今天和过去的非洲社会范围非常广泛：从平等社会到精心设计的等级帝国。贫富悬殊，古老的口头文化与古老的扫盲传统和先进的电子媒体并存，成功地利用非洲庞大的生物多样性资源与我们都是饥荒形成鲜明对比从新闻中太熟了。无可争辩的是非洲大陆的创造力。无论是应对大规模的城市化进程，发展新型政治体系，还是发明原创的文学和戏剧类型，非洲人都是活跃而富有韧性的自己的财富创造者。非洲研究和人类学系的教学计划以非洲人对非洲大陆和世界的看法为基础。
Our undergraduate BA Social Anthropology and Anthropology degree at the University of Birmingham will enable you to understand and analyse the contemporary world in all its variety. Explore alternative perspectives on today's major topics and learn to question established norms and assumptions. The range of African societies today and in the past are enormous: from egalitarian communities to elaborately hierarchical empires. There are extremes of wealth and poverty, ancient oral cultures exist side by side with old traditions of literacy and state-of-the-art electronic media, successful local exploitation of Africa's massive pools of biodiversity contrasts with the famines we are all too familiar from the news. The staff who teach our undergraduate Anthropology and African Studies degree have lived and taught in countries beyond Western Europe, and have a range of language skills acquired through intensive ethnographic fieldwork. In Social Anthropology, you will learn how to search for, select from and evaluate sources of information, weigh up arguments, and present your findings effectively. As an anthropologist however, you will also become sensitive to the assumptions and beliefs that underlie behaviour in a range of social and cultural contexts.