Social anthropologists seek to understand how people make their lives meaningful, how these everyday lives shape our society and are in turn shaped by the global flow of information through the media, medical discourse, economic policy and historical transformation. Social Anthropology is best geared to help us understand our complex and messy world because of its unique ability to produce detailed accounts of ordinary lives in diverse contexts and to link these particularities to the interplay between social life, cultural life and immense political and economic structures. Graduates are well positioned to carry these research skills into civil society, state and marketing contexts.

Why study Social Anthropology?

By choosing to study Social Anthropology, you choose to engage closely with a wide field of knowledge. From urban anthropology, focusing on the social and political implications of urban planning and urban space, to public health, to mass media, to market research and product development we strive to involve our students in service-learning projects that bring them directly into contact with initiatives in a South African context. The undergraduate curriculum at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University is structured in such a way that it immerses students in relevant aspects of social life, gives them research experience and prepares them to ask the sort of questions and generate the types of insights that have made anthropologists sought-after social scientists.