My distinction between anthropology and sociology:
Anthropology translates unwritten cultural assumptions and norms into written, analyzable forms. From its roots in colonial and imperialist discourse, its goals have always been to explain the "Other" to the Western world. Following the dissolution of most explicitly imperial regimes in the mid-20th century, and the sudden desire by so-called 'natives' to speak for themselves, anthropologists ceased explaining the "other" to the "west" and began instead to explain EVERYTHING to themselves.
Sociology examines how unwritten cultural assumptions influence the products of that culture; that is, examining the connections between the unwritten or implicit and the written, where "written" stands in for all concrete forms of cultural production. Its history is closely linked to anthropology's, but has always been more concerned with analyzing inequality and marginality within a single society.
I know explaining sociology through anthropology, or vice versa, is problematic, but it's because I've been reading a lot of meta-anthropological texts lately and only have texts explicitly produced as 'sociology' or 'sociological' to guide me. All of this is coming from my reading of standard anthropological and sociological texts from before the 1960s, contemporary sociological texts, contemporary post-colonial discourse, and a LOT of literary and cultural theory, so it's pretty biased, but since I've been thinking about it a lot the last couple of days, I figured I might as well get it down. I'm sure there are a TON of counter-examples to disprove it, but it seemed like a better answer than the standard "Anthropologists only know how to do ethnography" that I get from sociologists and the "Sociologists only care about the West" coming from anthropologists.
... thoughts?