Canterbury, United Kingdom

Social Anthropology and Social Policy

Bachelor's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: social
Qualification: BA
Kind of studies: full-time studies, part-time studies
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
University website: www.kent.ac.uk
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humans and human behaviour and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Policy
A policy is a deliberate system of principles to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent, and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organization. Policies can assist in both subjective and objective decision making. Policies to assist in subjective decision making usually assist senior management with decisions that must be based on the relative merits of a number of factors, and as a result are often hard to test objectively, e.g. work-life balance policy. In contrast policies to assist in objective decision making are usually operational in nature and can be objectively tested, e.g. password policy.
Social
Living organisms including humans are social when they live collectively in interacting populations, whether they are aware of it, and whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
Social Anthropology
Social anthropology or anthroposociology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of sociocultural anthropology).
Social Policy
Social policy is a term which is applied to various areas of policy, usually within a governmental or political setting (such as the welfare state and study of social services).
Anthropology
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) Tristes Tropiques
Anthropology
Every culture faces the same fundamental challenges. Men and women come together, children are brought into the world, nurtured and sheltered; elders are led into the realm of death as fearlessly as the imagination allows. To be human is to know the terror and splendour of a night sky, the crush of storms, the blood cries of enemies sweeping in with the dawn. Such is our common experience. To bring order to chaos, sense to sensation, we have created rules, which cross-culturally are remarkable in their consistency. ... Yet within this common fabric, this cloak of humanity, lie the individual threads of specific and highly specialized ways of life, distinct cultures, each with its unique and wondrous dream of the Earth. Unravelling the cloth and holding the strands to the light is the practice and contribution of ethnography.
Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World (2007)
Policy
When I see a merchant over-polite to his customers, begging them to taste a little brandy and throwing half his goods on the counter,—thinks I, that man has an axe to grind.
Charles Miner, Who'll turn Grindstones? Essays from the Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe. In The Gleaner (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) (1811).
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