DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2018.v06i04.022

Pages: 935-938

This paper is about the rise and consolidation of anthropology as a viable academic discipline as part of larger colonial discourse and its complex and problematic relationships with the disciplines of history and sociology. The underprivileged position of anthropology as a discipline with its workspace being non-industrial, non-western and primitive societies in relation to sociology which reserves its position over western, European and developed societies and its social studies portrays the categorization of academic disciplines by Europeans based on civilization scale and developed/underdeveloped hierarchy. In the attempt of colonial observers to study the native lives, anthropology provided the necessary tools to claim a scientific study of cultures and practices through ostensibly impartial narratives. Their surveys and ethnographic reports led towards establishing a vast repository of data on human practices. Anthropological enquiry attempts to understand the everyday lives of people; history, on the other hand focused on events that marked revolutionary changes in the lives of people. The anthropological turn in history in the form of shift in focus from the revolutionary to the mundane was assisted by the growing stress on interdisciplinary studies across academia.