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.