Adam Kuper - The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown

Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
In 16 Volumes

First published in 1977

Reprinted in 2004 by
Routledge

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First issued in paperback 2010

1977 Adam Kuper for selection and editorial material

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-33032-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-61157-2 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-136-54116-2 (ePub)

Miniset: Social and Cultural Anthropology

Series: Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography

The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown

edited by

Adam Kuper

Routledge & Kegan Paul

London, Henley and Boston

First published in 1977
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street,
London WClE 7DD,
Broadway House,
Newtown Road,
Henley-on- Thames,
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Boston, Mass. 02108, USA
Set in 11/12pt Garamond
by Weatherby Woolnough
Wellingborough, Northants

Selection and editorial material Adam Kuper 1977
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald
The social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown.
1. Ethnology - Addresses, essays, lectures
I. Title II. Kuper, Adam
301.18 GN325

ISBN 0-7100-8556-7
ISBN 0-7100-8557-5 Pbk
ISBN 13: 978-1-136-54116-2 (ePub)

1. From Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Cohen & West, 1952; New York, Free Press paperback, 1965, pp. 1-4.

2. From Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 70, 1940, pp. 1-12.

3. From An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, ed. Sol Tax et al University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 109.

4. Sections I and III from A Natural Science of Society, Chicago, Free Press, 1957, pp. 85, 124-8; section II from The Andaman Islanders, Cambridge University Press, 1933 edition, pp. vii-viii.

5. From American Anthropologist, 51 (2), 1949, pp. 320-2.

6. From Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 81, 1951, pp. 15-22.

7. From The Andaman Islanders, pp. 232-46, 257-9, 264-5, 297-307, 324-8.

8. From Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 75, 1945, pp. 33-43.

9. Part I from Oceania, 1 (1), 1930, pp. 34-65; part II from ibid., 1 (4), 1931, pp. 444-56.

10. From Africa, 13 (3), 1940, pp. 195-210.

11. From African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, ed. A. R. Rad- clifFe-Brown and D. Forde, Oxford University Press, 1950, pp. 3-85.

The editor and the publishers are grateful to Dr Godfrey Lienhardt and the Royal Anthropological Institute for permission to reprint these selections, and to the following editors and publishers: to the RAI for .

Finally, the editor gratefully acknowledges the bibliographical help given by Mrs R. Kennemore of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Radcliffe-Brown has come to stand for a phase of British social anthropology which is currently out of fashion. For a man so ready to dismiss his predecessors, there is perhaps a certain justice in this, but current stereotypes are too crude to be left unchallenged. There are anthropologists who apparently believe that Radcliffe-Brown (despite his student nickname Anarchy Brown) wanted societies to be static, perfectly integrated natural systems, and who regard him as a proponent of the archetypal conservative position in the social sciences. Others, who seem to have read some of his programmatic statements but not his specific analyses, ridicule him as a displaced naturalist, grubbing about for non-existent social species and reifying the anatomies and physiologies of societies. Even more crudely, he is sometimes dismissed as the author of a conglomerate and largely imaginary theory vulgarly termed functionalism. (Malinowski regarded Radcliffe-Brown, accurately enough, as the leading opponent of the specific theory which Malinowski himself called functionalism.)

Even fairly recently he was closely read, and particular ideas of his had great influence. His kinship theories provided the direct inspiration for seminal studies by Fred Eggan, Meyer Fortes, Sol Tax, Lloyd Warner and others; and yet by a particularly unfortunate irony his best-known contribution is his badly-flawed early paper, The mothers brother in South Africa. His influence on kinship theory today is largely indirect, except in the special area of Australian kinship studies. In the field of ritual and symbolic systems, he emerged as the hero of Lvi-Strausss critical monograph, Totemism