Alfred reginald radcliffe-brown biography of donald

He was most well known for his work in the development of structural functionalism. He attended Trinity College in Cambridge where he studied anthropology where he studied under H. Rivers and A. During his time at Trinity College, Radcliffe-Brown was also influenced by the works of Peter Kropotkin, who was a communist philosopher. Inhe went to the Andaman Islands where he spent two years tracing genealogies before returning to England.

Radcliffe-Brown only went on two field studies because he found field work to be difficult and taxing. While he was at the University of Sydney, Radcliffe-Brown developed a social anthropology program and created the journal Oceania. Eventually, He moved to the University of Chicago in to teach anthropology. After his time in America, Radcliffe-Brown moved back to England in to teach social anthropology.

Radcliffe-Brown concluded that such behavior was primarily found in structural situations where the potential for conflict or awkwardness was high. Thus, joking and avoidance behaviors were alternative rather than opposite ways of solving similar social problems. Radcliffe-Brown saw a lot of potential in the Durkheimian analysis of kinship. He viewed kinship as a juridical system of norms and rules.

Alfred reginald radcliffe-brown biography of donald: Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born on

A kinship system was understood as an unwritten constitution for social interaction. It was a key institution to the understanding of the social organization in small-scale societies. For Radcliffe-Brown, the importance of kinship was not its origin but its meaning in contemporary society Barnard Structural functionalists used kinship to study the politics, economics and religion of primitive societies.

Kinship was a framework for the creation of groups in pre-state societies. The groups would have collective rights to land and animals. They demanded loyalty during wars and were also involved in settling disputes and organizing marriages. Radcliffe-Brown held two theories of totemism. He explained how Australian Aborigines classified the world and people as members of different social groups.

He agreed with Durkheim that totems have the function of expressing clan solidarity. For Radcliffe-Brown, totemism was an exclusive development of the symbolism of nature. A group chose a species to represent them since that species was already of ritual importance Barnard Evans-Pritchard editorsAfrican Political Systems. Oxford Univ.

Pages 1—85 in A. Edited by M. British Academy, London, Proceedings Oxford: Clarendon. British Journal of Sociology Man Lowie, Robert H. Redfield, Robert Introduction. Edited by Fred Eggan. Social Anthropology of North American Tribes. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia.

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was a British anthropologist closely associated with the development of structural-functionalism.

His firm theoretical framework and his administrative skills helped to consolidate social anthropology as an academic discipline across the British Commonwealth. Defying his impoverished lower-middle-class beginnings, Radcliffe-Brown enjoyed an elite academic education at Cambridge Universitywhere A. Haddon — and W. Rivers — were his mentors.

Yet his leanings toward the natural sciences remained with him throughout his career, and the use of analogies between social structures and structures occurring in nature are emblematic of his style of thought. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Andaman Islands — and Western Australia —but never achieved the kind of in-depth alfred reginald radcliffe-brown biography of donald with local settings that would soon become typical of social anthropology.

He went on to become founding professor at the University of Sydney —professor at the University of Chicago —and chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford — He continued lecturing at universities in BrazilEgyptEngland, and South Africaand served as president of the Association of Social Anthropologists until shortly before his death.

Even by his own account, Radcliffe-Brown was a slow writer. His only monograph is The Andaman Islanders ; the rest of his publications are articles and lecture transcriptions. Comparisons between different societies should enable anthropologists to discover universal and essential relations; apparent diversity should be reduced to clear classifications.

He was a charismatic lecturer, able to impress upon others a habitus of scientific rigor. Even some streams of American anthropology, with its longstanding emphasis on culture and historical particularity, were influenced by him. But just as much as he united scholars during his lifetime, his name soon became synonymous with an overly rigid and intellectually unsatisfying approach that no one wanted to follow anymore.

From the s onward, all major figures in British social anthropology, notably E. Leach, Edmund. London: British Academy. Radcliffe-Brown, A. Cambridge, U. In African Political Systems. Meyer Fortes and E. Evans-Pritchard, xi-xxii. London: Oxford University Press. Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brownas he was known formally after changing his name in Radcliffe having been his mother's original surnamewas born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham, at Birmingham University where he spent a year as a premedical studentand at Trinity College, Cambridge Universityfrom which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mental and moral science.

Among those who taught him as an undergraduate were C. Myers and W. Rivers both medical psychologists who had participated in Cambridge's pioneering anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait off the northeastern tip of Australia.

Alfred reginald radcliffe-brown biography of donald: Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown started not

After graduation in Radcliffe-Brown went on to study anthropology under Rivers and A. Haddon who had also been on the expedition of — and was sent by them in to study the people of the Andaman Islands, southwest of Burma, for two years. Radcliffe-Brown's initial report on this expedition, "The Religion of the Andaman Islanders," published in Folk-Lore in his book The Andaman Islanders was not published untilled Trinity College to offer him a fellowship, the tenure of which from to was for a brief period combined with a teaching position at the London School of Economics.

Radcliffe-Brown quickly became part of the rapidly developing, distinctively sociological approach to the study of primal societies, and by the s he was probably this movement's most influential figure. Until well into the twentieth century this field was dominated by the ethnological approach, the practitioners of which were particularly interested in the detailed history of particular societies and the patterns of diffusion and transmission of their cultures.

That style of analysis was itself still influenced by the evolutionist approach that had been strongly in evidence in the later part of the nineteenth century and had largely regarded religion as a primitive form of science. While the ethnologists of the early part of the twentieth century did not cling strongly to the latter view, they stood in contrast to the emphasis that Radcliffe-Brown, under Durkheim's influence, increasingly placed on the idea that primitive societies should be analyzed synchronically rather than diachronically.

In other words, Radcliffe-Brown's work increasingly involved the claim that in order to comprehend scientifically the main features of a society one should regard it as a functioning whole; its different parts were explainable in terms of their interrelatedness and their contribution to its maintenance. Radcliffe-Brown's impact, which grew intermittently but strongly in the s and s through his teaching and writing in various countries, was based primarily on his advocacy and practice of what he came to call a natural science of society, with particular reference to social structure.

His attention to religion was largely confined to the study of ritual and ceremony — which was particularly evident in the book that he published on the Andaman Islanders in — and the related phenomenon of totemism. In his work on ritual, Radcliffe-Brown was greatly influenced by Durkheim's argument that the primary significance of ritual is its expression and promotion of collective sentiments and social solidarity.

In his first major essay on totemism, "The Sociological Theory of Totemism," published in the Proceedings of the Fourth Pacific Science Congress inRadcliffe-Brown maintained that Durkheim, by arguing that a totemic object acquires its significance via its sacredness, had begged the crucial question as to why totemism in primal societies typically involves plants or animals, even though Durkheim had pointed cogently to the ways in which ritualized collective conduct in connection with totems was intimately related to social structure and social integration.

Alfred reginald radcliffe-brown biography of donald: Alfred Radcliffe-Brown was Professor of Anthropology,

Radcliffe-Brown argued that plants and animals should not be regarded simply as emblems of social groups, but rather that they are selected as representatives of groups because objects and events that deeply affect the material and spiritual well-being of a society or any phenomenon that represents such an object or event are likely to become what he called objects of the ritual attitude.

Although there has been disagreement as to the extent to which Radcliffe-Brown's second essay on this subject "The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Instituteinvolved a substantial change of position, there can be no doubt that it exhibits a very explicit interest in a theme that was not conspicuous in the essay of — namely, the various relationships between totemic objects and between these objects and the structures of the groups that maintain ritual attitudes toward them.

Instead, he argued for the use of the comparative method to find regularities in human societies and thereby build up a genuinely scientific knowledge of social life. To that end, Radcliffe-Brown argued for a 'natural science of society'. 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.

Moreover, he claimed that existing social scientific disciplines, with the possible exception of linguisticswere arbitrary; once our knowledge of society is sufficient, he argued, we will be able to form subdisciplines of anthropology centred around relatively isolated parts of the social structure. But without extensive scientific knowledge, it is impossible to know where these boundaries should be drawn.

Radcliffe-Brown carried out extensive fieldwork in the Andaman Islands, Australia, and elsewhere. According to Radcliffe-Brown, the function of religion is to install a sense of dependence on fear and other emotional strain on the human body into a society. Radcliffe-Brown was often criticised for failing to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied, in particular changes brought about by colonialism.

Many critics also believe that in Radcliffe-Brown's theory of structural-functionalism, there is an error arising from the assumption that one's abstraction of a social situation reflects social reality in all details. Therefore, all analysis is done on the basis of imagination. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

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