Research in social anthropology
Social anthropology in Lund is a dynamic academic environment, where researchers and teaching staff together offer broad, thematically and regionally grounded expertise. The study of human relationships, social institutions, belief systems and everyday practices is at the heart of what we do.
Within social anthropology, we explore how people shape and reshape their sociocultural worlds. Our research covers areas such as political anthropology, migration studies and human rights, shedding light on how societies function and change in different parts of the world.
Anthropologists typically work in specific cultural contexts and field sites, using in-depth qualitative methods to study how people continually create and recreate their sociocultural worlds.
In Lund, our researchers and teachers carry out research in a wide range of geographical areas – from Palestine and Burundi to Denmark and China, and beyond. We integrate our thematic and regional knowledge into our teaching and share our own first-hand research experiences with students, alongside the anthropological and ethnographic literature they engage with during their studies.
Social anthropology is characterised to a large extent by ethnographic research methods. This means that we spend extended periods in our field settings, getting to know local people, talking and interviewing them, and often taking part in their everyday lives to gain insight into how groups and communities sustain their sociocultural ways of life. By focusing on broad themes such as kinship, identity, religion, politics, migration, inequality, gender and globalisation, we also ask how societies adapt and change over time.
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Anthropological research offers valuable perspectives on contemporary global challenges. For example, at a time when armed conflict, climate change and economic inequalities drive migration, one of the anthropologist’s key tasks is to understand migrants’ lived experiences of cultural change, gender and power relations within migrant groups, how people navigate local bureaucracies, and the practices through which diasporic communities are formed.
We aim to share these perspectives with our students, while encouraging them to think critically about cultural assumptions, power, (in)equality and diversity, and to develop their analytical and communication skills – both within social anthropology and in dialogue with related disciplines.
Learn more about our research in social anthropology in Lund University Research Portal.