ABSTRACT
The scientific enterprise has been a reductionist one, and sociologists show great ignorance of the history of science in making the word “reductionism” an invective. There is also a large residue of teleology in sociology, but unfortunately, this is also true of evolutionary thinking in biology, notwithstanding heated denials. Lee Ellis’ prediction of the imminent demise of sociology is most questionable because it is based on a rather naive assumption, namely, that the survival of a discipline is related to its intellectual quality. Intellectually, sociology has no claim to a separate existence from anthropology. The distinction between the two is largely a historical accident traceable to racism in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America: dark-skinned colonials were studied by anthropologists; lightskinned colonizers by sociologists. Sociology should, by rights, be a small specialty within anthropology: the social anthropology of western societies.
