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Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
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A.R. Radcliffe-Brown

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown-Gilerovich (born 17 January 1881 in Birmingham -

died 24 October 1955 in London) was an English social anthropologist who developed
the theory of Structural Functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating
to the social structure of primitive civilizations.

Contents
[hide]
 • 1 Biography
• 2 Work
o 2.1 Concept of function
o 2.2 Concept of social structure
o 2.3 Evolutionism, diffusionism, and the role of social anthropology
o 2.4 Ethnography
o 2.5 Criticisms
• 3 Publication
• 4 References

• 5 External links

[edit] Biography
Radcliffe-Brown was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England. After studying at
Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to the Andaman Islands (1906-1908) and
Western Australia (1910-1912) to conduct fieldwork into the workings of the societies
there, serving as the inspiration for his later books The Andaman Islanders (1922) and
The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1930). However at the 1914 meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Melbourne he was accused by
Daisy Bates of plagiarizing her work.

In 1916 he became a director of education in Tonga, and in 1920 moved to Cape Town to
become professor of social anthropology, founding the School of African Life. He was
later professor at the universities in Sydney, Chicago, and Oxford. His most prominent
student during his years at the University of Chicago was Fred Eggan.

While he founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, according
to Rodney Needham [1] his absence from the Institute during the war years prevented his
theories and approach from having a major influence on Oxford anthropology.

Further university appointments were University of Cape Town (1920-25), University of

Sydney (1925-31) and University of Chicago (1931-37).

[edit] Work
He was seen as the classic to Bronislaw Malinowski's romantic. Radcliffe-Brown brought
French sociology (namely Émile Durkheim) to British anthropology, constructing a
rigorous battery of concepts to frame ethnography.[citation needed]

Greatly influenced by the work of Émile Durkheim, he saw the aim of his field to study
primitive societies and determine generalizations about the social structure. For example,
he saw 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.[citation needed]

[edit] Concept of function

Radcliffe-Brown has often been associated with functionalism, and is considered by some
to be the founder of structural functionalism. Nonetheless, Radcliffe-Brown vehemently
denied being a functionalist, and carefully distinguished his concept of function from that
of Malinowski, who openly advocated functionalism. While Malinowski's functionalism
claimed that social practices could be directly explained by their ability to satisfy basic
biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown rejected this as baseless. Instead, influenced by the
process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, he claimed that the fundamental units of
anthropology were processes of human life and interaction. Because these are by
definition characterised by constant flux, what calls for explanation is the occurrence of
stability. Why, Radcliffe-Brown asked, would some patterns of social practices repeat
themselves and even seem to become fixed? He reasoned that this would at least require
that other practices must not conflict with them too much; and that in some cases, it may
be that practices grow to support each other, a notion he called 'coadaptation', deriving
from the biological term. Functional analysis, then, was just the attempt to explain
stability by discovering how practices fit together to sustain that stability; the 'function' of
a practice was just its role in sustaining the overall social structure, insofar as there was a
stable social structure (Radcliffe-Brown 1957). This is far from the 'functional
explanation' later impugned by Carl Hempel and others. It is also clearly distinct from
Malinowski's notion of function, a point which is often ignored by Radcliffe-Brown's
detractors.[citation needed]

[edit] Concept of social structure

While Lévi-Strauss (1958) claimed that social structure and the social relations that are
its constituents are theoretical constructions used to model social life, Radcliffe-Brown
only half-agreed. He argued (1957) that social relations are real, and even directly
observable; but that social structure is a theoretical construction posited by the scientist
on the basis of his or her observation of social relations.

He shared with Lévi-Strauss the notion that a major goal of social anthropology was to
identify social structures and formal relationships between them, and that qualitative or
discrete mathematics would be a necessary tool to do this. In that sense Radcliffe-Brown
may be considered one of the fathers of social network analysis.

In addition to identifying abstract relationships between social structures, Radcliffe-

Brown argued for the importance of the notion of a 'total social structure', which is the
sum total of social relations in a given social unit of analysis during a given period. The
identification of 'functions' of social practices was supposed to be relative to this total
social structure.

[edit] Evolutionism, diffusionism, and the role of social anthropology

A popular view in the study of tribal societies had been that all societies follow a
unilineal path ('evolutionism'), and that therefore 'primitive' societies could be understood
as earlier stages along that path; conversely, 'modern' societies contained vestiges of older
forms. Another view was that social practices tend to develop only once, and that
therefore commonalities and differences between societies could be explained by a
historical reconstruction of the interaction between societies ('diffusionism'). According
to both of these views, the proper way to explain differences between tribal societies and
modern ones was historical reconstruction.

Radcliffe-Brown rejected both of these views because of the untestable nature of

historical reconstructions. Instead, he argued for the use of the comparative method to
find regularities in human societies and thereby build up a genuinely scientific knowledge
of social life.

To that end, Radcliffe-Brown argued for a 'natural science of society'. He claimed that
there was an independent role for social anthropology here, separate from psychology,
though not in conflict with it. This was because psychology was to be the study of
individual mental processes, while social anthropology was to study processes of
interaction between people (social relations). Thus he argued for a principled ontological
distinction between psychology and social anthropology, in the same way as one might
try to make a principled distinction between physics and biology. Moreover, he claimed
that existing social scientific disciplines, with the possible exception of linguistics, were
arbitrary and did not have any principled reason to exist; once our knowledge of society
is sufficient, he argued, we will be able to form subdisciplines of anthropology centred
around relatively isolated parts of the social structure. But without extensive scientific
knowledge, it is impossible to know where these boundaries will be drawn.

[edit] Ethnography

Radcliffe-Brown carried out extensive fieldwork in the Andaman Islands, Australia, and
elsewhere. On the basis of this research, he contributed extensively to the anthropological
ideas on kinship, and criticized Lévi-Strauss's Alliance theory. He also produced
structural analyses of myths, including on the basis of the concept of binary distinctions,
an idea later echoed by Lévi-Strauss.

[edit] Criticisms

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,
but he is now considered, together with Bronislaw Malinowski, as the father of modern
social anthropology.

[edit] Publication
Radcliffe-Brown has written several books and articles. A selection:
 • 1922, The Andaman Islanders.
• 1931, Social Organization of Australian Tribes.
• 1940, On Joking Relationships: Africa: Journal of the International African
Institute, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul., 1940), pp. 195–210 doi:10.2307/1156093
• 1952, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: posthumously
• 1957, A Natural Science of Society: based on a series of lectures at the University
of Chicago in 1937 and posthumously published by his students

[edit] References
1. ^ Rodney Needham

• Lévi-Strauss, C. Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans.

Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963)
• Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., (1957) A Natural Science of Society

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its
sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this
article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

• On the concepts of function and social structure in social science

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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Radcliffe-Brown"
Categories: English anthropologists | English atheists | University of Cape Town
academics | Social anthropologists | Functionalism | Old Edwardians (Birmingham) |
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge | 1955 deaths | 1881 births
Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced
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