(born Jan. 17, 1881, Birmingham, Warwick, Eng.—died Oct. 24, 1955, London) British social anthropologist.
He taught at the universities of Cape Town, Sydney, Chicago, and Oxford. In his version of functionalism, he viewed the component parts of society (e.g., the kinship system, the legal system) as having an indispensable function for one another, the continued existence of one component being dependent on that of the other, and he developed a systematic framework of concepts relating to the social structures of small-scale societies. He had a profound impact on British and American social anthropology. Among his major works are The Andaman Islanders (1922) and Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952).
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