Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown: biography of this English ethnographer

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was an English anthropologist who conducted 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 theoretical, focused on the concept of function understood in a sociological sense as against the biological functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski.

Next we will see some brushstrokes of the life of this author, as well as his thoughts and we will mention some of his works, through a biography of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown.

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Brief Biography Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, born as 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 from 1905 to 1909, graduating with honors in moral sciences. During that time he earned the nickname "Anarchy Brown" by showing an interest in 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, was taking an increasingly revolutionary vision. Upon learning about Kropotkin, a revolutionary but also a scientist, he understood that the best way to improve society was to understand it better scientifically.

Travel and field study

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown studied psychology under the direction of W. h. R. Rivers who under the direction of A. c. 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 E. L. Grant Watson and the Australian writer Daisy Bates, and he would carry out a field study 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 various books. Among the most notable we have "The Andaman Islanders" (The Andaman Islanders, 1922) and “The Social Organization of Australian Tribes” 1930).

But before having published these texts he had to face a 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. Despite the fact that the accusation was serious, the subject did not seem to go much further.

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years of teaching

In 1916 Radcliffe-Brown became the 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 various institutions later, including the University of Cape Town (1921-1925), the University of Sydney (1925-1931), the University of Chicago (9131-1937).

Last years

In 1937 he would decide to return to his native England, becoming a professor at Oxford University that same year.. He maintained his teaching position at this illustrious institution until his retirement in 1946. Almost a decade later, on October 24, 1955, he would pass away 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 who they named Mary Cynthia Lyon Radcliffe before traveling to Australia. The couple did not live happily, since soon they would distance themselves due to his travels, breaking up married life by 1926 and, although it is not certain, in 1938 they would end getting divorced

thought and work

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown he is described as "in love" with Bronisław Malinowski, since it seems that he had quite a philia for his philosophy. He brought French sociology, mostly represented by Émile Durkheim, into British anthropology, building a rigorous and extensive battery of new concepts for the branch of ethnography.

Heavily influenced by Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown saw in institutions the key to maintaining the global social order of society, analogous to the organs of a body and certainly taking an organic vision of the social phenomenon as complex as society itself. His studies of social function examine how customs are intended to maintain, to a large 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 refused to be considered a functionalist and carefully distinguished Malinowski's concept of the function that he raises, who did openly support functionalism.

While Malinowski's functionalism asserted 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 philosophy of process, he 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 at least require 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 stabilizable social structure to which keep.

Evolution of cultures and diffusion of cultural practices

A widespread idea in anthropology at 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 checked. The societies seen as more "primitive" were understood as the representatives of the first stages of this process., while the most developed were interpreted as the representatives of the most advanced stages.

Another view held in early 20th century anthropology was that social practices tend to develop only once. It was believed that the similarities and differences between societies could be explained by reconstructing them historically, that is, that is, to interpret 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 by means of diffusion, that is, being “copied”, not having been discovered simultaneously and independent.

According to these visions, the most appropriate way to explain the differences between tribal and modern societies It was the historical reconstruction, interpreting what stage they were in and what influences they had received from the others 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 his biography section, Radcliffe-Brown carried out extensive fieldwork in the Andaman Islands, Australia, Polynesia, and Africa. His work contributed to expanding the knowledge about the vision of kinship in different cultures., although he criticized the alliance theory advocated by Lévi-Strauss and other structuralist anthropologists.

critics

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown is often criticized for having belittled or ignored the effects of the historical changes that occurred in the societies he studied, especially those that occurred because of colonialism, a phenomenon that was in full swing in several of the places where it ended up, such as Australia and Africa. Despite this he is, along with Bronisław Malinowski, considered one of the great fathers of modern social anthropology.

Bibliographic references:

• Ruiza, M., Fernandez, T. and Tamaro, E. (2004). Biography of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. In Biographies and Lives. The online biographical encyclopedia. Barcelona, ​​Spain). Recovered from biografiasyvidas.com.
• Hogbin, Ian (1988). "Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald (1881–1955)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Center of Biography, Australian National University. 11.