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--- a._r._radcliffe-brown [2021/07/08 21:24] – [References] Ryan Schram (admin)
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 ## A biographical note
-When Alfred was young, he was known as Alfred Brown, born in the United Kingdom, and raised by his mother who had to work to support her children after their father died when Alfred was young. Brown eventually earned a scholarship to study at Cambridge. Then he would have been able to study under anthropologists in the sense of people who were interested in the human species and its diversity, but there was no formalized sense of anthropology as a study of culture and society. Brown liked philosophy, especially the anarchist writings of Kropotkin, which got him the nickname “Anarchy Brown” (Goody 1999, 1). I imagine that anthropology students were a bunch of misfits, hipsters, and rebels even back then before there was anthropology as we know it. But Brown also legally changed his name to Radcliffe-Brown, incorporating his mother’s maiden name, but also making himself sound a little more aristocratic than he really was. His other nickname was “Rex” (Kuper 1973, 52).
+When Alfred was young, he was known as Alfred Brown. He was born in the United Kingdom, and raised by his mother who had to work to support her children after their father died. Brown eventually earned a scholarship to study at Cambridge. Then he would have been able to study under scholars who may have called themselves anthropologists but were not part of a single field of anthropology. Brown's first teachers of anthropology were scholars who were interested in the human species and its diversity, but had not coalesced into a single unified group. Brown's education was thus very eclectic. He liked philosophy, especially the anarchist writings of Kropotkin, which got him the nickname “Anarchy Brown” (Goody 1999, 1). I imagine that anthropology students were a bunch of misfits, hipsters, and rebels even back then before there was anthropology as we know it. But Brown also legally changed his name to Radcliffe-Brown, incorporating his mother’s maiden name, but also making himself sound a little more aristocratic than he really was. His other nickname was “Rex” (Kuper 1973, 52).
 Radcliffe-Brown eventually went on to found many of the first departments of anthropology at several universities, including one at the University of Sydney, the first department of anthropology in Australia. His time at USYD was short, but nonetheless the department of anthropology pursued a research agenda largely shaped by its founder even after he left. Its anthropologists would contribute to a comparative study of human societies with the aim of discovering the universal laws of their social structure.