Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnography at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

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Overview Sociocultural anthropologists at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill embrace the humanities when they investigate realms as far-reaching as expressive culture (music, performance, material arts, texts, architecture, film, and other semiotic media); religious practices and movements, moral values, ethics, and human rights; history, heritage, and memory practices (how the past has made and is recollected in the present); stories and storytelling; knowledge formations, the construction of (multiple) realities through practices involving entities as various as the dead, deities, non-human life forms, and things; consumption and tourism; and nature, biomedicine, and other sciences and technologies.Key facts:Members of the Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnography Program thus study history, memory and everyday life in Japan; memory practices of how the past is made and recollected in the present, and how intellectual property law is interpreted in Southeast Asia; expressive religious experience among African Americans; psychiatry as a globalizing form of knowledge and practice in South Asia; and meanings and modes of evidence within emerging forms of technologized embodiment in biomedicine.Sociocultural anthropologists attend to the social sciences when they examine the enacted and performed divisions, solidarities and alliances that mark interactions between individuals, groups and communities of different ethnicities, classes, genders, sexualities, and nationalities, and generate different forms and meanings of power. They thus consider relationships of caste inequality; class antagonisms and alliances; ethnic conflicts and chauvinisms; processes of race and state formation, citizenship, and sovereignty; the function of economic institutions (e.g. markets), and the processes of production, consumption, distribution, exchange and waste disposal; the asymmetries of gender and different sexualities; urbanization and transnational migration; the making of democratic and nondemocratic politics; social movements and their knowledges; political leadership, parties, factions and interest groups. As they do so, sociocultural anthropologists reflect critically on the Western (and sometimes ethnocentric) premises of much prevailing social science scholarship, and seek to advance it in more innovative directions. I want to find another Master Course

Sociocultural anthropologists conduct long term research in one or more communities and participate in daily activities while they observe and engage with community members. The Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnography program is offered by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.