LSE’s Anthropology Department, with a long and distinguished history, remains a leading centre for innovative research and teaching. We are committed to both maintaining and renewing the core of the discipline, and our training of PhD students is recognized as outstanding.

Delhi RooftopsAnthropology has been taught at the LSE since 1904. Following the arrival of Bronislaw Malinowski in 1910, the School became one of the leading centres for the development of modern social anthropology, and many of the key figures in this evolving tradition – including Firth, Leach, Mair, Freedman, La Fontaine and others – were at the LSE as students or teachers. To this day, the Department retains a strong commitment to anthropological research of the kind championed by Malinowski and Firth. Our research output is based primarily around long-term ethnographic fieldwork, mostly conducted in non-Western settings. We conduct fieldwork in many different places (including India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Caucasus, Mongolia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Madagascar, East Africa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia, the USA, Colombia, the Andes, Yemen and Jordan); and our projects address a very wide range of concerns. (see Research| for more details).