Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology- Sociocultural

University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

A key focus of the cultural anthropology faculty is the study of complex organizations, their institutional logics, and their shaping of everyday experience. The program thus breaks definitively with the regionalist or area studies emphasis in our discipline’s past. It also moves beyond the conventional categories of kinship, mythology, religion, politics, ''social change,'' etc. Faculty conduct groundbreaking research on such complex organizations as corporations, non-governmental organizations, technology, and the state, among others. Graduate students are drawn to our program to study how institutional logics circulate in transnational space. These logics are distinctively modern and are cast in rational or technical terms. But they do not erase local knowledge or customary practice, hence ethnographic research remains crucial to graduate training and our students develop, under faculty guidance, innovative methodological strategies specific to their research projects.