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Social Anthropology: Department
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Anthropology is distinctive among the social sciences and humanities for its grounding in ethnographic fieldwork. Experienced in face-to-face field investigations, departmental staff and postgraduate students provide unique insights into on-going social processes in the wider region while contributing to anthropological theory. The department attracts postgraduate students from all over the world, including many from Asian and Pacific countries. Department members are frequently sought out by public bodies such as the government and the media for their knowledge and expertise. The department regularly hosts visiting scholars from around the world, and its alumni include many of the world’s leading scholars of the region.
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Social anthropology is an interdisciplinary program involving joint participation of the anthropology and sociology departments. A mutual interest in problems of social organization and culture provides the basic focus. The social anthropology concentration is designed for students with an interest in sociological and anthropological perspectives, theories and methods.
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In 1999, Tim Ingold moved to take up the newly established Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, where he has been instrumental in setting up the UK's youngest Department of Anthropology, established in 2002. In his latest research he has been exploring three themes, all arising from his earlier work on the perception of the environment, concerning first, the dynamics of pedestrian movement, secondly, the creativity of practice, and thirdly, the linearity of writing. These issues all come together in his current project, funded by a 3-year ESRC Professorial Fellowship (2005-08), entitled 'Explorations in the comparative anthropology of the line'. Starting from the premise that what walking, observing and writing all have in common is that they proceed along lines of one kind and another, the project seeks to forge a new approach to understanding the relation, in human social life and experience, between movement, knowledge and description. At the same time, and complementing this study, Ingold is researching and teaching on the connections between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (the '4 As'), conceived as ways of exploring the relations between human beings and the environments they inhabit. Taking an approach radically different from the conventional anthropologies and archaeologies 'of' art and of architecture, which treat artworks and buildings as though they were merely objects of analysis, he is looking at ways of bringing together the 4 As on the level of practice, as mutually enhancing ways of engaging with our surroundings.
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The Department is recognised by the ESRC and has one quota award for its MA in Social Anthropology and one for Environmental Anthropology. It is ... recognised for the receipt of ESRC and joint ESRC/NERC research studentships.
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