social anthropology
Social anthropology is the British academic term for what Americans call cultural anthropology — the study of human societies, their structures, rituals, beliefs, kinship systems, and ways of organizing collective life.
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Social anthropology is the British academic term for what Americans call cultural anthropology — the study of human societies, their structures, rituals, beliefs, kinship systems, and ways of organizing collective life. Where American cultural anthropology tends to emphasize culture as a system of shared meanings, British social anthropology has historically focused more on social structure and institutions. The distinction is largely a matter of tradition and geography: same rigorous ethnographic fieldwork, different theoretical flavor. Either way, it's the discipline that sends researchers into communities to live among them and figure out how people actually live.
She did her PhD in social anthropology, spending two years in rural Ghana studying kinship networks.
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(Britain) cultural anthropology.
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Semantically related
- linguistic anthropology53%
(anthropology, originally, and, chiefly, US) The branch of anthropology that studies language and language use.
- social47%
Of or relating to society.
- form44%
(social) To do with structure or procedure.
- class43%
(sociology, countable) A social grouping, based on job, wealth, etc. In Britain, society is commonly split into three main classes: upper class, middle class and working class.