The last 100 years of anthropology

Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism

Durkheim’s ideas were brought into anthropology by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. This is usually called his “structural functionalist” theory of society.

What is most interesting about societies is that they tend to stay the same. We should ask why they don’t change.
- The elements of a society—kinship behavior, political leadership, economic norms, ritual cycles—function to maintain an equilibrium in society as a whole.
This was an argument against evolutionary and historical perspectives on society which claimed that you could understand social institutions by looking for their origins in the past.
- He argues that this risks a retrospective bias, like a “just-so” story.
- A good illustration of Radcliffe-Brown’s attack on this position is in his analysis of the role of the mother’s brother in many different, unrelated patrilineal societies (Radcliffe-Brown [1924] 1952).
Although not always remembered this way, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was politically radical, especially in his younger days. His nickname was “Anarchy Brown” (Goody 1999; see also Maddock 1992).

Radcliffe-Brown, equilibrium, and colonialism as genocide

Radcliffe-Brown wants us to ignore the role of history, saying this is a naive way to explain the formation of a society.

I don’t think it is entirely fair to say that Radcliffe-Brown is blind or ignorant of global structures of domination.

He does acknowledge contact, change, and domination in some of his writings. His comments on them are telling.

He notes that there are limits to the organic analogy.

“A pig does not become a hippopotamus” (Radcliffe-Brown [1935] 1952, 181).
- Unlike an individual animal, societies can and sometimes do become something totally new.
- The functional integration of a society will tend to reestablish balance in face of disruptive events. But if a disruption is powerful enough, the balance will shift and a new, stable form will replace the old one.
An organism lives and then dies. Societies don’t have to die (Radcliffe-Brown [1935] 1952, 183).
- A better analogy for a society is a corporation, which is immortal and will outlast its mortal members.
- A society will die if it is overwhelmed by a more powerful, aggressive force, and Radcliffe-Brown cites the destruction of Australian Aboriginal societies in the wake of Australian colonization as an example.

So Radcliffe-Brown recognizes that societies change, and that the domination of one society by another is a major part of that. But he can only see it in the extreme, as genocide and ethnocide.

Today it would be more common for people to say the opposite:

Australian Aboriginal and Indigenous societies survived the violent colonization of their worlds.
Later forms of colonial domination have transformed these Indigenous societies.

Boas and the concept of plural cultures

Franz Boas is responsible for creating a properly cultural anthropology in which difference can be explained with a new idea of culture.

Each culture is its own total picture of the world, a Weltanschauung, which is distinct from all others.
Rather than say that different societies have different degrees of culture (a level of achievement on a scale), Boas argues, “Each cultural group has its own unique history, dependent partly upon the peculiar inner development of the social group, and partly upon the foreign influences to which it has been subjected” (Boas [1920] 1940, 286).

Salvage anthropology

Anthropologists think in terms of cultural relativism based on Boas’s argument that culture is a whole.

While Boas and his students were interested in each culture’s unique path of development, they also sought to document Native American cultures they feared would disappear.

Their ethnographic projects were a “salvage” operation to record a disappearing way of life and way of thinking.

They relied on interviews with people who had experieced an intact cultural pattern.
Their ethnographic descriptions were a reconstruction of a past society rather than of one in which they immersed themselves.
Though a minority, some still do salvage anthropology (or “urgent anthropology”). Is there a good reason for this to be done?

Cultural continuity

As an expression of a tendency of the social whole toward equilibrium?
As an expression of the capacity of a society, as a political community, to govern itself and to determine for itself how it will be organized and people will live together?
As a reflection of the fact that people—as individuals and in communities to which they belong—know themselves and are, in a sense, the best experts on themselves.

Cultural continuity as a value today

Cultures continue, and they also change. Which fact is more relevant to understand the present, either at an individual level, at the level of a single community of people, or when thinking about people in general and globally?

References and further reading

Boas, Franz. (1920) 1940. “The Methods of Ethnology.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 281–89. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Goody, J. R. 1999. “‘Anarchy Brown’.” Cambridge Anthropology 21 (3): 1–8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23818707.

Maddock, Kenneth. 1992. “Affinities and Missed Opportunities: John Anderson and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 3 (1): 3–18. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1299130650/citation/A1AFF0273E484BEBPQ/1.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1935) 1952. “On the Concept of Function in Social Science.” In Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 178–88. New York: The Free Press.

———. (1924) 1952. “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa.” In Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 15–31. New York: The Free Press. https://archive.org/details/structurefunctio00radc.

ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world---A guide to the unit

Lecture outlines and guides: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 13.2.

Assignments: Module I quiz, Module II essay: Similarities among cases, Module III essay: Completeness and incompleteness in collective identities, Module IV essay: Nature for First Nations.