Radcliffe-Brown AR
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (born Alfred Reginald Brown; 17 January 1881 – 24 October 1955) was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of structural functionalism and coadaptation.
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Biography
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born Alfred Reginald Brown in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England, the second son of Alfred Brown (d.1886), a manufacturer's clerk, and his wife Hannah (née Radcliffe). He later changed his last name, by deed poll, to Radcliffe-Brown. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1905; M.A., 1909), graduating with first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos. While still a student he earned the nickname "Anarchy Brown" for his close interest in the writings of the anarcho-communist and scientist Peter Kropotkin.[1]
"Like other young men with blood in their veins, I wanted to do something to reform the world – to get rid of poverty and war, and so on. So I read Godwin, Proudhon, Marx and innumerable others. Kropotkin, revolutionary, but still a scientist, pointed out how important for any attempt to improve society was a scientific understanding of it."[2]
He studied psychology under W. H. R. Rivers who, with A. C. Haddon, led him toward social anthropology.[3] Under the latter's influence he travelled to the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and Western Australia (1910–1912, with biologist and writer E. L. Grant Watson and Daisy Bates) 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 Bates of plagiarising her work.[4]
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. Further university appointments were University of Cape Town (1920–25), University of Sydney (1925–31) and University of Chicago (1931–37). Among his most prominent students during his years at the University of Chicago was Sol Tax and Fred Eggan. After these various far-flung appointments, he finally returned to England in 1937 to take up an appointment to the first chair in social anthropology at Oxford in 1937, a post he held until his retirement in 1946.[5] He died in London in 1955.
While he founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, according to Rodney Needham[6] his absence from the Institute during the war years prevented his theories and approach from having a major influence on Oxford anthropology.
Work
He has been described as "the classic to Bronisław Malinowski's romantic".[7] Radcliffe-Brown brought French sociology (namely Émile Durkheim) to British anthropology, constructing a rigorous battery of concepts to frame ethnography.[8]
Greatly influenced by the work of Émile Durkheim, 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]
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