The Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine is at the forefront of innovation in anthropological research, and has become recognized as one of the top Anthropology programs for graduate work in the United States. It is the second largest sociocultural program in the University of California system and among the twelve largest nationally.

The Department focuses on social and cultural anthropology, with a strong emphasis on understanding emergent processes and systems at a number of scales, including the local, national and transnational level. The Department fosters a critical empiricism that employs a range of ethnographic, historical, and quantitative methods to address questions of subjectivity, political economy, and social inequality. Follow the links to the left and above to learn more about our vision and our programs.

How We Do Anthropology

We believe that a theoretically and methodologically engaged anthropology of the contemporary must engage in research at the intersection of the local the global as well as the past and present, coming to grips with the large-scale cultural transformations and the institutions and practices of modernity.

Accordingly, given our emphasis on empirical research based on long-term fieldwork, we are doing anthropology in a way that would have been recognizable to our disciplinary forebears, but certainly unanticipated by them. We conduct ethnographies of modern societies using new methodological and theoretical tools that challenge anthropology's traditional notions of culture, time, space, and fieldwork methodology. In critically engaging the discipline's past, we are building its future by redefining what doing anthropology can entail.

Central to our work is the understanding that we must critically reflect on the constitution of the social sciences and the disciplines, as we push the boundaries of our own field and link up with interdisciplinary studies, both in our scholarship and in our pedagogy.