What is Anthropology and Ethnology?

Cultural anthropologists and ethnologists study and seek to understand people - why they are the way they are and do what they do, how they think, how they speak, eat, fight, love, and how they organize themselves socially, politically, and in relation to phenomena such as gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity and inequality.

We usually build our knowledge of people by in depth studying and sharing everyday life with them. This is called fieldwork, where we spend long periods of time, sometimes several years, living with people or participating in the context we are studying. Common research methods include in-depth interviews and observations, and collecting people's stories, memories and descriptions. It is also common to include archival material and material objects among the sources. These methods result in what we call ethnographic texts, which are vivid and detailed descriptions of the social context being studied.

Anthropological and ethnological research goes beyond simply describing cultural contexts and phenomena. By understanding how everyday life appears to the individual, ethnographic texts can form the basis for complex analyses that deepen and complicate knowledge about groups' shared cultural expressions, religion, political systems, power, work, migration, environment, gender and many other topics.

By working with models that make the familiar appear in new ways, adopting transnational perspectives, and including a historical component in the analysis, research can go beyond casual understandings of cultural expressions, traditions and norms. Researchers at the department have conducted long-term research in Sweden and Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Melanesia.