1.4 Relationship with the Other Social Sciences

(The syllabus's list — for each: shared ground + the anthropological difference. Cross-referenceSociology Unit 1.3's table: the sister course taught the mirror image.)DisciplineShared groundThe anthropological differenceSociologysocial institutions, stratification, change; in Nepal born as twin departmentssociology: one's own society, survey and statistic; anthropology: the holistic, comparative, fieldwork view of any society (small- scale especially)Historyreconstructing the human past; ethnohistory as shared methodhistory: documents and events; anthropology: the deep time of evolution and the everyday past of non-literate societies (oral tradition)Economicsproduction, exchange, consumptionanthropology: economies embedded in kinship and ritual (Polanyi; the gift — Unit 5.4) — the market as one institution among manyPoliticalSciencepower, order, the stateanthropology: politics without the state — acephalous orders, feud, ritual authority (Evans-Pritchard's Nuer — Unit 2.3); the state seen from the villagePsychologythe person, development, identityanthropology: the self as culturally constituted (Mead's culture- and-personality; Unit 4's enculturation vs the nature-nurture debate)Lawnormative order, dispute, sanctionlegal anthropology: law's anthropology asks how order exists where no state is — custom, lineage, oaths, ordeals, mediation (Malinowski's Crime and Custom; Llewellyn & Hoebel's Cheyenne Way); in Nepal: guthi, badghar, kipat, mukhiya — the living-law scholarship (Jurisprudence Unit 2.3.3 and Sociology Unit 3's Nepal paragraphs) — and the practical field of customary-law recognition, legal pluralism and indigenous rightsThe closing line for exams: anthropology is the social sciences' generalist and comparativist — the discipline that insists…