Anthropology - What will you learn?
Undergraduate Handbook 2024-25 Postgraduate Handbook 2024
Through studying anthropology, you will learn how to research cultural practices and social institutions such as: religion and ritual, kinship and family, economy and the market, politics and government, language and performance, science and technology, traditional healing and biomedicine, and much more.
You can also study forensic anthropology, which applies skeletal analysis and archaeological techniques to solve criminal cases.
You will engage in practical, experiential learning, including ethnographic fieldwork projects.
Anthropology fosters creativity and imagination by helping us to think beyond our own pre-conceived worldviews. By cultivating better understanding across cultures, anthropologists also confront forms of prejudice, injustice, and inequality.
Why choose this subject?
Whatever you are most passionate about — from gaming culture to identity politics to environmentalism — anthropology can give you the tools to enrich your interests in a deep and sophisticated way. This is because anthropologists rigorously study all aspects of human behaviour and society. This also means that anthropology is well-suited to students curious about many inter-connected topics.
Maynooth University anthropologists bring the world into the classroom, helping students understand local problems in a global context. We actively engage with many pressing concerns, including aging populations, famine, nationalism, citizenship, racial discrimination, security, surveillance, warfare, international migration, drug use, health problems such as HIV, language policy, consumer culture and environmentalism, as well as rapid technological change.
Anthropological sensibilities have become increasingly important in an interconnected transnational economy and global political situation, where understanding cultural difference is necessary to succeed and flourish, or to bring about social change.
The links below draw from the main course database of the university. For local departmental information about our courses and brief descriptions of modules, please go to “Undergraduate Information” or “Postgraduate Information”.