IB Social and Cultural Anthropology Syllabus + Topics

Group 1

Area of Inquiry 1 – Classifying the World

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.

Area of Inquiry 2 – Health, Illness and Healing

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.

Area of Inquiry 3 – The Body

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.

Group 2

Area of Inquiry 4 – Belonging

Belonging examines how people become members of communities and how identities and social relationships are created through inclusion and exclusion. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Community

• Ethnicity and race

• Family

• Globalization

• Ideology

• Kinship

• Nation-state

• Social and biological reproduction

• Personhood

• Socialization, enculturation, and acculturation

Possible topics include:

• Imagined communities – nationalism, diaspora, sports communities, youth cultures, professions, online communities, and religious groups.

• Contemporary families – adoption, fosterage, reproductive technologies, sexuality, divorce, transnational families, and domestic labour.

• Politics of inclusion and exclusion – citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, racism, Islamophobia, diversity, and religious belonging.

• Childhood, youth, and ageing – peer groups, education, work, child labour, human rights, and care of older people.

• Emotions and belonging – friendship, love, trauma, support groups, shared interests, and everyday violence.

You may also investigate how migration, globalization, and digital technologies allow people to create forms of belonging across national borders and physical distances.

Area of Inquiry 5 – Communication, Expression and Technology

This area explores communication as a cultural practice and examines how language, media, performance, technology, and symbolic expression help people construct social reality. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Communication

• Commodification

• Exchange

• Globalization

• Hegemony

• Hybridity

• Performance

• Technology

• Transnationalism

Possible areas include:

• Communication in global times – social networks, mobile phones, digital technology, diasporic media, and transnational communication.

• Media and popular culture – television, radio, music, social media, vlogging, gaming, and representations of different social groups.

• Symbolic language – clothing, food, and other practices that communicate identity and meaning.

• Writing and orality – oral traditions, writing technologies, language, and relationships between language and power.

• Symbolic production – myth, ritual, ideology, theatre, festivals, play, and performance.

• Political discourse – social movements, hate speech, lobbying, activism, testimony, and collective memory.

This topic is particularly relevant to contemporary life because it allows you to investigate how digital technologies and media reshape identities, relationships, political participation, and cultural expression.

Area of Inquiry 6 – Movement, Time and Space

This area examines how movement, space, and time are understood differently across societies and how these ideas shape people's experiences. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Boundaries

• Exclusion

• Globalization

• Inclusion

• Liminality

• Movement

• Space

• Time

Possible topics include:

• Migration and mobility – refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, tourism, pilgrimage, and transnational movement.

• Space and boundaries – social constructions of place, identity, heritage, and political difference.

• Diasporas and imagined communities – transnational and virtual communities and the compression of time and space.

• Spaces of modernity – airports, refugee camps, transport terminals, tourism, and virtual spaces.

• Urban anthropology – cosmopolitan communities, enclaves, landscapes, and social exclusion.

• Memory and time – heritage, remembrance, history, nostalgia, and the reinvention of cultural traditions.

• Ideas of the future – utopias, millennial movements, science, and virtual communities.

One important idea in this topic is that time and space are not necessarily neutral or universal experiences. Their meanings can be produced through social relationships, rituals, memories, and cultural practices.

Group 3

Area of Inquiry 7 – Conflict

Conflict explores political anthropology and the ways power operates between individuals, groups, institutions, and states. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Authority

• Conflict

• Consensus

• Governmentality

• Hegemony

• Ideology

• Resistance

• Social control

• State

Possible topics include:

• Violence and suffering – structural, symbolic, institutional, and gendered violence, as well as war, torture, terrorism, and genocide.

• The state – citizenship, nationalism, law, bureaucracy, human rights, biopolitics, and post-colonial states.

• Performances of power – political rituals, leadership, deference, resistance, and hidden forms of opposition.

• Policing and security – prisons, surveillance, privatized security, and states of emergency.

• Human rights – refugees, indigenous peoples, marginalized communities, governments, and NGOs.

• Social movements – environmentalism, labour rights, women's rights, civil rights, anti-racism, youth movements, and anti-globalization.

• Indigenous issues – land rights, displacement, reconciliation, reparations, and human rights.

• Political systems – egalitarian, authoritarian, democratic, ranked, stratified, and state-based systems.

• Systems of inequality – class, caste, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, and religion.

Rather than treating conflict only as warfare, anthropology allows you to examine everyday conflict, resistance, inequality, political institutions, and less visible forms of power.

Area of Inquiry 8 – Development

Development examines attempts to improve people's economic and social conditions while questioning who defines improvement and whose interests development serves. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Conflict

• Development

• Environment

• Exchange

• Globalization

• Ideology

• Modernization

• Neo-colonialism

• Sustainability

Possible topics include:

• The local and the global – national policies, international organizations, NGOs, and development agencies.

• Social movements – environmental activism, indigenous land rights, women's activism, grassroots movements, and anti-globalization.

• Economic and environmental sustainability – informal economies, ecotourism, and access to food, water, and land.

• Poverty and wealth – international aid, NGOs, the World Bank, migration, remittances, and microcredit.

• Development and health – infectious disease, hunger, refugees, indigenous healing, child mortality, and gender inequality.

• Development and underdevelopment – colonialism, post-colonialism, development policies, and policymakers.

A major anthropological question is whether development programmes genuinely improve people's lives or sometimes reproduce unequal power relationships. You may therefore examine issues such as neo-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, aid, and who gets to decide what communities actually need.

Area of Inquiry 9 – Production, Exchange and Consumption

The final area examines economic life from an anthropological perspective. Rather than assuming that all people make economic decisions according to the same principles, economic anthropology investigates how production, exchange, labour, consumption, and value are shaped by social and cultural contexts. Inquiry-specific concepts include:

• Capitalism

• Colonialism

• Commodity

• Consumption

• Exchange

• Globalization

• Labour

• Production

Possible areas include:

• The place of the economy – economic rationality, morality, value, and culturally different meanings of economic behaviour.

• Production – hunter-gatherer systems, horticulture, peasant production, and capital.

• Commodification – bodies, culture, indigenous knowledge, and globally traded commodities.

• Consumption – material and symbolic goods, food, identity, popular culture, and global consumer cultures.

• Capitalism – transnational corporations, inequality, capital and labour, resource access, alternative economies, and subsistence insecurity.

• Work and labour – working conditions, child labour, slavery, human trafficking, migration, informal economies, workplace cultures, and precarious employment.

• Systems of exchange – reciprocity, redistribution, markets, money, gifts, ceremonial exchange, patron-client relationships, remittances, and microcredit.

This topic helps you understand that economic activity is never purely about money. Production, exchange, and consumption can also express identity, social relationships, morality, cultural values, and power.

Part 3 – Engaging in Anthropological Practice

The final part of the syllabus allows students to apply anthropology themselves through the Internal Assessment. At SL, this involves limited fieldwork, including observation, a second data-collection activity, and critical reflection. At HL, students undertake a more extensive fieldwork project. The fieldwork element reflects one of the most distinctive features of anthropology – anthropological knowledge is produced not simply by reading about people, but through carefully observing, interacting with, and attempting to understand social life. Students must consider ethical questions throughout this process, particularly issues such as informed consent, confidentiality, researcher influence, representation, and responsibility toward research participants. At HL, the course additionally places greater emphasis on anthropological ethics, theoretical depth, and independent fieldwork. 

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