About the Department

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology is a unit of the School of Social Sciences, Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University. It was founded in 1960 by a Jesuit anthropologist, Fr. Frank X. Lynch, S.J. The other early members of the faculty were Fr. John F. Doherty, S.J., who became Chairperson, Mary Racelis, and Fr. John J. Carroll, S.J., Most of the Department’s present senior faculty were former students of these founders. In turn, several members of the junior faculty were former students or research associates of these senior faculty members.

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology trains its students to use sociological and anthropological perspectives in the analysis and interpretation of contemporary issues, the pressing ones being the tension between globalization and national integration, the inequalities in access to power and resources among different groups, and the consequences of these structural forces on cultures and identities.

In this training aim, the Department expects its students to acquire a critical sense of the social world. Students, in turn, can use this ability to examine phenomena with social rigor, to assess contending ideologies of social change, to offer alternative narratives on tradition, modernity and social change, and to make workable recommendations for plans and policies that enhance people’s welfare.

Mission-Vision

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology commits itself to contribute to national development by forming social scientists who will devote their lives to the ideals of Jesuit pedagogy -- academic excellence, cultural rootedness, mature spirituality, and the promotion of justice – serving those who are in need, most especially the poor and powerless.

Through its training, research, and action programs the Department enables students to see the interdependence of culture, structure, and agency in reproducing and transforming social life, particularly in societies like the Philippines that belong to the global South.

These academic skills, the Department believes, coupled with the intellectual and value formation acquired through the University’s core curriculum, are seen as prerequisites for interpreting and acting on a social world where global forces and local habits confront each other; where gross inequalities and strategies of exclusion drive communities to extreme marginality; where the relentless degradation of the physical environment brings about illness, famine, homelessness, and despair; and where the growing rationalization of modern life co-exist with the deconstructive ethos of a highly technological postmodern age and the surge of a fundamentalist, sometimes fanatical, faith.

The consequences of these forces on genders, age groups, social classes, and ethnic communities, especially how these groups and individuals in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world, face and accommodate to these contexts, also occupy a key place in the Department’s training, research, and action agenda.

To sustain this academic commitment, the Department deems it imperative to maintain a responsive program of studies run by a group of faculty members whose unassailable professional competence, or sapientia, and superior teaching skills, or eloquentia, match their great concern for human welfare, communitas, and a nurturing attitude, or cura personalis, towards students and staff, colleagues and consociates.