Part 1 introduces the foundations of anthropological thinking and provides the tools you will use throughout the remainder of the course. It is organized around three main elements:

• The language of anthropology – key concepts and inquiry-specific concepts
• The practice of anthropology – ethnographic methods and ethical considerations
• Anthropological thinking – anthropological theories

The Nine Key Anthropological Concepts

The course is built around nine key concepts . These provide the analytical framework through which you examine ethnographic material and the different areas of inquiry. The IB emphasizes that these concepts should not be treated as rigid definitions. Their meanings and uses can change according to historical, theoretical, and cultural context.

This concept explores the convictions, values, ideas, and viewpoints that members of a social group may understand as true. You may examine how different communities determine:

• What counts as knowledge
• Who has the authority to produce knowledge
• How religious or cultural beliefs influence understandings of reality
• How knowledge is transmitted between generations
• Whether one system of knowledge can be considered more legitimate than another

The course encourages you to question whether knowledge can ever be completely objective and to consider how cultural experiences shape what people believe to be true.

Change refers to the alteration of social or cultural elements within a society . You may investigate how change results from:

• Internal developments within societies
• Contact between different cultures
• Migration
• Technology
• Political transformation
• Economic developments
• Globalization

Anthropologists are particularly interested in understanding how people respond to change and why certain cultural practices continue while others are transformed or abandoned.

Culture refers broadly to the systems of meanings, beliefs, symbols, and practices through which people organize their lives. You will consider culture as something that is:

• Socially constructed
• Shared among groups
• Expressed through practices and symbols
• Connected to material objects
• Dynamic rather than fixed
• Sometimes contested within societies

Contemporary anthropology generally rejects the idea that cultures are completely homogeneous or clearly bounded . Instead, cultures are understood as fluid, changing, and internally diverse .

Identity concerns how people understand themselves and how they are understood by others. You may explore:

• Personal identity
• Group identity
• Religious identity
• Ethnic identity
• National identity
• Gender identity
• Social identity

Anthropologists investigate how identities are produced through social relationships and how they may change according to context, migration, political circumstances, or interactions with other groups .

Materiality focuses on the relationship between human beings and the objects, resources, bodies, and physical environments that form part of social life. Anthropologists may examine how objects:

• Acquire cultural meaning
• Communicate social status
• Form part of relationships
• Move between people
• Become commodities
• Contribute to identity
• Influence how people experience their bodies and environments

Rather than treating objects as simply physical things, anthropology considers the social relationships and meanings connected to them .

Power concerns the ability of individuals or groups to influence the behaviour of others and the distribution of resources . You may examine:

• Political power
• Economic inequality
• Social hierarchies
• Institutional power
• Gender relations
• Colonialism
• Resistance
• Structural inequalities

Some anthropological approaches understand power as operating throughout society rather than simply being controlled by governments or political leaders.

Social relations refer to relationships between individuals and groups and form the foundation of social organization . You may examine relationships involving:

• Families
• Kinship groups
• Friends
• Communities
• Economic exchanges
• Workplaces
• Political organizations
• Religious groups

These relationships involve both individual agency and social expectations , meaning that people make choices while also being influenced by the societies in which they live.

Society concerns the ways humans organize themselves into groups, networks, institutions, and relationships . You may investigate:

• Communities
• Social institutions
• Political systems
• Economic structures
• Family organization
• Religious institutions
• Social hierarchies

Anthropologists also question where one society ends and another begins, particularly in an increasingly interconnected world characterized by migration and globalization .

Symbolism explores the meanings people attach to objects, actions, ideas, and processes . Symbols can appear through:

• Language
• Clothing
• Food
• Rituals
• Religious practices
• Art
• Ceremonies
• Political imagery
• Everyday behaviour

By studying symbols, anthropologists attempt to understand the networks of meaning through which people interpret their worlds.

This area examines the ways humans organize and categorize themselves, other people, and the world around them . Categories can reflect cultural ideas about identity, morality, status, purity, power, and difference . Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Boundaries
• Classification
• Commodification
• Cosmology
• Hegemony
• Morality
• Nature/culture
• Sacred/profane
• Socialization, enculturation, and acculturation

Possible areas of study include:

• Systems of stratification – class, caste, age, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
• Liminality – rites of passage, ritual processes, and personhood.
• Purity and pollution – classifications surrounding food, health, illness, the body, and nation-states.
• Insiders and outsiders – migrants, refugees, social groups, sexuality, and constructions of the “Other”.
• Marginality – criminality, social pariahs, outcasts, and subaltern groups.
• Knowledge systems – experts, indigenous knowledge, education, advocacy, and relationships between knowledge and power.
• Ritual and religion – shamanism, witchcraft, spirit worlds, and understandings of the sacred.
• Language and categories – definitions, linguistic categories, media, and propaganda.
• Perspectives on the environment – relationships between humans, non-humans, and place.
• Kinship – descent, alliance, family, fictive kin, and social organization.

This topic encourages you to ask not only how people classify the world, but also who creates categories, whose interests those categories serve, and how classification can produce inequality or exclusion .

This area explores how different societies understand the body, disease, health, suffering, and healing . Although biomedical explanations are influential around the world, anthropologists recognize that people's experiences of illness are also shaped by social relationships, psychological experiences, religion, culture, economics, and political structures . Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Biomedicine
• Biopsychosocial model
• Causation
• Embodiment
• Healing practice
• Health
• Hybridity
• Illness
• Inequality
• Suffering

Possible areas of study include:

• Suffering and pain – illness narratives, stigma, trauma, drug use, food disorders, political violence, and experiences of suffering.
• Healing practices – shamanism, witchcraft, faith healing, biomedicine, healing rituals, placebos, food, and nutrition.
• The body – illness, ageing, death, dying, and relationships between the body and self.
• Medicalization and social control – access to healthcare, organ transplantation, and commodification of bodies.
• Biopsychosocial approaches – relationships between psychological, social, supernatural, and biological understandings of health.
• Plural medical systems – combinations of biomedical and indigenous or alternative healing systems.
• Global health politics – infectious disease, inequality, structural violence, development, and governmentality.

This area demonstrates why illness cannot always be understood purely as a biological condition. Anthropologists are equally interested in how illness is experienced, interpreted, treated, and shaped by wider social structures .

The body may appear to be purely biological, but anthropology explores the many ways bodies are given social, political, symbolic, and cultural meaning . Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Commodification
• Embodiment
• Habitus
• Personhood
• Subjectivity
• The body
• The Other
• The self

Possible topics include:

• The ritualized body – rites of passage, shamanism, witchcraft, sacred practices, and liminality.
• The modified body – tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, prosthetics, disability, and cultural ideas of beauty.
• Bodily practices – sport, masculinity, performance, and the body as an expression of identity.
• The politicized body – violence, suffering, control, and discipline.
• The commodified body – organ trafficking, sex work, labour, and the economic use of bodies.
• Marginalized bodies – illness, social exclusion, personhood, and ideas surrounding death.
• Mechanized bodies – cyborgs, artificial intelligence, bionic limbs, and nanotechnology.
• The lived body – emotion, memory, sexuality, gender, and experiences of personhood.

This area encourages you to question whether the body can ever be understood independently from culture, social expectations, political power, and personal identity .