Anthropology and Sociology: Can’t we all just get along?

What would change if they were each dispatched to the other’s research sites?

Consider, as a partial answer, the archives of the sadly defunct Journal of Quantitative Anthropology.

Maybe better than ‘history of human institutions’, etc., would be to say ‘pre-history’ or ‘ancient history’. There are after all plenty of more or less self-identified ‘historical sociologists’–like the recently late Charles Tilly, for example, or Michael Mann, or Barrington Moore.

Actually, the anthropology of organizational structures is getting really popular, esp. with regards to the business world. Overall, there’s been a shift away from the “study the brown people” approach in anthropology, with a bigger focus turf that had normally been left to sociologists, so that difference is less current.

As an aspiring anthropologist, I’ve been taught that the difference was more ideological. Sociologists tend to take a more positivist approach, whereas anthropologists tend to get more into heavy theory influenced by continental philosophy. For example, my undergrad sociology courses involved learning stata, my undergrad anth. courses involved reading Kant.

Part of the friction comes from the fact that sociologists see themselves as more scientifically rigorous, whereas anthropologists think that sociologists, like economists, are committing the cardinal sin of drawing conclusions more precise than their data.

This comes up from time to time on the excellent group blog Savage Minds; see for instance this post and comments. If you hang out there you will come across a great deal of work by anthropologists who study industrialized cultures, so the initial definition given above may be more rough than ready. In the context of the US, at least, it is probably worth specifying that we are talking about socio-cultural anthropology or ethnography rather than the broader field of anthropology.

Speaking as an historian, it is evident that these ‘disciplinary differences’ are artefacts of history, of a time when meaningful distinctions could be made in academics’ minds between the ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern’, between societies that lived ‘in history’ and cultures trapped in the ‘ethnographic present’. All that persists now is the pale shadow of hundred-year-old prejudices. Just keep the f***ing economists out of it, fercrissake!!

What’s most interesting is that there’s nothing ‘tongue-in-cheek’ about that distinction, as the sundry departmental websites cited indicate.

@12, yes, maybe, but that’d be the historical baggage of being people from large, sophisticated, imperial or quasi-imperial states landing up in poor, isolated communities and trying to find out what was going on when face-to-face communication was the only plausible means of inquiry… A single anthropologist really could f*ck up a culture, in a way a single sociologist couldn’t [unless appointed to a govt task-force, of course].

The anthropologist Alfred Gell argued that the key difference between anthropology and sociology was that the former was primarily concerned with studying human society, social interactions and social processes within the lifetime of an individual human being, while the latter studied them over longer time periods than a single lifetime and/or with a focus on structures abstracted across multiple individuals (such as social classes). See his “Art and Agency” (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 7-11).

Anthropology at its core is more about the study of human origins and “race.”

As also an outsider (a “positivist” – in the broadest sense of the term – political scientist) I’d agree with britta (#5): I think it’s mainly ideology. To put it bluntly – I usually understand sociologists and can convey to them what I do with rather little trouble, which is not the case for anthro. Obviously, there are significant overlaps: Cultural sociologist that are hard to distinguish from anthropologists or (e.g.) Marxist anthropologists who could do the same work in soc.

from my experience, the “toolbox” is key. an anthropologist will insist that the practice of ethnography is unique and specialized to the field. i’m not as familiar with the socilogist’s technique, however i find it hard to believe that they don’t apply at least some ethnographic techniques.

correct me if i’m wrong, but i don’t agree with the “human origins” (#19) point, as a significant part of anthropological study is based on the idea that “culture” as an abstract leaves no physical history, therefore nothing beyond the present can ever be understood.

this is of course unique to cultural anthropology, because archaeology deals entirely with material remains.

Here’s a new question: if the human sciences are good for something, what have they actually fixed?

#25: The assumption here seems to be that a discipline–or a rag-tag collection of disciplines– needs to fix something in order to be good for something. But what, exactly, is it that you want fixed??

Anthropology, like Philosophy and like that part of Computer Science dealing with machine reasoning, treats introspection as a valid research method. I’m not sure if this is true of Sociology.

Perfect self-awareness, dave, is a an unachievable goal. But without the attempt, technical expertise fed by enthusiasm and faddishness is all we would have left. It would get boring being a such a passive machine.

The humanities are the sum total of the observations of technical experts in one field observing the behavior of technical experts in another and finding them amusing and odd.
For myself I don’t “do” anything, more than I have to. Mostly I just “am.” I’d say it give me perspective and that perspective is harder to come by than knowledge.
Again, basic stuff.

Something for you to to read
read. Begin at the top.

And this Iraq’s Human Terrain- HTS in Hindsight

And I’ll top it with a link to everyone’s favorite counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama, the founder of which spends his off hours following the adventures of Sir Harry Paget Flashman.

Here’s a bit from an author at Harvard of all places who styles herself “Charlie:”

“This blogger is reluctant to write-off all of academia as irrelevant, tweed-lovers. Most all of her advisors did significant government consulting work, and the academy and policy-makers were better for it. But these sad, petulant attacks from a small Ivory Tower fringe shouldn’t be tolerated. They are the last refuge of ill-informed scoundrels.

Ill informed? About Iraq?
The genius of political “science.”
I know this is a site where government work and intellectual activity aren’t seen as contradictory by nature, but still…

As a young and impressionable first year Anthropology student I still remember my lecturer that year – he’d crossed over from what he considered the ‘evils’ of economics to live the bohemian life of the anthropology tutor (ha!) ditching the suits for the exotic Chinese collared linen shirts, more suitable for field trips in Melanesia.

He was charismatic and charming, a true believer in the power of subjective introspection and ‘objective’ observation. He taught us that the fundamental difference between sociology and anthropology was in the methodology. Anthropologists conduct ‘field work’, immersing themselves fully in the culture around them. They do this in modern cities (say for example, studying the underground punk movement in Jakarta, Indonesia) or they do this on remote islands (continuing the work on the kula trading communities perhaps). Large scale or small scale didn’t matter to him it was more to do with the fact that when you live with people on a day to day level you begin to understand some things more clearly. At the same time other ‘certainties’ dissolve with experience and everything changes. This in turn informs the kinds of questions that are asked and this is the sticking point.

Sociologists have been critised for their survey method which simply asks pre-determined questions based on limited experience of the subject in question. Getting the right answers requires knowing where to start, which line of questioning to pursue.

I personally took all this on board that year, whilst also learning a little bit about physical anthropology too.

What never sat well with me was the obvious contradiction in the idea of ‘participant observation’ a method so cherished in anthropology. Surely it is clear that to participate in something (as a subject) the lines of objectivity are blurred, impossible. I never agreed with the faux science.

Furthermore, whilst different departments hold up these theoretical ideals the divisions eroded a long time ago – they are no longer useful to contemplate. I studied ‘the sociology of development’ as a unit in anthropology, I also studied ‘development and change’ as a unit in political science. The themes discussed and the assignments set were virtually indistinguishable (except of course that I probably learnt more about the structure of the World Bank organisation in political science). Both courses critiqued a linear, Western model of ‘development’ and both concerned themselves with unequal power relationships in the world economy and how decisions from the top can effect communities on the ground. I read widely from many disciplines to find the answers I sought.

Generally, as a result of all this, I feel that the distinction really just allows people to stay in jobs. While the status quo props up careers and there’s not much incentive for things to change from the inside.

Post-colonial critiques of anthropology (often by anthropologists themselves) are also another nail in the coffin for the discipline. It’s hard to continue to justify the overall tendency for the outsider anthropologist to speak on behalf of people. Those that were silenced, now speak for themselves. Did you catch the video on the rigged Mugabe elections? Case in point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/04/zimbabwe1 as well as the resurgence of oral history/first person narrative that is accommodated so well on the web. But I digress.