Objective and attainment levels

Objective

The pre-Master’s course in Social and Cultural Anthropology teaches students the knowledge, insight, skills and attitudes necessary to participate successfully in the Master’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology. In particular, the pre-Master’s course provides the students with theories, concepts and research methods from anthropology and the social sciences in general to describe, analyze and explain contemporary social issues. Students who have successfully completed the pre-Master’s course  can contribute to the formulation of policies dealing with these issues. In doing so, they are aware of the different positions and interests of the actors involved, the interaction between different societal levels (from the local to the global), cultural diversity, and the problem of ethnocentrism.

Attainment levels

Students who have completed the pre-Master’s course Social and Cultural Anthropology have knowledge of and insight into:

• processes and phenomena in the domain of social and cultural anthropology and development sociology;
• the most important fields of interest, theories and current debates in  anthropology;
• the history of various theoretical trends in anthropology;
• a number of ethnographic monographs;
• a number of themes that will recur in the Master’s;
• social science methodology, in particular methods of qualitative research;
• the chances and limitations of the application of anthropological views, theories and concepts in dealing with societal or organizational problems.

Students who have completed the pre-Master’s course Social and Cultural Anthropology have skills to:

• formulate a scientific definition of a social problem and to make an analysis of a  concrete societal issue on the basis of anthropological literature or raw empirical data collected by the student;
• engage critically with various scientific theories and concomitant concepts, to compare them and to connect elements from them in order to apply them to concrete societal issues;
• analyse and interpret qualitative research data;
• assess the reliability, validity and usability of research results;
• assess scientific anthropological theories and the applicability of them, and to report about them, both in spoken and written form according to a scientific standard.

Students who have completed the pre-Master’s course Social and Cultural Anthropology have an attitude that is characterized by:

• curiosity and eagerness to understand the background, cause and effect of societal issues pertaining to questions of (cultural) diversity and change, and solution to these questions;
• a critical mind-set with regard to common assumptions, which are popular in society;
• the capacity to recognize and puncture ethnocentric lines of reasoning, in particular when social actors define societal phenomena as ‘problems’ and propose solutions to those purported problems;
• the ability to reflect on the chances and limitations of scientific theories and research;
• intellectual integrity;
• an academic disposition, that is the willingness to test assumptions and theories.