Radcliffe-Brown’s main contribution to anthropology was to devise ways of classifying the numerous non-Western societies which were studied during the first half of the twentieth century into types and subtypes. This is exemplified by his classification of Australian Aboriginal societies. Although he carried out fieldwork in Western Australia, it was in an area where Aboriginal life had been severely disrupted by colonial settlement. Many of his data were collected at an isolation hospital for victims of venereal disease on an island, where he was able to obtain genealogies and statements of marriage rules but, unlike Malinowski, he did not observe how these procedures were translated into daily interaction during traditional life in the bush (Kuper 1983: 44-5).
Radcliffe-Brown demonstrated that all of the 130 Australian ‘tribes’ whose social organisation had been documented by 1930 had certain common dimensions in their social structure:
- (a) a local organisation made up of families grouped into bands;
- (b) the division of the tribe into social categories such as moieties ;
- (c) the use of a particular type of classificatory kinship terminology, each associated with a particular marriage rule ;
- (d) a totemic religion.
These common strands in social organisation were shown to vary in regular ways (Radcliffe-Brown 1930-).
- The kinship terminology corresponded to both the rule of marriage and the categories created by the moiety and section systems.
- The local group corresponded to the men of a totemic clan with their wives and children.
Radcliffe-Brown showed that a limited range of types of Aboriginal society could be identified, and named each after a representative ‘tribe’: the Kariera system, the Aranda system, the Murngin system, and so forth . Each of the 130 cases documented was assigned to one or another of these types.
When Radcliffe-Brown attempted to relate the different ‘species’ of Aboriginal society to one another, he did so by implicitly relying on the nineteenth-century notion of social evolution as an increase in complexity. He tended towards a Spencerian view that lower levels of social (a) A man marries a woman… (b) they have a son and a daughter.
In the Aranda system, women are exchanged between four lines of descent. Ego’s father’s father belongs to a different line of descent to his mother’s mother’s brother, and in the Aranda kinship terminology these men are identified with different terms. In the Mumgin system, ego must marry someone who is his ‘mother’s brother s daughter*, but cannot marry a ‘fathers sister’s daughter*. These two types of relative are therefore identified with different kin terms.
In the Kariera system, men belonging to two lines of descent exchange their sisters in mariage. From the perspective of the man labelled ego, there are alternative ways of tracing relationships to people occupying different positions in the system. The girl he niames is both his mothers brother’s daughter’ and his ‘father’ssister’sdaughter’. These two relatives are therefore given the same term in the Kariera
kinship terminology as is the father’s father and mother’s mother * brother.
One of the classic compilations of Structural Functionalist ethnographies in the Raddiffe-Brownian style is African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (1950), edited by Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde. The other is African Political Systems { 1940) edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard. In his introduction to African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, Radcliffe-Brown wrote that: ‘to understand any kinship system it is necessary to carry out an analysis in terms of social structure and social function. The components of social structures are human beings, and a structure is an arrangement of persons in relationships institutionally defined and regulated’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1950:82). In his introduction he classifies kinship systems into several basic types. Kinship is based on descent, and therefore the type of descent is the diagnostic feature. Descent may be cognatic (i.e. bilateral, as seen among the Sarakatsani and
Peloterenos), patrilineal (as among the Samburu), matrilineal (as among the Asante) or double unilineal. Cognatic descent (i.e. bilateral kinship) gives rise to personal kindreds, unilineal descent to lineages.
Marriage rearranges the social structure by creating new relationships between groups of kin. Radcliffe-Brown demonstrates that such a typology not only allows the classification of African kinship systems,
but allows them to be compared with Indian, North American, Teutonic and Tudor English kinship.
The typology of African political systems devised by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard in African Political Systems was essentially a reworking of pre-Functionalist models of social evolution: from hunter-gatherers lacking land-ownership, through uncentralised subsistence farmers and pastoralists with land or livestock vested in descent groups, to traditional, tribute-paying states. In the preface to African Political
Systems, Radcliffe-Brown defines political organisation as: ‘the maintenance or establishment of social order, within a territorial framework, by the organised exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1940). Two principal types of African political system were identified: states (such as the Asante), which have a centralised authority, and
stateless societies (such as the Samburu), where order is maintained because the segments of society have equal power, and balance each other in disputes.
Criticisms
- One of the main weaknesses of this approach to anthropology is that it is largely descriptive. There are no hypotheses to explain why the variety of human societies should take particular forms. The pseudohistorical theory that matrilineal descent is a survival from an earlier phase in social evolution was rejected, but no alternative causal theory of human social behaviour is put in its place. Radcliffe-Brown wrote that ‘All the kinship systems of the world are the product of social evolution. An essential feature of evolution is diversification… and therefore there is great diversity in the forms of kinship systems’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1950: 82). Unfortunately Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of diversity is misleading. He failed to relate it to any concept of adaptation and, like Herbert Spencer, visualised the social system evolving in its own right, not as a consequence of the changing behaviour of individuals. One reason why any such theory would have been difficult to arrive at, is that social institutions have been reified. Instead of keeping Malinowski’s insight that patterns of social behaviour are the consequence of people furthering their interests through interaction, institutions take on a life of their own. Evans-Pritchard’s argument that it is because the lineage structure of the Nuer is so ‘deeply rooted’, that Nuer can actually move around and attach themselves to any community they like by whatever cognatic or affinal tie they find it convenient to emphasise is a classic example ! Function has become defined by a tautology: the function of a custom is the contribution it makes to social solidarity. Why do customs take the form they do? Because that is the form they must take to perpetuate that type of social system.
- An equally serious criticism of Structural Functionalism has been advanced by Asad (1973).While it is true that Malinowski was concerned by the impact of colonialism, little or nothing of this appears in the monographs written by Radcliffe-Brown’s disciples. Asad argues that the Functionalists deliberately played down social change because they depended on colonial governments for access to the field. Consciously or otherwise they sought to reconstruct how their communities would have been if colonialism had never taken place, and in doing so minimised not only the dynamics of indigenous African history, but the consequences of the slave trade, and the introduction of taxation, wage labour and freehold title to land by colonial governors. Asad argued that‘it is because the powerful who support research expect the kind of understanding which will ultimately confirm them in their world view that anthropology has not very easily turned to the production of radically subversive forms of understanding’ (1973: 17). This explains why Safa relied on a Marxist analysis to explain the powerlessness of the shanty town’s inhabitants.