Study at the Department of Social Anthropology
By studying social anthropology at the University of Bergen, you will obtain knowledge about the world in its entirety. You gain a uniquely broad perspective on current events as well as a global understanding of our time based on insights from people’s lived experience.
Social anthropologists are experts at communicating knowledge across diverse cultures, backgrounds and perceptions. As a student in our department you will become skilled in critical thinking and in asking new questions. You learn to see the world through new eyes and to question some of the assumptions we take for granted. You work across a broad spectrum of themes, including inequality and identity, climate and environmental sustainability, the economy, technology, family and social networks, power relations and politics, religion and rituals, as well as migration, globalisation and other forms of social change. Through these topics you learn to understand how people produce meaning and organise their lives in different social and cultural contexts.
Learning social anthropology through practical examples and discussion
Our teaching combines lectures with seminars that provide room for collaboration and productive discussions. A bachelor’s degree in social anthropology provides a foundational introduction to the discipline and to anthropological ways of thinking. You attain key analytical concepts and perspectives, and an understanding of how social anthropological knowledge is produced.
The method of fieldwork
Fieldwork is the key method of doing social anthropology and what distinguishes the discipline from other social sciences. Social anthropologists learn to understand how other people produce and experience their own life-worlds through participant observation, conversations and interviews.
As a BA student you will be provided with an introduction to social anthropological method and knowledge production. Throughout the BA programme you learn to analyse and compare ethnographic material from different parts of the world, and in your BA essay you will explore a social anthropological topic that matches your personal interests.
As an MA student in the department you are free to pursue a topic and a regional specialisation of your own choosing, and develop skills in planning and conducting a term-long ethnographic fieldwork. The fieldwork will form the foundation for your MA-thesis and provides career-relevant competence in project-development and independent research and analytical work.
What are your career opportunities?
Our students get jobs because they are good problem-solvers and because they can work in a project-based and analytical way. The labour market and professional life reflect our times, an era in which cultural exchange and collaboration are becoming increasingly important. As an anthropologist, you become an expert at exploring and understanding new problems and situations.
Social anthropologists work in many different occupations, often in interdisciplinary collaboration, and frequently also in jobs that require international competence and cross-cultural insight.
Social anthropologists work in public administration, international organisations, research institutes, universities, museums and colleges, as well as in business consultancy, the health and social care sectors, work with refugees and immigrants, development projects, and environmental protection. Wherever they work, social anthropologists often play a crucial role in building bridges between different people, perspectives and fields.