(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.)
| Discipline | Shared ground | The anthropological difference |
|---|---|---|
| Sociology | social institutions, stratification, change; in Nepal born as twin departments | sociology: one's own society, survey and statistic; anthropology: the holistic, comparative, fieldwork view of any society (small- scale especially) |
| History | reconstructing the human past; ethnohistory as shared method | history: documents and events; anthropology: the deep time of evolution and the everyday past of non-literate societies (oral tradition) |
| Economics | production, exchange, consumption | anthropology: economies embedded in kinship and ritual (Polanyi; the gift — Unit 5.4) — the market as one institution among many |
| PoliticalScience | power, order, the state | anthropology: politics without the state — acephalous orders, feud, ritual authority (Evans-Pritchard's Nuer — Unit 2.3); the state seen from the village |
| Psychology | the person, development, identity | anthropology: the self as culturally constituted (Mead's culture- and-personality; Unit 4's enculturation vs the nature-nurture debate) |
| Law | normative order, dispute, sanction | legal 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 rights |
The closing line for exams: anthropology is the social sciences' generalist and comparativist — the discipline that insists every claim about "society" or "law" be tested against the whole range of human ways of living; for a lawyer, it is the professional antidote to assuming the Code is the world.