Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1881-1955

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was a British anthropologist closely associated with the development of structural-functionalism. His firm theoretical framework and his administrative skills helped to consolidate social anthropology as an academic discipline across the British Commonwealth.

Defying his impoverished lower-middle-class beginnings, Radcliffe-Brown enjoyed an elite academic education at Cambridge University, where A. C. Haddon (1855–1940) and W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) were his mentors. He first wanted to study natural sciences, but was directed toward “moral sciences” (comprising philosophy, psychology, and economics). Yet his leanings toward the natural sciences remained with him throughout his career, and the use of analogies between social structures and structures occurring in nature are emblematic of his style of thought. At the same time, he was able to combine his insistence on “structure” with a flamboyant way of dressing and a fascination with Peter Kropotkin’s (1842–1921) anarchism, earning Radcliffe-Brown the nickname “Anarchy Brown.”

Most of Radcliffe-Brown’s adult life was spent outside England. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and Western Australia (1910–1912), but never achieved the kind of in-depth familiarity with local settings that would soon become typical of social anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown’s influential academic career began in 1920, when he became the founding professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He went on to become founding professor at the University of Sydney (1926–1931), professor at the University of Chicago (1931–1937), and chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford (1937–1946). He continued lecturing at universities in Brazil, Egypt, England, and South Africa, and served as president of the Association of Social Anthropologists until shortly before his death.

Even by his own account, Radcliffe-Brown was a slow writer. His only monograph is The Andaman Islanders (1922); the rest of his publications are articles and lecture transcriptions. Although his academic career spanned half a century, Radcliffe-Brown’s theory remained more or less unchanged throughout. He constantly systematized the idea that social anthropology should become a “natural science of human society” through empirical investigations of social structures. Comparisons between different societies should enable anthropologists to discover universal and essential relations; apparent diversity should be reduced to clear classifications. Anthropology should focus on directly observable networks between persons, and distill “general structural forms.” Rejecting diffusionism, evolutionism, and any kind of “conjectural history,” Radcliffe-Brown was also critical of the concept of “culture,” which for him was a foggy abstraction and subordinate to social structure.

Assessments of Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution to anthropology tend to be polarized. He was a charismatic lecturer, able to impress upon others a habitus of scientific rigor. Even some streams of American anthropology, with its longstanding emphasis on culture and historical particularity, were influenced by him. But just as much as he united scholars during his lifetime, his name soon became synonymous with an overly rigid and intellectually unsatisfying approach that no one wanted to follow anymore. From the 1950s onward, all major figures in British social anthropology, notably E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), Raymond Firth (1901–2002), and Edmund Leach (1910–1989), denounced Radcliffe-Brown’s theory as unable to grasp history, social change, and unequal relations of power. That he wanted anthropology to become a “natural science” attracted particular scorn (e.g., Leach 1976). Even if Radcliffe-Brown’s importance for the discipline is now widely seen as historical, his emphasis on observable social networks, as opposed to cultural values, retains a certain influence, especially in Britain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leach, Edmund. 1976. Social Anthropology: A Natural Science of Society. London: British Academy.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1922. The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1940. Preface. In African Political Systems. eds. Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, xi-xxii. London: Oxford University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. London: Cohen & West.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1958. Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays. Ed. M. N. Srinivas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stefan Ecks