no offense to the sociologists in the crowd

but any paper that has a section titled "hey, at least we're not sociologists" makes us laugh.

on a more serious note, though, a lot in this article is incredibly debateable, but two points about the divide between sociology and anthropology stood out:

"the divide between sociology and cultural anthropology is in many ways the example par excellance of disciplinary thinking and its negative impact on the development of knowledge. the theoretical divide between the two sciences was the product of a kind of gentleman’s agreement between alfred kroeber and talcott parsons, the disciplinary 'doyens' of the time (wolf, 1999). this agreement was designed to prevent a turf war, giving anthropology the culture concept, i.e. the study of ritual and meaning, while sociology was given the study of society and social structure. this neat division prevented major fights, but the problems with this division should now be obvious to us. how do you study social structure without the meanings attached to it? how do you study meanings without the social relations they reference? this kind of non-dialectical, non-relational thinking left anthropology in a position to conduct idealist research and it made it difficult to introduce other perspectives and many of the subfields in anthropology–psychological anthropology, symbolic anthropology, economic anthropology were used to address this limitation."

it's easy to wonder how much of a service all of these subfields do anthropology. 

by constantly separating and categorizing our work from the greater whole, do we fracture our understandings?

krishnamurti would probably not approve. 

"one of the ongoing faults of much anthropological work is the fetishization of culture as a thing in and of itself, rather than the expression of particular materialities. culture is a semiotic system, nothing more and nothing less. but it is the emphasis on this system which ironically put american anthropology in a stronger position than its competitors. the division of labor conceived by kroeber and parsons left sociology studying categories such as class, race and social groups, categories which neoliberals would later argue had no relevance. anthropology on the other hand, studied shared meaning, values and religion, difference in short, and became of special interest to the powers that be and the discipline profited as a result––the culture concept won."

bet you didn't think you'd be thinking about cultural fetishization today.