A.R.

Radcliffe-Brown

Dear students, in making of sociology as a discipline the role of early thinkers play a significant
role. The approaches in the classical sociology usually were classified under three broad
categories as functionalism, conflict and symbolic interactionism. Among this functionalism was
considered to be the earliest. Structural functionalism, or in many contexts simply functionalism,
is a broad perspective in sociology and anthropology which sets out to interpret society as a
structure with interrelated parts. The functionalist approach to the study of society maintained
that society was a system of social institutions and attendant patterns of culture. Radcliffe-Brown
has often been associated with functionalism, and is considered by some to be the founder of
structural functionalism. With Malinowski, he initiated a "functionalist revolution" in British
anthropology during the early years after the First World War, rejecting the "conjectural history"
of the previous generations of evolutionist and diffusionist anthropology in favor of a
synchronic, systemic view. But while Malinowski contributed profoundly to the methodology of
anthropological fieldwork and championed a rudimentary functionalist theory that focused on
individual biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown, whose methodological contribution was minimal,
was inspired by Durkheim to formulate a sophisticated structural functionalist theory, which
focused on the needs of the social whole.
With these background students in this session we are going to see the contributions of Radcliffe
Brown. To begin with we can look into his biography.
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), was born on 17 January 1881 at Aston,
Warwickshire, England, second son of Alfred Brown and Hannah. He was educated at King
Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge and graduated with first-class
honours in the moral sciences tripos. He studied psychology under W. H. R. Rivers who, with A.
C. Haddon, led him toward social anthropology. He was elected as Anthony Wilkin student in
ethnology in 1906 (and 1909) and hence he spent two years in the field in the Andaman Islands.
Being a fellow of Trinity (1908-14), he lectured twice a week on ethnology at the London School
of Economics and visited Paris where he met the sociologist Emile Durkheim, whose theories
coloured all his subsequent work. He married Winifred Marie Lyon when he was at Cambridge
on 1910; they were divorced in 1938. During his tenure at Cambridge he became aware of the
work of Durkheim and Mauss. There after he started developing primary concern with the
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meaning and function of rites, myths and institutions. He systematized and expanded his
conception of social anthropology as the comparative study of society in a brilliant series of
lectures and seminars. This encouraged the application of anthropological methods to western
and far eastern societies. He returned England in 1937 to take up the position of newly created
Chair of Social Anthropology at Oxford and remained as a prominent anthropologist of the early
twentieth century. Until his retirement in 1946 he was working in Oxford University. He died on
24th October 1955 in London.
Books authored by Brown:

 The Andaman Islanders (1922)

 The Social Organisation of Australian Tribes (1931)
 Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952)
 Method in Social Anthropology (1958)

Radcliffe Brown and British Anthropology

Radcliffe Brown was a British anthropologist, founder of structural functionalism and father of
modern British anthropological theory. As a theorist Radcliffe-Brown also saw the potential of
bringing together Durkheimian sociology and the traditional anthropological interest in kinship.
Radcliffe-Brown went to the Andaman Islands (1906–08), where his fieldwork won him a
fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Initially when Brown reported the field studies of the
Andaman Islanders he formulated it ordinarily without special interest. On his exposure to
Durkheim’s work he got sparking interest in the way that social institutions act together to
sustain society – much as physical organs work together to sustain a living body. Using his own
modified version of Durkheim’s theories, which he called "structural-functionalism", he
reinterpreted the entirety of his work among the Andaman Islanders. His study The Andaman
Islanders (1922; new ed. 1964) contained the essential formulation of his ideas and methods.
And during his fieldwork among the Australian Aborginees (1910-1912), he utilized structural-
functionalism to analyze kinship, myth, totemism, in the context of social organization. When
kinship terminologies where understood normative systems that ascribed appropriate behavior
between various categories of kin, Durkheim's concept of society as a moral collective found a
seemingly ideal application.
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Radcliffe-Brown is viewed more as a theoretician rather than a field worker, strove to make
anthropology a branch of the natural sciences: without his conscious endeavour to apply
scientific methods to the study of society, later achievements would have been impossible. The
subject he was concerned to promote and advance was what he said, theoretical or comparative
sociology and it was Social Anthropology. He considered it as the branch of sociology that deals
with primitive societies. Now students we can discuss according to his conception what was the
nature of this science - sociology.
To start with, according to Radcliffe Brown
 Any science must have a clear and distinguishable subject matter, here according to
Brown it is observable ‘forms of social life’. The regular forms of social life were the
facts which theoretical sociology sought to understand and explain. For Radcliffe Brown
sociology was the comparative theoretical study of forms of social life; and social
anthropology was that branch of it which studied such forms amongst primitive peoples.
 The forms of social life, were not isolated or arbitrary, they were interconnected and
interdependent within a system of relationships of which each of them was a part. The
social system is Forms of social life in interconnection and interdependence. The starting-
point of sociology was the recognition of the existence of total social systems and no one
‘part’ of a society could be fully understood or explained expecting within this context of
the whole. He argued
‘It gives us reason to think,’ he argued, ‘that we can advance our understanding of human
societies if we investigate systematically the interconnections amongst features of social
life’.
 Radcliffe Brown explicitly accepted Comte’s distinction between ‘statics’ and
‘dynamics’ in any empirical science, that is, sociology. ‘Statics’ in sociology was
concerned with the nature and conditions of existence of social systems. ‘Dynamics’ was
concerned to the patterns of order and change in the actual societies of history. Thus the
analytical propositions of ‘social statics’ guides the substantiative studies of ‘social
dynamics’.
 Brown also accepted the evolutionary perspective in sociology. One advantage of the
evolutionary perspective, he argued, was that of seeing ‘forms’ as embodiments of
processes of adaptation to environmental conditions. Radcliffe Brown distinguished three
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 adaptational aspects of social system. They were (1) the ecological – survival by
accommodation to the outer physical environment, (2) the institutional – the internal
achievement of an appropriate order of social life i.e. regulating co-operation and
conflict and (3) the cultural – the socialization of individuals: the imparting of those
qualities of mind, character and conduct required by the social order to its individual
members. For Radcliffe Brown stability and continuity of social systems were aspects of
adaptation and it depends on the effectiveness of the adaptation. Radcliffe-Brown
established an analogy between social life and organic life to explain the concept of
function.
Till now we have seen the way Radcliffe Brown explains sociology as a discipline in a
theoretical manner. Now we can moves on to his structural functional analysis, which was the
core of his contributions to sociology.

Structural functional analysis

Radcliffe Brown was known for his explanation on structural functionalism. He developed a
systematic framework of concepts and generalizations relating to the social structures of
preindustrial societies and their functions. His theory had its classic formulation and application
in his work on The Social Organisation of Australian Tribes (1931). Treating all Aboriginal
Australia known at the time, the work cataloged, classified, analyzed, and synthesized a vast
amount of data on kinship, marriage, language, custom, occupancy and possession of land,
sexual patterns, and cosmology. He attempted to explain social phenomena as enduring systems
of adaptation, fusion, and integration of elements. He held that social structures are arrangements
of persons and that organizations are the arrangements of activities; thus, the life of a society
may be viewed as an active system of functionally consistent, interdependent elements. Radcliffe
Brown believed that there were three questions raised by the systems (particularly organic
systems where he tries to draw an analogy): morphology – the study of structure, physiology –
the study of function, and evolution or development.

The study of order and change as an adaptational process within the perspective of social
evolution could only be accomplished by an analysis of elements of social structure and their

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functional interconnections. That is the analysis of social system had to take the form of
structural-functional analysis. In social life persons were not related arbitrarily in their actions
but their relationships followed definite regulated procedures. There existed regular forms of
interrelationship for instance, family, economic activity, religion, government, law etc. i.e. social
institutions. Radcliffe Brown defined institutions in terms of ‘norms’ which were the units of
social analysis. He also distinguished organizations of activities from institutionalized
relationships. That is he argues that there was difference between with internal structures of roles
and positions. The function of an institution was the part it played to the process of the social
system as a whole. The continued existence of the whole depends upon the interrelated
functioning of all the parts. He argued that Structure, function and process are essentially
related aspects of the system as a whole. Continuity and change alike can only be analysed in
terms of them. The continuity of the structure is maintained by the process of social life. The
social life of the community is the functioning of the social structure. The function of any
recurrent activity is the part it plays in the social life as a whole and thereby, the contribution it
makes to structural continuity (Radcliffe-Brown 1952:178). Functional analysis, then, was just
the attempt to explain stability by discovering how practices fit together to sustain that stability;
the 'function' of a practice was just its role in sustaining the overall social structure, insofar as
there was a stable social structure (Radcliffe-Brown 1957).

The Comparative Method

Radcliffe Brown insisted that Comparative Method was crucial to sociology particularly for the
purpose of testing theories. According to him (1964)
‘Experiment in the laboratory, ‘he wrote, ‘is not essential. What is important is comparison of two
or more instances of certain things …. If there is to be natural science of human societies, its
method will be the method of comparing, one with another, social systems of different kinds’.

He stated that for the advancement in the efficacy and accuracy in sociology there was a need for
the improvement (and discovery) of techniques and procedures by which ever more exact
comparisons could be made. His emphasis on comparison was almost exactly that of Durkheim
and Weber. Construction of clear types for classification and comparison of the units of the

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societies was his chief attention. An indispensible part of the sociological analysis, for him, was
an accurate ‘taxonomy’, and a reliable ‘social morphology’.

Theoretical Sociology

Radcliffe Brown thought of ‘social systems’ as manifesting a very wide range i.e. from the
simplest to the most complex set of relationships, within society as a whole. A ‘social system’
was any ordered pattern of interaction within which people found ‘some convergence of their
interest’. A society was therefore a totality of many (small, large; simple, complex) ‘social
systems’ within it. Within the total institutional structure with all its functional interconnections
an analysis of all these ‘social systems’ was possible. According to him, ‘units’ of social
structure were regulated acts resting upon values; and human behaviour – from individual
conduct to massive organization – could be systematically observed, analysed, studied, in these
terms. In this background, Radcliffe Brown visualized that there could be one theoretical science
of society and that is sociology. Radcliffe Brown was not interested to create a new ‘school’ of
‘Functionalism’ and a new ‘science’ of ‘Social Anthropology’. His concern was to support,
clarify, and advance ‘theoretical, comparative sociology’ and to see it applied effectively to the
study of the ‘primitive’ societies in particular that is what called as social anthropology. He
claimed that there was an independent role for social anthropology here, separate from
psychology, though not in conflict with it. This was because psychology was to be the study of
individual mental processes, while social anthropology was to study processes of interaction
between people (social relations). Thus he argued for a principled ontological distinction
between psychology and social anthropology, in the same way as one might try to make a
principled distinction between physics and biology.

Summary

Radcliffe-Brown's contribution to sociology, in general, and social anthropology, in particular, as

the study of human society and culture can stand alongside those sciences of physics, chemistry
or biology. He attempted to discover and formulate the "universal laws" that underpinned all
human societies. Radcliffe-Brown was much influenced by the French social theorist, Emile
Durkheim. Radcliffe-Brown’s method was to approach the study of human societies by
recognizing that 'any persisting culture [is] an integrated unity or system in which each element
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has a definite function in relation to the whole'. In other words, that whole and parts of a society
are interconnected that is ‘functionalism’. Radcliffe-Brown thought that only laws of a human
society could be discovered by comparative study of diverse types of society. He also thought
that comparative sociology (anthropology) must use the standard scientific of starting from a
hypothesis and testing it in the field. Radcliffe-Brown was instrumental in introducing social
anthropology to American scholars.