What are the importance of the study of sociology and anthropology?

Question

What are the importance of the study of sociology and anthropology?

Answer 1

The study of anthropology is capable of increasing tolerance for diversity and difference in the world, aka Franz Boas and company.

Answer 2

The approaches of sociology and anthropology are somewhat different.

Had Anthropology remained true to its early 20th century re-formulation as a four-field approach, it would be the more holistic and scientific of the two - incorporating empirical studies of human biology, ecology, history and biological and social evolution.  However, the discipline is fragmented and partitioned to the extent that scholars rarely collaborate from one subfield to another, and even more rarely consult with natural scientists.  Instead, today, 'anthropology' usually refers to cultural or social anthropology - a highly theoretically-oriented field which offers humanistic understanding and political apologetics more than it offers scientifically valid arguments.  On the positive side, social/cultural anthropology offers a way to translate from one set of cultural categories to another - so that we can create more complete understandings than we could from simply translating language. It has also turned inward and critically examined its own cultural context.

Sociology has also changed a great deal over the years.  In Europe, it remains closely connected to anthropology, sometimes inhabiting the same department. In the US and elsewhere, the closeness of anthropology and sociology varies from school to school.  Unlike anthropology, sociology began by focusing almost exclusively on western societies and adopted broad generalization as a goal. This has, of course, changed as well.  And sociologists have also undertaken a thorough self-evaluation over the last 30-40 years, resulting in fewer practical applications, departmental disintegration and declining interest among students.  Sociologists tend to focus on social problems, and often use statistics based on conventionally and not very crticially  accepted cultural categories as opposed to questioning the categories themselves (as an anthropologist would often do).  Applied anthropologists often do the same, but from a more cross-cultural anthropological perspective.  

It is hard to sort through what the most important contributions of either discipline are.  From my perspective, anthropology is about learning that there are different ways of thinking and doing things than that which our culture has adopted and (if the discipline had stayed the course and continued to develop as a functioning interdisciplinary science) we might have been able to resolve many of the age-old debates about nature vs nurture, etc.  Instead, we are left with a lot of agenda-driven ideas from people who are convinced that culture is the prime mover and others who are convinced that biology is.  For sociology - there are many interesting and intellectually challenging studies of western society written from a thoroughly western perspective, and some good critical examinations of social problems. Again, however, the field is also prone to agendas, since its application of scientific method is often a facade for an underlying pre-ordained argument.