Cultural anthropology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I grew up above a takeaway on a road where four languages are spoken in the queue outside the post office, and for years I assumed this was simply background noise. Sociology A level changed that by giving me the vocabulary to ask why people behave as they do in groups, but I kept running into the limits of the survey and the statistic. What interested me was the detail that a questionnaire cannot hold: the way my grandmother's friends switch between Punjabi and English depending on whether they are joking or complaining, or why the men at the community lunch club always rearrange the tables before they sit down. Cultural anthropology attracts me because it takes those details seriously as evidence rather than as colour. Reading parts of Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific for a college extension task, I was struck less by the kula exchange itself than by his insistence that you cannot understand an object without understanding the relationships it travels along. That idea has stayed with me, and I have found myself applying it clumsily to things like the plants people choose to buy at work. I want to study a discipline that trains me to describe unfamiliar ways of living without flattening them into judgements, and that also turns the same attention back on my own assumptions. I am drawn to the comparative range of anthropology, from kinship and ritual to migration and material culture, and to the demand that arguments rest on close, patient observation rather than on what seems obvious.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels have given me three complementary habits of mind. Sociology introduced me to theory I can now use rather than recite: studying Weber on rationalisation and the debates around cultural capital taught me to ask what a concept explains and what it leaves out. I found methodology the most useful topic of all, particularly the trade-offs between reliability and validity, because it made me sceptical of my own tidy conclusions. History has trained me in source criticism. My coursework examined competing interpretations of nineteenth-century Irish migration to Birmingham, and working with census records and contemporary newspaper reports showed me how much depends on who was doing the recording and for what purpose. That has obvious relevance to reading ethnography, where the writer's presence shapes what appears on the page. English Literature has been unexpectedly important: close reading a text for tone, voice and what is withheld is not far from the interpretive work anthropology asks for, and studying narrative perspective has made me alert to how authority is constructed in writing. Alongside my courses I attended a series of free public lectures at a nearby university on culture and identity, and I have been reading independently, including Kate Fox's Watching the English, which I enjoyed while noticing how much it relies on generalisation about a national character rather than on situated fieldwork. Comparing it with the extracts of classic ethnography I have read has been a useful exercise in judging different kinds of evidence.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Last spring I carried out a small independent project on my local market, spending six Saturday mornings before my shift talking to four traders about how they describe their customers. I wrote consent notes, kept a handwritten fieldwork diary and transcribed what I could remember immediately afterwards. The most interesting finding was linguistic: traders distinguished between regulars, tourists and browsers, and the category a person fell into determined whether prices were mentioned at all. I learned practical lessons too. My early questions were leading, my notes were thin, and I had to accept that six mornings shows a fragment rather than a pattern. I wrote the project up as a 2,000-word report for my Sociology teacher, who pushed me to separate observation from interpretation more carefully. My Saturday job at a garden centre has taught me more than I expected about talking to strangers. I serve perhaps two hundred people a day and have become quick at reading how someone wants to be dealt with, which is a modest version of the sensitivity fieldwork requires. I also volunteer at a community lunch club, where I set up, serve and clear away, and much of the value is in sitting down to listen afterwards. Helping my grandmother with her shopping and her housing correspondence has given me a close view of how people navigate institutions that are not designed for them. I play in a college five-a-side team, which mainly teaches patience. Together these commitments have made me reliable with my time, comfortable with unfamiliar people and willing to be corrected, which is what I think studying anthropology will demand.

This example has 4,736 characters across the three answers. Use it for ideas and structure. Your own UCAS answers must fit within 4,000 characters in total, including spaces.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews