Ethnology is the discipline which studies the culture and traditions of developed societies. It is sometimes described as being at the intersection where history and anthropology meet. While ethnology is commonly offered in universities across Europe, this is the only full undergraduate programme of its kind in the UK.

Focusing on Scotland, but also looking at comparative material from elsewhere, you will study the varying ways in which a modern European nation expresses itself culturally.

The programme explores questions like:

How do customs, beliefs, social organisation, language, music and song help to create and shape identity in the modern world?
How do we use and make sense of the past from within our present?
How can this understanding help us to shape our future?
A highlight of the programme is the chance to work with the rich range of materials in the School of Scottish Studies Archives. These materials include thousands of hours of recordings of songs, music, stories, rhyme and verse in Scots, Gaelic and English, as well as in dialects now extinct.