The syllabus names six — treat each as "kinship with a difference."
| Discipline | Its corequestion | Overlap with sociology | The difference (exam point) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropology | What makes humans human? Culture, kinship, ritual, origin | Methods of fieldwork; concepts of culture, kinship, religion; in Nepal the two are historically twin disciplines (see 1.4) | Anthropology classically studied small, "other" societies holistically (and their pre-modern life); sociology studied one's own industrial society. The line has now almost dissolved |
| History | What happened, in sequence? | Both reconstruct society across time; sociology of the past ≈ social history | History is idiographic (particular events, chronology); sociology is nomothetic (patterns, laws-like regularities). History supplies sociology its longitudinal data (see your Nepali History course) |
| PoliticalScience | How is power organised and exercised? | Political sociology: state, parties, power, legitimacy, movements | Political science focuses on formal polity (government, elections, constitutions); sociology asks how power lives in all social relations — family, caste, gender, economy |
| Economics | How are scarce goods produced and distributed? | Economic sociology: work, markets, consumption, embeddedness of economy in society | Economics models choice with abstractions (rational actor); sociology insists behaviour is shaped by norms, networks, status — not price signals alone |
| Psychology | How does the individual mind work? | Social psychology; socialisation; attitudes and behaviour | Psychology's unit is the individual; sociology's is the group and the interaction. Both meet in the nature– nurture debate (Unit 4.5) |
| Law | How is conduct normatively ordered and enforced? | The whole field of Sociology of Law (Unit3): law as social institution, social control, and social product | Doctrinal legal science asks what the rule is; sociology asks what the rule does to society, and what society does to the rule. The bridge disciplines: sociological jurisprudence, legal realism, law-and- society |
Memory hook:Sociology is the general practitioner among the social sciences — the others arespecialists in one organ of the social body; law is the specialist sociology made a profession.