Every subtopic of DP Social and Cultural Anthropology, ready to teach.

This opening unit — 3 lessons across 1 topic — establishes the intellectual foundations of social and cultural anthropology: its definition and scope, its distinctiveness among the social sciences, and the core anthropological perspective of defamiliarisation. Students encounter culture as both an analytical concept and a disciplinary lens from the outset.

Skills & assessment. Lessons develop the ability to articulate what social and cultural anthropology is and how it differs from adjacent disciplines — a competency that underpins responses to AO1 and AO2 questions requiring definition, description, and disciplinary awareness.

Spanning 21 lessons across 7 topics, this unit builds the conceptual and methodological foundation for the entire course. Topics move from participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork methods through the nine areas of inquiry, the nine key concepts, major theoretical traditions, and the ethics of fieldwork — with HL extension lessons offering in-depth engagement with theoretical frameworks and their relationship to ethnographic evidence.

Skills & assessment. Students develop the ability to apply anthropological concepts and theories as analytical lenses — essential for AO2 and AO3 tasks — while lessons on ethics and reflexivity lay the groundwork for the internal assessment fieldwork component. HL lessons build the evaluative skills required for critical engagement with competing theoretical traditions.

The largest unit in the course at 33 lessons across 11 topics, this part moves students through all nine areas of anthropological inquiry with ethnographic case studies, cultural analysis, and conceptual application at the centre of each topic. A dedicated SL topic develops skills for reading and analysing three ethnographic monographs; the HL extension extends this to a fourth area of inquiry with comparative and critical engagement across multiple texts.

Skills & assessment. Lessons consistently apply the nine key concepts as analytical lenses to ethnographic material, building the evaluative and comparative skills required for AO3 and AO4 examination tasks. Reading and analysis lessons develop the ethnography-specific skills — identifying authorial perspective, evaluating evidence, contextualising with supplementary material — that are central to both the external examination and HL extended work.

Across 18 lessons and 6 topics, this unit guides students through every stage of anthropological fieldwork practice: designing a research focus and selecting appropriate qualitative methods, conducting participant observation and writing field notes, coding and interpreting data, and representing findings in ethnographic writing. HL extension lessons address the integration and critical evaluation of secondary sources alongside primary fieldwork data.

Skills & assessment. Every topic is directly linked to the demands of the internal assessment, with lessons on positionality, bias, reflexivity, and ethical representation ensuring students can account for their own role in the knowledge they produce. Tasks are framed around the command terms and assessment objectives that appear in both the IA and the examination, supporting coherent preparation across all assessment components.