Radcliffe-Brown distinguished “social anthropology” from ethnology. Radcliffe-Brown pointed out that Boas had set two research objectives: (1) the reconstruction of the cultural history of a particular people or region, and (2) the “investigation of the laws governing social life” . Noting that Boas had referred synonymously to the field of inquiry as “ethnology” or “anthropology,” Radcliffe-Brown proposed that the terms should mark different lines of inquiry, suggesting that anthropologists refer to those investigations that are concerned with the reconstruction of history as belonging to ethnology and to keep the term social anthropology for 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,The observation of regularities and search for general laws characterizes Radcliffe-Brown’s social anthropology.
Although Boas recognized the potential existence of laws of human behavior, in fact most of Boas’s efforts went to the explication of particular cultural developments. Radcliffe-Brown’s 1951 lecture was a response, fifty-five years after the fact, to Boas’s (1896) “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” in which Boas attacked the Victorian evolutionists . Boas had argued that focused, intensive fieldwork was essential, not loose comparisons based on uneven published sources. Radcliffe-Brown responded that comparative studies were also necessary and that library research was useful when it supplemented ethnographic fieldwork.
- Radcliffe-Brown complained that the modern anthropology graduate student setting out for fieldwork “is told that he must consider any feature of social life in its context, in its relation to the other features of the particular social system in which it is found. But he is often not taught to look at it in the wider context of human societies in general” . This is what Radcliffe-Brown proposed to do.
- Social anthropology was grounded in the comparative method; its goal was the elucidation of lawlike generalizations about human society.
- Radcliffe-Brown considered social anthropology to be a subdiscipline of comparative sociology—a discipline that he traced to the French social theorists such as Montesquieu and Comte, but most directly to Durkheim.
- Social anthropology differed from comparative sociology in scope but not in intent.
- Radcliffe-Brown wrote, “Comparative sociology, of which social anthropology is a branch, is here conceived as a theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim is to provide acceptable generalisations.
- The theoretical understanding of a particular institution is its interpretation in the light of such generalisations” .
Scientific laws—(like the law of gravity or the second law of thermodynamics)—are generalizing propositions about the relationship between two or more factors. They are not idiographic explanations of a particular occurrence but are broadly relevant to all cases that express that relationship. Thus, Newton’s law of gravity was not an explanation of why a particular apple fell out of a particular tree one day , but a statement about all bodies of matter characterized by mass and distance.
In nutshell, Radcliffe-Brown envisioned an anthropology that could discover scientific laws about human society, cross-cultural regularities between “structure” and “function.