Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (January 17, 1881 – October 24, 1955) was a British social anthropologist who developed the theory of structural-functionalism, and is often regarded, together with Bronislaw Malinowski as the father of modern social anthropology.

Life

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born on January 17, 1881 in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England as Alfred Reginald Brown, but later, by deed poll, changed his name to Radcliffe-Brown. As a child he developed tuberculosis, which left his lungs seriously impaired, and which ultimately contributed to his death.

After finishing the King Edward’s High School in Birmingham, in 1901 Radcliffe-Brown enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge University to study psychology, economics, and the natural sciences. However, he soon became interested in the work of W.H.R. Rivers, Alfred North Whitehead, and later Alfred Cort Haddon. Under the influence of Rivers, he changed his major to anthropology. Another influence at Cambridge that left a mark on Radcliffe-Brown’s later career and work was anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin. It was Kropotkin who expanded the Social Darwinist concept of the survival of the fittest and introduced the idea of cooperation as important for human survival.

Radcliffe-Brown undertook his first field study in the Andaman Islands, in 1906. In that work he built on the work previously done by E.H. Man and M.V. Portman, displaying the usual emphasis on ethnology and history. He spent two years in the Andaman Islands, and in 1908 returned to London.

It was then that Radcliffe-Brown became aware of the work of Emile Durkheim. Durkheim’s work made him reconstruct his own ideas and totally reinterpret his work on the Andaman Islands. Radcliffe-Brown conducted another field study, between 1910 and 1912, in Western Australia, in which he used his new theory of "structural-functionalism." Both studies served as the inspiration for his later books The Andaman Islanders (1922) and The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1930).

During Word War I, Radcliffe-Brown served as Director of Education in the Kingdom of Tonga, and in 1920 moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to become professor of social anthropology. At the University of Cape Town he founded the School of African Life and Language, and developed a research program in social anthropology.

In 1925 he moved to Sydney, Australia, where he became professor at the University of Sydney (1925-1931). There he developed program similar to that in the University of Cape Town, with even greater success. He founded the journal Oceania, and organized extensive field research in the area. His work The Social Organization of Australian Tribes, which was published in 1930, still serves as the sourcebook for the studies of the region.

In 1931, Radcliffe-Brown came to the University of Chicago as a visiting professor of anthropology. The next several years were among the most productive in Radcliffe-Brown’s career, which he spent in writing and teaching. It was during this period that he expanded his theory of social anthropology, and developed his conceptions of primitive law. The peak of his career at Chicago was his public debate in 1937 with Mortimer Adler entitled “The Nature of a Theoretical Natural Science of Society.”.

In 1937, Radcliffe-Brown returned to England to serve as the Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford. The Second World War, however, prevented him from conducting any major research projects, and he spent the next few years serving as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He also lectured at universities in Yenching, China, São Paulo, Brazil, and Alexandria, Egypt.

After his retirement in 1946, Radcliffe-Brown spent several years in the University of Cairo and Grahamstown in South Africa, editing African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (1950) and publishing his Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952).

The last years of his life Radcliffe-Brown spent fighting a series of episodes of bronchitis and pneumonia. He died in London in 1955.

Work

Radcliffe-Brown developed the field of structural functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating to the social structure of primitive civilizations. He was greatly influenced by the work of Émile Durkheim, and similar to Durkheim who studied global social phenomena, Radcliffe-Brown saw the aim of his fieldwork to study primitive societies and determine generalizations about the social structure. He believed that social institutions should be studied like scientific objects. For example, he regarded institutions as the key to maintaining the global social order of a society, analogous to the organs of a body, and his studies of social function examine how customs aid in maintaining the overall stability of a society. He said:

Such a view implies that a social system has a certain kind of unity, which we make speak of as a functional unity. We may define it as a condition in which all parts of the system work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency, i.e., without producing persistent conflicts which can neither be resolved nor regulated. [On the Concept of Function in Social Science, 181]

Radcliffe-Brown rejected conventional historical diffusion and social evolutionary approaches to anthropology. He was rather critical toward evolutionary speculation about the development of cultures and societies. He said:

We do not observe a “culture”, since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction. But direct observation does reveal to us that…human beings are connected by a complex network of social relations. I use the term “social structure” to denote this network of actually existing relations. [On Social Structure, 190]

Radcliffe-Brown believed that the goal of anthropology was to carefully compare different societies and formulate general social laws based on the conclusions from the fieldwork. His desire was to understand how societies work, and to identify the significant constituent parts and the ways that these parts function together. Rather than studying different cultural traits and their diffusion between cultures, Radcliffe-Brown aimed to study general laws of the cultures. He opposed historical particularism of Franz Boas and his followers who claimed that to understand one’s culture one need to understand the history of that culture. Radcliffe-Brown saw that approach too speculative. He favored cross-cultural comparisons. He was interested, for example, in how very similar social structures could develop in the cultures that were geographically separated and rather distinct.

The job of an anthropologist, claimed Radcliffe-Brown, thus is to describe the anatomy of social structure, and to understand how different parts function together and in relation to the whole. He claimed:

I conceive of social anthropology as the theoretical natural science of human society, that is, the investigation of social phenomena by methods essentially similar to those used in the physical and biological sciences. ... there are some ethnologists or anthropologists who hold that it is not possible, or at least not profitable, to apply to social phenomena the theoretical methods of natural science. For these persons social anthropology, as I have defined it, is something that does not and never will exist. For them, of course, my remarks will have no meaning, or at least not the meaning I intend (On Social Structure, 189).

Radcliffe-Brown used whole series of examples to support his claims. In his famous essay On Joking Relationships, published in 1940, he describes a custom in some cultures, where people engage in a formalized type of banter, exchanging jokes among themselves. To understand the custom, claimed Radcliffe-Brown, one has to understand the function of complex social structures and their relationship that play role in the custom. He was able to explain the custom and prove his point.

Radcliffe-Brown also contributed extensively to the anthropological study on kinship. His work on aboriginal societies of West Australia revealed a complicated kinship system that was practically unknown before, and helped understand the structure of aboriginal society in general. Moreover, in his 1924 paper The Mother's Brother in South Africa, Radcliffe-Brown focuses on the South African family ties. He studied one particular, rather peculiar custom, observed in some tribes, of the relationship between a boy and his maternal uncle. Through studying the patterns of relations between different social groups, Radcliffe-Brown was able to explain the meaning behind the custom.

Radcliffe-Brown vs. Malinowski

Radcliffe-Brown is considered, together with Bronislaw Malinowski, as the father of modern social anthropology. Although he did not share the same vigor for fieldwork as Malinowski, through his development of the theoretical framework for that fieldwork he contributed to the development of social anthropology. He is thus considered the theoretic, while Malinowski was rather practical, contributing to the methodological foundations of anthropological fieldwork.

Both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski are today considered functionalists, but Radcliffe-Brown rejected such comparison. He coined his own term, structural-functionalism, to separate himself from Malinowski.

Criticism

Radcliffe-Brown was often criticized for failing to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied, in particular changes brought about by colonialism. His analysis of the society, that saw social institutions as functionally interdependent parts of the society, which works as a giant organism, is often considered as oversimplified. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, who was Radcliffe-Brown’s early follower and who eventually replaced him at Oxford, later denounced structural-functionalism as a form of reductionism.

Legacy

With his incorporation of the work of Émile Durkheim) into his theories, Radcliffe-Brown brought French sociology to British anthropology, constructing a rigorous battery of concepts to frame ethnography. He made a break from traditional anthropology by emphasizing functional study of the structures of the society and creation of the general theoretical concepts that could be backed by the results of field research. With this he influenced the whole new generations of researchers, who either supported or criticized his ideas.

Both Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas used some Radcliffe-Brown’s concepts in their own studies. His structural-functionalism found its utilization in the subfield of political anthropology, especially in the work of Max Gluckman, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard. His most prominent student during his years at the University of Chicago was Fred Eggan.

Radcliffe-Brown was one of the first “international” anthropologists, who was not bound to any particular academic institution. With his work he influenced scholars on almost every continent, and thus contributed to reduce ethnocentrism and bridge the gap between American and British anthropology on one side, and anthropologies of other countries.

Bibliography

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1913. Three Tribes of Western Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 43, 143-194

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1923. Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology. South African Journal of Science, 20

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1924. The Mother's Brother in South Africa. South African Journal of Science, 21, 542-55.

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1931. The Social Organization of Australian Tribes. Oceania, 1, 1-4,

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1939. Taboo. Cambridge University Press

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1965, (original work from 1940). On Social structure. In A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (Ed.), Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: The Free Press.

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1964 (original work from 1922). The Andaman Islanders. Free Press. ISBN 0029255805

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1967. Religion and society: Henry Myers lecture. Bobbs-Merrill.

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1993. On the Concept of Function in Social Science. Irvington Publishers. ISBN 0829038159

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 2002 (original work from 1952). Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Essays and Addresses. Free Press. ISBN 0029256208

• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. & Forde, Daryll. 2005 (original work from 1950). African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. Trubner & Co. ISBN 1844530388

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Goody, Jack. 1986. Under the Lineages Shadow (Radcliffe-Brown Lectures in Social Anthropology Series). British Academy. ISBN 0856725293

• Meyer, Fortes. 1963 (original work from 1949). Social structure: Studies presented to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Russell & Russell

• Kuper, Adam. 2004 (original work from 1977). The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown. Routledge. ISBN 0415330327

External Links

• A. R. Radcliffe-Brown - Biography
• Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown – Biography by Fred Eggan and W. Lloyd Warner

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) – Distinction between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown – Biography

• Anthropological theories: Functionalism – On functionalism (The University of Alabama website)

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