What is anthropology, anyway?
Last week, I embarked on an MA in Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability at SOAS, University of London.
It’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? And if I’m completely honest, I’m not sure I can tell you what it means.
I’m going to give myself some grace there, because I have a year of study to figure it out. One way I intend to do that is through these weekly reflections on what I’m learning. By the end of the year, I hope that I’ll have my own answer rather than repeating the lines from the SOAS website that hooked me in the first place:
"We ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human in a complex and ever-changing world, critically questioning existing assumptions and knowledge, and productively thinking about how to create a more just and sustainable world." (SOAS 2025)
This first week of classes has been largely introductory, but there has been a theme across most of my modules (noting that I’m also taking a module this semester in the Department of Development Studies): what is anthropology, anyway?
It seems to me that anthropology engages with the big ideas and challenges of our times through the study of the everyday. It’s by understanding day-to-day life and the micro that we can illuminate the often hidden or diffuse structures that shape those lives, that shape our lives.
In that, anthropology is a practice of holding complexity and nuance. I’m told I’m about to get (even more) annoying; cultural relativism seems to require there being no single right answer or way of seeing things.
It’s full of questions. At least, this first week of classes has been full of as-yet unanswered questions. Are we living in an age of migration? How and why is that perceived and governed as a ‘crisis’? How did sustainability and development come to be coupled? Whose futures are we concerned with? What are we sustaining? What does it even mean to be human?
Anthropology asks questions because these words, these ideas, carry implicit histories, contexts and assumptions. When we interrogate them, we open up space for new possibilities and understanding. Nothing about our society and our way of life is ‘natural’; it’s all man-made. By deconstructing death, freedom, or kinship, we create the opportunity to reconstruct those ideas differently.
That excites me.
In just the last couple of weeks, the Planetary Health Check 2025 reported that we have now breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries. (I’m cautious to say ‘we’; human activity is clearly responsible for that breach, but that activity is not uniform across the world. See, thinking like an anthropologist already!)
My point is that we are on a dangerous trajectory. The ways of thinking and being that got us here are not going to get us out of it, to loosely paraphrase Einstein. We need to reimagine the fundamental ways we understand the economy, politics, the lived environment and relationality. It seems to me that anthropology offers a way of doing that.
I’m also noticing that this doesn’t feel unfamiliar to me. Checking your assumptions, making the implicit explicit, holding polarities: these are all ideas I know from Authentic Relating. That’s a practice that means so much to me. It’s changed the way I connect with people in my life, and it brings me a lot of joy to witness others, as a facilitator. And I’ve been wanting more from it in recent years. I’ve been longing to use those tools to have better conversations about the state of the world - to use those tools to change the state of the world - but I haven’t been sure how.
I think anthropology might be my answer.
So, what’s an MA in Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability all about? Ask me again at the end of the year. I suspect I’ll still have lots of questions, but I think that may be the point. In the meantime, I’m staying curious and will be using this platform to help me make sense of what I’m learning week by week.
