Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 700

workplace, university and political arena, and even *kinship and *marriage (Gregory and
Sanjek 1994).
In these circumstances anthropologists ponder not only new research topics, but also
the effects of racism and its institutionalization (which no longer requires overt racist
attitudes) within their own discipline. The African-American social anthropologist St
Clair Drake began his career in the 1930s but despite professional achievements could
not do fieldwork in Africa during the 1940s because †Melville Herskovits, who chaired
the principal funding committee, believed that Whites could do objective research in that
continent but Blacks could not (Bond 1988). Closer to the present, while anthropologists
work and the discipline is widely established in a people-of-all-colours world, by 1989
some 93 per cent of US anthropologists in full-time academic positions were White, even
higher than the 89 per cent White figure for all full-time US academics (Alvarez in
Gregory and Sanjek 1994), or the 76 per cent White population (which includes persons
of North African and Middle East origin) counted in the 1990 US census.
ROGER SANJEK
See also: biological anthropology, Franz Boas, caste, colonialism, essentialism,
ethnicity, nationalism, slavery

Further reading

Banton, M. (1983) Racial and Ethnic Competition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Benson, S. (1981) Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Bond, G.C. (1988) ‘A Social Portrait of John Gibbs St. Clair Drake: An American Anthropologist’,
American Ethnologist 15:762–81
Cock, J. (1980) Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation, Johannesburg: Ravan
Press
Davis, A., B.B.Gardner and M.Gardner (1941) Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of
Caste and Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Drake, St C. (1987, 1990) Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 2
vols, Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California
Gould, S.J. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Norton
Gregory, S. and R.Sanjek (eds) (1994) Race, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
Harris, M. (1964) Patterns of Race in the Americas, New York: Walker
Leacock, E. (1969) Teaching and Learning in City Schools: A Comparative Study, New York:
Basic Books
Montagu, A. (ed.) (1964) The Concept of Race, New York: Free Press

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.

Born in the industrial Midlands of England in 1881, the last of three children of a family
fallen on hard times, Alfred Reginald Brown was to enjoy a brilliant career which took
him from King Edward VI School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge to chairs
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at Cape Town, Sydney, Chicago and Oxford and visiting professorships in China, Brazil,
Egypt and other countries. In 1926 he added his mother’s maiden name to his own by
deed poll, thus putting the seal on a form he began adopting during World War I.
Radcliffe-Brown spent most of his adult life outside England, with particularly
formative periods in Australia and South Africa, where his brother and sister were settled.
Whether because of a restless temperament, the precarious state of anthropology or his
hope, invariably disappointed, that the discipline might somewhere become solidly
enough established to allow research to flourish, he never stayed more than a few years in
one place. Through his peregrinations, which evoke the wanderings of a culture hero, he
spread the message of social anthropology widely, both in and beyond academe. The
process was aided by the charm and theatrical flamboyance Radcliffe-Brown often
displayed, qualities which co-existed with a deep inner reserve. In 1931, shortly before he
left for Chicago, a woman journalist gave an impression of the figure he cut:

Sydney is to lose her Radcliffe-Brown, the tall, slender professor of

anthropology, who has graced her ballrooms and, in the De Chair reign, so
many Government House parties. In spite of his violent prejudices in
favour of modern art, Radcliffe is a gentle soul, very popular with the
undergraduates.

Natural science fascinated Radcliffe-Brown from boyhood. His interest in it can only
have been strengthened by admiration for Bertrand Russell, whom he had taken as his
philosophical guide. However his vision of a natural science of society, propounded in
the posthumously published but unrevised Chicago lectures of 1937, was never fully
developed and was to be dismissed out of hand by his successor at Oxford, the Catholic
convert †E.E.Evans-Pritchard, who maintained that anthropology is akin to history and
that the search for laws is vain.
*Art, especially painting, was another early interest of Radcliffe-Brown’s. Known
among artists and bohemians in Sydney and Cape Town, his aesthetic leanings found
further expression in a passion for classical Chinese culture and in drama and music. Not
one to wear heart on sleeve, Radcliffe-Brown had an attitude to life which can be gauged
from his lecture at the Society of Artists’ Exhibition in Sydney in 1929: the modern
painter hates vagueness and sentimentality, seeks clear-cut and definite results and, in
keeping with the scientific spirit, appeals to intellect rather than emotions. The words
could be used to describe his own outlook on anthropology and life, provided allowance
is made for a romantic streak, the manifestation of which included attachment to the
name Radcliffe and championship of the theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by
the Earl of Oxford.
Radcliffe-Brown trained in anthropology under †A.C.Haddon and †W.H.R.Rivers at
Cambridge. The Andaman Islanders, his first book, carried a warm dedication to them; in
1922 he described Haddon to a correspondent as ‘my own master, to whom I am
gratefully indebted for what success I have had’. But although he and Rivers had in
common a deep interest in problems of *kinship and social organization, his conception
of them and of the methods by which they might be solved had come by 1912–14 to
diverge sharply from his mentor’s. It seems, too, that by the same period his growing
enthusiasm for a ‘sociological’ approach had gained the upper hand over the
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‘ethnological’ which retained Haddon’s primary allegiance and on which he himself had
relied when planning his Andamanese fieldwork of 1906–8. The definitive
pronouncement of a characteristically Radcliffe-Brownian position, in which †ethnology
and social anthropology are clearly distinguished and historical surmise and conjecture
called into question, had to wait until 1923, however, when ‘The Methods of Ethnology
and Social Anthropology’ appeared.
Even before going to university Radcliffe-Brown had turned in the direction of
anthropology through the influence of †Peter Kropotkin and Havelock Ellis. His early
anarchism would have made him receptive to Kropotkin who, around the turn of the
century, was prepared to recommend that the study of society should precede attempts at
reforming it and that the path to understanding a complex civilization lay through simpler
societies. Of the Siberian tribal life he experienced in the 1860s, Kropotkin had written
‘to live with natives, to see at work all the complex forms of social organisation they
have elaborated far away from the influence of any civilisation, was, as it were, to store
up floods of light’. The words are virtually prophetic. Taken together with Rivers’s
passion for kinship, they define the direction in which Radcliffe-Brown would make his
major contribution.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to stereotype him as a Kropotkinian. He rejected such
labels (*functionalist was another) as unscientific, though his description of Andamanese
social life carries a distinct flavour of Kropotkin. The islanders are described as living in
local groups, each of them ‘independent and autonomous, leading its own life and
regulating its own affairs’. They knew ‘no organised government’ and ‘no such thing as
the punishment of crime’. Community affairs were ‘regulated entirely by the older men
and women’, but of authority they had ‘little or none’. Despite the existence of private
*property in portable things, ‘the Andamanese have customs which result in an approach
to communism’.
It was to Ellis, who began reading †Émile Durkheim in the 1890s, that Radcliffe-
Brown owed his introduction to the ideas of the French sociological school. The
influence is apparent in lectures he gave in Cambridge and Birmingham in 1910 and
1913–14. In 1923 he was recommending, to second-year students at Cape Town, The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and De la division du travail social (not then
available in English) and also the Mélanges d’histoire des religions of Henri Hubert and
†Marcel Mauss.
Radcliffe-Brown considered that the best chapters of The Andaman Islanders were
those in which he interpreted *myth and ceremony through the concepts of meaning and
function formulated by Hubert. But far from being an unquestioning disciple of this
school, Radcliffe-Brown criticized much in Durkheim’s treatment of the social
organization and the religion of *Aboriginal Australia. He had the advantage of first hand
knowledge through fieldwork, principally in 1910–12 but also for shorter periods in later
years.
Australia is the part of the world with which he is perhaps most closely associated. His
work on kinship, *cosmology and local organization, conceptualized in terms of structure
and function and aiming at comparative generalization, remains of interest,
notwithstanding criticism. It is both curious and instructive that the models of local
organization Radcliffe-Brown constructed as early as 1913 have been almost universally
rejected since the 1960s (and indeed were criticized before then), yet they are often
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referred to in the burgeoning literature on land rights. The paradox is explicable if one
assumes that he alone has been able to introduce order, even if erroneously, into
multifarious Australia-wide data.
Radcliffe-Brown was not a prolific writer. To understand his style of anthropology it
is helpful to read work inspired or influenced by him, as presented in such collections as
Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (Eggan 1937), African Political Systems
(Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) and African Systems of Kinship and Marriage
(Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950). Together with his papers on ‘The Social Organisation
of Australian Tribes’ (1930–1) they illustrate the application of *comparative method to
restricted regions. He did not, however, regard this as the only way in which
generalisation might be pursued. In ‘The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology’
(1951) he used the Heraclitean notion of a union of opposites, governed by tension and
complementarity, to elucidate Australian and other cosmology. Contrary to the opinion of
*Claude Lévi-Strauss, it was not a late development in his thought but had, as †Raymond
Firth has pointed out, been expounded more than two decades earlier in his lectures at
Sydney.
Little interested in bourgeois accumulation, Radcliffe-Brown died in relative poverty
in London in 1955. A surviving sister-in-law remembers him as a man who had loved the
life he led.
KENNETH MADDOCK
See also: British anthropology, functionalism, Aboriginal Australia

Further reading

Eggan, F. (ed.) (1955 [1937]) Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press
Firth, R. (1956) ‘Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown 1881–1955’, Proceedings of the British
Academy 62: 287–302
Fortes, M. and E.E.Evans-Pritchard (eds) African Political Systems, Oxford: Oxford University
Press
Gordon, R. (1990) ‘Early Social Anthropology in South Africa’, African Studies 49:15–48
Maddock, K. (1992) ‘Affinities and Missed Opportunities: John Anderson and A.R.Radcliffe-
Brown in Sydney’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 3:3–18
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1922) The Andaman Islanders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
——(1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London: Cohen & West
——(1958) Method in Social Anthropology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. and D.Forde (eds) (1950) African Systems of Kinship and Marriage,
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Stanner, W.E.H. (1985) ‘Radcliffe-Brown’s Ideas on “Social Value”’, Social Analysis 17:113–25