offer a Master’s degree (the MPhil) in social anthropology, which can serve as a conversion course enabling graduates in another subject to gain a thorough grounding in anthropology, which can serve as a preparation for doctoral research. Our large and varied body of research students, studying for the MRes and PhD degrees, make us one of the most important centres of doctoral training in the subject. Cambridge social anthropology PhDs have gone on to teach at universities across the world, and to distinguished careers in a wide range of professions from the media to international development.

London School of Economics and political Science (LSE) - U.K

4 The London School of Economics and Political Science  commonly known as the London School of Economics or LSE) is apublic research university located in London, England and a constituent college of the federal University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw for the betterment of society, LSE joined the University of London in 1900 and first issued degrees to its students in 1902.^[4][5] Despite its name, LSE conducts teaching and research across a range of legal studies and social sciences in 26 academic departments or institutes including mathematics, statistics, media, human geography, public affairs and international history^[6] and is recognised as one of the leading social science universities in the world.^[7][8]

LSE is located in central London, near the boundary between Covent Garden and Holborn. The area is historically known as Clare Market. It has 10,600 students and just over 3,000 staff^[9] and had a total income of £299.6 million in 2014/15, of which £27.1 million was from research grants.^[1] 155 nationalities are represented amongst LSE's student body and the school boasts the highest percentage of international students (73%) out of all British universities – ranked 2nd in the world for the highest proportion of international students.^[10] The School is organised into constituent academic departments and 25 research centres.^[11] LSE forms a part of the academic golden triangle of highly research-intensive English universities.

The School is consistently ranked among the top universities nationally^[12][13] and in the world.^[7][14][15] According to the most recentResearch Excellence Framework, published in 2014, the School has the highest proportion of world-leading research among all British universities.^[16] The QS World University Rankings 2016 puts the LSE among the world's top eight in all but two of 14subjects. In addition, its graduates are consistently ranked among the most employable by international employers — ranking within the top five for the past five years.^[17]

The LSE has produced many notable alumni in the fields of law, economics, philosophy, history, business, literature, media and politics. Around 45 past or present presidents and prime ministers have studied or taught at LSE, and 28 members of the currentBritish House of Commons and 46 members of the current House of Lords have either studied or taught at the School. To date, 26% (or 12 out of 46) of all the Nobel Prizes in Economics have been awarded to LSE alumni and current and former staff.^[18] Out of all European universities, LSE has educated the most billionaires according to a 2014 global census of dollar billionaires.

Social Anthropology (available as a BA or a BSc)

Anthropology is a life-changing discipline. It shows you the incredible diversity of human experience, offering insights into ways of living that you might never have considered before. But it also forces you to confront challenging philosophical questions about what it is that makes us, as humans, so different – and about what we might nevertheless have in common.

The LSE course is designed for imaginative, critical thinkers who are passionate about understanding why the world is as it is – and about using the insights anthropology provides to make it better

University of California, Berkeley(UCB)- United States

5 University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is one of the world?s leading academic institutions. Widely known as "Cal," the campus is renowned for the size and quality of its libraries and laboratories, the scope of its research and publications, and the distinction of its faculty and students. National rankings consistently place Berkeley?s undergraduate and graduate programs among the very best in a variety of disciplines. Our high-acclaimed faculty currently includes: 7 Nobel Laureates, 225 members of the Academy of Arts & Sciences, 131 members of the National Academy of Science, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of the United States, and 141 Guggenheim Fellows, more than any other university in the country. It was here that two professors discovered plutonium in 1941 as well as numerous other elements, including berkelium and californium. Berkeley faculty are quoted daily in newspapers and journals throughout the world as experts in their fields. But Berkeley is also about extraordinary students! While most of our 22,800 undergraduates are Californians, every state, and more than 100 foreign countries are represented on campus. The student body can best be characterized by its talent and its diversity; in fact, there is no single...

For Anthropology Majors  

Faculty Undergraduate Advisors provide general academic advising, are available to talk to students about planning for graduate school, and evaluate requests for exceptions, including credit for transfer courses. The 2015-16 Undergraduate Advisors are Professors Kent Lightfoot (Archaeology) and Stanley Brandes (Socio-Cultural).

The Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer (SAO), Frances Bright, is responsible for day-to-day advising of declared majors and students interested in Anthropology. The SAO can assist students with: declaring the major; assessing progress in the major; administrative concerns (i.e. TeleBEARS, Add/Drops); graduation matters; general info on Anthropology courses offered each term; options for independent study; Senior Honors Program; researching graduate programs and enrichment opportunities; and referral to other campus offices.

Sociocultural Anthropology

Required coursework

In the first year of the program students in social cultural anthropology are required to take a two-semester sequence, Fundamentals of Anthropological Theory, Anthropology 240A-240B. The goal of these courses is to cover classical and contemporary debates in the field and their genealogy in earlier philosophical anthropologies, in classic sociology and political economy, and in terms of intersecting frames of modernity, colonialism, nationalism, and biopolitics. Social cultural students are also required to enroll in Anthropology 290 (departmental lecture series) each semester they are registered before advancing to candidacy.

First Year Examination

At the end of the first year, a progress of each student is assessed and students may be given an oral examination by a group of faculty members. The decision about continuation within the graduate program is made on the basis of performance during this examination and on the student's academic work throughout the first year. A student may be requested to leave the graduate program, even though the oral examination was judged passing if the student's academic work was judged weak and the department's faculty is concerned that a student will not complete the program satisfactorily.

Departmental Review of Graduate Students

At the end of the fall semester, an annual mid-year review of graduate student progress is conducted by the Graduate Advisor and faculty. This is generally a review of first-year students' progress but may include reviews of advanced students as well. Each student's progress is assessed and recommendations are made as appropriate.

At the end of spring semester, a similar year-end review is conducted. This is a more general review of all graduate students in the department.

Second and Third Years

Students, in consultation with their advisors, elect other seminars, courses, or language training as appropriate to individualized plans of study. The seminars and individual research work during this period are directed toward preparing the student's three field statements and fulfilling the language requirement--both which are necessary for the preparation for the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination.

Field Statements

Field statements are bibliographical essays on areas of specialization that are to address substantive areas of anthropology. Each field statement is a critical summary and analysis of issues and debates in a field of knowledge. Social cultural students will write two field statements on topics such as kinship, religion, linguistic anthropology, history of anthropology, economic anthropology, etc. The third field statement is most often on the student's chosen ethnographic or research area. Faculty sponsors will work with the student in the preparation of these fields. Sociocultural students may choose to work with a professor outside the department on one of their field statements.

Dissertation Prospectus

The dissertation prospectus is an intellectual justification and research plan for the dissertation. Sociocultural students must get their prospectus signed by all three dissertation committee members and file it at the end of their third year, either before or after the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination. There is no designated length for a sociocultural dissertation prospectus.

Biological Anthropology

All the procedures and regulations of the overall Anthropology Ph.D. apply to students specializing in biological anthropology. Students can be admitted to work with archaeology or sociocultural faculty. The Head Graduate Advisor has authority over the implementation of requirements for these students. The Head Graduate Advisor for 2014-15 is Professor Saba Mahmood.

Admissions

Students are admitted to pursue the Anthropology Ph.D. under the advising of the biological anthropology faculty in archaeology or sociocultural anthropology. It is strongly suggested that students communicate with faculty before submitting an application. Students must designate Biological Anthropology as their program, and must list two faculties with whom they intend to work.

Required coursework

In the first two years of their program, biological anthropology students are required to take one theory seminar: either Archaeology Theory (229A) or Fundamentals of Anthropological Theory (240A or 240B) as advised by their supervisor. In addition, they are required to take a total of two additional upper division courses, one of which is to be a methods course (this could include Anthropology 229B and/or courses outside of the Department as determined to be appropriate). Biological Anthropology students are required to enroll in Anthropology 290 (departmental lecture series) each semester they are registered before advancing to candidacy.

First Year Examination

At the end of the first year, the progress of each student is assessed and students may be given an oral examination by a group of faculty members. The decision about continuation within the graduate program is made on the basis of performance during this examination and on the student's academic work throughout the first year. A student may be requested to leave the graduate program, even though the oral examination was judged passing if the student's academic work was judged weak and the department's faculty is concerned that a student will not complete the program satisfactorily.

Field Statements

Biological anthropology students will write two field statements on topics such as a research method or analytical tool, or a theoretical approach. The third field statement will be in the student’s chosen topic area. Faculty sponsors will work with the student in the preparation of these fields. Biological anthropology students might choose to work with a professor outside the department on one of their field statements.

Dissertation Prospectus

The dissertation prospectus is an intellectual justification and research plan for the dissertation. Biological Anthropology students must submit their prospectus before the Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination and it should be no more than eight pages in length

Medical Anthropology

The Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology is one of the pioneering programs in the discipline both nationally and globally. The program provides disciplinary leadership and outstanding and comprehensive training leading to the Ph.D. degree. No other program offers the Joint Program's combination of excellence in critical medical anthropology, studies of science, technology and modernity, intersections of medicine and social theory, and cutting edge scholarship.

Topics of active research include:

·                                 violence and trauma

·                                 genomics and ethics

·                                 transplantation and organ and tissue commodification

·                                 citizenship, immigration, and the body

·                                 psychiatry, ethnopsychiatric, and psychoanalysis

·                                 youth and child survival

·                                 hunger, infectious disease, development, and governmentality

·                                 traditional medicine and its modernity

·                                 sexuality, gender, and the commodity form

·                                 geriatrics and dementia

·                                 death, dying, and the politics of "bare life"

The core faculty on the Berkeley side of the Joint Program form an organized research group called Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. This group links medical anthropology, science and technology studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. There are eight faculty in the group: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Program Director of Medical Anthropology; Paul Rabinow, Director of the Project on Genomics and Society; Lawrence Cohen, Co-director of Medical Anthropology; Stefania Pandolfo (Interim Program Director for 2011-12), Charles L. Briggs, Stanley Brandes, Cori Hayden, and Seth Holmes. Together with colleagues at Berkeley and UCSF and with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program and in the Department of Anthropology, these scholars have created both the most diverse and the most contemporary program in the field.

The expansion of traditional medical anthropology at Berkeley into Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body reflects several disciplinary breakthroughs associated with our faculty. Though variants of "medical anthropology" are almost as old as the parent discipline of anthropology, the organized field emerged in post-war North America as an effort to link international public health, ethnomedicine, and allied social science in the service of the anthropology of development. The field shared both the promise and the limits of modernization theory more generally. Both the critical Marxist and symbolic/interpretive challenges of the 1970s and 1980s thickened debate, along with closer links to historical analyses of the scholarly medical traditions and to the development of qualitative methodologies concurrent with the expansion of NIH, NIMH, and other governmental programs of research support.

Despite the rapid growth of the field at this time, most research remained auxiliary to the categorical if not the political and economic imperatives of biomedicine. With the arrival of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Berkeley became a leader in defining what she famously termed a "critically applied medical anthropology." Critically applied medical anthropology refused the theory/applied divide that characterized so many departments and programs, arguing the impossibility of separating "theoretical" debate in cultural anthropology and the human sciences on the one hand and more "applied" commitment to the health and survival of communities and groups, on the other. Scheper-Hughes's articulation of a critical anthropology of hunger offers a powerful example of the change in the field she was instrumental in creating.

The rise of this movement at Berkeley led to a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s with two dominant programs in graduate training, critical medical anthropology in the Joint Program at Berkeley and UCSF and interpretive medical anthropology at Harvard. Lawrence Cohen came from Harvard in 1992 to join Scheper-Hughes, and the teaching and joint research that has resulted from their collaboration represent a critical and ongoing conversation bringing together the leading formations in the field. Cohen has worked to link debates between critical, interpretive, and biocultural medical anthropologies to broader theoretical questions of materialization that have emerged in feminist and queer scholarship.

The rapid growth of science studies and the increasing centrality of both science and the body to contemporary debate in the academy posed new challenges to medical anthropology. Paul Rabinow has studied the new genomics intensively, work leading to three books and to the development of what he has termed an anthropology of reason. Against too-easy criticism of scientific and medical practice that did not question what Michel Foucault called the "speaker's benefit" of the critic, Rabinow offered a method and a form of analysis that offered a way out of the endless battles of the "Culture Wars." Berkeley anthropology emerged as the most powerful alternative to the dominant approaches to the sociology of science and science studies.

From the mid-1990s and on, these two streams of medical anthropology and the anthropology of reason have been in closer and sharper interaction. Scheper-Hughes wrote a famous article calling for a "Barefoot Anthropology"; Rabinow offered his own vision of a "Well-Heeled Anthropology," and Medical Anthropology Program affiliates Professors Laura Nader and Aihwa Ong both authored important responses to this debate. Far from pushing students towards either pole, the debate constituted a space for encouraging students to link critical, interpretive, and genealogic analysis. Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs are studying challenges to neoliberal health policies and new understandings of health, citizenship, and the state emerging from revolutionary healthcare in Venezuela. Seth Holmes studies labor, health, and health care in the context of transnational in/migration and agricultural systems, particularly in the U.S. and Mexico.  Against this background, he has explored the ways in which perceptions of race, class and citizenship play into (and, at times, challenge) the naturalization and normalization of social and health inequalities. In addition, Holmes studies the ways in which medical students and physicians come to perceive and respond to social difference.

In a world of linking new genomics, bioinformatics, and pharmacotherapy to corporate medicine and public-private hybrid structures internationally, "bioethics" has become ever more ubiquitous and empty a critical practice. The question of ethics and more generally of human futures links the current work of Cohen, Rabinow, and Scheper-Hughes. To this question and to the related investigation of trauma, loss, and healing, Stefania Pandolfo brings a rigorous anthropological conversation incorporating contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis and her research in a Moroccan psychiatric hospital.

Pandolfo's work provides a bridge allowing for analysis linking medical anthropology and recent social theories of language, melancholy, and the body. Pandolfo has offered extensive training to graduate students in the anthropology of medicine, science, and psychiatry, linking a reexamination of existential psychiatry and a close engagement with the work of scholars from Benjamin and Blanchot to Freud, Lacan, and Binswanger to both Maghreb and European clinical and theoretical work.

By tracing genealogies of the unexamined imbrication of theories of language, knowledge, performativity, and representation with research on biomedicine, public health, and traditional medicine, the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program enables students to critically synthesize linguistic and critical medical anthropology in such a way as to transform both realms of anthropological inquiry. Charles L. Briggs has explored these connections through research on narrative and statistic representations of epidemic disease Latin America; urban violence and its problematic representations; and a five-country study of how understandings of health, disease, citizenship and the state are profoundly shaped by news coverage of health, all in collaboration with Clara Mantini-Briggs.

Other Berkeley anthropology faculty affiliated with the Medical Anthropology Program bring important resources to graduate student training in the critical analysis of medicine, science, and psychiatry. Laura Nader was instrumental in helping to define the field and remains a leading scholar of medicine and the state. Stanley Brandes has studied many topics of relevance to the field, including alcohol and culture and questions of death and the body.