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Radcliffe-Brown's Contributions to the Study of Social Organization

1955; Wiley; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/587222

1468-4446

Meyer Fortes,

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture

T T is astonishing to conclude from some of the reviews of this selection of Professor Radcliffe-Brown's essays and papers [I] that there are professional sociologists who owe their Srst acquaintance with his work to this publication. For it can be categorically asserted that each of the papers here reprinted has been a major landmark in the growth of social anthropology over the thirty years since the publication in I924 of the famous Mother's Brother paper (Chapter I in the present collection). They embody a series of discoveries and hypotheses which ehanged the course of anthropological study, at any rate in Great Britain, and have only been fully appreciated by anthropologists in the past decade or so. Readers of American anthropological journals [2] will find that some of the most influential anthropologists there have recently isolated a contemporary British, or as some prefer to say structuralist , school of social anthropology. The measure of aptness there is in this label refers to a frame of analysis that has grown primarily from the assimilation of Radcliffe-Brown's ideas and theories into the body of British anthropological research. This assimilation is so complete that one often repeats Radcliffe-Brown's arguments, even his examples, without realising it. How often have I, and other social anthropologists, not used the example of a Court of Law to illustrate the assumption that order and consistency in its institutions are necessary for the social life of a community to go on smoothly ? But we seldom recollect that it was first used to illustrate this very argument by Radcliffe-Brown in his paper on Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology'* (South African Journal of Science, I923). I think it is a pity that this paper is not reprinted here, for it is the Srst published statement, in a generalized form, of what Radcliffe-Brown considers to be the distinctive methods, theories and field of inquiry of social anthropology. It is true that the essentials of his point of view are to be found in the Andaman Islanders, which appeared at the same time (I922), but the reader has to extract them and generalize them for himself and this is not a task that appeals to the non-anthropologist. It is true, also, that the thesis of the I923 paper is expanded and is more incisively stated in the