Competing enterprises: A comparative analysis of introductory cultural anthropology and introductory sociology textbooks

What is anthropology? What is sociology? What is the basis of the division between the two? Is that division a relic of nineteenth century thinking?; With these questions in mind, anthropology and sociology are compared both as social science disciplines asking certain kinds of scholarly questions and as academic teaching enterprises. A model of the "Academic Credentials Market" in which the two disciplines compete for market share is developed and an analysis of their market shares in the last half of the twentieth century is presented. The histories of anthropology and sociology are traced from their common roots in antiquity through their nineteenth century separation into two distinctive disciplines and their institutionalization in the twentieth century.; A content analysis of a representative sample of introductory anthropology and sociology textbooks was conducted to reveal how the disciplines are presented to introductory students and what they indicate regarding the distinction between the disciplines. Findings suggest (1) that there is a high degree of conformity to a "standard" model among introductory sociology textbooks while there is considerable variability in organization and content among introductory cultural anthropology texts, (2) cultural anthropology is presented as one of four subfields of general anthropology, a holistic discipline that straddles the sciences and humanities and studies all humans in all times and places while sociology is presented as a social science interested primarily in modern industrial societies, and (3) the two disciplines do not share widely in each other's discourse communities.