Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1881–1955)

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, an English anthropologist, was the founder of the school of anthropology known as structural functionalism. The term derived from the importance that the concept of social structure acquired in the 1930s, when Radcliffe-Brown was a lecturer on social anthropology in Oxford.

Radcliffe-Brown maintained that anthropology was a special strain of the sociology put forward by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Its purpose was to establish the social laws of tribal societies by studying their social structure and the functions of their institutions. The majority of his work dealt with institutions, such as those formed by groups of relatives with the use of magic.

To discover social structure, he used interviews and participant observation to study the norms, duties, and rights that regulate social behavior. He distinguished within society between the real structure and the formal structure. The former includes daily life, in which people pass between different positions or social statuses, for example, from son to father or from single to married person. Formal structure establishes the duties and social rights that correspond to each person in these positions. Radcliffe-Brown proposed that the formal structure consists of the norms, rules, and customs that remain over time and regulate relationships between individuals.

To determine the formal structure, Radcliffe-Brown argued that anthropologists must identify the groups within a society, for example, groups of relatives. The anthropologist must also learn the relationships via the norms between relatives that rule their behavior and establish the social category to which they correspond, for example, the status corresponding to a husband, a woman, a son, an uncle, and so on, to determine the duties and rights that belong to each status. Finally, the anthropologist should analyze the behavior between people based on such norms. Radcliffe-Brown, by taking the nuclear family as the basis of studying kinship, argued for the deep investigation of complex kinship systems, such as those that exist in many African societies.

The concept of social structure proposed by Radcliffe-Brown became very important in the development of anthropology. His studies of totemism and kinship systems led to other English anthropologists approaching the study of societies whose political organization was based on clans and lineages.

In his early works, Radcliffe-Brown shared with Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) the idea that societies depend heavily on the natural elevation of certain animals necessary to their survival to sacred status, turning them into sacred objects or totems. He later went beyond merely subordinating the cultural explanation to biological needs, a characteristic of the last years of Malinowski's work, proposing that the stories relating to totems are a way of symbolizing the social relationships of solidarity and opposition that are part of societies divided by a clan system of kinship.

The anthropologists Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973), Raymond Firth (1901–2002), Meyer Fortes (1906–1983), Edmund Leach (1910–1989), and Max Gluckman (1911–1975), to mention some of the more prominent, followed the structuralfunctionalist focus of British anthropology.