Part IIB

Part IIB places students at the coalface of the most pressing debates and issues in the discipline today. Two core papers in Advanced Social Anthropology address cutting-edge questions in the fields of Thought, Belief and Ethics (S4), and Political Economy and Social Transformations (S5). These papers put anthropological studies into direct dialogue with the latest research in fields as diverse as cognitive science, economics, moral and political philosophy, and social theory. In the final compulsory paper, S6, students get a chance to specialise in the anthropology of a particular world region. Every year, three options are available, each of which covers a broad range of topics and conceptual approaches.

Students then have the choice of taking two further papers, or taking one paper alongside a dissertation.

Additional papers are selected from a wide range of options in Social Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, and Archaeology.

For dissertations, students conduct their own independent research project under the supervision of a member of staff. This research can be library-based, or archival – but it can also include the student’s own ethnographic fieldwork, usually conducted in the summer vacation between Part IIA and Part IIB.