To some extent the difference lies in methodology.  Anthropology is characterized by participant observation.  Sociology is not, though the boundaries have certainly blurred in the past couple of decades.  In the study of a neighborhood or a corporation, an anthropologist would likely spend time living and working among the people involved, whereas a sociologist would rely more on gathering larger samples of more abstract data from questionnaires and information from census or human resources files.  The image of the ethnographer I always come back to is in the classic film on the Yanomamo with Napoleon Chagnon as a young (and much less beleagured) field researcher.  He's lying in his hammock, dressed as a decent Yanomano man, eating a banana, and conversing in an animated fashion with several other Yanomamo men.  In other words, he's simply hanging out as one of the guys in the community.  That's participant observation, and it's the central distinguishing method of anthropology regardless of whether the subject is a small village of horticulturalists in the Amazonian forest, a neighborhood in an American city, or a multinational, high tech corporation.

Bob Keeler

>>> [log in to unmask] 05/29/02 05:55PM >>>
So what is the difference between anthropology and sociology? Is
anthropology the study of other cultures and sociology the study of your own
culture?
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anita Cohen-Williams" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 6:45 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: SWA's " Got CALICHE ? " Newsletter, Wednesday May 29, 2002


> Mitch,
>
> I was not questioning her credentials. In fact, I think that it is a
> wonderful way to use anthropology. Now, if only marketing folks would get
> the message...
>
> The line between sociology and anthropology is becoming blurred, I think.
> An old argument that will never be resolved.
>
>
> At 12:21 PM 5/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
> > > Anita, Genevieve is a bona fide anthropologist, Ph.D. from Stanford
with a
> > > dissertation on the Carlisle School. She got a job with Intel, trying
> > to help
> > > them use anthropological techniques to ascertain how people operate in
> > the world
> > > (not just the US) so they could design computers to match people's
> > needs. This
> > > is part of that project. Not a bad way to use an anthropology degree.
> >
> >mitch
>
>
> Anita Cohen-Williams
> Search Engine Guru/SEO
> http://www.mysearchguru.com 
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