It's interesting to me to see this blistering critique of sociology, incidentally, owing to my own profession and the way it was taught to me. To be frank, cultural anthropology and sociology have a common history in some ways, but also a very rough history ever since they came to be seen as separate fields. In short, the attitude many of my professors held toward sociology was dismissive at best, and the sentiment was returned with gusto. All through my student years, there was this implicit awareness that both fields turned their noses up at one another a little bit, very specifically due to a supposed lack of scientific rigor. Sociologists regarded their very quantitative approach, based heavily on statistical analysis of survey data, as scientifically superior to the overly freewheeling, qualitative approach of cultural anthropologists (as they saw it). We were compromised, they would argue, by our love of ethnographic study and the inevitable bias that comes from studying in situ. While cultural anthropologists commonly regarded the narrower focus of sociology as nothing less than unjustifiably tossing out relevant data. If sociology couldn't work as a field science, was it a science at all? Surveys put too much power in the hands of researchers, alleged anthropologists, to define what kinds of data their studies could produce. The common lack of any reference to the biological elements of life were also a common avenue of critique, that by cross-training in physical anthropology, cultural anthropologists were much better prepared to comment on those matters where the physical and the social overlap.
In professional life, I have found these critiques less than useful. There's some justification for both portrayals, but they can also easily become inaccurate caricatures in the hands of over-excited grad students or aging boomers worried about their theoretical legacies. In real life, sociologists experiment with ethnography all the time. Anthropologists use survey. Everyone has opportunities to incorporate biological insights into their work if interested, and plenty of people in both fields have done so over the years. As time goes by, my alarm at the overall threat faced by the social sciences as a whole has come to be a much more serious preoccupation of mine. I cannot imagine the value of defining and rhetoricizing the presumed differences in the theoretical sets of sociology vs anthropology, sociology vs economics, psychology vs anthropology, and so forth, when all of these disciplines are under serious threat of dissapearing altogether. If sociology is somehow able to weather the storm and survive as anthropology and political science go under or get absorbed, at this point in my life I'd be perfectly content to change the job title on my desk as long as the knowledge generated by these fields is not allowed to die. We are at a precarious stage, and theoretical concerns are not the reason why.
