Ph.D. in Anthropology (Social Cultural and Archaeology): Introduction

Anthropology at Berkeley

Ph.D. in Anthropology (Social Cultural and Archaeology)

ATTENTION INTERNATIONAL APPLICANTS:

We strongly recommend that you apply online. If it is not possible for you to apply online we can mail you a paper application. If you live outside of North America, a mailing fee of $15.00 will be required. We require a draft drawn on a U.S. bank, or an international money order made payable to "UC Regents." No application package will be mailed outside North American until the fee has been received.

Introduction

The Ph.D. in Anthropology at Berkeley has been one of the leading programs in the discipline, nationally first-ranked throughout much of its history. Unlike the other classic American departments, at Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Penn, and Yale, Berkeley was in and of California and the West, and has since its inception been marked by a different relationship to fieldwork, to conversation between anthropology's subfields, and to the question of scholarship's relevance to public and political life. The depth, critical focus, and uniqueness of Berkeley's tradition continue to characterize graduate study. Between the intellectual resources of the department itself and its allied and affiliated programs, graduate students have unparalleled opportunities for training.

Graduate study at Berkeley is characterized by its extraordinary breadth. The department's award-winning faculty, both social cultural and archeaological, engage diverse analytic and substantive problems and work across the United States and around the world. The department is particularly well-known for current and emerging work in areas including:

Globalization, political economy, and the analysis of elites
Gender and feminist analysis in archaeology and social cultural anthropology
Genomics and the anthropology of modernity, science, and reason
Folklore theory and the history of folkloristics
Ethnoarchaeology and settlement archaeology
Violence, trauma, and their political and subjective consequences
Linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, practice theory
Paleoethnobotany and prehistoric agricultural practice and systems
The anthropologies of education, law, tourism, food, energy, space, and the body
The anthopology of sexuality, desire, and difference
Social and cultural history, (post) colonialism
Historical archaeology and material culture
Cultural politics of identity, space, and place
Museum anthropology
Anthropology of aging and the life course
Development, political ecology, and agrarian micropolitics
Coastal archaeology
Urban anthropology
Social mediation of mind
Psychoanalytic and psychological anthropology
The question of form in ethnography and archaeology
Social ecology
Missionary practices, Christianity and The New World
Post-soviet political discourse

A student's opportunities are enhanced by the Department's location, in at least two senses. First, the University of California is one of the most prestigious universities academicially, home to many top-ranked departments and scholars of renown.
The university has many departments and organized research units of international excellence with particular relevance to graduate training in anthropology. Some students have done joint degrees in programs ranging from Public Health to the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Besides the research programs of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Archaeological Research Facility, and the Folklore Archives, graduate students have made frequent use of campus programs and units like the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Institute of International Studies, the many area and regional study centers, the Bain Research Group on Gender, the Center for Urban Ethnography, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Human Rights Center, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, the University-Oakland Metropolitan Forum, the Survey Research Center, the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, the Center on Aging, and the Center for Working Families.

Many students undertake rigorous training in allied fields, drawing on resources in departments and programs like African American Studies, Art History, Classics, Demography, Economics, Environmental Studies, Ethnic Studies, Film Studies, Geography, Geology and Geophysics, History, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Sociology.

The second advantage of the Department's location is its setting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Culturally, the San Francisco Bay Area and California more generally have been and remain home to some of the most critical social and technical events and transformations of the past three decades. To work at Berkeley is to be immersed in new social and political movements; in new assemblages of information technology, physical and genomic sciences, capital, and politics; and in new local and transnational migrations and contests over nation, border, and identity. These transformations are of deep relevance to graduate training in anthropological thought, whether one's focus is the interpretation of paleolithic art, the analysis of postsocialist cultural politics, or the study of poverty and health.

Ph.D. in Anthropology
(Social Cultural / Archaeology)
Introduction
Curriculum
Advisors
Financial Resources
Contact
Application
AGORA Letter to Applicants
Graduate Division Rules
Residency
Registration

Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology

Master of Arts in Folklore

Undergraduate Program

Faculty

Office Hours

Lecture Series
290 Lecture Series
MedAnthro Lecture Series
ARF Brown Bag Lecture Series
Emeritus Lecture Series

Student Organizations
K.A.S.
A.G.O.R.A.
Graduate Student Contacts