{"id":119,"date":"2015-01-12T13:49:41","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T19:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/anthropology\/?page_id=119"},"modified":"2026-02-03T12:00:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T18:00:15","slug":"sociocultural-anthropology","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/anthropology\/research\/sociocultural-anthropology\/","title":{"rendered":"Sociocultural Anthropology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s past. It also moves beyond the conventional categories of kinship, mythology, religion, politics, \u201csocial change,\u201d etc. Faculty conduct groundbreaking research on such complex organizations as corporations, non-governmental organizations, technology, and the state, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Inside
Inside Linden Lab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undergraduate students have opportunities to conduct ethnographic research with faculty mentors through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), the Honors Program, and Global Studies, as well as through independent studies. Faculty mentorship of student research thematically integrates the study of local and transnational complex organizations and institutions as they relate to culture and globalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The complex organizations studied by faculty concern diverse fields:<\/p>\n\n\n\n