Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown: Biography Of This English Ethnographer
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was an English anthropologist who carried out important ethnographic studies about the peoples of different islands of Oceania, especially the Andamans and parts of Australia and Polynesia.
Apart from his field work, he stands out as a theorist, focused on the concept of function understood in a sociological sense compared to the biological functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski.
Below we will see a few glimpses of the life of this author, in addition to his thoughts and we will mention some of his works, through a biography of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, born Alfred Reginald Brown in the English town of Sparkbrook, Birmingham on January 17, 1881 He was the second son of the marriage of Alfred Brown and his wife Hannah, née Radcliffe. Young Alfred would end up deciding to add his mother’s maiden name to his name and adopting Radcliffe-Brown.
Early years and training
He was educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge during the period 1905 to 1909, graduating with honors in moral sciences. During that time He earned the nickname “Anarchy Brown” after showing interest in the anarcho-communist and scientist Peter Kropotkin
Radcliffe-Brown himself said that, as a young man, he wanted to do something to change the world, to make it a better place, away from poverty and war. As he read authors such as William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx, he took on an increasingly revolutionary vision. Upon meeting Kropotkin, a revolutionary but also a scientist, he understood that the best way to improve society was to understand it scientifically better.
Travel and field study
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown studied psychology under the direction of WHR Rivers who under the direction of AC Haddon led him to delve into social anthropology. Being under the influence of Haddon, Radcliffe-Brown traveled to the Andaman Islands, an archipelago where he would reside between 1906 and 1908.
Later, he would travel again, going to Western Australia where he would stay between 1910 and 1912. There he would have the company of the biologist and writer EL Grant Watson and the Australian writer Daisy Bates, and he would carry out field studies investigating the native societies of the region.
These trips, along with those he made to other places such as Polynesia and Africa, would later materialize in the form of several books. Among the most notable are “The Andaman Islanders” (1922) and “The Social Organization of Australian Tribes” (1930).
But before publishing these texts he had to face controversy. During the 1914 conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Melbourne and while he was still in Oceania, His former research partner Daisy Bates accused Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown of plagiarizing her work, based on an unpublished manuscript that she had sent to Alfred for comment. Although the accusation was serious, the issue did not seem to go much further.
Years of teaching
In 1916 Radcliffe-Brown became director of education in Tonga, a British colony at the time. Later, in 1921 he would travel to Cape Town and become a professor of social anthropology, founding the School of African Life there. He worked at several institutions later, including the University of Cape Town (1921-1925), the University of Sydney (1925-1931), the University of Chicago (1931-1937).
Last years
In 1937 he decided to return to his native England, becoming a professor at the University of Oxford that same year He maintained his position as professor at such an illustrious institution until his retirement in 1946. Almost a decade later, on October 24, 1955, he would die at the age of 74 in the city of London.
As a small glimpse into his most intimate life, we can reveal that Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown married Winifred Marie Lyon in Cambridge and had a daughter with her whom they called Mary Cynthia Lyon Radcliffe before traveling to Australia. The couple did not live happily, since they would soon become estranged due to his travels, breaking up their married life in 1926 and, although this is not certain, in 1938 they would end up divorcing.
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown He is described as a “lover” with Bronisław Malinowski, since it seems that he was quite fond of his philosophy He brought French sociology, largely represented by Émile Durkheim, to British anthropology, building a rigorous and broad battery of new concepts for the branch of ethnography.
Highly influenced by Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown He saw in institutions the key to maintaining the global social order of society, analogous to the organs of a body and certainly taking an organicist vision of the social phenomenon as complex as society itself. His studies of social function examine how customs serve the purpose of maintaining, to the greatest extent, the stability of a society.
The concept of function
Radcliffe Brown He is usually associated with functionalism and is also considered by some to be the founder of structuralist functionalism However, Radcliffe-Brown rejected being considered a functionalist and carefully distinguished his concept of function from that of Malinowski, who openly supported functionalism.
While Malinowski’s functionalism claimed that social practices can be directly explained by their ability to satisfy basic biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown rejected this idea. Instead, and influenced by Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, indicated that the fundamental units of anthropology should be the processes that occur in human life and their interactions
Radcliffe-Brown wondered why some social behaviors and social practices were repeated and even became fixed. He argued that this should require at least that other practices do not conflict with them and, in some cases, that these practices mutually support or intensify each other through interaction, a phenomenon he called “coadaptation.”
His functional analysis was simply an attempt to explain the stability of societies, discovering how practices fit together to maintain social stability Each social practice has a function which is itself the role that the practice plays in helping to maintain the social structure in general, as long as there is a stable or potentially stable social structure to maintain.
Evolution of cultures and diffusion of cultural practices
A widespread idea in the anthropology of the time was that, when studying tribal societies, it was believed that all cultures were “condemned” to follow a unilinear process of development or historical evolution, well defined and marked. Societies seen as more “primitive” were understood as representatives of the first stages of this process while the most developed were interpreted as representatives of the most advanced stages.
Another view held in early 20th century anthropology was that social practices tend to develop only once. The similarities and differences between societies were believed to be explained by reconstructing them historically, that is, interpreting how they had developed throughout history, especially based on the idea of unilinear evolution. It was believed that when a culture develops or discovers something new, it ends up passing to other cultures through diffusion, that is, being “copied”, not having been discovered simultaneously and independently.
According to these views, the most appropriate way to explain the differences between tribal societies and modern ones was historical reconstruction, interpreting what stage they were in and what influences they had received from other cultures. However, Radcliffe-Brown rejected both positions, considering that the historical reconstruction was not very reliable. He He was more in favor of comparing cultures to see if there were regularities between human societies and, consequently, build genuine scientific knowledge about social life.
Ethnography
As we have discussed in the biography section, Radcliffe-Brown carried out extensive field work in the Andaman Islands, Australia, Polynesia and Africa. His work contributed to expanding the knowledge we had about the vision of kinship in different cultures although he criticized the alliance theory defended by Lévi-Strauss and other structuralist anthropologists.
critics
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown is often criticized for having underestimated or ignored the effects of the historical changes that occurred in the societies he studied, especially those that occurred due to colonialism, a phenomenon that was booming in several of the places it ended up in, such as Australia and Africa. Despite this, he is, along with Bronisław Malinowski, considered one of the great fathers of modern social anthropology.
