A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

 

Radcliffe-Brown v. Malinowski

Both men were often linked as functionalists, but Radcliffe-Brown repudiated this link:

Malinowski has explained that he is the inventor of functionalism, to which he gave its name.  His definition of it is clear; it is the theory or doctrine that every feature of culture of any people past or present is to be explained by reference to seven biological needs of individual human beings…
I reject it entirely, regarding it as useless and worse.  Ad a consistent opponent of Malinowski’s functionalism, I may be called an anti-functionalist.

Radcliffe-Brown did have a view that could be called functionalist, but to distinguish it from Malinowski’s needs-based individualistic view, it was dubbed structural functionalism, for reasons that will become clear.

 

 

 

Opposition to Historical Particularism

Boas and his followers were historical particularists.  Particularists, in that they saw each culture as its own entity, un-related to others.  Historical, because to explain elements of any culture, you had to reconstruct its history (as Kroeber said: the only thing that explains culture is more culture – that is, that culture’s past).

In contrast, Radcliffe-Brown rejected conjectural histories (because they were conjectural) and favored cross-cultural comparisons.  

Radcliffe-Brown thought that generalization was what was distinctive about science, so to be scientific, a social anthropology had to come up with laws that generalized across cultures (or societies).  To this end, he proposed distinguishing ethnology (“those investigations that are concerned with the reconstruction of history”) from social anthropology (“the study of discoverable regularities in the development of human society in so far as these can be illustrated or demonstrated by the study of primitive peoples”).

Thus, instead of historical particularism, Radcliffe-Brown endorsed comparative generalizations, and saw social anthropology as a branch of comparative sociology which is “nomothetic”, or involving explaining particular events in terms of general laws (just as we explain a particular apple falling by appealing to the law of gravity that applies generally, to all objects).

 

Structure and Function

Social Structures are the units of comparison across societies.  They are relations of association between individuals that are independent of the particular individuals that occupy them.  (Think of them like roles: these can be occupied by different actors, but are not the same as those actors.  Romeo is distinct from every actor who has played him, and has a definite relationship with other roles, like Juliet.)  In endorsing social structures as the proper object of study, Radcliffe-Brown criticized “culture”:

We do not observe a “culture”, since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction.  But direct observation does reveal to us that…human beings are connected by a complex network of social relations.  I use the term “social structure” to denote this network of actually existing relations. [On Social Structure, 190]

To be more exact, however, social structures are the generalized forms of social forms, which are what the anthropologist observes directly, and which are particular to a single society or setting.  Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown viewed social structures as concrete realites (unlike “cultures”).

Examples of social structures:

 

The function of these structures was (contra Malinowski) not to serve individual needs, but to maintain society.  Radcliffe-Brown applied an organic analogy to the social realm:

The continuity of sstructure is maintained by the process of social life, which consists of the activities and interactions of the individual human beings and of the organized groups into which they are united.  The social life of the community is here defined as the functioning of the social structure.  The function of a crime, or a funeral ceremony, is the part it plays in the social life as a whole and therefore the contribution it makes to the maintenance of structural continuity.

Such a view implies that a social system has a certain kind of unity, which we make speak of as a functional unity.  We may define it as a condition in which all parts of the system work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency, i.e., without producing persistent conflicts which can neither be resolved nor regulated. [On the Concept of Function in Social Science, 180, 181]