The Central Department of Anthropology (CDA) is a leading teaching department at Tribhuvan University (TU) that offers quality higher education (MA, MPhil and PhD) in anthropology in Nepal. After more than three decades of teaching and research under the joint department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Tribhuvan University has recently established the CDA as an independent department in 2015. A ‘new’ department with a three decade of institutional and academic history, the CDA is committed to the Tribhuvan University’s vision of transforming the central departments as the centers for academic excellence. It aims at imparting students with a critical theoretical understanding by combining the global-local perspectives and provides rigorous training to enhance students’ analytical, research and writing skills. The Central Department of Anthropology provides the most updated courses of study integrating the classical four-field approaches in anthropology with arrays of specialized subfields relevant for understanding the histories and the contemporary issues in Nepal and the world at large. Currently, the Department offers MA (4 semesters) and MPhil. level (3 semester) courses in Anthropology. It also runs a Ph.D. program in Anthropology in collaboration with the with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, TU.
The Department has well experienced faculty members trained at the reputed universities from US, UK, Europe, Japan, India and Nepal. The academic interests and research fields of the faculty members include and overlap in the areas of – religion, kinship, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, historical anthropology, medical anthropology, inclusion and exclusion, federalism, peasantry and land, development, infrastructure, natural resource management, climate change, and so on. In addition to regular teaching programs, the CDA undertakes academic and applied research projects, publishes academic journals, provides various short-term trainings, and organizes the annual anthropology conferences, periodic seminars and bimonthly colloquium series.