Describe the similarities between sociology and social anthropology.

 Social anthropology usually has been defined as the study of other cultures, employing the technique of participant observation and collecting qualitative data. Social anthropology is similar to but not identical with sociology, at least in terms of how each discipline has developed since the last century. Social anthropology has focused on pre-industrial societies, sociology on industrial societies; anthropologists conducted their research in other cultures, employed the technique of participant observation (collecting qualitative data), and advocated comparative (especially cross-cultural) analysis; sociologists did research in their own societies, used questionnaires (collecting quantitative data), and rarely attempted to test their generalisations cross-culturally.

Of course, there have been many exceptions to these patterns with the result that sociologists have sometimes resembled anthropologists in their labours, and vice versa (Barrett, 2009). However, another way of examining the relationship between these two disciplines is by finding out the important differences. The first major difference is that while sociology is by definition concerned with the investigation and understanding of social relations and with other data only so far as they further this understanding, social anthropologists although they share the concern with sociologists, are interested also in other matters, such as people's beliefs and values, even where these cannot be shown to be directly connected with social behaviour.

Social anthropologists are interested in their ideas and beliefs as well as in their social relationships and in recent years many social anthropologists have studied other people's belief systems not simply from a sociological point of view but also as being worthy of investigation in their own right. The second important difference between social anthropology and sociology is simply that social anthropologists have mostly worked in communities which are both less familiar and technologically less developed, while sociologists chiefly studied types of social organisation characteristic of more complex, western -type societies. The distinction is by no means a hard and fast one; it implies difference in field rather than in fundamental theory, but it has important implications. It is in the study of smallscale systems of this kind, where person to person relationships are all important that the methods of social anthropology have been elaborated, and its main contributions to sociological knowledge have been in this field.

Finally, the fact that social anthropologists have mostly worked in unfamiliar cultures has imposed on them a problem of translation which is much less acute for sociologists, though it certainly exists for them too. Sociologists usually speak the same language (more or less) as the people they study and they share with them at least some of their basic concepts and categories. But for the social anthropologist the most difficult part of his/her task is usually to understand the language and ways of thought of the people he studies, which may be and probably are very different from his own. This is why, in anthropological fieldwork, a sound knowledge of the language of the community being studied is indispensable for a people's categories of thought and the forms of their language are inextricably bound together.

Thus questions about meanings and about the interpretation of concepts and symbols usually demand a larger part of the attention of social anthropologists than of sociologists. Never the less, sociology is social anthropologists' closest companion discipline and the two subjects share a great many of their theoretical problems and interests. Social anthropologists are sociologists as well, but they are at once something less, because their actual field of investigation has on the whole been more restricted and something more, because although they are concerned with social relationships, they are concerned with other aspects of culture as well. However, the top scholars in both social anthropology and sociology spend very little time in worrying whether what they are doing is sociology or social anthropology.

 

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