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The Honours Essay Option (ANTH 499A and 499B)

Students enrolled in the Honours Anthropology plan have the option of writing an Honours Essay. The major goal of the Honours Essay is for students to write a fairly substantial piece of work on a single topic. It should be characterized by a clearly defined research question which will require either extensive and intensive library research to answer, or some level of independent research such as questionnaires, participant observation or participation in a project and its subsequent analysis.

Honours students who think they would like to to an Honours essay should start thinking about possible topics well in advance, and should consult one or more of the Anthropology professors, preferably in the term before they plan to start. The Honours paper is a two term course so students enroll in ANTH 499A in the fall term and ANTH 499B in the winter term. Near the end of the ANTH 499B term we require all the students who are taking the course to give a 30 to 40 minute presentation on their work in order to share it with all of us. This is a public event but is not formally assessed. It is mainly to encourage students to understand the responsibility of disseminating their work, as well as to give upcoming students ideas and information about the process and to let us all find out what everyone is doing. The supervisor is responsible to help the student get the questions organized, shepherd any research involving humans or animals through the research ethics review committee (which means making sure it gets there in time for the various meeting dates and helping the student revise it if needed, in terms of the committee’s comments), setting up a supervisory arrangement that suits you both and establishing a mark for the completion of ANTH 499A. The final paper is graded by the supervisor and a final copy of the Honours paper is submitted to the Anthropology department office to be kept on file here.

A list of the titles of previous Honours Essays can be found here. If students would like to read some samples of previous work, please feel free to come to the department main office and look at some of the ones we have on file. Students are encouraged to look at these, but they are not available to take out. The essays can be read in the anthropology student lounge in PAS 2007.