Studying undergraduate Anthropology and African Studies will enable students to develop a distinctive set of skills and attributes, which will really help them to stand out from the crowd.

The range of African societies today and in the past are enormous: from egalitarian communities to elaborately hierarchical empires. There are extremes of wealth and poverty; ancient oral cultures exist side by side with old traditions of literacy and state-of-the-art electronic media; successful local exploitation of Africa’s massive pools of biodiversity contrasts with the famines familiarized from the news. The staff who teach the undergraduate Anthropology and African Studies degree have lived and taught in countries beyond Western Europe, and have a range of language skills acquired through intensive ethnographic fieldwork.

In Anthropology, students will learn how to search for, select from and evaluate sources of information, weigh up arguments, and present their findings effectively. As an anthropologist however, students will also become sensitive to the assumptions and beliefs that underlie behaviour in a range of social and cultural contexts.

After a thorough grounding of modules in the first year of the degree, the University of Birmingham offers a wide range of optional modules to study in subsequent years.  In the final year, students develop a dissertation on an anthropological topic based on their interests, in consultation with a supervisor with relevant expertise.