![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.andaman.org\/BOOK\/app-a\/a-radcliffe-brown.jpg?resize=140%2C210\" "\\"A.R.")
Like nearly all sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and social theorists in the twentieth century, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (born 17 January 1881 in Birmingham – died 24 October 1955 in London)\u00a0 spent much of his career describing what his anthropology was not.\u00a0 Adam Kuper similarly attempts to disentangle the misunderstood Radcliffe-Brown from the true theorist.<\/p>\n
While the misappropriations of Radcliffe-Brown’s theories are not interesting from the standpoint of the anthropologist or ostensibly to the student of the history of anthropology, as Kuper explains, Radcliffe-Brown’s influence among subsequent national generations of anthropologists is. Kuper laments that Radcliffe-Brown has been ridiculed as a “displaced naturalist” who mistakenly applied physiological and physical models to the study of social structures.\u00a0 What matters more for Kuper was the “direct inspiration” his kinship studies had on the work of Fred Eggan, Meyer Fortes, and Sol Tax. <\/em>Radcliffe-Brown also\u00a0 emerged as the “hero” of Levi-Strauss’ Totemism <\/em>as well as “strongly influencing” Victor Turner and other important later twentieth century anthropologists.\u00a0 In conclusion, Radcliffe-Brown’s “profound” yet in many cases second-hand or indirect influence on subsequent generations has made his work difficult to objectively apprise.\u00a0 His “structural positivism” while “unfashionable” was not necessarily “untenable” (The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown <\/em>, 1977, p. 1)<\/p>\n Despite numerous changes throughout his career, Radcliffe-Brown, Kuper explains, consistently argued that the structures that he was investigating as the subjects of social anthropology, were “directly observable” and corresponded simply to “empirical reality.”\u00a0 The “starting point” of any investigation was “a set of living human beings involved in a series of social relationships with one another.”\u00a0 This “social network” was the “social structure” (3.)\u00a0 Behind the everyday network of interactions were the “structural forms” of society.\u00a0 Such an abstraction was “empirically real,” since the social form “corresponded to the stated norms and customary usages of various kinds of social relationships.”<\/p>\n Radcliffe-Brown was early on converted to the methodology of Emile Durkheim.\u00a0 Along with Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown was the most prominent proponent of Durkheim’s anthropological outlook.\u00a0\u00a0 The Durkheimian tradition, according to Kuper, mandates that sociological analysis “may explore the connections among social institutions and the connections between these connections.”\u00a0 As important for Durkheimian social analysis was an understanding of the interaction between the individual and the group, particularly those values which are internalized by the individual which contributed to group solidarity.<\/p>\n Radcliffe-Brown’s “structural positivism” distinguished him from the latter followers of Durkheim in France, as for the French Durkheimians, “structures” were the creation of the anthropologist rather than the product of the systematized observations of the anthropologist.\u00a0 If “structures” revealed anything for Claude Levi-Strauss<\/a>, it was the hidden rather than the empirical reality.\u00a0 For Maurice Halbwachs, according to Kuper, this “reality may lie at the level of a ‘collective unconscious.'”\u00a0 Levi-Strauss noted in this regard that “The term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it.” \u00a0 Where Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown really differ, as Alan Barnard points out, was that Levi-Strauss conceived of\u00a0 “social structure” as the “structure of social relations of all societies.”<\/p>\n Levi-Strauss’ conception of\u00a0 social structure concerns the underlying structure of all possible social structures.\u00a0\u00a0 Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, always regarded social structures as accessible empirically, moving from the individual to the relations of that individual with others in the community, to groups within the community and how they interact with other groups, and finally to relationships between communities (Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology<\/em>, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, 511.)<\/p>\n