Social Anthropology and Arabic

Social anthropology and Arabic is a combination that reflects a deep intellectual complementarity. Social anthropology studies human societies and cultures in their full diversity, examining how people organise their social lives, create meaning, exercise power, and understand themselves and one another. Arabic is the language of a vast and culturally rich part of the world, and learning it opens up both the literature, scholarship, and media of Arabic-speaking societies and the possibility of ethnographic and professional engagement with communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, this four-year, full-time degree is taught within a university whose entire orientation is towards the study of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, making it an unusually well-suited context for this particular combination. A foundation year is available for students who would benefit from additional preparation.

You will study anthropological theory, ethnographic method, and the comparative study of social institutions, kinship, religion, politics, and economy in their cultural contexts, while also developing your Arabic language skills to a high level, reading texts in Modern Standard Arabic and engaging with the diversity of Arabic-speaking worlds. SOAS's distinctive research environment ensures that both the anthropology and the Arabic components of the degree are informed by genuine scholarly depth in the regions and traditions they address.

Graduates of social anthropology and Arabic find careers in international development organisations, NGOs, the diplomatic service, journalism, education, cultural policy, research, and the broader range of organisations that work in or with the Arabic-speaking world. The capacity to communicate in Arabic alongside an anthropological understanding of cultural difference is a rare and valued combination in the graduate market. Many graduates also go on to postgraduate study in anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, or area studies, and academic research is a natural destination for those with the strongest scholarly interests.