School of Social Sciences

Anthropology

Happy multiracial friends group taking selfie with mobile smart phone

Anthropology is the study of humankind, its common roots and the sources of its rich diversity. The discipline’s uniqueness lies in its global, comparative, and diachronic perspective.

Anthropologists believe that a true understanding of the human condition can only be achieved by studying the distant as well as the near, the ancient as well as the modern. Different branches of the discipline focus on different aspects of human experience, such as how our species evolved, how traditions of thought and behaviour are learned, how and why cultures change and persist.

As the ‘global village’ and its development challenges expand, people who possess different values, religions, customs and perspectives increasingly find themselves competing for scarce resources while trying to live together. For such reasons, there is a growing demand for the expertise and methodologies of people trained in anthropology.

Knowledge of Anthropology is particularly useful in the following areas:

  1. Positions that require specialised knowledge of particular cultures, people or parts of the world; eg research posts in national research institutes and development agencies, human resource departments of large organisations and foreign service.
  2. Education at all levels, where pupils and students come from a variety of backgrounds.
  3. Development consulting and applied research for bodies as the World Bank, World Health Organisation, United Nations agencies, and other non-governmental organisations.
  4. Museums, radio and television, newspaper journalism, film production or other fields that make use of qualitative research methods.
  5. Psychology, social work, town planning, housing, market research, and jobs in the field of race relations, and ethnic minorities.
  6. Medical research, designing culturally sensitive health promotion programmes.

We offer the following programmes in the field of Anthropology:
BA, Bsoc Sc, Bsoc Sc hons, MSoc Sc and PhD

Anand Singh singhan@ukzn.ac.za
Gerelene Pattundeen pattundeeng@ukzn.ac.za
Nokwanda Yoliswa Nzuza nzuzan@ukzn.ac.za