Background

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, born Alfred Reginald Brown, was born on January 17, 1881, in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, United Kingdom. He was the second son of Alfred Brown, a manufacturer's clerk, and his wife Hannah. He later changed his last name, by deed poll, to Radcliffe-Brown, Radcliffe being his mother's maiden name.

Education

Alfred was educated at King Edward's School. Born into a family of modest means, he on the urging of his brother began premedical studies at the University of Birmingham. Though he had aspired to a degree in the natural sciences, Brown was convinced by a Cambridge tutor to enter Trinity College as a student in the moral sciences. He got there a Bachelor of Arts in 1905 and a Master of Arts in 1909.

Among his Cambridge teachers was the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who had recently returned from the Torres-Strait expedition to Melanesia in the South Pacific-the first major anthropological expedition sponsored by Cambridge.

While still a student Alfred earned the nickname "Anarchy Brown" for his close interest in the writings of the anarcho-communist and scientist Peter Kropotkin.

Career

Radcliffe-Brown conducted fieldwork in the Pacific among the Andaman Islanders from 1906 to 1908 as part of his thesis research. While completing his field-work, Radcliffe-Brown began to read the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim's ideas about the structure of social relationships would have a profound effect on Radcliffe-Brown and would influence his development of structural-functionalist ideology.

From 1910 to 1912, Radcliffe-Brown carried out fieldwork among various aboriginal tribes of Australia. A distinct focus of this research was kinship and its relationship to social structure. Two important volumes resulted from this fieldwork: "The Social Organization of Australian Tribes" (1931) and "Structure and Function in Primitive Society" (1935). Together they demonstrate his important theories, still known as his version of functionalism. In this system, which applies to small- scale societies, component parts of society - such as kinship systems and legal systems - are considered to be interrelated and to have an indispensable effect on each other.

In addition to being a meticulous field researcher, Radcliffe-Brown was a distinguished lecturer at the University of Capetown (1920-1925), the University of Sydney (1925-1931), the University of Chicago (1931-1937), and Oxford University (1937). At Oxford University, he also served as the first president of the Association of Anthropologists.

Throughout the latter part of his life, Radcliffe-Brown continued to pursue research on the social structure of primitive groups. Following World War II, Radcliffe-Brown set up research projects in Africa and Australia. He also conducted field research in South America.

Achievements

• Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was one of the most eminent anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century. He developed a systematic framework of concepts and generalizations relating to the social structures of preindustrial societies and their functions. He is widely known for his theory of functionalism and his role in the founding of British social anthropology. He is now considered, together with Bronisław Malinowski, as the father of modern social anthropology.

Works

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• book

  • The Andaman islanders; a study in social anthropology 1922
  • Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses 1952
  • The Social Organization of Australian Tribes 1931

Views

Radcliffe-Brown formed his theoretical approach as early as 1908 when as a postgraduate student he stated the requirements of a science of human society. He considered them to be threefold: to treat social phenomena as natural facts and thus subject to discoverable necessary conditions and laws; to adhere to the methodology of the natural sciences; to entertain only generalizations that can be tested and verified. He never departed from these rules, although his conceptual thought developed steadily.

Instead of explaining social phenomena in historical or psychological terms, which he believed to be impossible, Radcliffe-Brown proposed to explain them as persistent systems of adaptation, coaptation, and integration. His main working hypothesis was that the life of a society can be conceived of as a dynamic fiduciary system of interdependent elements, functionally consistent with one another. He had used the notion of "social structure" as early as 1914, but in Frazer's and Rivers' rather ill-defined sense, as almost a doublet of "organization." In the 1920s his use of the notion became more explicit, and in the 1930s quite precise. In his final formulation, structure refers to an arrangement of persons and organization to an arrangement of activities. At the same time, he substituted the concept of "social system" for that of "culture." All these changes were connected.

In order to achieve scientific explanation, Radcliffe-Brown urged that anthropology free itself from concern with what Whitehead called "the goading urgency of contingent happenings." Although he was himself a humanist, he saw that humanist anthropology was premature and could prevent wide induction, comparison, and generalization. His primary goal was the abstraction of general features and the search for comparable types and varieties, and he believed that the only acceptable method for acquiring systematic knowledge is to test successive hypotheses with facts. Some of his contemporaries who admired his empirical and analytical studies nevertheless failed to appreciate the extent to which these studies derived their excellence from his methods and principles; instead, they felt that his anthropology was unduly sparse, rigid, and lacking in human values. The impression that Radcliffe-Brown's work was surrounded by an aura of unreality was created by his abstract conception of anthropology as a science that could move from empiricism, classification, and unguided induction to postulation and many-dimensional theory. It was a conception that anthropologists with a historical, genetical, or psychological outlook, including those of Malinowski's school, could not accept, and indeed his idea of social anthropology as "comparative sociology," with the fundamental character of natural theoretical science, did not win the recognition Radcliffe-Brown had hoped for. To be sure, many of the empirical and analytical discoveries that he made only by virtue of that conception, as well as his general principles of functional-structural study, came into wide use.

Personality

A flamboyant, egocentric character, Radcliffe-Brown cultivated the idiosyncratic. He was handsome, charming, and a brilliant conversationalist, and moved in Sydney's highest social circles.

Connections

On 19 April 1910, Alfred married Winifred Marie Lyon. They were divorced in 1938.

Father:

Alfred Brown

Mother:

Hannah Brown

ex-wife:

Winifred Marie Lyon

colleague:

Bronisław Malinowski

References

• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
  2004
• Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School
  1973
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 212
  2011