IB Diploma Programme Social and Cultural Anthropology Higher Level
IB Diploma Programme Social and Cultural Anthropology at Higher Level is a two-year course that examines human societies and cultures through comparative ethnographic study, developing students' ability to apply anthropological theory across nine areas of inquiry. The course is structured around nine key concepts (Belief and Knowledge, Change, Culture, Identity, Materiality, Power, Social Relations, Society, Symbolism), three groups of Areas of Inquiry from which students select one per group (with HL students selecting four total), and an HL-exclusive component in Theoretical Perspectives that must be integrated across all assessment papers. HL students also conduct a full original fieldwork study of 60 hours, producing an independent research report assessed against four criteria.
330
Minutes
7
Questions
4/7
Passing Score
$173
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
This subject is designed for IB Diploma students who seek a rigorous academic preparation in social science and wish to develop comparative cross-cultural analytical skills grounded in ethnographic evidence; it is ideal for students planning university study in anthropology, sociology, development studies, international relations, or any field requiring critical cultural literacy and qualitative research competence.
What's Covered
1Engaging with Anthropology
2Group 1 Areas of Inquiry
3Group 2 Areas of Inquiry
4Group 3 Areas of Inquiry
5HL: Theoretical Perspectives in Anthropology
6HL Fieldwork and Internal Assessment
7Exam Technique and Assessment Strategy
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Engaging with Anthropology 2 topics
Language and Core Concepts of Anthropology
- Recall the IB-prescribed definition of culture as a shared, socially constructed system of meanings, values, and practices that are transmitted across generations within human groups.
- Recall all nine IB-prescribed key concepts — Belief and Knowledge, Change, Culture, Identity, Materiality, Power, Social Relations, Society, Symbolism — and distinguish each concept's scope and analytical focus within the discipline.
- Comprehend cultural relativism as the methodological principle of suspending ethnocentric judgment when interpreting beliefs and practices, and distinguish it from moral relativism, citing ethnographic examples where the distinction is consequential.
- Distinguish emic (insider) from etic (outsider) perspectives in anthropological description, and apply the distinction to evaluate whether a given ethnographic account privileges the subject's or analyst's interpretive framework.
Ethnographic Method and the Practice of Anthropology
- Comprehend participant observation as the central anthropological method — including the researcher's dual role, the spectrum from full participation to detached observation, and how prolonged fieldwork generates ethnographic thick description.
- Analyze how ethnographic texts produce authority and knowledge, comparing how classic monographs (e.g., Malinowski's Argonauts, Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures) construct the voice of the observer and the representation of the Other.
- Apply the six Big Anthropological Questions as analytical lenses to evaluate how an ethnographic text addresses issues of nature vs. nurture, individual vs. collective, universal vs. relative, local vs. global, similarity vs. difference, and continuity vs. change.
2Group 1 Areas of Inquiry 3 topics
The Body
- Comprehend how the body is simultaneously a biological organism and a cultural artifact, explaining how societies shape bodily experience through practices such as scarification, cosmetic surgery (e.g., Brazil), circumcision, or dress codes.
- Apply the concept of embodiment to analyze how sensory experience, habitus, and bodily hexis encode social norms — drawing on Bourdieu's practice theory or Csordas's paradigm of embodiment — in a specified ethnographic context.
- Analyze how binary gender categories are culturally constructed and contested, evaluating ethnographic evidence from societies with third or multiple gender roles (e.g., hijra, fa'afafine, two-spirit) against heteronormative assumptions.
Classifying the World
- Comprehend how societies organize reality through classification systems — including totemism, taxonomies of nature, purity and pollution (Douglas), and kinship terminologies — and how these systems structure social relations and world-views.
- Analyze how racial and ethnic categories are socially constructed rather than biologically fixed, using ethnographic evidence (e.g., Yanomami, Kalahari San) to demonstrate how group boundaries shift according to political and historical context.
- Apply Mary Douglas's pollution/taboo framework to evaluate how a specific cultural prohibition functions to maintain social boundaries, reinforce hierarchy, or express conceptual anomalies within a classificatory system.
Health, Illness and Healing
- Comprehend the anthropological distinction between disease (biomedical pathology) and illness (culturally interpreted experience of suffering), explaining how explanatory models of sickness vary across societies and medical traditions.
- Apply comparative analysis to evaluate how different healing systems — shamanic, humoral, biomedical, spirit-possession — legitimize knowledge about the body and encode social power relations between healer, patient, and community.
- Analyze medical pluralism in globalized contexts, synthesizing evidence on how communities negotiate between biomedical and traditional healing practices and how pharmaceutical globalization reconfigures local health-seeking behavior.
3Group 2 Areas of Inquiry 3 topics
Belonging
- Comprehend kinship as a culturally constructed system of social relationships, explaining descent reckoning (unilineal, bilateral, cognatic), alliance theory, and how non-biological ties (fictive kin, adoption) are incorporated into kinship idioms.
- Analyze how group membership produces collective identity through shared origin narratives, ritual initiations, and boundary maintenance — using ethnographic case studies of village, ethnic, diasporic, or religious communities.
- Apply feminist anthropological frameworks to analyze cases where women challenge or renegotiate traditional social roles (e.g., women in New Guinea rejecting prescribed gender obligations), evaluating tensions between structure, agency, and cultural change.
Communication, Expression, and Technology
- Comprehend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its weaker variant (linguistic relativity), explaining how vocabulary, grammatical categories, and discourse conventions shape but do not determine cultural perception and social action.
- Apply symbolic/interpretive theory (Geertz's thick description, Turner's social drama) to analyze how ritual performance, ceremony, and expressive culture communicate shared meanings and enact social transformations within a community.
- Analyze how digital media and communication technologies reconfigure social relations, identity performance, and cultural transmission across generations, drawing on ethnographic research on online communities or technology adoption in specific societies.
Movement, Time, and Space
- Comprehend how migration — voluntary, forced, labor, and diasporic — restructures identity, belonging, and social organization, explaining key concepts of transnationalism, diaspora, and deterritorialized culture in anthropological literature.
- Analyze how culturally specific constructions of place, sacred geography, and spatial organization encode social hierarchy, cosmological order, and collective memory — using ethnographic examples such as Aboriginal Dreaming tracks or Hindu temple layouts.
- Synthesize ethnographic evidence on how global flows of people, goods, and ideas (Appadurai's scapes framework) simultaneously homogenize and diversify cultural identities, evaluating the tension between cosmopolitanism and cultural preservation.
4Group 3 Areas of Inquiry 3 topics
Conflict
- Comprehend how structural and agentic sources of conflict operate within social groups, distinguishing competition for material resources, symbolic capital, and political authority as drivers of intra- and inter-group violence in anthropological theory.
- Apply ethnographic analysis to urban conflict settings (e.g., Bourgois's In Search of Respect on crack dealers in Harlem), evaluating how structural inequality, cultural capital, and gendered identity shape both violence and resistance.
- Analyze ethnographic accounts of genocide, war, and state violence to evaluate how ordinary people become perpetrators or survivors, examining the roles of dehumanization, propaganda, in-group/out-group dynamics, and political mobilization.
- Synthesize anthropological theories of resistance — Scott's everyday resistance, Gramsci's hegemony, and postcolonial agency — to evaluate how marginalized groups contest dominant power structures through cultural practice, ritual, and collective action.
Development
- Comprehend the anthropological critique of development as a Western-imposed discourse, distinguishing Escobar's post-development theory from mainstream modernization models and explaining how indigenous communities respond to development interventions.
- Apply anthropological analysis to evaluate how local ecological knowledge, traditional land management, and sustainability practices are incorporated into or excluded from international development projects, using ethnographic case studies from the Global South.
- Analyze how global capitalism, structural adjustment, and neoliberal economic policies produce and reproduce inequality along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and region, drawing on ethnographic evidence from specific communities affected by development processes.
Production, Exchange, and Consumption
- Comprehend Mauss's theory of the gift and Malinowski's kula ring as systems of reciprocal exchange, explaining how gift-giving creates social obligations, reinforces hierarchy, and generates solidarity distinct from market commodity exchange.
- Comprehend Marx's modes of production as adapted by anthropologists (Sahlins, Wolf) to explain how subsistence economies, tributary systems, and capitalist relations organize labor, ownership, and surplus extraction across different societies.
- Apply Appadurai's theory of commodity fetishism and the social life of things to analyze how objects acquire and lose commodity status as they move through different cultural contexts, using ethnographic examples from market or artisan economies.
- Analyze how globalized labor markets and transnational supply chains reconfigure gender relations, class formation, and cultural identity in communities incorporated into global production networks (e.g., call-centre workers in India, factory workers in export zones).
5HL: Theoretical Perspectives in Anthropology 3 topics
History of Anthropological Theory
- Recall the major claims of nineteenth-century evolutionism (Morgan, Tylor) — unilinear cultural evolution, stages of savagery/barbarism/civilization — and explain why this paradigm was subsequently rejected on both empirical and ethical grounds.
- Comprehend structural functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown) and functionalism (Malinowski) as explanatory frameworks, explaining how each accounts for the persistence of social institutions by reference to structural integration or individual psychological needs.
- Comprehend Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology — binary oppositions, the raw/cooked distinction, myth as mental structure — and explain how structuralism shifted anthropological focus from social function to underlying cognitive universals.
- Comprehend symbolic and interpretive anthropology (Geertz, Turner), explaining thick description as a methodological commitment to reading culture as a text and the ethnographer's role as interpreter of locally meaningful symbolic action.
Theories of Power, Gender, and Critique
- Comprehend feminist anthropology's critique of androcentric bias in classic ethnography, explaining how Rosaldo, Ortner, and Strathern redirected attention to women's agency, domestic/public domain asymmetry, and the gendered production of anthropological knowledge.
- Comprehend postcolonial anthropology's critique of how colonial history shaped both ethnographic subjects and knowledge production, explaining Said's Orientalism, Fanon's colonial subject, and the Writing Culture debate on ethnographic authority.
- Comprehend practice theory (Bourdieu's habitus/field/capital, Giddens's structuration) as a resolution of the structure-agency dualism, explaining how embodied dispositions reproduce social structures while allowing for transformative action.
Applying Theory Across Areas of Inquiry
- Apply a specified theoretical perspective (functionalist, structuralist, interpretive, feminist, postcolonial, or practice theory) to interpret ethnographic evidence from a chosen Area of Inquiry, demonstrating how the chosen framework illuminates aspects invisible to competing theories.
- Analyze a single ethnographic problem from two contrasting theoretical positions (e.g., functionalist vs. postcolonial readings of gift exchange), evaluating the explanatory strengths, blind spots, and political implications of each framework.
- Synthesize multiple theoretical perspectives into a coherent analytical argument about a key concept (e.g., Power, Identity, or Change) as it manifests across two or more Areas of Inquiry, substantiating the argument with specific ethnographic illustrations.
6HL Fieldwork and Internal Assessment 3 topics
Fieldwork Research Design
- Apply ethnographic research principles to formulate a focused, feasible fieldwork research question that connects an anthropological concept to a real-world cultural setting, specifying scope, anticipated methods, and ethical considerations.
- Apply multiple fieldwork data-collection methods — participant observation, semi-structured interviews, field notes, and possibly surveys or archival records — selecting methods appropriate to the research question and community access constraints.
Anthropological Ethics
- Recall the core ethical principles of anthropological fieldwork — informed consent, confidentiality, do-no-harm, researcher reflexivity, and accurate representation — as codified by the American Anthropological Association and IB expectations for the IA.
- Apply ethical principles to evaluate dilemmas encountered in fieldwork — including covert observation, use of vulnerable populations, representation of sensitive practices, and the researcher's dual obligation to informants and disciplinary norms.
- Analyze how the researcher's positionality — gender, class, ethnic background, language — shapes fieldwork access, data interpretation, and the final ethnographic text, integrating reflexive commentary into a critical evaluation of IA findings.
Fieldwork Analysis and Reporting
- Analyze primary fieldwork data by coding qualitative evidence, identifying recurring themes and contradictions, and linking observed patterns to anthropological concepts such as power, identity, or social relations within the chosen area of inquiry.
- Synthesize fieldwork findings into a 2,000-word research report that states a clear research question, presents evidence from data collected, applies anthropological theory, evaluates limitations of the study, and draws ethnographically grounded conclusions.
7Exam Technique and Assessment Strategy 2 topics
Paper 1 Strategy
- Apply close reading and anthropological analysis to unseen ethnographic or theoretical texts in Paper 1, identifying the author's interpretive framework, the cultural context described, and the key concepts at stake within the available two-hour examination window.
- Strategy for applying anthropological ethics concepts in Paper 1's dedicated ethics question, constructing a response that identifies the ethical issue, applies relevant principles, evaluates competing considerations, and reaches a justified position.
- Strategy for integrating a theoretical perspective (HL-only requirement for questions 2 and 3 of Paper 1) into short-answer responses, selecting the most productive framework for the specific text and question prompt without forcing irrelevant theory.
Paper 2 Strategy
- Strategy for constructing Paper 2 extended essays that connect a key concept to two or more Areas of Inquiry, planning argument structure, selecting and integrating ethnographic illustrations from studied texts, and allocating the 2.5-hour exam time effectively.
- Strategy for selecting and deploying ethnographic illustrations in Paper 2 essays — balancing specificity (naming ethnographer, community, location, date) against analytical development, and avoiding descriptive summaries that fail to serve the argument.
Scope
Included Topics
- Engaging with Anthropology: the language, practice, and epistemology of the discipline
- Nine Areas of Inquiry organized across three thematic groups (The Body, Belonging, Classifying the World, Communication/Expression/Technology, Conflict, Development, Health/Illness/Healing, Movement/Time/Space, Production/Exchange/Consumption)
- Nine prescribed key concepts: Belief and Knowledge, Change, Culture, Identity, Materiality, Power, Social Relations, Society, Symbolism
- Six Big Anthropological Questions as organizing intellectual frameworks
- HL-only Theoretical Perspectives: functionalism, structuralism, symbolic/interpretive anthropology, feminist anthropology, postcolonial and postmodern critique
- Ethnographic fieldwork methodology: participant observation, interviews, field notes, data collection ethics
- HL original fieldwork: research design, data collection, analysis, and 2000-word research report
- Comparative ethnographic analysis using canonical texts (e.g., Malinowski, Geertz, Bourgois, Mead)
- Anthropological ethics: informed consent, reflexivity, representation, researcher positionality
- Paper 2 extended essay connecting a key concept to areas of inquiry with ethnographic evidence
Not Covered
- Biological/physical anthropology and human evolutionary genetics
- Archaeology and material culture excavation methodology
- Linguistic anthropology as a standalone discipline
- Quantitative social science methods (surveys, statistical modeling)
- Psychology and individual cognitive development
- Economic modeling or macroeconomic theory
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