The guide

Anthropology

Humanities & Social Sciences

The comparative study of human cultures, past and present, understood on their own terms first: what people believe, build and practise. Explaining or generalising across them comes afterwards.

This suits you if…

You would rather understand why a practice makes sense from inside a community than judge it from outside. Long, patient, unglamorous observation genuinely interests you more than reaching a quick conclusion does.

Look elsewhere if…

You want the extended fieldwork the subject is known for to start in year one. Or you are uncomfortable with a compulsory strand on human biology and evolution alongside the cultural material. The real fieldwork mostly waits for postgraduate study, and sociology gives you social patterns without that biological strand attached.

What this subject actually is

You will also see it called

Social Anthropology · Cultural AnthropologyThe same subject, under a different department in a different country. Search for all of them.

What the first year is really made of

You don't study people from a lecture theatre for very long. A short observation exercise arrives in the first term. You sit somewhere public and write down, without judging it, everything a stranger does for an hour. That's the method the whole discipline is built on, and it is far harder to do without imposing your own assumptions than it sounds. A parallel strand on human evolution and biology surprises students who signed up expecting only culture. It's usually that unexpected science, not the fieldwork, that some people leave over.

The catch

The discipline's core method is living inside a community for an extended period to understand it from the inside. That's difficult to do properly as an undergraduate, and belongs mostly to postgraduate research. So a bachelor's gives you the theory and the method in miniature, rather than the fieldwork the subject is known for. 'Anthropologist' is also rarely a job title outside academia and a few specialist agencies.

What to do about it now

The school subjects that actually matter

Biology
History or social studies
English

What admissions screens on, and what the first year assumes you already have. The only thing on this page you can start today.

Where it leads

Kinds of work this opens

A list, not a prediction. Most people in these jobs did not study exactly this, and most people who study this end up doing something the list does not name.