Anthropology

Overview

Students must take the two core courses ’The Craft of Anthropology' and 'South African Ethnography’, and two additional elective courses selected from those on offer. A research report of approximately 10,000 words based on original research is also required. Attendance at the weekly Wits Anthropology Seminar Series is compulsory.

Curriculum

Semester 1

Course Title: The Craft of Anthropology | Course Code: ANTH4024A

The Craft of anthropology provides a context in which to examine the categories, theories, methods, and craft of social research and writing. In this course, we will be thinking together about the process of undertaking a research project, engaging with some debates within the discipline about the history and significance of ethnography in the 21^st Century. Students will be introduced to research methodologies and unpack conceptual concerns and modes of analysis in their diverse research projects. This course is designed to help students reflect on the rich insights they have gained throughout their undergraduate studies and introduce students to new approaches that can help build on their research interests to design Clear, Researchable, Relevant and Evocative research proposals. This course is a Writing Intensive Course, which means taking seriously the role writing plays in thinking and processing during the research design process. Writing Intensive learning is aimed at preventing premature foreclosure of meaning, and assists you to frame arguments and revisions, so that you are able to communicate your proposal not to an abstracted machine called “the academy”, but to another human being. The Writing Intensive design of this courses allows for active learning so that you learn to enter a disciplinary writing culture with a clear and confident writing voice.

Course Title: Sociocultural theory | Course Code: ANTH 4027A

This course is a modest introduction to selected ways of knowing and the social structures and relationships that shape their premises and limitations. We explore the following questions: What are the histories from which ways of knowing emerge? What do these ways of knowing illuminate, what are their blind-spots, or what is left unsaid? What might it mean to ‘write with African worlds’? What might it mean to ‘think with African worlds’ in their global context? Put differently, how might one understand, analyse, complicate, and ‘translate’ fractions of everyday practice in various micro-contexts on the African continent? What might one learn about the ways macro-contexts influence the everyday? ‘Translation’ here is not for, but against colonial and metropolitan eyes. The purpose of this course is twofold: (a) to support your work in the Craft of Anthropology course and (b) to do so by introducing you to ways in which some authors write and think with African worlds. Combined, Sociocultural Theory and Craft of Anthropology serve to support your thinking – conceptual and practical – about your research project.

Semester 2

Course Title: Ethnographic Analysis and Writing | Course Code: ANTH 4025A

The Ethnographic Analysis and Writing course provides students with robust training in reading and analysing field notes and interviews and developing, from these, vivid and conceptually sharp texts. In this course, we will cover topics including writing life histories and narratives; producing deep descriptions of space, character, and relationships; integrating ethnography and theory; and refining and editing texts. Students will write from their fieldwork and develop a portfolio that can be used towards their final research essays and reports. However, more than simply training participants to write academic work, this course aims to equip students with some of the fundamental techniques of good writing that can be adapted across an array of forms and professions. Furthermore, it seeks to guide students in finding their writing voices.

Course Title: African Ethnography | Course Code: ANTH 4018A

This course explores the anthropology and ethnographies of sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, it does so by exploring different genres/forms of what might legitimately be considered an ‘ethnographic’ text in an African context where Africans have produced different types of self-representational texts that lie outside the ‘traditional’ anthropological canon of ethnography. At the heart of this tension are the colonial origins of anthropology as a discipline as well as ethnography as a mode of inquiry and writing about Africa.

Course Code: ANTH4023 | Course Title: Research Topic

Entry Requirements

• Students will be considered for admission to Honours in Anthropology if they have a final mark of at least 67% or higher for 3^rd Year in Anthropology.

Students must have an average 3rd year mark of at least 65% in Anthropology III.

University Application Process

University Fees and Funding

Click here to see the current average tuition fees. The Fees site also provides information about the payment of fees and closing dates for fees payments. Once you have applied you will be able to access the fees estimator on the student self-service portal.

For information about postgraduate funding opportunities, including the postgraduate merit award, click here. The University's Postgraduate Funding portal is a database of scholarships, bursaries and other funding opportunities available to Wits postgraduate students. Please also check your School website for bursary opportunities. NRF bursaries: The National Research Foundation (NRF) offers a wide range of opportunities in terms of bursaries and fellowships to students pursuing postgraduate studies. External bursaries portal: The Bursaries South Africa website provides a comprehensive list of bursaries in South Africa.