About Comparative Cultures
Comparative Cultures (COS) studies examine not just contemporary industrial societies but the very varied ways in which human beings have organised their lives together, now and in the past. COS units are cross-cultural and historical, focusing on processes of social development and comparing the ways of life found in societies of all kinds: modern and pre-modern, agrarian and industrial, capitalist and socialist, Eastern and Western. Interdisciplinary perspectives are encouraged, and debates in this area cut across literary theory, history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology.
Comparative Cultures begins its specialisation at second year. Students normally use two first-year units in Anthropology ,Politics, and/or Sociology as the basis for a minor or major in COS but other units from cognate areas may be allowed. Second-year units deal with the rise of capitalist societies, with the study of culture, with understanding prejudice and discrimination in its many guises, and with the impact of scientific rationality on our view of the world and our place in it. In the third year students can choose among options including the sociology of literature; the consumer society; bodily representations; media, gender and sexuality; nationalism; the sociology of disabilities; Japanese society; Marxist, critical, structuralist and post-structuralist theories.