RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. R. (1881–1955) was an English social anthropologist. Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, as he was known formally after changing his name in 1926 (Radcliffe having been his mother's original surname), was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham, at Birmingham University (where he spent a year as a premedical student), and at Trinity College, Cambridge University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mental and moral science. Among those who taught him as an undergraduate were C. H. Myers and W. H. R. Rivers (both medical psychologists who had participated in Cambridge's pioneering anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait off the northeastern tip of Australia). After graduation in 1904 Radcliffe-Brown went on to study anthropology under Rivers and A. C. Haddon (who had also been on the expedition of 1898–1899) and was sent by them in 1906 to study the people of the Andaman Islands, southwest of Burma, for two years.
Radcliffe-Brown's initial report on this expedition, "The Religion of the Andaman Islanders," published in Folk-Lore in 1909 (his book The Andaman Islanders was not published until 1922), led Trinity College to offer him a fellowship, the tenure of which (from 1908 to 1914) was for a brief period combined with a teaching position at the London School of Economics. It was in those years that he first encountered and became permanently influenced by the sociological orientation of Émile Durkheim. Radcliffe-Brown quickly became part of the rapidly developing, distinctively sociological approach to the study of primal societies, and by the 1920s he was probably this movement's most influential figure. Until well into the twentieth century this field was dominated by the ethnological approach, the practitioners of which were particularly interested in the detailed history of particular societies and the patterns of diffusion and transmission of their cultures. That style of analysis was itself still influenced by the evolutionist approach that had been strongly in evidence in the later part of the nineteenth century and had largely regarded religion as a primitive form of science. While the ethnologists of the early part of the twentieth century did not cling strongly to the latter view, they stood in contrast to the emphasis that Radcliffe-Brown, under Durkheim's influence, increasingly placed on the idea that primitive societies should be analyzed synchronically rather than diachronically. In other words, Radcliffe-Brown's work increasingly involved the claim that in order to comprehend scientifically the main features of a society one should regard it as a functioning whole; its different parts were explainable in terms of their interrelatedness and their contribution to its maintenance.
Radcliffe-Brown's impact, which grew intermittently but strongly in the 1920s and 1930s through his teaching and writing in various countries, was based primarily on his advocacy and practice of what he came to call a natural science of society, with particular reference to social structure. His attention to religion was largely confined to the study of ritual and ceremony—which was particularly evident in the book that he published on the Andaman Islanders in 1922—and the related phenomenon of totemism. In his work on ritual, Radcliffe-Brown was greatly influenced by Durkheim's argument that the primary significance of ritual is its expression and promotion of collective sentiments and social solidarity.
In his first major essay on totemism, "The Sociological Theory of Totemism," published in the Proceedings of the Fourth Pacific Science Congress in 1929, Radcliffe-Brown maintained that Durkheim, by arguing that a totemic object acquires its significance via its sacredness, had begged the crucial question as to why totemism in primal societies typically involves plants or animals, even though Durkheim had pointed cogently to the ways in which ritualized collective conduct in connection with totems was intimately related to social structure and social integration. Radcliffe-Brown argued that plants and animals should not be regarded simply as emblems of social groups, but rather that they are selected as representatives of groups because objects and events that deeply affect the material and spiritual well-being of a society (or any phenomenon that represents such an object or event) are likely to become what he called objects of the ritual attitude. Although there has been disagreement as to the extent to which Radcliffe-Brown's second essay on this subject ("The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1952) involved a substantial change of position, there can be no doubt that it exhibits a very explicit interest in a theme that was not conspicuous in the essay of 1929—namely, the various relationships between totemic objects and between these objects and the structures of the groups that maintain ritual attitudes toward them.
Some have regarded Radcliffe-Brown's work at this point as embracing a form of cognitive structuralism, which is committed to the view that while animals and plants are good to eat they are even better to "think" (that is, they constitute a highly suitable and accessible symbolic means for "talking about" central features of a society's social structure and its relationship with its environment). Others have insisted that Radcliffe-Brown did not move so far beyond his original position of maintaining that the selection of totems is based primarily upon the tangible effects that particular plants or animals are perceived to have in a society. For discussion of the debate see Milton Singer's book, Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (1984).
Bibliography
Radcliffe-Brown's major writings on religion are to be found in The Andaman Islanders, 3d ed. (Glencoe, Ill., 1948), Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London, 1952), and The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown, edited by Adam Kuyper (London, 1977). Illuminating discussion of his work can be found in Adam Kuyper's Anthropology and Anthropologists, rev. ed. (Boston, 1983).
New Sources
Câmara, J. L. Bettencourt da. Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss: A Reappraisal. Lisbon, 1995.
Maddock, Kenneth. "Affinities and Missed Opportunities: John Anderson and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney." Australian Journal of Anthropology 3 issue 1/2 (1992): 3–19.
Singer, Milton. "On the Semiotics of Ritual: Radcliffe-Brown's Legacy." In Theory and Method: Evaluation of the Work of M.N. Srinivas. New Delhi, 1996.
This is the complete article, containing 999 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
