Social Anthropology Research

Social Anthropology is the academic extension of curiosity in other people and their living conditions. Social anthropologists are interested in all aspects of human diversity, such as people's world views, rituals, perceptions about illness and health, livelihoods, kinship and political organization.

Primarily, we focus on social and cultural aspects. Social anthropologists use ethnographic methods, i.e., collection and processing of basic research materials through field work, with participant observation as their primary method. The social anthropological research has a holistic approach and is based on a cultural relativistic perspective. This means that a given phenomenon is always studied in its larger context and that the social anthropologist attempts to see the phenomenon from the perspective of the studied society. It does not however preclude that social anthropology also engages in cross-cultural comparisons of different societies.

The social anthropologists at LiU are active in several faculties and departments, and in both subject specific and interdisciplinary research environments where they conduct research in a variety of areas. The common ground is the ethnographic methods and the anthropological approach. An example of a research project is Anette Wickström's study in rural north-eastern South Africa of the specific meanings of family, love, sexuality, integrity and identity among Zulu families. Another example is Corinna Kruse's project in which she examines how traces from crime scenes becomes converted to forensic evidence which is then used in legal proceedings. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the Swedish judicial system, the project also studies the ways in which its various embodiments - the police, the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science and the judicial process - help to create secure evidence.

The Research Environment for Cultural Sciences (FKV) forms the research and research superstructure of the four subdivisions social anthropology, religious studies, philosophy and art history and visual communication within the Section for Cultural Sciences (KVA) of the Department of Culture and Communication.

Research

• The Research Environment for Cultural Sciences
• Research projects