Doctor of Philosophy in Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnography

Sociocultural anthropologists conduct long term research in one or more communities and participate in daily activities while they observe and engage with community members. This approach is always collaborative, grounded in conversation rather than in distanced and decontextualized analysis. This approach and the knowledge it generates are intensely local, on the ground and in the weeds with the peoples it studies yet synthesizing and critical of received canons and theories. Its disciplined, participatory, long-term, and self-reflexive methods mean that ethnographic knowledge is hard-earned and unique. At the same time, sociocultural anthropologists often employ methods from the humanities and other social sciences to complement their ethnographic research.

Sociocultural anthropologists 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.

Members of the 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.

More specifically, members of the Program study the negotiation and contestation of colonial processes by sovereign indigenous peoples in north America, gender, race, and sexuality in changing cultural, political, and economic contexts in Latin America, the processes through which reproductive health strategies contribute to liberalize post-Soviet Russia, the relations between ethnic identities and class and state formation in Southeast Asia, the ways Andean communities use heritage and place to defend entrepreneurial activities, social movements and activism in Latin America, the Caribbean and North America, and how people's identities and behaviors express experience, society and history through race, religion and class in the Caribbean, among other research foci.

A bachelor's degree (based on a four-year curriculum) completed before graduate study begins or its international equivalent with an accredited institution an average grade of B (cumulative GPA 3.0) or better. One unofficial transcript from each university attended must be uploaded within the application. All unofficial transcripts must be uploaded to your application in order for your application to be reviewed. Please do not mail transcripts as part of your admission application, we only accept unofficial uploads for application evaluation. If you are offered admission, one official transcript for each university attended will be required prior to the first day of the term. IELTS -7.0 , TOEFL IBT- 90