Q.How does the chapter describe sociology’s relationship with history, psychology, and social anthropology?

The chapter shows sociology growing closer to history through social history, meeting psychology on the social shaping of individual behaviour, and merging with social anthropology's older "modern vs primitive" divide. …

The chapter describes sociology's relationship with history, psychology, and social anthropology as three distinct but increasingly close connections, each different in nature.

With history, the relationship has grown closer over time. History was traditionally the chronological record of past political and military events, centred on rulers and elites, while sociology studied present social structures and relationships. But the chapter notes that historians today write about the history of art, of cricket, of clothes and fashion, and of architecture and housing styles — topics that amount to social history, and are close in spirit to what a sociologist studies, since they focus on everyday, lived, and cultural life rather than only formal political events. Sociology, correspondingly, draws on historical material to explain how present social arrangements came about, so the two disciplines today inform each other closely.

With psychology, the chapter frames the relationship around a shared interest in the individual approached from different angles. Psychology studies the individual mind and behaviour largely in its own terms. Sociology's interest in the individual is always as a social being, shaped by, and acting within, groups and institutions — so where an explanation of behaviour requires attention to social context and not only internal mental processes, sociology and psychology meet. …