The twin disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology arose out of ideological concerns: support for colonization, and reorientation of Western society in the face of industrialization. Colonization demanded a justification of the superiority of the colonizer over the colonized, and industrialization demanded a new equation between the owners and the labouring class.
With shipping, and later aviation, people from the developed countries began visiting distant lands in search of raw materials, markets, and samples of exotic flora and fauna. Merchants, explorers and religious missionaries undertook these voyages. The exotic and vastly different cultures of non-Western countries attracted the scholarly community as well, both for academic research and for providing assistance to the colonial government. The study of primitive societies became a specialization by itself. The discipline of Anthropology thus took birth, and was described as the study of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘past’. Colonization created a necessity for understanding the cultures of colonized societies. Similarly, students of society were also called upon to study the problems caused by changing social structures in the wake of industrialization in the countries of Europe. The ideological battle between Marxists and non-Marxists also influenced sociological research.
Thus, two sets of students of society were created: those who studied their own society, and those who studied the societies of others. It is this feature that led to the distinction between Sociology and Anthropology. Sociology came to be defined as the study of one’s ‘own’ society, by implication Western society, and Anthropology the study of ‘other cultures’.4
It will be helpful to elaborate the factors that shaped the discipline of anthropology. Since it grew as the study of the tribes that inhabited the colonies, anthropology was dubbed as a ‘colonial’ discipline, decried by many as a tool in the hands of the colonialists.
In order to rule alien societies, the colonizers needed knowledge of the cultures of the ruled. The administrators sent out to rule these colonies were encouraged to study these native cultures and maintain diaries of their observations. These diaries provided useful inputs in training successive waves of administrators. Universities also began sending scholars to study the native cultures, as well as the flora and fauna of the alien lands. Thus, both students of man and of natural history were drawn to these settings.
The cultures of these societies were very different. The people belonged to different races, spoke different languages, wore exotic dresses, practised different customs, and had divergent orientations towards the supernatural, which appeared more magical than religious. There was a need to understand these cultures in order to better manage and administer them.
Students of natural history and anthropology welcomed the opportunity to carry out investigations of their subject matter in strange settings to further exemplify the theory of evolution as developed by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species. Anthropologists found the key concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest used by Darwin to explicate his theory of evolution useful, and they tried to build an evolutionary ladder for human societies by putting the savages at the bottom, barbarians in the middle, and civilized peoples at the top. Colonial administrators used this framework to justify their superiority and the legitimacy of their rule over the colonies.
One of the followers of Darwin, Francis Galton, saw merit in the process of natural selection and developed ideas about the power of hereditary influence, virtually ignoring the existence of cultural processes. He invented the concept5 of Eugenics, leading to generalizations regarding racial superiority, a heavily racist approach.
When Darwin’s theory of evolution was published, there was little understanding about human cultures as a socially inherited way of life. Those studying human society were guided by biological determinism, and later by geographical determinism. Human behaviour was regarded as a product of one’s biology and the geographical environment. This was opposed by those anthropologists who saw culture as a system that influences human behaviour. It gave rise to the debate on nature versus nurture. In earlier sociology textbook discussions, heredity and environment figured quite prominently; environment was narrowly defined as geographical or natural surroundings, or broadly as inclusive of both natural and cultural settings.
Scholars working to develop a general theory of evolution focused on Human Society, or Human Civilization, as a whole to distinguish it from lower-level animals, and attempted generalizations about the origin of society and its evolution. Included in this category are students of history and Ethnology. The Ethnologists were different from Ethnographers. The latter took to describing the ‘actually existing structures of societies’ considered to be primitive, representing, in a sense, the earlier ladders of the currently advanced societies of the West.
Those investigating non-Western societies of the primitive world also developed a scientific protocol for research and reporting. Notes and Queries in Anthropology, for example, can be regarded as a book on social science methodology that dwells on what to seek and what to observe. The technique of ‘participant observation’ was developed to study people who were preliterate and incapable of communicating with foreign observers. British anthropologists A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski took the lead, not only in the investigation of tribal societies but also in developing a structural-functional framework for the presentation and explanation of field data. Due to its origin and orientation towards the societies of the colonies, anthropology was seen as a discipline aiding the colonial administration.
Just as pioneering anthropologists came from the biological sciences, the originators of sociology were mostly academic outsiders, coming from diverse backgrounds such as Physics and Mathematics, Law, Philosophy, History, and Engineering. All were led towards social thinking because of their concern with deteriorating social conditions caused by World War I, or by the processes of industrialization and urbanization. While early anthropologists were drawn into investigations of the past and primitive forms of human society, pioneering sociologists were concerned with their immediate present and with shaping the future in accordance with their ideology of a desirable society. Marx took recourse to history and proposed his theory of dialectical materialism. Those disagreeing with his formulation developed a structural-functional approach for the study of society.6
Anthropology developed a holistic framework, understanding society as a complex, interactive whole. The discipline also propagated cultural relativism, implying an appreciation of cultural phenomena within their own context, rather than evaluating them as good or bad according to the values of the researcher’s own culture. Studies of these small societies covered all aspects—social structure, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology. Sociology attempted to cover all these areas while studying larger societies. Of necessity, it had to develop a methodology that suited the study of large populations, and a complex web of social relationships.
However, the key goal of both disciplines remained the same—studying the social sphere. The size of the society or the type of methodology employed should not separate these intellectual efforts. No definition of society, or of any of its components, can be scientific if it cannot be universally applied. Therefore, while the two disciplines might have originated because of different stimuli, their ultimate aim unites them. That is why the distinction between them is regarded as superficial, and is increasingly being discarded.
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