Duke university anthropology graduate program

Tell us how Duke will help you pursue your interests, and about your strengths and weaknesses. In addition, when you pick your references, be certain to find people who know you well and can recommend you and your work style. We strongly encourage you to review additional department-specific application guidance from the program to which you are applying: Departmental Application Guidance. Writing Sample None required.

We strongly encourage you to review additional department-specific application guidance from the program to which you are applying: Departmental Application Guidance APPLY. In both disciplines, it is widely understood that cultural diversity and cultural change cannot be accounted for either by the traditional narrative techniques of historians or by the traditional ethnographic descriptions of anthropologists.

Instead, historians realize they must look beyond action, intention, and event, to underlying patterns, unspoken presuppositions, institutional and discursive structures.

Anthropologists realize that kinship, ritual, social role, discourse, and belief are all subject to improvisation, contestation, politicization, and thus to change. Scholars in both disciplines have looked to practice theory, as developed by Bourdieu, Giddens, Ortner, and Sewell; to postcolonial studies, as developed by Stoler, Dirks, Spivak, Das, and Burton ; to performance theory, as developed by Sahlins, Butler, Sedgwick; and to other, related approaches.

Drawing on these streams of theory, anthropologists and historians strive to come to grips with the full implications of cultural diversity and change. The challenge is to understand what all actors in a given context consciously know and intend as well as what they unconsciously take for granted, what they do on purpose and what they do without reflection, and to see how action and conflict have both intended and unintended consequences.

One goal of such research is a new kind of total history, of the kind the Comaroffs have attempted for South Africa. Another goal is the recovery of forgotten or suppressed pathways to meaning of the kind rescued from oblivion by recent work on indigenous sexuality in colonial Mexico or Spanish judicial repression in colonial Peru.

We've compiled several resources to assist you while working toward your doctorate — from Duke websites and links, to details regarding on-going requirements, grant information, and summer field research. Graduate Degrees Our Ph. We also offer an M. For Prospective Students For those interested in our program, learn more about our degree, our university, and our community. Learn More.