130 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
Levi-Strauss. C. 1962. Toremum. Trans. R. Needham. Boston (/963).
Marett, R. R. 1908a. The threshold of religion. London.
---. 1908h A sociological view of comparative religion. Soc. Ret!. 1:48-60.
---, 1941. A Jmeyman at Oxford. London.
Maren, R. R., I'd. 190B. Anthropology and the classics. New York (1966).
Murray, G 1907. The rise of the Greek epic. Oxford.
Needham, R. 1974. Surmise, discovery, and rhetoric. In Remarks and inlif'ntiom: Skep-
tical essays about kinship, 109-72. London.
Persistiany,]. 1960. Durkheim's letter to Radcliffe-Brown. In Essays on 5Qdology and phi-
losophy, I'd. K. H. Wolff, 317-24. New York (964).
Perry, R.]. 1975. Radcliffe-Brown and Kropotkin: The heritage of anarchism
social anthropology. Kmeber Anrh. Soc. Papers 51152:61-65.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 192Z. The Andaman i5/aJU:len. Cambridge.
Schapera, L n.d. Social anthropology. [Notes on the lectures of Radcliffe-Brown at
Capetown University, 1924?] in the library of the Institute of Social Anthropology
Oxford.
Stewa~t, Jessie. 1959. Jane Ellen Harrison: A portrait from lerren. London.
Stockmg, G. W., Jr. 1976. Radcliffe-Brown, Lowic, and The historyoferhnological
H!st. Amh. Newsl. 3(2):5-8.
Tax, S. 1932. Primitive religion: Notes on the lectures of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown,
1932. Anlh. Tomorrow 4(2) (1956):3-41.
~start, A., ed. 1979. l.ettres de Radcliffe-Brown a Mauss. Etudes durkheimiennes 4:2-7.
W~.son, E. G. 1946. But 1{) what purpose: The autobiogmphy of a contemporary. London.
tre, 1.. 1981. Mrs. Bates and Mr. Brown: An examination of Rodney Needham's
allegations. Oceania 51:193-210.
RADCLIFFE·BROWN
AND BRITISH
in British
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
'
theory. Two Views of British Social Anthropology at Midcentury
winter Late in 1951, an exchange took place in the pages of the American Anrhro-
pologist between George Murdock of Yale University and Raymond Firth of
the London School of Economics. The immediate occasion was the appear-
ance the preceding year of African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Radcliffe-
Brown & Forde, eds. 1950), in which exemplary products of two decades of
• empirical research were analyzed in the context of a theoretical orientation
there given its final forrnularion after four decades of elaboration and refine-
ment. The volume's contributors included most of the leading figures of the
elite Association of Social Anthropologists, which five years previously had
sorted itself out from the morley assemblage of the Royal Anthropological
Institute (ASAM: 7/23-4/46). As the contributors' institutional identifica-
tions in the table of contents testified, they by then occupied professorial posi-
tions from which they were [Q dominate academic anthropology in the Brit-
ish sphere over the next two decades. Looking back from that later vantage
point, their epigonal historian described them as "an exceptionally tightly-
knit professional group, with a revolutionary methodology, shared standards
of training and evaluation, and a fairly coherent theoretical framework" (Kuper
1973:9-10). From the perspective of their transatlantic critic in 1951, they
seemed to have all of "the characteristic earmarks of a 'school'"-which Mur-
dock regarded as per se grounds for questioning their membership in an in-
ternational scientific community of "anthropologists" (1951:470).
Although granting them an "average level of eth nographic competence and
theoretical suggestiveness probably unequalled by any comparable group else-
\ where in the world," Murdock felt that their work was characterized by "off-
setting limitations" further justifying their exclusion from the anrhropologi-
, 131
 132 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
cal community: narrowness of substantive and ethnographic interests, theo-
retical parochialism, "disinterest" in general ethnography, "neglect" of history
and the processes of cultural change in time, and a "widespread indifference
to psychology." Not only did their narrow focus on kinship and social struc-
ture lead to a "fractionating tendency inconsistent with functional theory"
and greatly increase "the dangers of reificanon," it also implied the abandon-
ment of "the special province of anthropology in relation to its sister disci-
plines": "Alone among the anthropologists of the world the British make no
use of the culture concept." They were, in fact, not anthropologists at all,
but "professionals of another caeego-e," and like "many other sociologists,"
they tried "to discover valid laws by the intensive study ... of a very small
and non-random sample of all societies," without adequate "comparative or
cross-cultural validation." Having resolved his totemic "ambivalence and un-
easiness" by defining them as sociological fowl rather than anthropological
fish, Murdock was willing to let the British do their own thing-even if it
was, as sociology, outdated by a generation (l95l:467~72).
Murdock's posture was more than a bit paradoxical. He was himself some-
what marginal to the characteristically Boasian perspective from which he
criticized the British; charging them with abandoning history for social typol-
ogy, he was nonetheless, as a critic and outsider, himself impelled toward in-
tellectual typology. Perhaps because Firth was a non-Africanist insider "not
afraid to be called eclectic," he viewed "Contemporary British Social Anrhro-
~logy" in somewhat less monolithic and mote historical terms-as the quali-
fving temr;ral.adjective implicitly suggests. Although granting the strong in-
fluence of their personal ethnographic experience," Firth suggested that the
alleged narrowness of British social anthropologists was more apparent than
real. More ethnography was "read than cited," and transatlantic movements
~f staff and stu.dents h~d "spread knowledge of the more important conrribu-
t~ons to Amenca~ sO~lalanthropology." Bur it was in fact by isolating a par-
ticular sphere of mqurry and developing a "more precise framework of ideas
and substantial propositions" that British social anthropology had "got its
ch.aracter." However, that character was not peculiarly British, and it was
oriented.. toward a broader scren tifi
'"' e· 'Th'
I c community. at this commumty, was
not prtrnarllv composed of human biologists, students of primitive technol-
ogy, a~d ~rc~eologists was of small moment. What was important was not
to rnamtam an old fashioned-and spurious-unified science of man" but
rather to strengthen mea - gI 1' d 'I' ' recent rehistoricization he seemed unaware 00, Murdock in fact allowed that
. ." run U mter lSCLpmarv connections with other so-
cial sCiences:
. .. sociology in th "psvch ' '
e narrow sense, psyc ologv, economics, politi-
cal SCience, jurisprudcno-, and "such history as is problem oriented" (1951.
475-80), '
h But if he insisted that it was by being sociological that British social an-
t ropology had achieved its "unequalled" ethnographic competence and rheo-
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRlTISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY I3J
rerical suggestiveness, Firth was nonetheless willing to grant that "much of
what Murdock has said is just and calls more for reflection than reply." Re-
sponding to the serious scientific issue underlying Murdock's specific charges,
Firth treated various aspects of "the central problem of allowance for varia-
tion." In general, his approach was, first, to insist on the legitimacy of a scien-
tific strategy ("generalizations in the natural sciences are assumed to be valid
for a wide field of phenomena without the need of testing every instance");
then, to grant in effect certain limitations in its actual implementation ("the
unwillingness or inability of the theorist to state clearly how far he was de-
scribing the behavior of an abstract model created by himself, and how far
he intended his analysis to describe the behavior of people in an actual named
society at a given period of time"); and then, to suggest either that not all
British were guilty of such failings, or that recent practice showed signs of
j
taking them into consideration ("this view, however, is ceasing to be an effec-
tive British position"). After twenty-five years in which it had "done much
to establish a more significant typology," British social anthropology now ap-
peared to be "moving slowly and unevenly toward a more systematic study
of variation, including variation over time" (1951:478-88).
Because it so neatly juxtaposes the perspectives of the outsider and the
insider, the Murdock/Firth exchange would seem to provide a good stand-
point from which to view British social anthropology as an historical phe-
nomenon. But it also highlights certain methodological issues in intellectual
history-which, like anthropology, faces problems of abstraction and varia-
tion. This is the case even when an intellectual phenomenon bears a label
(e.g., "Freudian" or "Durkbeimian") that protagonists, critics, and historians
are all inclined to employ unquestioningly; it is much more so when a unify-
ing label or concept raises hotly debated epistemological issues (as in the case
of "paradigm"), or lends itself to a derogatory interpretation (as in the case
of "school"). In the present instance, there are so many qualifications, not
only in Firth's historicizing defense of British social anthropology, but even
in Murdock's typologizing critique, that the hisrorian is hard put to specify
", just when and in which actors the phenomenon under attack was actually
realized. Murdock in fact exempted almost every major British social anthro-
pologist from some aspect of his criticism, and various passages suggest that
he, too, saw the "school" as a rather recently emergent historical phenome-
non. Postulating a declension from Firth to Fortes to Evans-Pritchard (whose
Richards, Schapera, Forde, Nadel, and Firth all showed "definite intimations"
of the "possible emergence" of "a group of anthropologists in the strict sense."
He also recognized a considerable distinction between Malinowski-who had
still studied culture and who "continued to expand and revise his theories
I to the last year of his life"-and Radcliffe-Brawn-who "seems never ro have
 134 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 135
corrected a mistake nor to have modified his theoretical position in any sig- cal oppositional episodes may cast light on the historical roots of the view-
nificant respect since its earliest formulation decades ago" 0951:466, 472). Mur- point at issue in the 1951 exchange.
dock's "school" thus threatens to collapse into a single individual.
From this perspective, then, the 1951 exchange suggests that historical in-
quiry concerning modern British social amhrofXllogy might well start with Radcliffe-Brown and the Sequence of Paradigms
the career of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. There, if anywhere, we might expect to
in Anthropology
find a proximate source for the distinctive typological features that Murdock
characterized so negatively. But taking a clue from Firth's historidzing response, Rather early in his career, fifteen years before he augmented his name to dis-
and from a concern all would accept as characteristic of British social anthro- tinguish himself from [he "many Browns in [he world" (ACHP: RB/ACH
pology, we may perhaps place the problem in a slightly larger framework-one 11112/21), A. R. Radcliffe·Brown became possessed of a set of ideas which,
that may also help in approaching issues of variation and abstraction else. as applied to the particular national disciplinary tradition in which he worked,
where in intellectual history.
were significantly innovative. Their elaboration, systematization, and refine-
Insofar as intellectual movements may be compared to "unilineal descent ment became the preoccupation of his somewhat nomadic professional career.
groups," one would expect their fission or segmentation to produce groupings Shedding books and papers as he moved from place to place around the in-
with a distinctly relative or situational character-groupings that would be tellectual periphery, he deliberately carried little intellectual baggage. Although
both construed and evaluated differently by insiders and outsiders, depend- :
he acknowledged certain large intellectual debts that placed him in legitimat-
ing on the context in which group definition was at issue (Beattie 1964:99- ing relation to major traditions in social theory, he was reluctant to see his
101; Fortes 1953). Although Murdock was not a member of the traditionally own viewpoint as an historical phenomenon. Much given to retrospective
dominant lineage in American anthropology, in confroming the tribe from systematization, he later bridled at Robert Lowie's suggestion that he had
across the sea, he tended to view it from a traditionally Boasian standpoint, "shifted his position" on significant theoretical issues (Stocking 1976b), and
and to minimize its internal differentiation. Although Firth was not a rnem-
ber ~f :he currently dominant lineage in British anthropology, and therefore are several important obituary essays and appreciations (e.g., Eggan 1956; Elkin i956; Firth 1956;
saw It 10 much more differentiated fashion, he nevertheless felt it necessary rortes 1956a; Fones, 00. 1949; Stanuer 1956, 1968) as well as chapters based on published sOurCeS
to defend his tribe against attack from without. in various histories of anthropology, either general or specifically British (e.g" Kuper 1973; Harris
The modern study of segmentary lineages emerged from the work of 1968; Hatch 1973). He is discussed in works of an historical-theoretical character (Fortes 19690:
Jarvie 1964; Leach 1961, 1976), and there is by now a body of what might be called historica]-
Radchffe-Brown, and it seems appropriate that his own career followed a
critical writing largely devoted to the question of the originalitv Or derivative character of his
definite pattern of oppositional self-definition. As any dominant clan leader work on Australian social organuanon (e.g., Needhom 1974; White 1981), The only extended
might, he himself tended retrospectively to construe such episodes so as to historical treatment, a chapter in Ian Langham's history of the Rivers school {l981:Z44-300),
em~ha~ize the purity of his descent from earlier ancestral figures. These self. shares the strengths and weakne'Se5 of that volume, which is indeed characrerisncallv River,ian
validating ancestral claims are not without basis· Radcliffe-Brown did indeed, in it. combination of systematic empirical research and que.tionable interpretation. Although
based On extensive archival research. and a commendable conCern with the rechnical derails of
d~rive. much of his thinking from Emile Durkh~im. However, conte:nporary
kinShip analysis, it is marred by the overinflation of Rivets' theoretical influence on Radcliffe-
hlstoncal evidence suggests th at hiISch aractensuc
.. ant hrooolozi
ropa ogrca I·viewpoint
.
~L~ L Brown, and rather uncritically accepts the recent attacks On him. A satisfactory historical under·
was first develo ......
t-'~
d in oppo . . h f ..
smcn to t at 0 a more Immediate mentor,
W H R
. . . standing of Radcliffe·Brown's contribution to the development of British Social Aruhropologv
Rivers, during the years between 1910 and 1914; and that its final elaboration will have somehow to transcend not only the myth~his!Ory generated by some of his followers,
was only accomplished in the 1930s, in opposition first to the dominant orien- but also the debunking efforts of his critics. While rc is of course necessary to dispose of ,ertain
tation within American ant hid .
ropo ogy, an then to the views f .I
0 Bronis aw
exaggerated claims of originality, the attempt to reduce Radcliffe·Brown to an emin·II' derivotive
figure does not help us understand the great impact he had on anthropology on both sides of
Malinowski, his competitor for lineage leadership within the British anthro- the Atlantic in thl' 19305, 1940s, and 19505. I! should be, but probablv is not, needless to assert
pological tribe. While it will not be possible here to treat Radcliffe-Brown's that to focus on episodes in the Career of a single anthropologist is not to commi[ one>elf to
career in an exhaustively h!rsronca . . a f t hese crtn-
. If as hiron, I close exammanon .. a "great man" theory of the history of anthropology, nor to deny the importance of many other
factors, including the funding and the colonial context of anthropological inquiry. I have ap-
preached the funding question in an unpublished manuscript drawn upon herein (Stocking
I. Althoughsomeg=ipyo Ih· . I '-,.
B . . ra IStory ctrcu arcs among aothropologises, rhe career ofRa()l,; rrre- j 197&): the latter merits more systematically histori,al treatment than that initialcd in Asad
rown h as ehclted so far relativel li I· h Th
Y Itt I' In t e way of serious intellectual historiography. ere ([973).
 136 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR,
RADCLIFFE-BROWN ANO BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY III
perhaps tended to push back the dates by which he formulated his character-
At the time Radcliffe-Brown came upon the scene, the evolutionary em-
istic positions. But however cavalierly he may have treated the ideas or the
bodiment of the developmental paradigm was entering a state of crisis. Al-
empirical data of those he regarded as amateurs, and however much his olvm-
though this crisis has yet to be studied systematically, it is abundantly evi-
pian posture may have alienated some of those with whom he came in con-
dent in contemporary historical materials. E. B. Tyler's long-awaited magnum
tact, his devotion to the refinement and propagation of his viewpoint was
opus on the evolution of religion, already partially in galleys, lay gathering
a critical factor in a major intellectual reorientation in British anthropology.
dust in his files, in part at least because of intellectual developments that had
To place that reorientation in the broadest perspective, it will help to keep
called into question some basic Tylorian assumptions (Stocking 1981b). An-
in mind that anthropological speculation prior to 1900 had always been car-
drew Lang had just fallen from evolutionary orthodoxy to embrace a degen-
ried on in an essentially diachronic framework, in the British as in all other
erationfsr hypothesis of primitive monotheism (1901). R. R. Marett had JUSt
European anthropological traditions. In somewhat simplified schematic terms,
postulated the existence of preanimistic religious phenomena (1900).More gen-
the history of anthropology from its earliest origins may be viewed as the al-
erally, there was a growing discomfort with the way in which evolutionary
ternate dominance of two paradigms: on the one hand, a progressive develop-
categories articulated with what Marett now preferred to call "rnagico-religious"
mental paradigm, deriving ultimately from Greek speculation on the origin
phenomena (Stocking 1983a:91). Anthropological debate swirled particularly
of human civilization, which was expressed in sixteenrh-cenrurv humanist,
around the problem of rorernism, with special reference to the striking new
eighteenth-century progressivist, and nineteenth-century evolutionist specu-
lations on the same topic; 00 the other, a migrational or diffusionary para-
, ethnographic data Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen had published on the
Aruma of Central Australia (1899). Mclennan's original socioreligious con-
digm, deriving ultimately from biblical assumptions about the genealogy of
ception, in which matrilineal exogamous clans were held together by respect
nations, which was expressed in medieval and again in seventeenth-century
for a single animal emblem (1869), did not fit too easily with the complexities
speculation, and was reasserted in the early nineteenth century as the "ethno-
of the section systems regulating Australian Aboriginal marriage. Indeed, by
logical" tradition (Stocking 1973, 1978a, 1981a, 1983b). While it is impossible
1906 one observer felt the new Australian data threatened to "overthrow all
here to offer.a detailed comparison, it is important to emphasize that although
recognized principles ... [of] the totemic regulation of marriage" (Thomas
the assumptions of their inquiry differed in many respects, both paradigms
190637).
focussed on processes of change in time, which given the nature of the evi-
At the center of the turmoil stood James G. Frazer. Despite tension that
dence they dealt with, could only be approached by indirect means. Both
had arisen with his intellectual master Tylor by the time of its second edition,
paradigms compared forms coexisting in the present in order to reconstruct
The Golden Bough (1900) is a fine instance of the almost parodic reduction
the past, .whe.ther in terms of hypothetical developmental sequences or pre-
sumed hlstoncal connections.
, In ~hisContext, Radcliffe-Brown's work may be seen as an important con-
seminars, and certain unpublished manuscripts (though d. Stocking 1973 and 1978a). Al-
tnbuting factor to the first major break in the alternation of diachronic
though I use "paradigm" in a way that departs significantly from Kuhn's original ,usage (d.
~ara~igms, and the reorientation of an important current of anthropological Kuhn 1962, 1974), I nevertheless find it a nicely resonant Term for recurrent alTernunve frame-
mq~lry ~~ward the investigation of synchronic sociological problems. This works of anthropclogtcal speculation that have some of the characteristics Kuhn annburcs to
dehlstoncl.zation_which was never complete (cf. Lewis 1984), and arguably "paradigms." In addition to the developmental and the diffusionary paradigms, one,c~n dIS-
was o:ver Intended to be, which would surely be derogated by many anrhro- tinguish a third major trnditional anthropological orientation: [he polygenist, which IS In fact
essentially atemporal, since it assumed the existence of distinct types or races of mankind un-
pclogisre today, and seems likely now to be reversed~is by no means to be
changed since their creation. However, its denial of human unity made it fundamentally he{~ro-
atttlbute~ solely.to the influence of Radcliffe-Brown. In a somewhat different dox to the European anthropological tradition, and it surfaced as a legitimate anthropological
way, Malmowskl also contributed to it; and the fact that a similar change alternative only in t:he mid-nineteenth century, when it was a factor in the crisis of t:he eth-
occurred in American anrh I , .
no cgical paradigm and the emergence 0 f'" c aSSlca. '" evo ,..UtlOnism. In viewine
• ~ ~ Radcliffe-Brown
h ropo ogy suggests that more general influences may
ave been at work (cf Stocking 1976a). Nevertheless it is in this context as pan of an even mo", fundamental paradigm discontinuity, I do not wish to imply that a
that Radcliffe-Brown's anthropol . I k' I' I synchronic sociological orientation was withom precedent-which he himself appropriately
. .
sigriiticance.e oglca career ta es on its maxima hisrorica found in Monresquleu (R-B 1958;147). Bur within the empirical sphere that his{~rically has
distlnguished "anthropology" as a realm of inquiry and speculenon-ahe comparative study of
1l0n·European peoples-crho Momesquicuan tradition previously manifested itself alway~ m a d,a-
I. These two paragraphs take for, ." . h
cronic .
guise. so that it does not seem appropTlate to disti
rsnbguis. h a sync ,.rromc so ctoloekal
~ para-
rant"" an Orrentation to the general history of anthropol-
ogy that cannot be fully elaborated here and has
'
L -
""e.,
~ d ,
eve ope
d
SO
f'ar arge ,.y In
,
my e<:tUre5,
digm in {he history of anthropology prior ro the twentieth century (d. Stocking 1978a and
198Ib).
 138 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
of the basic assumptions of an intellectual viewpoint that may occur in the
work of epigones arriving on the scene after the impulse of originally genera-
tive problems has been spent. Its opening pages display all the fundamental
assumptions of social evolutionary thought: the uniformity of nature, the
psychic unity of mankind, the comparative method, regular stages of devel-
opment, and the doctrine of survivals (cf. Carneiro 1973). But what is most
striking in Frazer are those assumptions that especially characterize what Evans-
Pritchard (1933) later called the "English Intellectualist School": the classical
principles of associationist psychology (similarity and contiguity) embodied
in the two forms of sympathetic magic, and the overriding preoccupation with
the problem of the motives behind bizarre customs-notably of course those
that "gave birth to the priesthood of Nerm" (1900:1,4). The same preoccupa-
tion motivated the three "theories" of torerrusm Frazer incorporated into his
encyclopedic compilation of data on 10temism and Emgamy of 1910, by which
time the presumed unity of the diagnostic features that Mclennan had linked
together back in 1869 was in radical danger of unravelling. Whatever may
be the evaluation of his status by more recent anthropologists (d. Jarvie 1966,
and Leach 1966), there is no doubt that in rhe first decade of the century,
Frazer was the figure who more than any other exemplified the evolutionary
paradigm, now after four decades in a state of increasing disarray.
Rivers' Conversion from Evolution to Ethnology
Although Frazer was ensconced in his evolutionary armchair in Trinity Col-
lege when. Radcliffe-Brown came up from Birmingham in 1902, Brown's an.
thr,opologlCaltraining came largely from W H. R. Rivers; he was in fact Riv-
ers first (and best known) student in that field. Because he later took what
pr~~ed to be the "wrong" road Out of the early twentieth-century paradigm
crisis It has been d,·ffi,ul, ,. d . R· , hi
, 0 gam an a equate understanding of Ivers IS'
torical influence-' evert the reo II - a . f
'- .. recent ellort to resurrect It SUllersa bit rom com-
pensatory overestimation (Langham 1981;Slobodin 1978). Bur if the leaders
o~the next generation reacted sharply against the rather extreme conjectural
history of Rivers' [arer y .. hid d
'- ears, It IS noner e ess the case that for two eca es
he was the most influential figure in British anthropology. His electric intel-
lect and striking pre h d . d
. , sence a great Impact on all with whom he worked, an
hIS Ideas, even when later rejected, helped define the framework of anthro-
pological debate.
Trained originally In m dici R· I
. e IClne, Ivers moved to neurology and psycho ogy
111the early 1890s be' h fi
, e Omlng t erst
Le . .
crurer In Physiological and Experi-
m~ntal Psychology at Cambridge in 1897.When Haddon organized the Cam-
bndge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, he chose Rivers to carry
RADCLiFFE-BR.OWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHR.OPOLOGY 139
Out the first systematic attempt to apply the "new" experimental psychology
to a "primitive" population. To a psychologist familiar with the work of Fran-
cis Galton on the inheritance of mental ability in family lines, it seemed only
natural to collect genealogies to "discover whether or not those who were closely
related resembled one another in their reactions to the various psychological
and physiological tests" (Rivers 1908:65). Rivers quickly perceived that the
"genealogical method" he used in the Torres Strait had sociological potential
as well (1900:75); it in fact articulated admirably with the approach to the
study of kinship elaborated thirty years previously by the American evolution-
ary anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in 5)'stems of ConsangHinity and Affinit),
(1870). Although Rivers continued to carry out important psychological re-
searches, he devoted much of his energy in the decade after his return from
Torres Strait to further ethnographic fieldwork, and to the explication, de-
fense, and revision of Morgan's theories-or, as Rivers put it, to "sifting out
the chaff from the wheat of his argument" (l914a:95; cf. 1907).
Although some of Morgan's assumptions had been sharply criticized by
the leading British evolutionary theorist of primitive social institutions (Me-
Lerman 1876), Morgan's disciple Lorimer Fison earlv on introduced them
into the Australian ethnographic tradition (Fison & Howitt 1880). Subse-
quently taking the deceased Morgan's place as Fison's armchair mentor-bv-
correspondence, Tvlor was able to suggest an integration of Mclennan's con-
ception of exogamy with Morgan's classificatory system (Tvlor 1888:265). Via
this Australian connection Morganian assumption was also very much a part
of Frazer's speculation. If to speak of Rivers' "rediscovery" of Morgan is thus
to overstate the novelty of the matter, it is nonetheless true that Rivers' "in-
sistence on Morgan's principle that kinship terminologies and customs de-
pend on social causes, have social functions, [and] reflect socially ordained
rights and duties" marked a stage in the development of British social anthro-
pology (Fortes 1969a: 17,26). As Rivers himself saw it in 1914, the special
significance of "the body of facts which Morgan was the first to collect and
study" lay in the fact that it provided the basis for a "rigorously deterministic"
kience of sociology. "We have here a case in which the principle of determin-
ism applies with a rigour and definiteness equal to that of any of the exact
sciences, since according to my scheme not only has the general character
of systems of relationship been strictly determined by social conditions, but
every detail of these systems has also been so determined" (Rivers 1914a:95).
Although subsequent exponents (and in some of his moods, Rivers) were not
always so naively positivistic, the point of view and tone are authentically
those of the later social anthropological tradition: social anthropology was
to be the natural science of society, not simply on the basis of a generalized
reductionisr analogy, but because certain characteristic social phenomena were
I
asserted to be analveable by a rigorously scientific method.
 140 GEORGE W SroCKING, JR.
RADCLlFFE·BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 141
Bur if Rivers helped co define the tradition, he himself remained on the vival, the most direct way for the field ethnographer to explain a cultural prac-
other side of a major theoretical divide, insofar as his analysis of social or. tice in terms of motive was to ask people why they did it. But in most cases,
ganization was still carried on within a diachronic interpretive framework. "the Todas were quite unable to give explanations of their customs, the an-
In this respect he accepted without question the traditional assumptions of swer to nearly every inquiry being that the custom in question was ordained
th~ ~iscipline to which he came rather late in life. Although his scientific by the goddess Teikirzi" (1906:14);and Rivers had to make his own inferences
rranung made him quite sensitive to certain issues of method, he seems to about Toda motives. In some cases he simply confessed his inability "to satisfy
have started out in anthropology by rather self-consciously relating himself myself as to what people really had in their minds" (356); in others we can
to. the ev~lutionary viewpoint which, despite evident signs of paradigm strain, see him retreating toward the doctrine of survivals: "Possibly the Todas may
still dommated British anthropological theory. One gets a sense of this in his have some clear ideas about the connexton between their bells, gods and dairies,
first full-length ethnographic monograph: The Todas (1906), based on field- but I could not discover them, and am inclined to believe that the people
wor.k that he did in 1902. Like some of his later work, The Todas is a para- are now very hazy about the exact place of the bell and the god in their the-
doxical amalgam of methodological self-consciousness and uninhibited explana- ology" (427). At a more general level, however, there was a recurring problem
tory imagination-which manifested itself in the Context of difficulties Rivers of evolutionary fir. or the failure of evolutionary expectation: the combina-
had presenting his somewhat recalcitrant ethnographic data within an evolu- tion, for instance, of strict regulation of marriage choice with what to Rivers
tionary framework (cf. Mandelbaum 1980; Rooksby 1971; Stocking 1983:89). seemed almost total sexual promiscuity (529-32, 549), or the "highly devel-
To have selected the Todas for ethnographic study in the first place was oped" idea of a god and the complete indifference to the desecration of the
of course to engage evolutionary theory at a critical point since their poly- hilltop cairns associated with Toda gods (453-55). In the end, Rivers was forced
andry illustrated a problem'c·," t . M' -, 'f.'
" '- sage m Ci.Xnnans sequence a marriage rorms to conclude that Toda customs, many of which had "no exact parallels in other
(McI...e~nan1865:73).That Rivers' initial overall explanatory strategy was, how- places," ran counter to "perhaps the most definite result which modern re-
ever still evolurionarv . . I .,
, g IS various Y maturest. He often referred to aspects of search in anthropology has brought out": "the extraordinary similarity of
Toda Culture as representin ."" fl.
. . g a certain stage 0 evo utlon-frequently, a rran- CUstoms" among "widely separated races"-which was of course a basic as-
~1tlonalone: thus they had reached "a stage of mental development in which sumption underlying the notion of parallel evolutionary development (4).
It seems that they are no I'd onger sansne Wit . h t h e nomenclature of a purely
It is therefore not surprising that Rivers' specifically generalizing chapters
claSSificatorysystem ' and haveave oegu 0 rna ke diIstmCtlons
be n t . . hei . I
In r err termmo _ disappoint or otherwise abuse our expectations. After seventeen chapters de-
og~ for near and distant relatives" (1906:493 d. 541). Beyond this, there is scribing the ceremonies of the Todas, his chapter on Toda religion in general
a kind of general checking f
.
. f Tod I
a caregonex 0 roca cu rure against those of evo- is conceived in residual rather than integrative terms (1906:442)-a fact espe-
lutionary theory-often with negative results. Thus the Toda dara offered "lit- cially illuminating in contrast to Radcliffe-Brawn's Andaman Islanders (1922),
tle to SUPPOTtthe idea that h d _. ~
t e go s are perSOnificatiOns of forces of nature where the two explanatory chapters take up half the book. The structural
and "no definite'd d h .
. eVI ence towar s t e solution of the vexed question of the equivalent in The Todas is a concluding chapter on their "origin and history."
relation between polyandry' dJ f ··d"· h I
L an rn anncr e -ISSues t at derived respective y Here, after seven hundred pages in an evolutionary key,Rivers suddenly struck
rrorn the work of Tyler a d M ,- Ih
b n ci.Xnnan, at ough Rivers mentioned neither a "highly conjectural" diffusionarv chord, using his recalcitrant data on Toda
y na~e (447, 520). Finally, there is Rivers' fundamental idea of what consti- religion to suggest that they had come to the Nilghiri hills a thousand years
tuted explanation" in anth I foil .
di . h ropo ogy. oWlOgthe English intellectualist tra- before from the Malabar region, where they had been influenced by Chris-
mon, e saw explanation' f ..
. m terms 0 ongm and rnctive c-of discovering or tian and Jewish settlements (693-715). Given the failure of evolutionary as-
reconstructmg what ut"!'t .
. d h 11 anan purpose people have (or once had) in rheir sumption to explain so much of the Tocla data, Rivers turned instead to an-
mm s w en they perform . I
a paTtlcu ar customary act. Thus Rivers argued other approach to the problem of origins: the diffusionary historical approach
t h at some features of Toda h·ldb· h .
- " f . C I Itt ceremOnies "had their origin in the mo- characteristic of the alternative diachronic paradigm, which in its "ethnologi-
tive ? .promotlng lactation by imitating the flow of milk (329). cal" incarnation had not disappeared entirely from British anthropology dur-
It IS In this Context as II h .
h d' d h' ,We as t e conjunction of ill-starred occurrences ing the era of evolutionary dominance, and was still reflected in many of the
t at TIe ~p Is.sources of information toward the end of his fieldwork, that interests of Rivers' colleague Haddon (Urry 1982).
one must ViewRIvers' often f kl k
Al t h aug h· It ran counter to ranth
yac nowledged difficulties of explanation.
.
Although Rivers' difficulties with his Toda data document some of the
e assumptions underlying the notion of sur- stresses a more systematic ethnography helped create in the evolutionary para-
 142 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 143

digm around 1900 (cf Stocking 1983a), and in fact foreshadow his later theo-
of survivals as evolutionism had been. Without it, he could not use present
retical development, it was not until the 1911 meeting of the British Associa-
kinship terminology to reason back to prior marriage practices. Thus to bur-
tion for the Advancement of Science that he announced his "conversion" to
tress his new theoretical possession, he felt it necessary to argue, successively,
an "Ethnological Analysis of Culture." Rather than interpret cultural phe-
bOlh "The Disappearance of Useful Arts" (l912a) and "the persistence of the
nomena in ~erms of "independent processes of evolution based on psychologi-
useless" (1913:293),
cal tendencies common to mankind," Rivers now joined. the German ethnolo-
Viewed in terms of his relation to subsequent social anthropology rather
gists Graebner and Schmidt in explaining them in terms of "the mixture of
than to evolutionism, there are several further aspects of Rivers' conversion

I
cultures. and peoples" (l91U25). Elaborating his argument in the context of
that merit comment, Although Rivers (like many evolutionists) had an in-
dl~cu.ltles he had with Melanesian data he had collected in 1908, Rivers ap-
cipient notion of "function," it was to be, in the language of Macbeth, "smoth-
plied rr to Australian Aboriginal culture, which since the work of Spencer
ered in surmise"; and if he helped transmit the Morganian conc.eption of
and Gillen had, according to Andrew Lang become lost "in a wilderness of system, his later diffusion ism in fact tended to fragment cultures Into their
difficulties" (1907'209) 1,="1 d bl '- I - h -
' "b-- Y ue to pro ems In re atmg r e section systems "component elements," which were related to each other not in synchronic
and the totemic dans-ethnographic manifestations, respectively, of Morgan's
systemic terms, but rather in stratified diachronic terms as the laye:ed resi-
and Mclennan's evolutionary viewpoints. While for evolutionists Australia dues of different episodes of culture contact (1914b:lI, 2), Beyond this, there
provided a "homogeneous example of primitive human society" Rivers was
troubled by the "COl" " t "h f £ " •
is the problem of Rivers' attitude to "psychology." His stated position, ~v~n
XISence t ere 0 two rorrns of SOCIalorganization. So after his "conversion" to ethnology, was to insist on the continuing validity
long as he had been "ob es d" bv " d I _ _ _
s sse y a cru I" eva unonary point of view" rhis of a psychological analysis of "the modes of thought of different peoples" as
fact "seemed an absolut .. m t " hi Vi _ '
, ... ys ery to tm. lewmg them now as the result a parallel enterprise 0911:132), and within a few years he in fact moved toward
of a ml~ture of two peoples similar to that which he had found in Melanesia,
an integration of psychology and ethnology (1917), under the influence of an-
evervdung was clarified' on" h d d" h d I - -
, . -- a possesse t I" ua orgamsation and matn- other of his intellectual enthusiasms-psychoanalysis, which he encountered
hneal descenr" the oth " . d _ _
.. ' et- was organtze In torerruc dans possessing either while treating shell-shocked soldiers during the Great War, Bur for a period
patnlmeal descent 0 I __
f ather and child" Generali' ' r at any rate c ear recogmtlon of the relation between after his "conversion" in the context also of his failure to explain Toda culture
hi R" . ".
' zmg ISargument Ivers insisted that evolution- - psyc h OIOglStlCterms,
In - - 'h I" seems to h ave put asiid I" th I" psychological
, analysis
ary speculations can have n f b - I' h
. 0 rm aS1Sun ess t ere has been a preceding of culture because his current psychological viewpoint seemed Inadequate
analYSISof the cultures and '"I- - "
. , C1VIIzatlons now spread over the earth's surface. to the task. As we shall see, all of these issues were implicated in his relation-
OtherWIse It was "impo -bl h h _
b ' SS1 I" to say w et er an Institution or belief possessed ship to Radcliffe-Brown.
Yfa Ple~ple who seem simple and primitive may nor really be the product
o a re atlvely advanced cultu £ - b
, re rOrm1ng utone element of a complexity which
at fi~st sl~ht seems simple and homogeneous" (1911:130-32).
Rivers conversion to eth I - I I - - "Anarchy' Brown and the Andaman Islands
no oglca ana YSISImplied neither the abandon-
mem 0 f the Morganian fa . I
. cus on SOCia structure nor the toral rejection of Brown first came in contact With - R-Ivers as an un d erg raduate enrolled in.' theI
evo Iutlonary assumptio P , I b
- ns. reClse y ecause social structure was so "nmda- Moral Science Tripes, which at that time consisted of philosophy, polmca
menta IIYImpOrtant" and' h"
· reSIstant to c ange except as the result of the inri- economy, and psychology (Stocking 1977). He later recalled that as a result
mate bl en d mg of peapl ", fu 'h·~ "b
. es, It rms t;:U y far the firmest foundation" on which o f h-IS youthful acquamtance
- - h t h I" B"tltlS h ava nt-garde mtellecrual
.' Have-
to b ase et h nologlCal an I ' If I Wit
- - I a YSIS. one cou d determine the sequence of changes lock Ellis and (apparently through Ellis) the exiled Russian anarch,lst, ~tlnce
In SOcIa structure one ld h-
[ th ] d a I' cou use t IS to establish "the order in time of the Peter Kroporkin he had come up to C am b tI-dge a Irea d ya "sociologist" , Intent
o er Illerenc I" emencs inc h' h" .
com lex" (1911-134 0 W Ie l~ ISPOSSibleto analyse a given [culture] on devonng -' his life to "the SCIentific
- - study a f cu Iture "(BMPL-R-B/BM ' 12l3i/29;
h- ~ " 138), Although RIvers' diffusionary hypotheses required R-B/Kroeber as cited in Kelly 1983; cE. Perry 1975). After taking his degrc ,
1m m many cases to assume th d '
Co " d
I' r a vance
d" cu Itural 1"1 I" egeneratlDn of Culture in order to account
. -'
In 1905 he stayed on for a year 0 f wor k Wit - h t h e new Iy established Boar d
t
Otlca - I
ana IYSIS - 0 f social ements m peoples of otherwise "low" culture, his his- of Anthropological Studies (Gathereole n.d.), reading physical anrhropologdy
structure was at least as dependent on the doctrine - Duckworth, archeology WIth
WIth - RI-dgeway, et h no Iogy \vith Haddon, an
 144 GEORGE W STOCKING, JR.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 145
kinship with Rivers-with whom he had already studied psychology. Rerro-
specrivelv, he insisted that "from the outset" he and Rivers disagreed "on the h· luroej.B rown
t ISvo umer. ~ later
<H
said that he had "all his life accepted k'the hypothesis
h hesi
subject of method" (R-B 1941:50), and recalled having undertaken in 1905 a of social evolution as formulated by Spencer as a useful war 109 ypot ests
"long essay on the concept of function in science" as part of a general work . h estu d yo f soclcty
mt . "(R - B 1958,189)
.. Whether derived from Spencer. (whom
f
on sciemific method (Stocking 1976b). Surviving evidence from the period, he would have read in large doses for the Moral Science Ti-ipos) or rom
however, suggests that his disagreements with his mentor emerged more gradu- Kro otkin {whose Mutual Aid is, among other things, a ~elange of SOCial
ally, and did not fully crystallize until 1913. P .
evolutlonarv .
assumptions [0
I"erry, 1975[1 evolutionism provided . .the unclerlv-
h _
Certainly Brown's Andaman fieldwork was undertaken within a framework ing framework of the lectures. And though he began by rejecrmg t e prm-
,
ciple . . ,
of unilinearity, he in fact tended to treat msutunons . rerms
h h. a f a senes
I
of diachronic assumption. Although at one point he later said that he had In

gone out to study a "primitive people who had no toremism" (R-B 1923:22), .
of progressive stages, One must rmme late y di I add , however t at IS eva u-
. '. II ir as the
contemporary evidence and subsequent retrospection both confirm that he tionary orientation was h eavr ·1y 0 ur kheimian . Characteristica
..,. y, 1 wh t he
was interested in reconstructing the "primitive culture" of the Negriro race, " .. d I or and function" of particular SOCIal institutions t a
ongm, eve opmc , . I nts of the
which was presumed to have been the lowest of four population strata in South- discussed. And indeed, one can pretty well relate parncu at segrne
east Asia (R-B 1932:407; cf. ACHP: Temple/ACH 3/16/06). Modelled on that lecture series to particular Durkheimian sources.. f h d I em of
of the Torres Straits expedition, his fieldwork encompassed every aspect of .
What is most interesting, f rom t h e porn
. r of view o t e h eveopm close
anthropological research, including material culture, physical anthropology, Brown's thought are the two conc Iu d!109 topics,
. s W hich toget er occupy
dE" '-
and psychological testing (Stocking 1983a:83). Insofar as social enrhropologi- ' f1'
to half of the notes. They consist of re ecnons on
"f mism an xogamy
ore hil the series was
cal data were concerned, his work seems not to have been so successful as (which may well have been provoked by the appearance, W ue f the evolu-
he and Rivers may have hoped. He had difficulty collecting genealogies, ad- iumj, f0 IIowe d by aS.treatment
in progress, of Frazer ,5 cornpen dium) h 0 , '-
d Hertz as well
mitting in prim that "this branch of my investigation was a failure" (I93Z:72). ' ". hi
non of religion, 10 w IC h B d
town r ew on Robertson mit . an of his, Anda-
Even so, his attempt at what might be called "social paleontology" was-by as on Durkheim. It is here t h at h e rna d e t he most extensive
f I. use
ing Durkheim
retrospective systematization in another theoretical context-to provide the ·f dd I . he course 0 exp icau ,
man data. It is almost as 1 su en y, In t. If h had found no clas-
underlying empirical basis for the "social physiology"'ater associated with his . I
the Andaman matena too on a new k significance.
. b e h were the type
name (c(. Kochar 2968). sificarory system among ten h A damanese, It was ecause t ey d Draw-
In 1908, however, that development still lay in the future. Judging by the . . d d he only one yet encountere .
caseofthepreexogamoussoclety-m ee ,t. fTheD ... nn/Labor-Brown
. h D khelm 0
one long surviving published fragment (which may even be the missing Trin- ing heavily on early Our' kh elm-t e ur
Itll5l0
re of 0 ulation increase such
ity Fellowship thesis!) the first version of Brown's Andaman ethnography was P
offered a hypothesis as to how under the pressu . h Ph .ng out of the ani-
influenced more by Haddon than by Rivers, and showed nor a trace of Durk- .
a society might . . an db ecome exoga mous , Wit as an
dIVide
heim (despite his later recollection that he had been introduced to Durkheim's mal world in the process (cf, R-B 1923:Z0-Z~). f I" -the British "an-
Contrasting two schoo Isot f e mterp
work by Ellis in 1899 [Kelly 1983]). Indeed it seems to have been an almost h' retatlon 0 re 19lon
I Iy :nclined toward
Boasian attempt at historical reconstruction on the basis of a comparative thropological" and the Frenc h" soCia . IOgl'ca\"-Brown
( c ear
. I to, illustrate "The
~nalysis of CUlture elements (R-B 193Z:407_94). Similarly, articles he published h ' A d data lor matenil
the latter as he called on IS n aman .. .. Hit ,uggested that the
In 1909 and 1910 reflect little of his mature theoretical viewpoint-though in Origin Development, an d Function . 0(ReligIon, e a er. _ . 1910 "as an
defending himself against the criticisms of the German diffusionist Schmidt ' I { ders had been wntten In
last two chapters of The Andaman san. . of rhe institutions
he did .offer certain strictures on historical arguments based on the doctrine h d' the mterpretatlon
attempt to develop a new met 0 10 f hit , .. material in fact
of surVivals (R-B 191Oa:36),.One suspects that it was during the same academic of a primitive people " (R-B 1922·:IX1, an d some B' ate ec us clear
"- that he had
year, when he lectured on Australian ethnology and the Kwakiud potlatch . (the book ut It seem
roughly parallels certain portions a b' • in I"ter theoretical
at th~ London School of Economics, that he had his first systematic encoun- nor yet fully developed that ana IySIS,I . 'f on Iy ecause f cer,3,
hates " More impor-
ter With the Durkheimian literature. ... " . I I") absent romt en lopmenr.
catch-phrases (such as SOCIa va ue are . Id Brown
A record of that enCOUnter survives in notes of the series of lectures he . f h' Il theoretlca eve ,
tant, from the point of view 0 lS overa _ h . lutionary viewpoint
gave on "Comparative Sociology" at Cambridge early in 1910 (cf. pp. Il3~Z8, . I h·ft f a dlac romc evo
had not yet made the crUCla s I rom'L t"O have taken place
to that of synchronic analYSIS. .. Is hill seems no ,
. Th· IScrltlca
 146 GEORGE W STocKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 147

until several years later, in the context of debate with Rivers over the inter- The first letter affirmed a not-vet-disrupted discipleship: Brown was pleased
pretation of data Brown collected during his second fieldwork expedition to that a manuscript on childbirth customs fitted with Rivers' Melanesian work;
Western Australia.
he asked for a copy of Rivers' British Association address, which he had missed
while in Australia. Discussing his own plans for further Australian research,
he suggested that he now had "a good working hypothesis of the ori.gin ?f
The Problem of Totemism in Australia the Australian social organisation, and indeed of the origin of rorermsrn In
general." The key was the dual division, and he was "m~r~ wedde~ tha~ ~ver':
Brown's original proposal for a field trip to Western Australia was simply for
to his theory that it was "essentially a mode of orgarusmg the oppostuons
a general survey, with subsequent concentration on whatever tribe prom-
ised "the most valuable results" (ACHP: R-B/Cambridge Board of Anthro-
that arise in savage societies in connection with marriage, initiation: et
the present, however, he proposed to publish only factual data, leaving ques-
7:"
For

pology 11/4/09). By the time he arrived in Perth in September 19lO, his goals
tions of origin" until after further field research, Although he,expected the
were more definite. Despite his later much-debated recollection that he had
intermediate forms of the Lake Eyre tribes to provide the ultimate key, he
gon~ then~ to find a kinship system he had previously hypothesized to exist,
hoped first to go to north Queensland to study "the local and relationship
the interview he gave to The WC.\CAus!mlian (R-B 191Ob) suggests rather that
organisations in their relationship to the totemic clans" among a tribe whose
he hoped to provide evidence for the hypothesis advanced at Cambridge on
the origin of roremism on WhiICh hiIS vIews were '"10 Critlca I respects Stl.11 "maternal descent of the totem" would contrast to the male descent he found
'-- ~ -
in Western Australia, ,
rather traditionaL Thus although Frazer had been forced to the conclusion
that totemism and exog'my w" ' , , "fu d II d" , , Responding subsequently to Rivers' "conversion" address, Brown at this
, . ere msnrunom n amenta y rsnncr m on- point defined their differences in minimal terms. "Fully" accepnng the pr~po,~
gin and nature" (1910 I ") B II
: , xu, rown sti saw them as intimately related, He
sition that "analvsis. of a rmxe
. didcu rure must prece e sociological explanation,
proposed nothing less than to "settle" the issues of the rotemism debate. The , dRi Ivers , argument to
he simply insisted that Australian culture was unrruxec.
Austr~lian Aboriginals "personified" a "stage" that "probably every race"-
Includmg "our own an t "h d d h . the contrary depended on treatlng · t h e system 0f marn iage classes and , ' the sys-
, ces ors - a passe t rough. By studying all the varia- · . . (Ia a Frazer) , and assoclanng each
Clans of Australian marr'·'g" I· hi _~..l' • I· h tern of totem clans as separate mstirunons
" , , a ... regu aClons, IS eXp<;UltIon would cast Ig t on " t d that both classes and clans
the ortgm of the svsre " d '''. .. with a different population stratum. Brown InSlSe
~ ...m, an on ItS progressive development" from two
were "inseparably bound up Wit t ere atlons hiIp sys,tern" and that
· h he relati , the form '
to four and from four to eight" exogamous classes (cf, JSBL: R-BID. Bates
n.d.). flecri
totem ism took in any group was a re ectlon 0 I spar f ir ricular SOCIalorgaOlza-
, ' ,
rion. "Social structure" was "fundamental," and "the specia1is~tlon"of r e1 lglou ,
w The bvarious 'aCCOUntsof Brown's Australian fieldwork suggest~ that it , roo, functions [was] the result 0 f r h e specta. I'tsanon
, of social functions. ,_Atl -oug
l dh
as at est a ra.xed success (Watson 1946:105-25; cf. Watson 1968 and Salter
1972), Once again how di h d further correspondence reveale d r h at basi
asrc rna tt er s of conceptualizatlon an "
b ' ,ever! me locre et nography was to be transforme ' r'ng
definition were at issue, Brown cone Iu d e d b y reltera I his "full agreement
fiy theoretICal reflection. Rather than reCOUnt what is known of his fieldwork,
rst amon~ the syphilitic Aboriginals incarcerated on Bernier Island and later with "the main point" of Rivers' address, d. d".
among mamland grou h d Rivers' unpreserved answer apparent lytd sugges e the twO IIsagree d h. qUIte
.
ps, or enter t e ehate about his debt to Daisy Bates,
t h e devoted ethnogmph· h ' . fundamentally about Australia." In response, Brown fu r ther exp hkate ISvIew
.
. N IC amateur w 0 for a time accompanied the expedi- · h lp 5ystem" on t at 'I
connoent:
tion ( eedham 1974, Wh' 1981)· . of the "two essential features ate f h re Ianons
, , ,Ite, It wdl be more worthwhile to turn to the "t h e existence of clans due to the d"lsnncnon, a f nearer and more distant
survIvIng contemporary e id f h· d . I b' re a·"
v ence 0 IS eveloping theoretical viewpoint m tives of the same kind" and "the classification of the world of natura °h J'd~t~
correspondence he carried ' h h· .
ha ft h' on Wit ISmentor Rivers while living in Birmmg- of religious or mythic , significance mto
. twO d'IVISIOns
' , "according to t e IVl-
m a er IS return to England early in 1912.3

3, Broken off late in 1912 the Bro /R'

dence is contained. Langham's read-
follow' d' -'
mg year an COntinued Into the elf
wn Ivers Correspondence "", ...moo the summer of the
9 rion (here cited as WHRPj, in which most 0 f t h e correspon L _ h d'd not have
material for ,h • d hell' ar y pan 0 I 14, This corresponde~ provides the source -Ing of this material - substann3. IIy from my 0 wn • perhaps o<:causc e , 1 I (19IJJ "
. differs quite
'~an t e '0 OWing sect 0_ h
d' to Rivers' arlide on surVlva S ,
vuere d no parem hencal
.rr ' 't . h. lOn, U<:cause t e letters are almost all undated ' I have access to Brown's critically important letter respon mg, 'b blication by
offers more j . ,CI anons to t e Brown/Rivers correspondence. Langham (1981:373-74) copy of which was made available to me b y F~ rcu~ E ggan pnor to ItS su sequent pu
spec fie tJtatlons to envelopes 12027, 12039, 12058. and 12062 of the Haddon Colle<:- Meyer rortes (R-B 1913b).
 148 GEORGE W STocKING, JR.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 149
sions of the human society." Although borh together constituted "the eoremk
organisation of the Australians," the former was more fundamental, since "a condescending. Accusing Brown of basing his definitions too narrowly on
society might possess the social organisation without the classification, but Australian materials, he suggested this was justifiable only if one adopted the
[not} ... the classification without some son of social divisions." But until Frazerian view "that the Australians represent a stage in the evolution of
he carried out his proposed field study of the "connection of the local or- human society in general." Arguing that Brown's definition of cla,n was to~
ganisation, the relationship system and the totemic dans in tribes with female narrowly genealogical, Rivers offered his own somewhat overlapping de~m.
descent," he could not rebut Rivers' argument that the "intimate connection" tions of the contested concepts: a clan was an exogamous group within a tnbe,
of the latter two was "the result of blending." whose members were bound together either by "a belief in common descent"
or by "the common possession of a totem" (cf. Rivers 1914b:I, 7); ~otemism
In this context, Brown introduced new ethnographic data that were to bring
maUers more sharply into focus: the case of the Dleri of Central Australia, was simply the term he used for "a form of soci~1 organisati~n , , : In which
the totemic link forms an essential element of SOCIalstructure. Having chosen
who had recendy been discovered to have a double system of totems, one
with male descent similar to those in Western Australia, and one with female his definitional ground, Rivers had no objection co Brown's explanati~n of
descent similar to eastern tribes. In the next severalletters he advanced a "work- the Dieri case "except that it assumes at the outset" what had co be expla,l,ned,
If the Dieri already had two kinds of social grouping, Rivers saw easily how
ing hypothesis" of the origin of the Dieri system: assuming a single develop-
one of them may have taken on the magtco-re . I··
19lOUS1ideas .."ad practices, of
mental sequence of Australian totem ism, he argued that the Dieri represented
a spe~ia! transitional state in which the newer western paternal fonn had been western totem ism." But it was their presence in the first place that required
explanation, and by implication Rivers had an explanation even if Bfo~n
supenmpcsed by borrowing in a tribe that still retained the older eastern mater-
did not: they were a type case of the blending that characterized Australian
~al totems, Although he was able to justify this "imitation" by a lengthy con-
~ectural argument, in evolutionary terms his position was, to say the least, Culture, fi Id k
Brown responded ro the definitional issues by appealing COhis e wor.
Incongruous, and it left Rivers with an obvious diffusionary alternative. In
t,he meantime, however, Brown Went on to react to Durkheim's recently pub- In Australia there were "rwo lIlerent sorts 0 f social groups that .may. be to-
tWO diff
remic", he used the term clan " on I'y lor t h ose b as ed on the distinction . be-
" .
lished Eleme~tary FOrmsof the Religious Life (912), in which the interpretation
.
tween .
near and distant kiIn, E xogamy was no.~ their defining characreristic,
of the totem Ism of another Central Australian tribe had even further com-
but simply the consequence 0 f t h e fact t h at theirc members were nearly, re-
plicated "the whole question of the evolution of roremisrn in Australia."
lared. These groups were sornenrnes, totermcic aand sometimes not 'I.sometimesd
.. ~rown had of COurse already accepted Durkheim's general thesis of the . b y fe,male sometimes
constituted by male descent an d sometimes .' loca 1l2e
s~CIOIo.gicalorigin of religion," and he agreed with "almost everything" Durk-
helm said about the Ar B I. and sometimes not. Although he did I not W1S . h t 0 "define terms "In SOCIOogvd
unta system per se. ut on certain more genera Issues,
he was critical Durkher h d I . I d on the basis of Australian f acts on Iy,"tbt ese gcoups seemed to correspon ,
.. ' . elm a not exp ained why totem objects were se ecte II d I 'but what was Important
from ~he practical economic life of everyday," and he was wrong about the fairly closely" to what were elsewhere ca e cans, .' ' '
evolutionary posttto fA· . [ hi was "not the name but the facts," On the question of Dien roterruc offer ine t'a
. no runta totelmsm. Reaffirming the hypothesis 0 1S . h t hiIS a d equ atelv without "0 enng .. a
Cambndge lectures B d h " . I Brown felt that he could not d ca 1 Wit
'. ' rown argue t at the Andamanese "pre-totemic socia
orgamzatlOn had did· h" . .h theory of Australian social orgamsatlon In gener al."
. " ' In view of, Rivers cnt!-
. "d eve ope mto t e classificatory system of Australia" Wit · , b k h
Its ual divisions" d' '. II h cisms, and many things in Durk h elms 00, e w" postpolllng theb paper
d
t h,an bemg mtnve . " an Its ongma Y matrilineal clans. The Arunta, rat er in which he would offer it; and for t h e present .It seemed best to a an on
O kh' ,pn , were a late stage. Beyond this, Brown disagreed with
ur elms definition of ' U d h. the correspondence, h B h d be
I d h' totemlsm as above all" a name or emblem; an t IS h I .It seems clear t at fown a -
e 1m to pose explicitly . d fi ., '. d Viewing the first exchange as a woe, , h f.1
( certam e nltlonalissues 10 an unpreserve note
or notes) on the Conce t U '" " I gun to move Out of the relationship. 0 f stu d ent-co-me. mor Despite, I t e aJAure
. d h p s totemlsm and clan," The former apparent y em-
p h aSlZe t e presence of" 'fi . .. I of his Andaman kinship work, he h a d b y t h'IStim , e published artlc des onIR. us-
a speci c maglco-rehglous relation between the c an
an d some species of I b· " d . h'
tralian kinship whose excellence RIvers Imse was If to acknowle ge, d Ivers
fi '
. b
In a su sequent lener e
.. , natura 0 Jeet ; the laner was apparently that use
h .. h" 1924:194-201). The exchange aiso heightened his sensitivity to ceh~taln ~ n1;
system 0f k insh' b ' mp aSlZing t e distinction ' within the classificatory ,
tlonal . ,
problems, which he inSIsted on approac h'mg in terms '0of ISempmcah <h <
R" Ip, etween near and distant kindred" (d. R-B 19I3a:159).
Ivers only extant lett ' h· fi d b. data rather than in terms of tra d mona I evo IutI'onary categones.'I n teo .
·· e
er in t IS rst series was brief , pointed , an a It , .
hand, his continuing underlymg commitment to a diachrolllc evo utlonary
 150 W.
GEORGE STOCKING, JR. RAOCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 151

viewpoint, and his simultaneous unwillingness to insist on that viewpoint when ese customs were invented or borrowed, or adopted "from their own early
pushed on questions of "origin," compromised his position. When Rivers ancestors," which "seems to me to be much the same thing." Whatever their
threatened to force him into a corner on an issue of conjectural history Brown origin, they must be "adapted to some need of the Andaman collective con-
backed off from the battle. ' science (to speak teleologically, and not meaning a conscious need)." Histori-
cal questions were no doubt interesting and important, but they did not "affect
the questions of causal relations in the present." As Durkheim argued, these
Survivals and Causal Relations in the Present had to do with how "the customs of a society" served "to maintain a certain
system of ideas and emotions which in its turn is what maintains the society
By the time the correspondence was resumed. in the summer of 1913, Brown in existence with its given structure and its given degree of cohesion." Draw-
seems to have resolved the ambiguities of his position. One can only specu- ing analogies to the study of language and examples from Andaman technol-
~ate as to the, catalyst. Perhaps it is to this period that we may date rhe read- ogy, Brown distinguished between "dynamical" and "statical" problems. Al-
mg ofR~ssell s mathematical philosophy, which several writers have suggested though the latter did not depend on the former, he was prepared to argue
was critical to Brown's development (cf. Singer 1973; Scanner 1968). It seems that "in many cases the dynamic (historical problems) must depend on the
mhocSch.kely,.however, that he went back to Durkheirn, and to the Rules of static (psychological) problems."
t e onologlcal Method-th
. e fifth c h aprer 0 f- which argues for an essentially With this letter, the separation of the two points of view was accomplished.
sync.hrontc ~pproach to the explanation of social facts (Durkheim 1895:89-124). The critical passages are those referring to "causal relations in the present"
Bur It may Simply be that he [i d h hi -- and "the needs of the Andaman collective conscience." The former rejected
if h' rea rae t at ISposition would be much stronger
e ~ut aside the diachronic framework in which he had previously been both the problem and the concept of diachronic causation; the latter redefined
operating.
the framework of psychological interpretation from that of individual motiva-
. Be th~t alsit may, the exchange opened on July 12, with Rivers comment- tion to that of thc functional needs of the whole culture. But there were still
- ond t east
109 chapters of The Andaman i,fa-"--- JIUt'n", W
h-IC h Brown h ad men- other issues to be dealt with, and it is significant that they came together
none as soon to be forw d d h in relation to the problem of "survivals"-which was a critical assumption ro
d' A ar e w en the previous exchange broke off the
P'h'''1 l.ng ugus~, and which by now were already in proof form. Brown's both the evolutionist and the Riversian historical approaches, and which
woe interpretation of And h
social v I" . aman mvt as an expression of their "system of Brown admitted would, if accepted, compromise his position.
a ues ran quite Count t h - R- Responding to an article on "Survival in Sociology" Rivers published in
that m th di -I d er 0 a r esrs Ivers had developed to the effect
y or man y ealr with th d - _ - October, Brown sent him the draft of an essay elaborating his view "of the
1912b) R' e rare an exceprional In native life (Rivers
. IVers nevertheless fou dB' methods to be adopted in the study of social institutions" (R-B 1913b). He
now he h - - _ d n rowns argument compelling, and it was
· '- w 0 rrururruze the dift erences be tween them. At the same time he began by rejecting Rivers' antithesis of the "psychological" and the "histori-
ca IIe d anennon to th e b '
call social - I h. co~tra~t etween "psychological" and "what I should cal" methods. Following McDougall (1905:1), Brown defined "psychology" as
ogrca or Istotlcal mr ." "the science of human behaviour" of which sociology was simply that branch
And I erpreranon, suggesting that the history of
aman cu ture might not b" h dealing with "those modes ofbehaviour that are determined in the individual
In recpo fu h e SO opeless" as Brown seemed to feel.
~ nse to rt er unp d by the society." Sociology in [Urn encompassed both static and dynamic (or
gOt "to tho b t "f A reserve comments, Brown granted he had not
"- 0 tom 0 ndam k' h- as Rivers would have it, "psychological" and "historical") problems. Assuming
from hic h an ms lp, and decided therefore to back off
<> argument t at it wa" ]]
he continu"d _ I s rea y a pre-classificatory system"-although that there were "only a limited number of ways in which a human society
... pnvate y to belie' H- can be constituted," social statics sought the laws governing "the causal rela-
battlefield of . I h' ve It was. avmg thus withdrawn from the
conJectura lStory h fi tions subsisting between different elements of the same social organisation."
self from issues f - _ R' ,e was now nally free to disentangle him-
a ongm Ivers had a I - - - Social dynamics dealt with "the causes that produce changes of social or-
out that th.. pparent V continued to press by pomnng
..re were CUstoms s"1 th ganisation, and therefore with the origins of social institutions." Where he
in the world T h- B Im\ ar to osc of the Andamanese elsewhere
. lOt IS rownnow' I and Rivers disagreed was on the order in which these two sets of problems
sorry to hea th I' I' SImp y responded, "l am afraid you will be
r at lee qUlte com~ bl - - d should be approached (R-B 1913b:3S-36).
decided the issu f " Otta e With thlS"-that is to say, he ha
e 0 ongln was no J h - In this context, Brown turned to the problem of survival, which Rivers
of view it was, n bl anger to t e poine, that from his pomt
onpro em . It d'd II
I not rea V matter whNher the Andaman- had defined as a custom "whose nature cannot be explained by its present
 152 GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 153

utility bur only thro h i h" ..

it" hnocenn-i ug Its past rsrory, Arguing that the notion of "uril- he could not proceed without having from Rivers an explicit definition of
y was et nocenrnc (or as he put it .. bi . j B social phenomena-and awaiting that, the manuscript broke off, in midpara-
calling the CUstoms coonecred .h h I su hJecnve, rown suggested that
"useless" d d d . Wit t e mot er's brother in the Torres Strait graph (R-B 1913b:45-46).~
end f
epen e on a pnor concept
. " p. Ion 0 ten
r "h fu damenral purpose or Rivers' answer was brief. Without apparently considering the implications
o SOCiety. roposmg that soc' r be rded" .. for his theoretical position, he "very largely" accepted Brown's comments on
librium or balance f ~ f ~e ~ rega as a condition of equi-
that its purpose waso"i[:~;s 0 co. esion a~d disr~ption," Brown suggested the issue of "urilirv." But he disagreed "absolutely" with his definirions of psy-
and that the "utilit " b n COntinued existence In a state of equilibrium," chology and of social phenomena, and therefore felt that "as regards the main
Y -or errer the "social fu . .. ( , I' , question," his position was "wholly untouched." Refusing to go into the mat-
tion was the way it Ib _..I' ncrron -0 any socra msnru-
, conm ured to this end He h ab'" ter by letter, he said that he planned to give a talk at Oxford the next summer
non of survival- "In '. . re, [ en, was an iecuoe cnre-
. any given Instance the h hesi h on "the relations between sociology and psychology," and that meanwhile
sttcunon is a survi 1 d ypot esis r at a custom or in-
va must epend on some h hesi h fu Brown might like-to "defer rewriting" the paper until he had a chance to read
that such a CUstom fulfil ( ypoc esis as to t e nction
tween such CUstoms I~ ~r on the .nat~re ~f the necessary connections be- Rivers' "little book on social organisation," which would appear shortly (R-B
an 1913b33-34),
in effect to say that u t e other msurunons of the society)" -which was
any argument about s . I. I Although Brown professed to find "hardly anything in it with which I do
hypothetical solution f bl urviveu must necessarl y rest on
s a pro ems of social ... I not agree," and to look forward "snll more eagerly" to Rivers' forthcoming
peal to "the mental d" .. h statics, r was nor enough to ap-
" rsposmon w ich we call '''C II' , History of Melane5ian Society (l914b), the appearance of Kimhip and Social Or"
tron what in fact had b conservartsm. a mg mtc ques-
n ganisation (l914a) did not so much resolve matters as make explicit the fact
anthropology for at I eh'r an unexamined methodological assumption of
east ty years Bro - -' h rhat the two were talking past one another. While in 1912 Brown had taken
needed explanation. ~\V, ,wn suggesteu t ar conservatism itself
. . we must kno h . h' . the stance of the empiricist appealing to his data against a priori assumprion,
vatlsm in general and h' w w at IS t e soc131 function of conser-
.lT w at IS the cause of ~h " f" ." now that he had finally achieved his own mature theorerical stance, he saw
d Illeren~ conditions~ (R-B 1913b:35_41) ~ e van8t10n 0 ItS mtenslty In
their roles reversed: whereas Rivers insisted that sociologists must confine rhem-
Pushmg his attack B .
cal" structure of arg , rowfn argued, on the basis of an analysis of rhe ulogi. selves Uta concrete or objective phenomena such as are capable of exact ob-
uments rom surviv I h h' servation," Brown insisted rhat this could only produce "empirical general-
present condition f. as, t at t elr use to reason from "the
o a SOCietyback t· ....d isations," never uexplanations,n and that social institutions were dependent
edge of the principb f 'I . 0 ItS pas~ epended on a general knowl-
SOCIa statics ,ce Sin . h ' 'I on fundamental laws of psychology, Brown felt thar he got along umuch bet-
know Iedge ualmo" 0 h. III t e present state of soclOloglC3 I
, ~cnot mgwask f h rer and ever so much more rapidly" when he had "a working hyporhesis of
and of the laws that I h. nown ate functions of social institutions
. regu ate t elr relat" h the fundamental nature of human sociery, such as I have now." But this hy-
survival were only of I "h Ions one to anot er," arguments from
(not based on survival h vauewenwh"d pothesis uwould be quite useless" unless he uworked out the psychological ex-
heave III ependent historical evidence
t planations" as he went along. The advantage of this uconscious psychological
short, the idea of sur. IYhPOd eses) as to the process of historical change,n In
Uti'I'Ity ror sociology; its main func-
. was as a foil. "I~Viva method" was that it protected one from unconsciously accepting the "unsci-
non . f a only. lim"ted I
. 'IS 0 extreme I . , entific" assumptions of "popular psychology,n or of "the associationist intel-
CUstomsin a SOCietyate real! . merest III SOCialstatics to determine which
lecrualist psychology of thirty years ago." Rivers' empiricism in fact concealed
In drawing his arm, Y surVIVals, if there be any suchn (R-B 19lJb:43-45).
'f ·o~ment h'f db ac k to the general ques- such assumptions, and therefore rhey could neither reach agreement "nor even
tlon 0 the psycholo" I together . ' Brown Site
Our kh eim's Ru/e5) h, d fi dglca explanation f 'I h properly argue with one another" about specific issues.
0 sOCIa p enomena, which (following
, e ne as urnod f h' , Shortly thereafter, Brown offered some final comments in the course of
mon to all or to a gre be es 0 t Illkmg, feeling and acting com-
at nurn r of th be f d remarks on manuscripts each man had wriuen for the journal Anthropo5 on
upon t h em by the soci . If e mem rs 0 a society and impose
, h ety Itse "[fRi Id the issue that more than any other had given focus to the anthropological
mig t agree on the" . vers wou accept that definition, they
h Id proper task of the . I discussion since 1900: the definition of totemism (Rivers 1914c; R-B 1914a).
e wau exclude think' SOCiaagist"; but Brown suspecred that
" Ing and feell ng In opposirion to Rivers' continuing insistence on defining totemism as a
processes they could be". ,on t h e groun d S that as "purely menta I
th . not directly b _..J" . d
at Since actions we d . 0 servcu. AgalOst this Brown argue
Id b . re etermIned by ,h h " , 4. The versiol1 of this artide-dmft published by Meyer FortC5 omits a p.1renthesi, il1serted
wou e Incomplete th dOd oug ts and feelmgs, any explanatlon
by Brown explJil1ing the reason fm its Ul1finished state (R·B 1913b:46),
at I nor take them into consideration. But he felt
 154 GEORGE W. SrOCKING, JR.
RADCLIFfE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 155
"form of social organisation," Brown proposed to cut through the empirical
and theoretical confusion surrounding the concept by using torernisrn to refer
only to a "special magico-religious relation between each social division" and
"some species of natural object." On this basis, he suggested rhar there were
"five different forms of roternism in Australia which may have originated en-
tirelv independently of one another," but between which there was "a close
relation of psychological dependence." Admitting that "his theoretical and
methodological bias" largely determined his choice of definicion, Brown still
insisted his was better, since it was more adaptable to historical problems than
Rivers' was to psychological problems, and because Rivers' in fact presupposed
a specific theory of "clan toternism," But in the end he appealed simply to
his 'preiudtces". "What makes me ding so much to my own is that I do so
strongly feel the necessity of dealing with many psychological problems be-
fore attempting to attack the historical problems."
In view of the fact that Rivers was for mosr of his career well-known as
a psychologist, and Radcliffe-Brown was for much of his known to Oppose
psychological interpretations, it seems more than a bit paradoxical that their
parting of theoretical ways should have ended on this note. One way of resolv-
ing the paradox is to place both men once again in relation to nineteenth-
century evolution, which (as Radcliffe-Brown was later fond of pointing out)
had a dual character. On the one hand, the basic problem of evolution was
one of historical reconstruction, broadly conceived, and causation was con-
ceived in diachronic terms. On the other, this historical reconstruction was
undertaken on the basis of a set of assumptions about the basic laws of hu-
man psychology, which was conceived in essentially individualistic, utilitarian,
and intellectualist terms. Up to a point, one can interpret the intellectual de-
velopment of Rivers and of Radcliffe-Brown as alternate responses to the cri- W. H. R. Rivers in his Cambridge study, 1919.Photograp h b YSarah Neill Chinnery (courtesy
sis in evolutionism in the conrexc of this basic duality. Rivers retained an his- of Sheila M. Waters).
torical orientation to the definition of problem and causation, but abandoned
..
commitment to evolutioOlsm. Fun hermore, on ceI.Rivers
h h. no longer stood in
0 rkheirman
(for the moment) the psycholDgical approach, rejecting the problem of "rno-
. 1 Ildi10m 111
his path, he CaSt off the psycho 1ogica ln w 1lC IS own ur ..., ,
rive,' because he was unable at this point to conceive it in other than intel-
lectualistic, individualistic terms (1916). In COntrast, Radcliffe-Brown rejected alternative was initially phrased. h 1 erasion dur-
the historical problem, but retained (foe the moment) the psychological The brie f definitiona 1···oppostnon 10 Anth TO pos was t eon.' y 0 N d bt
.
ingRivers'hfetim.ethatt he rwo rnen con fr onte d each other A 10 pnnr. ou
I· 1, r 0tri 1914
approach-but on the basis of a redefinition of psychological assumption. "Mo-
tive," construed in indiVidualistic, intellectualist terms, became 'function," con- this was due in part to the fact that Brown return
ed to usrra
B ' ems clear,
If) a er ,
strued in unconscious collective terms. ·1 11
remaining in the antipodes unn we a er e w ft th ar was over. ut It seei forced

But however apt, this formulation of their opposition has nonetheless a also that the POwer of his still-living mentor's person1 'flity mlay.have 1" n., not
somewhat fleeting situational character. Rivers was in (act shortly to turn again Brown's natural reticence to publis. h hiIS t h eoren tea otrnuh anons. db towas
adopt
. .
until after Rivers' death 10 early une J 1922 (h
w en
Brown a egun
) h h fi oily offered
to psychology, when in the COurse of his wartime work with shell-shocked
soldiers he discovered Freud, who seemed to promise another route out of his mother's maiden and elder b rot her' er S JillOdd]e name
cliff t at e been n" "The
. t f the rrrerences etw
the crisis (Rivers 1917). And Radcliffe-Brown did not in fact immediately aban- in prior a strong programmatic staremen 0 " (R B 1932) With Rivers

don diachronic problems entirely; nor did he ever abandon an underlying Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology.· 'b· 1 for Brown
no longer preem.pting the framewcr k 0 fd e fi"OItlO n , tr was pcsst e
 156
GEORGE W. SrocKlNG, Ja.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 157
to redefine their relati hl [airni
cized "scctcl .. hose lip., ~ aiming for himself the field of a now dehistori- trusting uses of the concept "function," he implied that Malinowski had turned
ogy c-w ost re ationship '0 ps.cho'-" h "' "
terms not dlssimil h' '""5)' e now In tact argued In from the strict Durkheimian path, while he had remained constant. Retro-
urn at to t ose Rivers had argued in 1916.
spectively, he felt that Malinowski's article on "Culture" for the EnC)'dopedia
of the Social Sciences (1931) marked a distinct break in his thought-the begin-
ning of a final phase in which it was dominated by the individualistic biola-
The Romantic and Classical Modes gizing functionalism ultimately systematized in the posthumous Scientific The-
in British Social Anthropology ory of Culture (1944).
Radcliffe.Brown was not the I . While this account does indeed describe the movement of Malinowski's
that helped c on y comnburor to the dehiseoricizing process anthropology, which at one point he spoke of as an attempt to reduce Durk-
to rorm modern B .. h . I
a diachronic '0 h'
a sync rome em h -
nus socra anthropology_ The same shift from
L- C I
heim to the terms of "behaviourisric psychology" (l935b:ll, 236), the histori-
of Bronislaw M I" ki h p asrs may uc 10 lowed in the early work cal process is somewhat more complex. Just as Radcliffe-Brown tended retro-
a mows I-w 0 in 1913 I r d '
essay on Survivals (8MPY: 191 a 50 ~oun z:ason [0 criticize ~iver~ spectively to rationalize the development of his own anthropology, so did he
cizing process was perha I 3 n.d.). ~r MallOowskl, however, the dehisrori- tend to view Malinowski's development more discontinuously than was ac-
a by-product of Ps ess a reflection of theoretical reconsideration than tually the case. Even before he went into the field, Malinowski had expressed
a new mode of ethnnar<> h' - . ~'f .a: '
recension 0(0 kher . _e.,up ic Inqulry_.-ur I Radclme-Browns serious reservations about Durkheimian theory; and the position he later ar-
ur elm provided h .
work of mode B"" h t e major portion of the theoretical ground- ticulated in the article on "culture" had in fact been developing from the first
rn ntis socialant hiM'" . time he encountered Freud in the context of his Tiobriand experiences (d.
wroughrcreation_myth rovided ropo ogy, ahl\()\l,'S1C1s ~1~-<OnsClously
tradition ref.
5, kl
DC mg
Pl98
3a).
the charter (or the modern British fieldwork Stocking 1984).
On the other hand, Radcliffe-Brawn's structural interests took some time
These contributions reflect h
two men whl h F" h d . t e respective intellectual temperaments of the to come sharply to the forefront of his own anthropology. That he spoke of
, c rrr escnbed' ~L' ~
m~ntic" and the "classical" mod In aesUl~t1c te~~.as~~n~n~ rhe ro- his early work as "psychology" was not merely a function of Rivers' preemp-
pnority Over sc,"on,"' . es_For Mahnowskl, Imaginative IOslght" had tion of "sociology" for diachronic inquiry. He had studied psychology with
'-
regularih' mean, '
I C generall
" "h
. 'f h "'~"
~anon, I t e lormal expression" of observt:U Rivers, and had evidently been influenced also by the Social Psychology of Wi 1-
'1
cial mold." Fo R d "a
IOrclng t ed
r a c hie-Brown
.. f ".
IVersltles 0 the human creamre into an artl -
h I _...I
ham McDougall (1908)-which in turn reflected the influence of the then highly
straint the not'"o
,
r~
no system" h d
' w 0. va. ucu pIlXISlon, proportlon, and re-
• • •

h
respected Alexander Shand, who between 1890 and 1914 had attempted to
full COntent of ph a pnorlty, sometimes "to the neglect of t e realize John Stuart Mill's long-neglected project for a science of "ethology"
enomenal real' .. I ~ (Shand 1914; Leary 1982). Shand's influence is in fact manifest in the early
postulatcs ofgTO '. Ity. n COntrast to Malinowski's need to test
up action In term
ways emphasized h ~r
f" d" "d
so In IVI ual action," Radcliffe-Brown a-
I work of both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Shand's conception of "sen-
t e [Ormal q I" . h timent" was integral to the "working hypothesis" in terms of which Radcliffe-
systems" (Firth 1951:480). ua Itles m erent in the StruCture of groups as
Brown interpreted the customs of The Andaman Islanders (1922:233~34); indeed
The anthropological
pel1lmenc-thei . consequences of these differences in intellectual tem- in its Andaman phase, his anthropology was a study of the social formation
"k"tnshlp algebra"
r respective
th . attitud. es towa,u-...l w h"at Malmowski sometimes
"II~" ca t:I..l of sentiments, and might appropriately be described as a "functional psychol-
. ,elr contrastm .. . "d I ogy of CUlture." It was only later that the social structural interests associated
anXiety and soci I" I g Interpretations of the relation of mdlvI ua
a ntua or the' d'a . n" with this Australian fieldwork came to the fore. And even as late as 1931,
-are well-known d' lr Ilierent conceptions of a S(X:ial"institutlO
,an needn tb h
1941). But if Firth' r .0 ere earsed here (cf. Parsons 1957; Homans when he first read Malinowski's article on "culture," he spoke of it as a "fine"
·
two Itneage elder s'. ormulatlon
ley d .1 epitomizes
" " the contrast between t he piece, and regularly assigned it in the course on "The Comparative Science
II S,ltlsasotrueth h d" d of Culture [sicl" that he continued to give throughout his stay at Chicago
a ybecamematter f" I att e Ifferencesberweenthemonlygra u-
so mtelectu I . (Paul 1934; Rosenfels 1932).
o fR adcliffe-Brow' h . a controversy, and that the later elaboration
ns t eoretlca!' . h" In short, the theoretical falling out between the two lineage elders was an
COnteXt. VIewpoint can only be understood in t IS
interactive rather than an asymmetrical process. Although implicit in their
After Malinowski had
aCCOunt of their in, II passed from the scene, Radcliffe-Brown offered an respective intellectual temperaments and in their respective responses to Durk-
e ectual reI' h" heim and Rivers, it also depended on the grodual development of certain
anOns Ip (R-B 1946). hxus.sing on their con-
 1

RAOCLIFFE- B ROWN ANO BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOCY /59

.h<me, 1ft ach -.,". 'houdu. and d.. __ '" .. 10m. Fun,,"-
(h~Pt'OCt'SI C JJl-It 110I NmpIy an aft -.,.. mcrOeauaJ realm. bur in w
c neeu ollhnr chanp"l lIhrn nUn,. lftIhfUoonaI stJiJC(lIm,
10
w hlCh '_nd 19 ........". .- ...... '-pm_ '" ,""omrol.
rt:5Ourt'ts and ~ntl

Supermen ni/ed ( m 60r (, r Functional Amhropol"iY

By the Mllfu-.c:...
fltnt' .m~ 1ft london I ilInthropollgr
~ ruFllth
'n 1910. !\ockl./f e. s.-.,. ""-" '0 ,-" 11 rm '"
1... Ahhoogh
brxh reen ...... 'n
10\1.'«1In 8ro'l,n',
e..... r.- '0
nd
cpa
1911 19/i. nd~Loh >I<i ouuaI/, foI
&tn.. ra _ ..... London hooI of EconooUcs
in 1913_ Ii CFtrrh 1'151). Bro.-n Iet:fftI, to ~~ sprnc has nnw: In Birmingham,
and the two did rtoe' _ru..lly tneu Until AutuN 1914 M dtC' Ausualian meft-
ings of the Bmtsh ~1Of\. Dr ..... IIUIW
Brown h.td pr.llued Malmo\l4"s
first tnoOOgraph (lqJ l) .... rnodd ollDnhcxr and an ~hdmmg argtl'
menr" again,t «he r1o'OIullQnary hypodtais oI-lI"Oup mJrnagt"-althoug!J Itt
~'as Cmlcal of the- t~l1nt'nt 01 "UN"",-n "u,,",up WUhool rUtn-nCt to (he
sYS{emof clans and l'lla"""lr fR.-B ,qNb). Nout~ ht $Ubstquencly
recalla:t that their 'cnilhy dJ.fiCUt8ont- .. rhtt tUM hadendrd in "fair/yrom"
pletea~ment" (I~" ""
~~ ~~
Both mon ..... on 'ho ... "h ..... I'oafic clun .. ll"dd 11•• 1. bu.' ./
d,,,,,. on'<lI«.u.' <00<"", bot "'n 'horn ....... "'" .0 h.. " ,.un pi",",;.
after the publicatIOn of th~r ''&-0 landmark I'IIonOpaptu of 1922. MahrJOll'SI
had ap"""'ndy """on '0 !\ockM .. 8"""" pn ng 110< I\ndaman ~_
.i'hough hOJma""nal" on • .."". ,h•• la, inrn h. J'OS"S"oo ...
" , hu t ~ry bloodyman and "'Oman' ~fka me
'the SOCiety, .1. _L_
uwnlCt f'f1S(ICCOn-
of
ow n
'nos, be .. ,h,,, viewpoonu (BM5C, R.B 192H;J~ IIhhough a "'~ ...
A""""uu ess had 00< yeo _hod h,m 'n Sou,h AI"",. RadcIdT .. Brown n •.•

thel k r- ...... nded· 'L_£-tion- }.lillm

-, ---,..u on a.imllar noteof' muruailmelleaualK.Kfll1llU1 . k Ex.
L

ow. .,. Bal...,. sa,d thongs ho wuhod ho hod 'ooudcd on hi>own boo c:,1~,
opo
~'''"ng ,h, h ,ha, M.hno..oki migh, Jom hom on ,I>< 0.", Town r~rn/
'. ~POnded
am '0 • 'bou,
quo.y .h ... , ...... d,/fusron"", of EJlioo Sm" ;nd
W'h/h P,,,y by ""ailing hOJd.ba •• with lli,....on 1913-14. Frobcnm' ,h
t e Americaru bodol "calapproa Bronislaw Malinowski, ca_ 1925 kounesy f Helena
0" ) Wayne Malinowsk a an d the
" Depanm~nt
were mare re-liable but the gltllt!ral md: <JgI hesis of Anthropology, london School of EconomIcs"
was a~ "unsound" as the "old com~ratl\-'t' method- of framing an hYJX>.cd nc~
SCOUting the w ld (, nJi ~l---: theevi e
h d- or Or co rmatory dara, and simply ,~ ...ng
t at ,d no, n, fBMPy, R-B/BM 11/6122) . .
Malinowski f . h- -diffusionlstS,
h' 0 CourksharedanantiP3thYIOthe_hehoht lC sh" rsl
......IS ChOPfkOfOne of Rivers' Works Includes thedoggerd "It gives ~ the slVt'-th"
JO t In of POOr D-. ......1 Elliot ml
"IVers / Being made a megalith / fur our loru
160 GEORGE W. STocKING, JR.
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 161

(BMSC, Rivers t924:174). But it is interesting that at this time both men still
entertained the possibility that distribution studies might cast light on the
history of culture. Radcliffe-Brown had in mind a complete study of the dis-
triburion of Australian cultural elements-although he insisted that any his-
torical hypothesis must be based also on a consideration of each element "in
relation to the cultural system in which it occurs" (BMPY: R-B/BM 11/6/22;
d. 8M 1922:232).
A year later, the note of mutual identification was again struck. Congratu-
lating Malinowski on his recent appointment at the london School of Eco-
nomics, Radcliffe-Brown commented on the fact that both suffered from re-
current respiratory illnesses-which in his own case made it likely that he would
spend most of his life in the antipodes, despite his longing for the amenities
of European civilization. And he was struck by a singular similarity in their
anthropological interests: Malinowski's essay on "The Problem of Meaning
in Primitive Language," (1923) recalled an unpublished draft on Andaman
languages in which he, too, had sketched a new linguistic method (d. R-B
1932:495-504). The rest of the letter, however, is in a retrospectively more
expected mode. His teaching was now "almost entirely from the sociological
point of view": "pouring out" the "accumulation of twelve years thinking," he
was giving his students "a theory of social structure, a theory of kinship, of
law, of religion, and a theory of art." Given five lives, he might write on them
all, but for the present he proposed to concentrate on Australian kinship and
toternisrn, and on African law (BMPL R-B/8M 5/22/23; d. Schepers n.d.).
When plans began to be developed about this time to establish a chair
at Sydney as the focus for anthropological work in Oceania, both Malinow-
ski and Radcliffe-Brown were obvious prospects. Malinowski, now on the way
to establishment at the intellectual center, felt that his primary commitment
was to the London School of Economics, and he wrote to Haddon (one of
the electors) that Radcliffe-Brown was "as alike in his outlook to me as is pos-
sible in such an unsettled science as ours" (BMPL: BMiACH n.d.). Radcliffe-
Brown's eventual selection (over A. M. Hocarr) provided the occasion for a
second face-to-face meeting, when both men were brought to the United States
in 1926 under the auspices of the Rockefeller philanthropies. Radcliffe-Brown
visited several American universities on his way to take up the Rockefeller-
funded chair in Sydney, and Malinowski conducted a survey of American
anthropology for the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (Stocking 1978c).
This was the year in which Malinowski published his functionalist manifesto
as the. article on "Anthropology" in the Encyclopedia Britannica (l926a); and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Sydney. Austr:llia, ca. 1930. Photograph by Sarah Neill Chinnery
Radch~e-Brown later recalled that, staying together at the Yale Club in New (counesy of Sheila M. Waters).
York CIty, they had disagreed over "the most convenient and profitable way
to u~e the word 'function' in social anthropology" (1946:39). Although this
was Indeed the issue on which later theoretical confrontation was to hinge,
 162 GEORGE W. SrocKI '0, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 163

contemporary documentary evidence does not yet convey a sharply focussed

sense of opposition.
In May of 1927. Malinowski apologized to Radcliffe-Brown for not having
answered some unpreserved communication: -8m sun::ly we supermen need
not stick to any convemions, and I alwavs feel mat my lowering spirit and
yours touch above the highest levels of microcosmic: nebulas and there gaze
in silence at one another." Pleased that Radcljff~Brown was "taking over- his
"best pupil," Raymond Finh, who would appreciate Radcliffe-Brown's ·poim
of view in theory," Malinowski suggested that he might also like to consider
Firth as lecturer (BMPl: 8M/R-B 5/11/27). ~Iying that he already had Firth
in mind as Successor, Radcliffe-Brown congratulated Malinowski on his re-
cent promotion to professor, and wondered if perhaps Malinowski might help
get him a job in Europe that would allow mort: time to wrtre (BMPY: R,BlBM
8/29127).

In the same letter, Radcliffe-Brown raised several points of theoretical differ-

ence suggested by his reading of the first half of So and Repression in Samgt
Sociel'y (927). Commenting on Malinowski's presentation of the Trobriands
as a social order based on ~mother-right," he insisted that all kinship was in-
herently bilateral. It was now thirty years since: Durkheim had distinguished
parent;! and coruanguinile (ef. Maybury-Lewis 1965), and in these terms the
Trobriand father and son were consanguineous kin, even if they failed to rec-
ognize the relationship. Beyond this, he felt that in general Malinowski had
conceded entirely too much to the Freudian viewpoint, 'Oting that he him-
self had read ev-erything the Freudians had written on the topic of mythology,
he insisted that it was valueless.
The first two essays on Sex and Repression had been Malinowski's conuibu-
tion. to the general upsurge of anthropological interest in psychoanalytic t~e-
ory In the early 192Os-an interest pioneered of course by Rivers (cc. Stocking
.1984).But when Ernest Jones rejected OUt of hand any attempt to revise F~ud.
Ian orthodoxy in the light of comparative ethnographic data, Malinowski had
COUnteredwith a sharply critical attack on Totem and Taboo, in which he drew
o~ Shand's concept of "senetmenr" to develop the idea of culture as creertog
a secondary environment~ that modified the instinctual endowment of man,
In retrospect, Malinowski's argument On these issues seems clearly an early
formula~on of his later psycho-biological functionalism 0927:204-8; d, 1944)· . 1932. Phorograp h b v Sarah Neill Chinnery
Raymond Firth, Sydney, Australia, (courtesy of

If Radcltffe-Brown in 1927 evinced no trace of his later criticism, it is perhaps Sheila M. Wm:ers),
because he was himself in this period still speaking of the "biological function~
of~Culture" in im . h ... , _..J h n beings
. posing t e common sentiments" that umrec uma
Into ~~ial groups (1930:269). Indeed, after reading the second half of Malin-
owsk! s book h b . f . obi In the
. ' e sent a ne note withdrawing all of hIS JectiOns,
end, Malinowski h a d granre d t h e Freudians no more t h an h e hirmse If \.\'ould
(BMP'!' R·B/BM 9/5/27).
164 GEORGE W. STocKING, Ja. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 165

The matter of bilaterality of kinship was subsequently pursued by Radcliffe. sionist rival William Perry-with whom he had got "chummy" lately, and who
Brown in the COntext of debate with Rivers' follov.<tt Brenda Seligman over with fieldwork experience might even become interested in the "tight" kind
the interpretation of the Ambrym data cclleceed by Bernard Deacon before of anthropology (BMPL: BM/R·B 3/25/29), Radcliffe-Brown responded that
he died of blackwater fever in 1927 (d. Langham 1981:200-243; Larcom 1983). he was leaving the selection of Powdermaker's site to E. P. Chinnery and Greg-
Radcliffe-Brown attributed Rivers' earlier difficultiQ with the Ambrym male- ory Bateson, that a year's research money was available for Richards, that
rial to his inability to allow for the coecseence of matrilineal and patrilineal Ian Hogbin would be coming to London for a year when he finished his On-
institutions-remarking in a footnote that even 50 -acute- a thinker as Mal- tong Java fieldwork, and that while there was a shortage of funds, he would
inowski had been similarly misled. Kinship-the reccgmdcn of genealogical see what he could do for Perry (BMPL: R-B/BM 7/9/29; d. Stocking 1982),
relations as the basis for the regulation of social relations-was always "nee- Despite some hints of the lineage segmentation yet to come, the 1920s ended
essarily bilateral." In COntrast, descent-the entrance of an individual into a with the leaders of functionalist anthropology still maintaining between them-
social group as the child of one of its m~mben-was alway$ necessarily 'uni- selves and to the world at large a theoretical and methodological united front.
l~tera~." t,f anthropologists would give up tbe old evolutionary (and the new Writing to Malinowski on the last day of the decade, Radcliffe-Brown recalled
diffueionlsr) attempt to classify whole societies as either "matrilineal" or "patti- his youthful decision to devote his life to "the scientific study of culture." The
~ineal:" and instead apply those terms to the speci6c institutions of descent, trouble with anthropology was its name, which by tradition included such
mherltance, succession, etc., they would think "much more dearly: In this studies as physical anthropology and prehistoric archeology-which he hoped
context, Radcliffe-Brown offered a general plea for a -functionalist" anthro- he would never again have to teach. He was now planning to leave Sydney
~logy, and (despite his foornore) pointed to Malinowski as its best exemplar in 1931 to get a job in America or, preferably, Europe. Despite his respiratory
m England (R-B 1926, 1929a. 1929b). problems, he was ready to try even Cambridge or Oxford, just as long as he
h Malinowski ~s of Course gratified. and early in 1929 responded with the did not have to teach courses on "The Races of Man." In this context, he
ope that Radchffe-Brown would indeed soon return to Europe, where there was much in favor of a scheme Malinowski had for establishing a "Colonial
was plenty of room for two upholders of the functionalist method (BMPl: Institute," and offered himself as the only man "in the British Empire who
BM/R-B 3/25/29)_ He did, however later respond in print to the issues that has been lecturing regularly on the principles of Native Administration," Once
Radcliffe-Brown had raisec, back in England, "you and I and anybody else who will help us" could join
'~_..J. '
10 a general treatment of what he ca 11~~'h
eu r elm· ~
passeonkinship"Th ' [ki in building up "the new sociology or anthropology that is needed" (BMPL:
hin n ,at Impasse would never have- arisen ·if the study 0 em-
Slptleshadbee
. . n carneted tIn r h e field along with the life history 0 fh't e m-
R-B/BM 1'2131/29),
dividual
bee- if terrni no Iogres,
' Iega 1 systems, tribal and household arrangemeo"
h a d een studied in
" process a f developmem and not merely as f xeo ~~-', pruu
Rivalry for Influence in the Rockefeller Foundation
"f'''h' Bu.t although he spoke of clan relationships as "one-sided distortions"
o r . e onginal pa renra I re1atlonship ' and promised subsequently to return to
h In fact, Radcliffe-Brown's return from the anthropological periphery, in the
t e ISSue,he seem'
SlOe Itect to have accepted the point about the um'IaternI'ley
o fd escem (1930'156 161) T'\ __ ' _ • _ lib<, context of competition for influence with major sources of institutional sup-
- , ' uesplte denslve comments about the vast go port at the center, was to lead to the first serious rifts in the united front for
tween the pseud h .
o-mat ematlcal treatment of the too-learned anthropo oglst
I '
an d t h e real
B facts of savage lie (151), he was in general quite lau atory of
I'" d functionalist anthropology,S Malinowski's "Colonial Institute" was part of a
R ad cI'd llle- rown' 1" developing plan to win major support for anthropological field research l~
. cr s app ICatlon of "the functional methoo.- Indeed, he seems
m enect to have b d d h the functionalist mode. Involved in competition with the diffusionists at Uni-
. a an one the whole problem to Radcliffe-Brown from t at versity College where Perry's seminars for a time attracted more students than
POInt on, leaving th h k' h~
e
to gat h er dust i h'
many c apter drafts of his promised book on InS Ip -' own Malinowski could not afford to re1y on 10
hIS 'd' Irect access to the field
ff'
By th" n IS 0 Ice files (cr. FUnes 1957- Stocking 198Ib). research'on which the "revolution in anthropology~ was to be grounded. With
'. IStlme ' the int erc hange 0f students previously• initiated by F'Itt h ""
b egmnmg to de I . . Rockefeller support in Oceania organized since 1926 under Radcliffe-Brown's
nar and R d [,:e °BPInto a regular traffic between Malinowski's London semi-
a Cine- rown's roo . S h he was
sending H p rns In ydney. Malinowski wrote t at
rna er a cng. Inquired about pos5.lblltles ror M
5. The argument in this section draws from a yet unpublished paper (Stocking 197&), where
deey R'"h d onense owder k 1 ' ' '1"
ar 5 , ande ven won d ered if something might be done for hiS ' df!u' funer documentation will be provided.
I
 166 GEORGE W. STocKING, JR.
aegis, Malinowski began to explore possibilities for African research. By 1929
he had joined forces with Dr. ]. H. Oldham, a leading figure in the recently
established International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, in a
campaign to win support for a "practical anthropology" oriented toward prob-
lems of African colonial development. Faced with a competing initiative from
the politically influential Rhodes House at Oxford, the African Institute for-
warded to the Rockefeller Foundation in March of 1930 a printed appeal for
£100,000 over a ten-year period.
That fall, while both these proposals were under consideration Radcliffe-
Brown suggested [Q the Foundation that they be included, along with the
renewal of the Sydney grant and a proposal he offered for research at Cape
Town, within a "concerted plan" for a series of "functional" studies of all
"surviving native peoples." He had been invited to serve as president of the
anthropology section at the centenary meeting of the British Association in
London, and he proposed to make his visit the occasion (or "doing all in my
power to bring about a world-wide cooperation in the systematic scientific
investigation of the backward cultures" (RA: R-B/M. Mason 11/17/30). Al-
though the Found~tion voted in April 1931 to make a $250,000 five-year grant
to the Afncan lnstiture, when Radcliffe-Brown stopped off in New York that
sum~er, ~undation officers were quite receptive to the idea of a 'general re-
consideration of their anthropological commitments.
In Septem.ber 1931 Radcliffe-Brown made his long-delayed reentrance upon
~he m.etropohtan anthropological scene. During the 19205, Malinowski, hold-
I~g high the banner of "functional anthropology," had been able to push
himself through a motley crow d 0f'agmg eva I'unorusts - .
retired . eth-
colonial
nographers, an~ ~iffusionist children of the sun to win rhe central place upon
t~e stage of British anthropology as writer, teacher, and chief informal ad-
visor to both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Colonial Office (d. Kuklick
1978). But at the moment w h en h'IS TOIe as Iea d!mg man of functionalist an-
thropology seemed gua ran t ee d , b ac k upon r h e stage from the colonial wings
came Radcliffe-Brown, as the featured speaker "On the Present State of An-
~hropo!ogiCal"Studies" at a major scientific gathering (R-B 1931a). Granted
It was only a cameo" ap d '
. . ~earance unng a stopover on his way to a new ap-
pomtmen~ at the UniverSIty of Chicago, the reports Malinowski received while
on sabbatical leave in the south f F h ,
b . o. ranee were sue as to cause second thoughts
a out cl~se collaboration with his fellow anthropological "superman."
. Radchffe-Brown
. was unde t ki dvi
r a 109 to a vise 01 dharn on the implementa-
tion of ~he Afncall Institute's "five year plan" of research. Worse yet, Oldham
was taklng seriously
. his a dvi
vice t h at rescarc h be carried on in strictly scientific'
nonevaluatlve terms , focuss' mg on eccnornn;. I'e He 'm its relation to social struc-
ture and "social cohesion" (BMPL: Oldham/BM 9/9/31) F h d'
, k·' . romt estan polOt
o fM a Imows I s more loosel· . fu ' , , sociological than himself, should of all people see the importance of keeplllg
y mtegratlve nctlonahsm, the study of economiC
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 167
life implied "the study of all the other essential aspects of culture," and theory
must be constantly cross-fertilized by practice: any investigation carried on
without regard to "whether certain changes would be ruinous to a society
or benefit it" would ncr help to forward the practical adrninistrarive goals by
which the grant had originally been justified (BMPL: BM/Oldham 9/12131).
Although a compromise was worked out by Malinowski's "lieutenants" Gor-
don Brown and Audrey Richards (BMPL:BM/Oldham 9/13131), they were
both concerned lest Radcliffe-Brown would somehow "snaffle" the money when
he arrived back in the United States (BMPL: Richards/BM [9124/31]).
The situation was further complicated because Radcliffe-Brown's actual
presence in London was having some influence on certain members of the
Malinowskian circle-notably, Evans-Pritchard. Two years previously, Evans-
Pritchard had written to Malinowski suggesting a correlation between his field-
work experience and his theoretical orientation: "no fieldwork/Durkheim's
views"; "limited fieldwork/Radcliffe-Brown's views"; "exhaustive fieldwork/
Malinowski's views" -which Malinowski had blue pencilled to indicate only
a uvery short distance" from "God's view" (BMPL: E-P/BM 11/25128). Now,
however, in the context of personal friction with Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard
was moving back toward Radcliffe-Brown. Meyer Fortes spoke of his "particu-
larly vivid recollection" of the evening in Evans-Prichard's "sumptuous Blooms-
bury flat" when Radcliffe-Brown, "with characteristic self-assurance," gave "a
whole lecture on lineage systems, ending with the recommendation to look
up Gifford on this subject" (Fortes 1978:2,6-7; cf. BLUA: R-B/E. W. Gifford
correspondence 1922-23). As perceived by Malinowski's lieutenants at the
time, the encounter portended "possibilities of yet future str-ife!" (BMPL:
Richards/BM [9/24/31]; cf. BMPY: E. Clarke/8M 9124/31).
Such fears must have seemed confirmed when Radcliffe-Brown wrote to
Malinowski suggesting that the School of Oriental Studies, which at this point
also had an application before the Rockefeller Foundation for massive sup-
POrt, was the logical center in England for the future development of anthro-
pology (BMPL: R-B/BM 9/27131). Pursuing the matter in a letter from <=:hl-
cago, he asked Malinowski's cooperation in winning from the Foundanon
£50000 a year for his worldwide ethnographic salvage plan (BMPL: R-B/BM
n,d.). Malinowski forwarded the correspondence to Oldham and to his c~l-
Ieague Seligman at the London S c h 00 I 0f Economles . w ith comments of dire
foreboding: if "Radcliffe-Brown got into England, it would be a damn bad
job for our [African] Institute," and would "probably mean that our depart-
ment at the School would have to be scrapped" (BMPL: BM/Oldham 12/20/31;
BM/Seligman 12115/31). .. .. He drafted
Toward Radcliffe-Brown Malinowski adopted a delaying pohcy.
. not send a letter suggcsnng
but did '. that Radeh off e- Brown, wh a was even more
.
T
168 GEORGE W. STocKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 169

anthropology in a socra . Iscience

" context at the 1..0 d deriving theoretical differences began to come to the fore. Malinowski by this
(BMPL: BM/R-B 12115/31) N did h . n on School of Economics
0t time had second thoughts about the advantages of interchanging students.
Brown wrote early in 1932 '11 f' hi e quickly answer the letter Radcliffe-
te mg 0 15efforts to 0 . A " Although at one point he was willing to have Meyer Fortes go to Chicago
pologists in Support of rh .. " . h! rgamze mencan anrhro-
'- varus mg cultures" h d for advanced study, he decided that Fortes had better stay in London (BMPL
ing the School of Oriental Stud" he si sc erne, an once more push-
res as t e Single best l . 8M/Oldham 317/32); thenceforth, all the African Institute's Rockefeller fel-
be tween all British anth ropo I'ogrsts and a simi! .
A
center lor cooperation
. lows were pushed in the same direction. It was also at about this time that
would emerge at Yale E h"" h ar mencan center he expected
. mp aSlZlng t e delica f ch . Malinowski began to take to himself the credit for founding the "Functionalist
gested that the only alre . cy 0 r e negonations, he sug-
rnanve to a plan that all' E I d School of Anthropology," although in a characteristically joking manner: it
was one centered in the U . d S In ng an could agree on
ki rure rates and that h h d h was a title he had "bestowed by myself, in a way on myself, and to a large
S 1 Soon in order to decid hi h • e a to ear from Maiinow-
extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility" (R-B 1946:39).
It was not until April w~ W hie h t~ work for (BMPL; R-BlBM 1/30/32).
In 1934 it was he rather than Radcliffe-Brown who first publicly threw down
ing in the Rockefeller Fou'nd e~ e ha a better sense of how winds were blow-
. anon t at Mali k· Ii all the theoretical gauntlet by insisting strenuously on a fundamental difference
, time, Malinowski's influen
grant to the School of 0 ;
ce a
h d be
en e facr
nows I n y responded. By that
. defin!
I S do _ c or In re e nlng a scaled-down
between their points of view in his introduction to Ian Hogbin's Law and
I nenra
competitive to the African I "
tu res In t I
(BMP erms camp emenrary rather than
Order in Polynesia. Offering an extended critique of Radcliffe-Brown's article
h nsnruce Y: BM/S' E 0 on "Primitive Law" in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (R-B 1933)-which
t ermore, the Foundation h d d id d' If.. Ross 2114/33). Fur- he took as an implied criticism of his own Crime and Custom {1926b)-Malinow-
- a eCI e to cond f
ca l Institutions throughout the w ld be uc~ a survey 0 anthropclogi-
ski appealed to his article on "Culture" (1931) as the basis for a "functional
to the "vanishing Cultures" h 0'1 .fore coming to a decision in regard
sc erne. n thiS Conte R d I"f! B ' theory of custom" that would start from the "living, palpitating flesh and blood
ue d arguments for the S h I f On xr, a c I e- rowns contin-
c 00 0 nenral Stud' organism of man which remains somewhere at the heart of every institution."
am h ropology-which he would b .. les as a cemer for "functional"
Although he suggested that the "only point of theoretical dissension between
found (BMPL: R-B/BM 5/25/32) e Willing to direct if no one else could be
Professor Radcliffe-Brown and myself, and the only respect in which the
sume d a cooperative stant H -were less threat" enmg, an d M a I"mowskL" re-
o . e. e even suggest d h h Durkheimian conception of primitive society has to be supplemenred" was
Situation was to "get peopl I"k e t at t e real key to the English
" eel eyourselforRa dF" h the "tendency to ignore completely the individual and eliminate the biologi-
In ambridge and 0 ~ d" . ymon In to occupy the chairs
h x or , proposing tharrh d' h cal element from the functional analysis of culture," he made it clear that
e came to lecture in the U . d S ey 15[USS t e whole maner when
this tendency "must in my opinion be overcome" {l934:xxxiii, xxxviii).
by this time Radcliffe-Bra nth" d dtat~s (BMPL: BM/R-S 812l/32)-although
h " wn a eClded hesh Id " Radcliffe-Brawn's nlther acerbic response disclaimed association with "the
so t at our mode of think; ~ I ou stay In the United States
,ng wou d help Id h figment of an automatically law-abiding native," and suggested that the varie-
sa Ivage scheme (BMPL. R B/BM 9 rna t e worldwide ethnographic
gated nature of social sanctions was an "elementary truth" that required the
finally met again in Ch·· - . 11/32, 10/22/32). However when the two
f 0 lcago In April 1933 h ' construction of strawmen-opponenrs so that it courd be "claimed as a discov-
~om which it never recovered After .' t at plan had suffered setbacks
ery made by him in the Trobriand Islands." Denying that he ignored the in-
ell'S, the Rockefeller Found .' ... a drastiC reevaluation of its funding poli-
f h
o researc In anthrapolog
0 anon 100tiated a
h' h
'
years moratorium on all funding
dividual and eliminated the biological in the functional analysis of culture,
he suggested that'their really important differences were in "the uses of words."
drawal from existing com ~,w IC .was in fact followed by a phased with-
mltmenrs In the field. The "slow and laborious process of establishing a scientific terminology" in
the social sciences required exact definitions that had the same sense in all
societies and did not conflict with current usage. So far as he could tell "with-
The .O~enin~ of Theoretical Fissures out the aid of a definition" it seemed that Malinowski meant by "law" any
In unctlOnal Anthropology "socially sanctioned rule of'behaviour." lfhe would only stick to that meaning
in his writings, "he would find that not only do I not disagree with him, but
. ISSues 0 f lllstitutional
Although the' " influ neither does anyone else, since the greater part of his statements are common-
tween Maltnowski and Rad I"f! B .ence that exacerbated relations be-
. C! e- rownl h places of social science, only made to appear novel and profound by a novel
a time into the background h n t e early 1930s thus receded for
continued to affect their rel;ti~:s~nse of .O~~sition they had engendered and obscure use of words" (1935a).
p, and It IS In this COntext that their un- Obviously chagrined, Malinowski ironically pled guilty to creating a straw
 .... it ,

170 GEORGE W. STocKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY m

ma.n by having described Radcliffe-Brown as one of social anthm I 's "r merely as the highlighting of tendencies present in his work from the begin-
rericallv most acute thinkers" P .. full d po ogy heo- ning, as he left the Andaman materials behind and became more and more
where he pref d f h' rorrusmg y to ocumem his criticism else-
truism' b . ertC mht e moment to defend himself against charges of involved in problems of Australian social structure-a view we may assume
y notmg t hat w en he had ad ed hi ~ h he himself would have taken, insofar as he acknowledged change in his in-
ticns" before he we h Ti bn vane IS t eory of primitive sane-
. nr to r e ro rtands, authorities h E S Hid tellectual viewpoint. But the changes also reflect the oppositional contexts
had rejected it Like R d I'ft B sue as . . art an in which he found himself: not only his incipient opposition to Malinowski,
ences between'thom .. a C I e' rown, ~owever. he srill minimized the differ-
... ,ltwasonyregard
l .. - I but also his debates in the 1920s with the diffusionist heirs to Rivers' study
he had' d" dt mg primitive aw and economics that
'. venture LSagreement on certain speci fi cpoincs"(193')
.. . 10 of kinship, and later with American social scientists, who sometimes accom-
ful Clrcumscn - f diff ...a . at care- modated to the functionalist revolution by reducing functionalism to the psy-
inowski came~:o~h~ I ~renAceseems still to have been manifest when Mal·
!Cago In pril 1935 and srud ---' C I chological inregrarionalisr view of culture that had emerged in this period in
bate with Radcliffe-B Al h ' ents arranged a rorrna de-
rown. tough a "blood" f . American anthropology (Stocking 1976a).
expected the chairm H Id Lycan ronrancn was apparently In this context, some of the changes do seem to some extent to be simply
, an, am asswell d "bed " -I
Malinowski is said to h d' escn It as a ave fest" -[0 which
renamings-as when in lieu of extensive rewriting, Radcliffe-Brown proposed
ave respon ed: "Th fu " f Id
(McAllister 1978). . e ncnon a a age is tolerance"
that the word "sociology" be used in the second edition of The Andaman Is-
Privately, too, relations between the . . landers where the word "psychology" had appeared in the first (CUPA R-B/
was in fact to plav a I' I' . m remamed cordial, and Malinowski
roe In reauztng R d nr. B' - Roberts 9/14/32). But in addition to this terminological suppression of cer-
career with a major Engli he. a c I e- rowns hope of capping his tain conceptual motifs-which might not be a trivial matter for someone who
attempt to enlarge rhe i . .
IS professorial chai W' h h "I
r. It t e rat ure 0 is rival's
fh '
e mstltutlonal framework" hi h Rock came to weigh so heavily the problem of precise terminology in the social
was dispensed and th d I" t: m w IC efeller support sciences-there is.evidence of a certain receptivity ro new influences as welL
, e ec mmg rcrtunes of th d'ff " I
versity College Mali k' e I uSlomst enc ave ar Uni- The net result of all this was that by 1937, Radcliffe-Brown's anthropology
, nows I was left in . ,
thropology. The first d' a very strong po51t1on in British an-
aca emlC generation d could no longer appropriately be described as a "functionalist psychology of
M arett, and Seligman wa' represente by Rivers, Haddon,
' h
Sk I ad achieved a Brit" h
s passmg and amon
C ~
h" If '
g t elr 0 spnng only Mahnow-
' culture."
IS prOlessonal chao Wh " The matter goes perhaps somewhat deeper than the development noted
his opinion was very I'k I Ir. en It came to filling such chairs,
d'd ley to carry weight D \.. h" by Meyer Fortes, who emphasized a vacillation (eventually resolved in favor
I ate for the chair at 0 ~ d h . ec mmg lmself to be a can- of the latter) between a Durkheimian "functionalist" and a more strictly Ustruc-
X
ing to his "genius" at org ~r., deproposed Radcliffe-Brown instead, testify-
BM anltlng epartment . ShAn turalist" approach-the one seeing the systemic character of social institutions
( . PL: BM/R. Coupland 7/6/36) s m out rica and Australia in "external" terms as an adaptation to particular environments, the other
disappointment that th" L _ . Although one of the electors expressed
, ey must De COntent w'th d bes • seeing it in "internal" or Ugenotypical" terms as the reflection of particular fac-
was Indeed chosen-al h h I secon - t, Radcliffe-Brown tors inherent in each system (Fortes 1969a:45). However, Radcliffe-Brown's early
BM t oug apparemly b I
( PL: RC/BM 7/31136' E . y a C osc vote over Evans-Pritchard
' vans-Pmchard 1973) . Later that year Radcliffe- involvement in the Udyadic paradigm" and the reflections of "extensionist" as-
Brown wrote Malinow k" ( sumption in his paper on ''The Marher's Brother in South Africa" (1924) were,
"0 B s I a nore now in th . c '

pans
I
ear TOnia"and signed"R
forwar d to a cominuin
r
ror Oxford anrhro
I ex
") h '.
t anktng
"
g Cosc assoClanon and' d'
I h ,In
e more Imormal 19305, addressed
Mal' ki' h'
Inows Tor ISeffortS,looking
,
Icatlng that in formulating
• at the time, more than simply intellectual "survivals"; the extant notes from
his Cape Town lectures indicate that he did indeed see social organization
based on kinship as an extension ourward of the principles of behavior gov-
R-B/BM 12/10/36). po ogy, e would first seek Malinowski's advice (BMPL:
erning the various dyadic units in the nuclear family (Schapera n.d.). It would
seem to be in the context of his movement away from Rivers, his rejection of
Freud, his increasing differentiation from Malinowski-who assailed "kinship
TowardaNt aura IS' clence of SOClety
' algebra" from an ontogenetic, extensionist perspective-and not merely as an
internal development governed by the requirements of his Australian data,
By.the ti~e he returned to England' 19 or the logic of his thought, that he dropped his extensionis( vocabulary for
retleal otlentation had d m 37, however, Radcliffe-Brown's thco-
£ocus h'ISd'Ifferences withunM ergone change that of "structural principle" by the time he published "The Social Organisation
I' k' Stath b rought more sharply inw
a mows I" Nod ou b t t h e matter may be regarded of Australian Tribes" (193Ib; d. Evans-Pritchard 1929; Needham 1962:30-37).
 ........ iF

112 GEORGE W. SrocKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 173

hei And asfuFortes'

. argume
_ nt iIn f:act suggests, the movement from a more Durk- institutional framework, it is not surprising that intellectual controversy be-
ermran nctionalism which was sdll I" d tween the two quickly flared up again.
dress of 1931
turalism" of ~~~ t
e
ater
' . I. a tve an well in the centenary ad-
m;9"30scharactenstlcally Radcliffe-Brownian "social srruc-
, seems to have taken pi duri h' Chi
years It seems lik I h . ace urlOg IS rrago
. ley t at It was there in the h G " From "Pure" to "Hyphenated" Functionalism
tellectual milieu of Chi .' somew at more ermamc m-
S hI' tcago sociology and the close proximity of the Law
H~n~y ~h~t ~adch.ffe-.Brown first felt the direct inrellecrual influence of Sir In January 1938, Radcliffe-Brown attacked a book for which Malinowski had
th b . arne£.
m a slgnificanr wa y. M'arne ,s concept of "corporancn" provided written a laudatory preface, calling it "another of those monuments of mud-
e asts lor a view of rh . divid I' died thinking that are occasionally but still toO frequently erected in the name
1935b'37)' e m IVI ua m more clearly structural terms (RB
~semi~en't~tne ~suspe~ts ~hat it is in this context that his emphasis shifted from of anthropology" (1938). Malinowski indicated that he was drafting a reply
o sanction as the pi'
while the exact timin
r.
f h . r mary rem orcem~m of social cohesion. And "all in the same Blood and Thunder manner in which we conduct our printed
pbv is perhaps a g.o t e mfluences of Russelltan mathematical philoso- correspondence," and that this time he was going to "make a real villain" of
Adler the Arist ~~t ISS~~,it seems likely that his exchanges with Mortimer Radcliffe-Brown (BMPL: BM/R-B 1/29/38), Instead, however, he proposed
(through a third party, in the manner of a duel) that they hold a public discus-
refug: in the La: e~:~:'ll ~:pher for ~ho~ President Hutchins had found
1968; Stocking 1979). ' ghrened Its salience (cf. Singer 1973; Stanner sion of the issues between them, As challenged party, Radcliffe-Brown chose
the topic "the use of the concept 'function' in sociology"; and at Malinowski's
It was, in any case, Mortime Adl ' '. suggestion, he opened the discussion on June 17, 1938, at Le Play House with
the Social Science 0- ,. , r. er s suggesuon-m a Dean's Seminar in
ivrsron, In which rh ..... both .. _.J h I a formal statement of his position (BMPL H. Clark/BM 4/22/38; BM/HC
was the only hu ' hi -, parncsparecr-« at psycho ogy
man sCience w ich tl 5/5/38), Although its substance survives only in Radcliffe-Brawn's typed sum-
elaborate his own rh . I' .apparen y provoked Radcliffe-Brown to
eorenca views En a philo h' I h < mary of the thirteen propositions he would defend and in extensive notes
seminar of 1937, Althou h he' sop lea COntext in is rarnous
g Malinowski prepared for his rejoinder, it seems clear that this time the out-
"SOCialCooptation" by h h i dc~~tlnued to be interested in the processes of
w IC In ividual behavl
standardized with' . , avtor, r h oug h r, and emotion were come was not a "love-Fest."
lo a given SOCialgro h Radcliffe-Brown began by arguing that cooperative work in science de-
that there was ~o I h . up, e was now at some pains to argue
n y one t eoretlcal nat I' f - ' pended on acceptance of a common terminology, which made it ~essential
was ~in no sense~ a psychol (193. ura science 0 soclety,~ and that It
to give precise unambiguous definitions of all technical terms." In scientific
the analytic utility of Oogykh' ~.110). And although he continued to assert
a ur elmlan c . ffu usage, the term function had tWOprecise bur distinct meanings: physiological
necessary-after having d b d A . onceptlon 0 netion, he now felt it
_ e ate mencan anth I' h bo h function referred to the contribution an organ made "by its activity to the
In person and in print-t . . ropo ogISts on t e concept t
"r 0 mSlst that he had ~ I'd" ' persistence of the organic structure"; mathematical function, to expressions
runctionalist" (R-B 1935 ,394. never c alme the appellatlon
in which the substitution of a specific value for a variable term would give
parently at the urging of~;s Chi:~ 1949; Stocking 1978b). Furthermore-ap-
a value for the expression as a whole. By a process of degradation, each sci-
hIs persistence in talking of a ~C go srud~nt Fn:d Eggan, who suggested that
entific usage had in popular speech a corresponding ~imprecise" meani~g:_ on~
scured the difference b h.omparatlve SCience of Culture~ simply ob-
s etween 1m and A' I equivalent to ~activity" or ~effect"; the other, to "any relation of covanatlon.
h e now insisted that th I mencan cu tural anthropologists-
erecoudben ~. f Radcliffe-Brown proposed to use the term "social function" in a sense analo-
no bounded phenom I' 0 SCience 0 culture,~ because there was
ena entity to which I gous to the scientific conception of physiological function, as the contribu-
t h at t h e system of m' d cu ture corresponded in the way
In was Contained - h' h ' tion any usage or belief made ~to the persistence of the total complex of soci~1
f
o society was Cont~,'n"d 'h' Wit lo t e human body and the system
fa ... Wit mat . 'II 00 reactions [sic-relations!] which constitute the social structure of that SOCI-
c. Eggan 1971; Tax 1978) erntona y unded community (1937:106-7;
ety." Appealing to Hsun Tze, Monresquieu, Saint-Simon, and Ourkheim, he
Having completed th I' made a point of "deprecating" the recent usage referring to "any and every
la Brown was
R a d Clue- e bongrefinementofh' IS ~narura I' science of socIety,
'.
' 'd f" " d" tpo,,·
b f I I now fOught for th fi . . re IaClon of interdependence," or simply to the I ea 0 use an pu .
e air y c osc permanent I ' e rst tlme lOto what promised to
"covo Iutlon
. in anthro I re "(J'
atlonship with h'IS Iong-tlme
'I co laborator in t h e
. d - po ogy arVle 1964) G' ' . 'd R d '" B wn is ba>ed primarily
pIe an mdependent d . . Iven the fact that he now occu- 6. ThIs aCCOuntof the debate between Malmowskl an a CULe·ro
an potentially com .. . . on materials preserved in BMPY, Series II, Box 12, folder 34.
petltlVe poSition in the same general
.. ...... «

II
I
174 W
GEORGE STocKlNO, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISHSOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 175

Responding in a "semi-serious semi . I ... constituted out of the undifferentiated experience of the field observer, it was
as the "humble craftsman" f fun . I-l~u ar vern, Malinowski cast himself
caped "High Priest" exo n . ~ dncnonahsm. against Radcliffe-Brown's black- contained within a circuit that began and ended in the behavior of living
rcising emons with bl k . c human beings he had experienced in the field.
both of them were fun n I'. ac magic formuli. In truth
. c lona ISts With mino di . . ' The same empiricist heritage was manifest in Radcliffe-Brawn's insistence
m the "scientific analysis f \ . r rvergencres, shanng a belief
. ~ a actua reahty" as ~_..1 • that social (in contrast to cultural) systems were "real," "concrete" phenomena
gins or history' both of th opposed to speculation on on-
' em were committed h h'" (1940a:190; d. Tax er al., eds. 1953:153). However, converted earlv on to Durk-
a f CUltural process". both . to r e searc lor general laws
,were conVinced th "h . heim and touched at some point by the philosophical notions of Whitehead
I.w~re] one integral subject of stud ." Th at uman SOCiety a~d culture
and Russell, Radcliffe-Brown insisted on the methodological necessity of ab-
Insisted on embellishing hi c. y .. e trouble was that Radchffe-Brown
" b IS line empirical wo k . h " " stracting typical relationships of structure from the phenomenal reality in which
ver alar scholastic" def "" H r Wit a Window dressing" of
ninons. e spoke f· 'f they were embedded, and of distinguishing between different kinds of abstrac-
one, whereas the essenra f " ifi d 0 science as I all science were
. a SClentl c efi .. h tion from reality. And for him, abstraction moved always away from observa-
d erived from the reality a . I . muon was r at concepts should be
tion toward the formulation of general social laws. From this point of view,
Ridiculing the derivan pafrttc~ ar science studies empirically.
Ion 0 SOCiological b the most revealing passage of the debate is perhaps a marginal annotation
ogy, Malinowski suggest d h concepts y analogy from physiol-
. e t ere was a sense . hi h " Malinowski offered to the tenth point of Radcliffe-Brown's outline. There,
an organism with MG 1M "0. in w rc the debate Itself was
"\.' orns Insbe 1)" h dR- Radcliffe-Brown had suggested that "the social function of a usage or belief
Its rver, and the audie . be rg. Its ea. -B Its brain, he himself
.. , nee us wels B h . is to be discovered by examining its effects." While these were in the first in-
no science can live perm I . ur w arever their short-run utility,
'" anent yon anal . ». d h - stance effects upon individuals, it was "only the effects upon the social rela-
With the collective soul") h d I . ogIes. an t e organic analogy (along
tions of the individual with other individuals that constitute the social func-
Deriding Radcliffe-Brown' "a ~ng .sInce been found wanting in sociology.
for a "d"lcttonaryofho sh puntarusm tion," To which Malinowski had commented in the margin, "To me the dis-
mo " , of p flm , preclSlon.- - " polishing words
" d" p ones, Malmo k" . ed tinction is not relevant."
qUire turning to facts add I' ws I tnSISt that true precision re-
The relevance of the distinction was not, however, so easily denied. Each
bedrock reality." Fo h' n h eve o.plng your concepts always in touch with
h rim, t at reality w \ d - man returned to it in print during the following year. In an article on "The
s own that culture was" as revea e 10 fieldwork, which had
_ . , nor a scrap-heap" " _ Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis" published while he was
Slstmg organism" b '. ' not an evolVing or soilless a 'pet-
, ut an actlve Int ti d on sabbatical leave in the United States, Malinowski made a point of distin-
In this Context M I" k'. egrn ve, a aptive. and instrumental proc""-
Rd' ' a tnows -I defiantl b guishing "plain and pure" from "hyphenated" functionalism, insisting at some
a cliffe-Brown had co d d . y em raced the looseness of usage y
n length on the priority of the biological individual "both in social the"or an~,
four different levels of m e~ne£. argUIng that fieldwork had in fact revealed
"h R eanIng lor the co fu in the reality of cultural life" (1939:243). And in his Frazer Lecture on Taboo,
WIt adcliffe-Brown's fo ncept nction. correlating roughly
"f \' ur usages: use a d ·1' Radcliffe-Brown attacked Malinowski's derivation of magic from individual
1 you lke, Co-variation") th . f: . n Uti Ity, mutual dependence ("or
psychological need, arguing that ritual could as well cause as alleviate anxi-
man organism," and the 'satefsatl~ actlo n of "the biological needs of the hu-
tIves. "All' thIngs considered IShaction f ety, and insisting at some length on the social function (as opposed to the
d'lI 0 "d enve . d needs ""or cultural impera-
much", I·f In . Radcliffe-Brown',t de fiIllerence bet psychological effects) of ritual activity (R-B 1939). Although the argument was
. . ween t h em was really "not very
similar in its essentials to that advanced in The Andaman Islanders, it is worth
or "p" urpose and replaced" s . e nmon one g\ osse d "contnbution"
- as "use~ , [ ". ts" In a sense
th' persistence" by'" I noting that there was no longer any relerence to senttmen . '
at perSistence was "a mo I' Integra working" (on the grounds
Radcliffe-Brown's article the following year "On Joking Relationships" carried
and blood human beings rta ts~ue"~.All that Malinowski did was add "flesh y
S the argument one step further, by showing that what seemed .manifestl to
This "small" differen,e 0 t e h adow of 'purely social system ,,,
Id ~pera . be individual "psychological" phenomena were in fact expreSSIOns of strUC-
wou allow. Although the ps more consequential than Malinowski
h ycameb" tural relationship (1940b). .
s ared the bias toward conc ~ It In rather different ways, both men
the B .. h rete expenence h . Apparently, this exchange marks the last direct expression of theIr own
nns anthropological t d" t at IScommonly associated with
joking relationship. Caught in the United States by the outbreak of Euro-
ski, this concretism expresse;.m~t (cf. Lombard 197Z:1l3). With Malinow-
vation. Although for him ab Itse. at a level closer to that of actual obser- pean war, Malinowski died there in 1942, leaving Radcliffe-Brown alone as
stractlon enter e d t h e process by which data were the surviving resident elder of British social anthropology.
 176 GEORGE W. STocIUN'G., la. RADCLiFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 177

The Transition' m Person al, Institutional did not enter his charmed intellectual circle, or who were pushed outside of
and Disciplinary Perspecrive ' it, found much to criticize in Radcliffe-Brawn's somewhat mannered and con-
descending Edwardian style; bur with one notable exception, those who en-
As Audrey Richards was to note the - tered it did not find it necessary to make a "break" with him (Evans-Pritchard
a personal one" (1957-27)- nd' reacnon against Malinowski was-panly
WIt
, h t h e amhropolntri . a• ed even an ou UJuer.s "..1_, Iimired
- personal conracr 1973),
e
cgtsts tram beew h Their failure to do so, however, may reflect not only differences in the dy-
anecdote. Without reduct
mg ISSues method
me
cf r eowars offers pknry of confirming
nd h namics of personal interaction, but also the way these articulated with the
status, one can scarcely ru fro h. a meorv to epiphenomenal evolving institutional structure of British anthropology. By the time Radcliffe-
aCCOUnt without some
rn m rne n
chi y personal materials of the present
I Comment on this of h .. Brown returned to England in 1937, these "breaks" with Malinowski had al-
n modes appropriate to rh '. II especr t e cransmoa. ready taken place; and even if interpersonal dynamics had made repetition
Radcliffe-Brown were both ',nde.lr'dlnle._et:tual temperaments, MaJinowski and more likely, the external institutional context made it less necessary. The ex-
ti d IVI uats who '_..1
Ion an repulsion. Although he' kl Insphal ~rong feelings of aurae- asperating dependence enforced by the career-market of the depression was
man, and enjoyed OC......~; I L~ ngly spokr of himself as a Polish noble- beginning to come to an end. With the phasing out of Rockefeller anthropol-
h
t e upper classes M I'
casiona weekeods
. h
att ecountryhornesoffriendsamong
, h ' a mowskl was an h ogy in 1937, Malinowski's patronage was cuttailed, and already in 1938 an-
In c e penumbra of an rei eart y man, who enveloped srudents thropological work outside his institutional orbit had begun to open up slightly,
somewhat as he came to ;eet~.t ego: ~lthough hIS style may have changed with the founding of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and a small expansion
to have been provocative] IS ~I_tlon under aneck in the 19JOs, he seems of anthropological work in British and colonial universities (Brown 1973). With
Powd erma ker felt that h y pemussrve h in in teIIecuraI -meeracecn. - Hortense the coming of the war, the younger anthropologists were off to war-related
all right to argue with ~i;t e demanded was loyalty, not reverence; it was work, and within a year of its conclusion, Radcliffe-Brown had reached retire-
42-43). This was pe,ha~ I so l ong as you were dearly 'en his side- (1966: menr age. While Evans-Pritchard as his immediate successot felt perhaps a
...~ ess preble .. h
was post-Riversian diffu" malic in t e 19205 when the 'orher side" special need to assert his own individual genius, the test of that generation,
wo ~ Slonlsm and h
. men,. Or whom contempornr' . per aps also ~Mrally in the case of riding on a wave of university expansion, requited no intellectual confron-
interaction, Ironically ho Y'<><h lalstandards sustained a more de .....ndent tation to establish themselves institutionally. Although by the early 1950s
,weVerte ., (h ~
seems to h ave elicited . . ' cntlc 0 t e universal oedipus complex the Radcliffe-Browninan moment was already waning, it was not until after
The pro bl em became rejection . on the parte ( a numbeTofhismalesrudenr.s.
his death that a more general theoretical teaction began,
from
b
. h- more senous as h
Wit In the lineage of .]
c
e came to leel his position threatened That the relations of individuals in small groups should playa decisive role
ecame involved in rather~ b,a anthropology, and in the middle 19305 he in the diffusion and institutionalization of intellectual innovations is scarcely
the auth ors h'Ip of ideas th Itter
£ h d L_. Controve rsy WIt . h t hrtt male students over surprising, in view of the literature in the sociology of science on "invisible
lormams
ater I at
spoke of th "b a ueen disc _.. J -
U::>:ICU m
h-'IS semmars. Severa I In-
'
colleges" and "solidarity groups" (Mulkay 1977). Insofar as the diffusion of
d evelop I
menta phase (Fa e Iteak" with M I' . -'
a mowskl as If If were a regular intellectual innovations depends on the activities of charismatic individuals
Although he was k ttes 969b; Gluckman 1969; Schapem 1969)_ focussing the energies of small groups of disciples' to exploit restricted institu-
adopted
. nOwn to enrertai
a more democrati I' n parties. With . Andaman dances, and
tional resources, one may anticipate departures from the norm of collegiality
up h Ism once Ie and ca...... ) RCStyelnth
d I't! e Unit-edS tates {where he soon gave implicit in the idea of "invisible college." This is especially likely insofar as
a certain . ...~, a C Ie-Bra J
,h emotIOnal distanc d d wn seems nonnally to have mainraineu the relations of charismatic innovator to disciple are inherently asymmetric-
Wit' hmesm ensm . suggest he e an Id etach ment. Bu t as his early experiments al, and likely to be charged with the psychological overtones accompanying
(F lrt 1956) ,a Ivanizing,cou
G 'm II cast a spe II on those who were susceptible
" Other types of authority relations. In the early stages of the development of
t IVe Intellect h' a groups b y t h e d'lteet verbal force of authOrlra-
'
£ ,e ehcited if h dOd a discipline or area of inquiry, as well as in the intimate process of the I~ter
tant lor . h'1m was not the ~~ e I notd
(eman d" diSCIpleship. What \\'as impor' reproduction of personnel, it seems likely that such interacti-:e groupS ml.ght
be qUite c asua I-bur rath ""Utee 0. pa r t'ICU I,d ar Ideas-about which he caul evidence the psychodynamics of kinship groups-not simply In the Radchffe-
In Contra s t to M alinowskier commltm h ent to ;1 systematic analytic viewpoint, Brownian style of intellectual lineages, but in the more Malinowskian stYle
seems
. to h aVe b een predo '• W 0 Iattra ere d students of both sexes his appeal
m ln3nt Yto of intellectual families (d. Campbell 1979).
sIan seem to h ave been those ( men; and in his case the forces ' of repul-
But if the earlier transition from "pure" to "hyphenated" functionalism may
o exdusio n mt h er than expulsion. Those who
 178 RADCLlfFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL 179
GEORGE W. STocKING, JR. ANTHROPOLOGY

be illuminated b [ . .. ncr a single instance (BMPL GB/BM 1/16/36), What he wanted was to dis-
ing institurional sr- acmg It In a context of personal imeracrion within evolv-
.. s ructures one may I . h h . sect the monograph, and rearrange its rich materials to show "nor the whole
ternal' disciplinary d oami Th a so ~lewtee ~nge In terms of an "in- of the mechanism but rather the working of each isolable sociological and
anrhropolo I Y rc. e succession of dominance in British social
gy was a so a movement from an inquiry d fi ed . "I· psychological law" (BMPL GB/BM 11/5/35; cf. Bateson 1936).
of its observational m thod len pnman y In terms Although Bateson's case-and Firth's in We, the Tikopia (1936)-suggests
e
retical presuPpositions A a ogy ~o one defined equally in terms of its rheo-
that it was not simply a matter of a viable Oceanic functionalism running
pology alternated bet' 5 many 0 lservers have noted, Malinowskian anthro-
ween two po es: one of detailed .. I b aground in Africa, this shift in ethnographic focus was perhaps a factor in
another in which Trobr: d " ernpmca 0 servarion, the theoretical transition. If the problem of abstraction was felt even by stu-
nan savages" were used ro i lid h
ries of late nineteenth and earl . 0 mva I ate t e grand then-
dents of small and bounded Oceanic societies, it was likely to be more strongly
date his own late fu . . y rwentierh century social science, or to vali-
55) Thl r n~tlonahst metatheory (Leach 1957:119' d. Panoff 19n felt by those dealing with the larger, more complex, and loosely margined
, IS was appropriate, perhaps to a I h f· ' . societies of Africa-particularly when the focus was on problems of culture
anthropology" wh h '. near y p ase 0 the revolution in
, en w at was required h discredi contact. At the conclusion of the African Institute's five-year plan for the study
the popularization of th . was rne crscrecnnng of the old and of culture change, Malinowski himself seems to have been less than fully sat-
I" new point of view B t h M I· k·' k
was later subjected to I " u w en a mows IS wor isfied with the results of studies carried on where the "main presuppositions
genera reevaluation by rh eedi .
British anthropologists (Firth d 1957 e succ mg generanon of of functionalism in its simple form break down" (1938:xxxvi).
reedy on the impasse that M'a~i . .>' several.com~ented directly or indi- As several writers have suggested, what Radcliffe-Brown offered intellectu-
middle 1930s His con iburt nowskian functionalism had reached in the
. trI unon to the dev I f h ally at this point was a theoretical orientation that made it easier to distin-
was not then at issue d here I I" opment 0 et nographic method guish between generalized empirical connection and specific analytical rele-
,an t ere IS ample indi . . h·
with students in the f ld h M ' .canon 10 IS correspondence vance (Kuper 1973:94). By focussing on particular types of social relations that
I" t at ahnowskian fu . I' " ked" .
sense that it facilitated the II ' ncrrona Ism wor eel In the could be abstracted from a given body of ethnographic data, it not only pro-
1983a). But in some ca coblectlon of large amounts of data (cf Stocking
ses pro ems seem to h . h vided a framework for ordering otherwise less tractable material, but seemed
t h esizing the material As Pi h I ave ansen w en it came w syn· to hold forth the promise of systematic comparative study, It represented a
. 1ft ater posed the "If h··
Iate d to everything e1 h d matter: everyt 109 IS re- further narrowing of anthropological attention, which for Malinowski as for
Malinowski's own gS;,w '" hoe~ the description swpr (Kuper 1973:94),
an d synt etle effort wh' h d· d . Radcliffe-Brown had already excluded the concern with material culture and
progress in the seminar f hi' Ie was ISCUSse as work-lO- racial type~somcwhat to the consternation of ethnological traditionalists like
B sot I" ear y 1930s p 'd d .
ut although Coral Gardens nd he' '. rovI, I" In some ways a model. Seligman and Haddon, But it was an approach that must have seemed espe-
the "furthest limitn b aft IT MagiC earned "institutional study» to
y means a "correlati f· .. cially attractive to students who had suffered the frustrations of"conract" studies
whole," it was not a m d I 'I" ng one set 0 actlvltles" with "the
carried on in the looser Malinowskian functional mode-and had then been
..' 0 e eaSI y Imitated As A d Ri h d
It was a toUT de force but' . u rey c ards suggeste ,
mem" (1957:27-28),
, It was not practical r'
po ItiCSto repeat such an experi-
criticizcd by the master in his volume preface (8M 1938).
1n this context, Radcliffe-Brawn's thinking clearly had an impact beyond
?thers would not have repeated the . the small group ta whom he explicated the nmions of "system" and "strUC-
Wnting to Malinowski in the fall of 1935expenment even if it were expedient, ture» in his rooms in All Souls during the last months before the outbreak
eral dissatisfaction with h' ,Gregory Bateson announced a gen-
IS approach: "Wh " of the Second World War (Gluckman 1969), Reiterated at their request in the
complete deHneation of II h f ere you emphaSize the need for
at I" actors relev I first of two successive presidential addresses to the Royal Anthropological In-
I emp h asize the need to c 'd h ant to a tata cultural situation,
stitute (R-B 19403; 1941), it provided the essential analytic underpinmng,for
. f
action 0 the same facto'
onsl er t ese fact
h
'
ors one at a time, comparing the nc an
r maw ole series of the two major cooperative efforts of the Radcliffe-Brownian mode: Af .
granting that the two ap h' separate situations." Although
!' , proac es might each be I'd" h Political Systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, ecls. 1940)-four of whose contrib-
ImItations," Bateson neve th I r. I va I wit in their respective utors had been included in Malinowski's culture contact volume- and AI-
die out of which simplQ r, I" e,ssfiI" t that Malinowski's was "a hopeless mud-
G '- SClentl c gene I' , rimn Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Radcliffe-Brown & Forde, cds. 1~50),
BIBM n.d. [October 1935]) Re d' fa IzatlOns can never come~ (BMPL:
Although both were published by the International African Institute, neither
had looked for the word "I " "a 109 Coral Gardens in this context, Bateson
oglC as applied to Trobriand culture and found Contained a single reference to Malinowski.
 180 181
GEORGE W. SrOCKING, JR. RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the 1970s as a decade of "institutional stagnation, intellectual torpor, and

parochialism" (Kuper 1983:192), or as an "intellectual cocktail" from which
something "highly combustible" might yet distill. What, from "one temporal
vantage point," seemed "a decline from a golden age" could in the long run
be "interpreted as transition to a new one" (Ellen 1983). But if theoretical co-
herence might be regained at some future point, [here was clearly a sense of
paradigm lost; from either perspective, the Radcliffe-Brownian moment seemed
a thing of the past.
lr is worth noting that its distancing was reflected in the heightened rele-
vance of many of the issues in the Murdock/Firth exchange. By 1980, Afri-
can ethnography had significantly declined in importance, particularly among
younger anthropologists, for whom problems of ritual, symbolism, and classifi-
cation were more salient than those of social organization, If anthropology and
psychology remained somewhat distanced, there had been a definite "shift to-
ward a more 'cultural' anthropology" -though the term itself still for some re-
quired quotationa] marking (Kuper 1983:190). There had also been a ooticeable
rapprochement with history, and [here was a significant interest in problems
of cultural change and development (Ellen 1983).The problem of the generaliza-
bility of "African models" had been a concern throughout the period (Barnes
1962; Coho 1977), which can be seen also as unified by a concern with the
problems of"reification" and "variation." While there was still talk of~parochial-
Institute of Social A rh -
1945-46 . Lei'! to nglu, [ronln row;
TOpology, University
K T Hadr of Oxford . Prof . A. R Radcliffe·Brown', class ism," and the impact of Marxist influences was a matter of debate, the variety
Radcliffe.Brown, Meyer Fortes {~d er
l~~~)ou, Phyllis Puckle (secretary and librarian) A. R. of those dying dinosaurs and scurrying mammals could be seen as evidence
ell,J.W.Brailsford , A . A . Issa, M . N . Srinivas
, - (c ,K.A.Busia;baekIt>W:L . .. EH' enrlques, W'N . l'W' for broadening anthropological vistas as well as for theoretical disarray.
Ourte;y of the In,dtute of Social Amhropology).
But if even from [his unstable vantage point, the Radcliffe-Brownian mo-
ment seemed still to stand on the other side of a divide, the transition of
The Radcliffe.Brownian M the 1930s seemed now much less sharply marked. From the perspective of
in Broader H" oment many posrrupture critics, Malinowskian fieldwork and Radcliffe-Brownian
tstorical Perspective
typologizing were simply two phases of the same empiricist butterfly collec-
A decade and a half after Radcliffe-Brown's . tion (Ardener 1971:450; d. Leach 1961:2); both represented the same, now-
of the postwar generation look" b k death, If seemed to one member
discredited "positivist" point of view.
ish anthropology "such that f~~g ae. that changes had taken place in Brit- Indeed, there are many today (especially, perhaps, in the United States)
useful, no longer are' mono h pmhe.tlcal purposes textbooks which looked
1 '. ,grap s w ich used for whom the real problem for historical understanding would seem now to
se ective, Interpretations whi h I to appear exhaustive now seem be: how could so many intelligent anthropologists have been so long infected
cal and lifeless." Such im c °InIce ooked full of insight now seem mechani-
dind ages ca up once . h by such a sterile and/or derivative viewpoint? Without accepting the charac-
an tn eed the "new anth I" again t e metaphor of paradigm terization, the question demands serious consideration, as an instantiation
" ropo ogy -ettl! h h' '
a structuralism" tout court yp enated In authorship but now
v , -was seen a di ' of a fundamental problem ofiotellecrual history-one which, in cross-cultural
terno Iogical break" (Ardener 1971'449) Bued I~g on the other side of an "epis- ' f 'I' h I gists' ex-
rat h er than trans-temporal situations, is qUite arm tar to ant ropo 0 .
no new paradigm swept rh f Id. de lit despIte the influence of Levi-Strauss
. e ne aecadlt h ' plaioing how it is [hat people can believe what seems from another p~rspec-
as a time when grand rh
eorenca
"I di
In
e a er, t e same writer saw the 1970s
( 'h"
, 'f'
tlve manifestly "foolish." Savoring the wonderful Irony 0 Its propaga 1.
oon bv
parade) had died off "sudd I osaurs Wit structuralism" leading the
. en y together" I' " an expatriate Pole and a self-exiled Francophile-not to mention the dlv.e~se
scurrYing over the anthro I . I ,eaVIng only small furry mammals"
po oglca ground (Ardener 1983) . 0 ne mig 'h' t vIew origins of many of their disciples-it is tempting to refer the matter to Bnush
 182 RADCLIffE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 183
GEORGE W. SrocKING, JR.

intellectual character. Given Malinowski's roche .. . British anthropology in the late nineteenth century mav be regarded as
glicieation after World War I d h r self-conscious intellectual an- a pre-Freudian science of the irrational-vthe polar complement of political
liarly English reading ofD rkh . w rh some would call Raddiffe-Brown's pecu- economy, which was the science of the characteristic rational behavior of civi-
UT elm t ere may be hi
irony would allow. Certainly he i 11 1 more ro t IS suggestion than lized men. A critical role in this science of the irrational was played by the
ogy has been recurrently aff:C:e~;te[h~~a cha~~ter of British enrhropol- doctrine of survivals, which (aside from the enveloping assumptional frame-
models and their dom ..sricart r d ppropnanon of French rationalist work of biological evolutionism) is perhaps the specific assumption most sharply
'-~ cation to a eeply ed .. 1 ..
end, the historian ofvrh od 8 . . root ernpmca tradition. In the differentiating nineteenth-<entury progressive developmentalism from earlier
em ern rirish sch I~ 1 d h "
ogy has little to do . h d h 00 cone u es [ at anthropol- manifestations of the same viewpoint (Hodgen 1936).1£the comparative method
" Wit gran theory," and d C
regional structural com . • b d' comes own lour square for a was the major ordering principle of cultural evolutionism, then the doctrine
panson ase upon th -fu . I·
that have been "the d" . C e ncnona 1St field studies" of survivals was its key interpretive principle. Presented with an array of in-
... rsnncnve rearure of od 8 ..
1983:204-5)- . ill ern rirish anthropology" (Kuper explicable, irrational beliefs and customs in the recorded accounts of present-
a program m some res . -I ,..~
Brown altered in the 1930 Q' ~ts Simi ar to the one that Radcliffe- day "savages," the armchair anrhropologist-archetypically, Frazer-could give
s. urte 81;1defrom . I h
colleague Marshall Sahli Id have i nanona c aracrer, or-as my them rational meaning through the built-in rationalistic utilitarianism of the
."
utilitarian assumption
ms wou
rhi h
ave it a
,n enrrenc
hed I .
ell rural bias toward doctrine of survivals: what made no rational sense in the present was per-
- ISessay as perh d
the problem. And despir h ' aps suggesre other approaches to fectly understandable as the sheer inertial persistence of the imperfectly ra-
. I I' t I' attention give t h f
nsrna, or career conside t" '" n 0 sue actors as personal chao tional pursuit of utility in an earlier stage .
it should be clear rh t ra Ions. within a particular institutional framework, The present essay casts only incidental light on why, in the decade after
.f a my own mterpretarlon gj b .
CI cellv cognitive facto W. h . n gives su sranrial weight to spe- 1900, this approach should have begun to seem unsatisfactory to some an-
rs. It OUt argum th hi .
Iess theoretical sense ""...orrect, " "It seems g athid t ISVIewpoint is in some time- thropologists, why there should have been such a widespread sense of the
t h I' context of the alee . . . nonet I' ess un erstandable that, in inadequacy of theoretical categories to empirical data (d. Stocking 1983a),
. ernattve viewpoints ff; . I .
R adchffe-Brownian strucrc ura I-funcn ncnonalt
I' ecnve y available
ed
at the time, One is inclined to suggest that the question, "Why do they do this crazy thing?"
tool of considerable po Ism seem to many an intellectual seemed more obviously presumptuous when carried to the field than when
wer.
There can be no question now of reenter! . asked from the armchair. But the new functionalism was equally if not more
a large input of Mal',no k' tenng the perIod that (allowing for privileging of the position of the anthropologist, since it assumed that he could
" ws Ian romant" ) . h
In British social anth I IClsm mig t be called the "classical era" find reason even where it had never in fact presented itself to the individual
ropo ogy, From across· 'b
mar kI'd more by decolo' . an IrreverSI Ie historical divide savage consdousness, And in the case of Radcliffe-Brown, we are rather led
. nlzatlon than b h '. ..
10 the guise of "method I . I y t I' rejection of positivism" -which back to particular intellectual influences felt in the moment of paradigm cri-
o oglca pragm . • ·11 '
198J:204)-the best w d' atlsm Stl has its attrncrions {Kuper sis, influences that link anthropology to the more geneI<lI context of Euro-
c haracter. ecanolstryto '"
appreciate ItS dIstinctive historical pean thought about "consciousness and society" (Hughes 1958). But in this
!he problem is complicated b h . case, the examination of su~viving correspondence leads us also to an appre-
eaSily mixable metapho, f I" y t I' multiple perspectives suggested by the ciation of the paradigmatic centrality of the doctrine of survivals-not only
so Ineage and d'
tween what one '"""reep,;v h". para Igm, and by the difference be- for Radcliffe-Brown in 1914, but also for the historian looking back from the
"h ....... I' IStOflan ofB .( h h
t earll'S" and his "views" (8 fl IS ant ropology has called a man's
fi d . urrow 1966·32) & . present,
n In The Natural Scien f Soc' '. trospeCtive!y, it is possible to More generally, perhaps it may heighten our appreciation of what was in-
ce DIety the d· f
sym b0 I s. (.c~.Singer 1973), Similar! I .groun 109 or .a. study of cultural deed a major theoretical transition in the history of anthropology: the break
rehlstonClzmg impulse a fi y, ookmg back to legitimate the present in the cycle of alternating diachronic paradigms that had characterized an-
out 8fltish' . social anth ' neI can ( nd "an h'lstoflca . I·Interest running through- · ". . n fan
I . I ropo ogy leWIS 1984) If t h ropology up until the early twentieth century. TI \1' d e h IstonCizatlO 0 -
o oglca caveats, it is quit 'bl . we attend to all the method- thropological speculation was doubtless a complex phenomenon, It was also
··1
t I' PflVI eging of synchro. I' POSSI
h I' I' to sho w t h at R a d c 1·/1 Ie-Brown regarded happening at about the same time in Malinowski, in a way that was at least
t h at w h at he opposed me ana " YSlsas·sImp Iy a methodological strategy and
superficially even more thoroughgoing: the major point of theoretical differ-
' was not real" b " . '
nor bl md us, however to h . lit conjectural" history. This should ence evident in his marginal notes to Radcliffe-Brawn's paper of 1923 was an
. h ' w at was gOI . h
tlet century-which is wh h ng on In t I' first decades of the twen- unwillingness to gI<lm sepaI<lte but equal statuS to the methodS of ethnol~gy
en t every" I d· .
P repare d f(c. Kuper 1973). a ISJunCture of 1922 was being {BMSC, R-B 1923:127, 130)-which, we may note again in passing, in the United
 184 WN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 185
GEORG£ W. STocKING, JR. RAOCLIFFE- B R O

. d to Richard Randolph for access to

States also underwent dehisroricizarion during the interwar period (Stocking iation of Social Anthropologists, an . 1 would like to express my
19763). Even so, when Radcliffe-Brown realizes in 1914 that he and Rivers CI , hi onal possession. ki M
Malinowski reprints rn IS pers fR d lufe-Brown and Malinows i, rs.
are talking past one another-that fundamental differences in methodologi- h d ghters o a curr: .. g
special appreciation to t e au Wa ne Malinowska, for their cont.mum
cal assumption make a continuation of their dispute fruidess-we feel our- Cynthia Pike and Mrs. Helena y rial assistance has been proVided at
selves present at the very moment of a rupture in the history of anthropology,
If we now seek to recapture an hisrcrical perspective ....-ithin as well as upon
cooperation and encouragement
i
various points with the help °h t De
h
Se~~tf h and Marian Lichtsceru Fund for
~ Pent of Anthropology and the ~or-
the discipline, it is from the orher side of this major historical intellectual I . IRe arch of r e epar m 'd Medlcme
disjuncture. Anthropo ogrca se d of the History of SCIence an
ris Fishbein Center for the Stu y
of the University of Chicago.

Acknowledgments
References Cited
This essay is a much-belated (and still partial) fruit of manuscript research
carried out during two six-month visits (0 England: in 1969, when I was in-
vited to Kings College, Cambridge, by Robert M. Young, who had organized ACHP See under Manuscript Sources. d it critics. Man 6:449-67.
. 71 Th w anthropology an I s
Ardener, E, 19. e ne . .' RAIN 56:11-12.
a seminar on the social study of the history of science, and again in 1973,
---. 1983. The ASA and Its C:;:1C~ colonial encOImter, London.
when Iwas a visiter to the Department of Anthropology of the London School Asad T. ed. 1973. Anrhropolog)' (l r "
of Economics. Iwould like to thank my hoses on both occasions, the reposi- ASAM 'See under Manuscript Source\-J Guinea highlands, Man 2:)-9.
tories and the archivists of the various manuscript materials consulted, and arnes· 962 African models in the ew
the several agencies that funded that research: the Wenner-Gren Foundation BB J, .Gl 1936 Natlf'1\. 2d cd. Stanford (l958 )· h' enn in social anthropology.
meson,.. . method~ an d ac Ii'vem
for Anthropological Research, the National Endowment for the Humanities, . J . 1964. Other cullllri'~:Alm.l,
Bcattle,
and the National Science Foundation. Versions of the first half of the essay, New York.
on Radcliffe-Brown and Rivers, were presented at the University of Sussex BWA. See under Manuscript Sources.
in 1973 and to several subsequent seminars on Radcliffe-Brown in the De- BM. See under Malinowski.
BMPL. See under Manuscript Sources.
partment of Anthropology of the University of Chicago. The second half,
on Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, was drafted at the Center for Advanced BMPY.See under Manuscri~t Sources. h Rhodes-
BMSC See under Manuscript Sources. . I I' Godfrey Wilson and t e
Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the academic year 1976-77 (where · h I and coloma ru e.
my stay was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities), and Brown, R. 1973. Am roporogv d 1973:173-98. '. Cambridge.
Livingstone Institute. In Asad, e. A iv in Victorian .locw!theory.
has been presented since then to several different groups. Helpful comrnenrs I· d society' m«lY I
Burrow,J. W. 1966. EvoMuon an . . led e.
on all or part of the argument have been offered by Bernard Cohn, Ron- CUPA See under Manuscript Sources. . I system vehicle carrvmg know g
ald Cohen,]ohn Comaroff, Fred Eggan, Raymond Firth, Raymond Fogelson, · lb I odel of the socia
Campbell, D. 1979. A trI a m 201 10 ed.
Meyer Fortes, Marshall Sahlins, David Schneider, Milton Singer, Marilyn Knowledge: Creation, Utilizadon 1:181-
CI ' I evolution. In
M' am
currenl.'i in culwral anthropo gy,
Serarhem, Stanley Tambiah, and others who have been present at one or Carneiro, R. 1973. assrca 21 E lewood Cliffs, N.J. d" traditional
g
another presentation. Although Ihave not cited all of them specifically, this R Naroll & F. Naroll, 57-1 . n . h. rories In Realm an nregIOn~
. ad I dlndmn IS .
essay has benefitted from the extended reminiscences of a number of liv- Cohn, B. 1977.African m e s an NC Mueller.
,_,
allla., e.d R ..,G Fox 90-113. Durham,
. I 'cal met ()(.l. lians.S.Solovay&J.
.. h.J r
ing and recently deceased British social anthropologists ~'ho knew Radcliffe-
Durkheim, E. 1895.Thernb of the SOCiO Ogl R . ,d N~
Brown and Malinowski (including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth,
Reprint cd. New York ( 1964) . f he religiouslife. Trans. J. wam. epont ~ .
S'
Meyer Fortes, C. von Furer Heimendorf, Max Gluckman, Phyllis Kabery, ~~_
--, 1911. The elementaryforms 0 t A h 58'544-47.
mund Leach, Lucy Mair, Audrey Richards, Isaac Schapera, and M. N. Snm-
York (1965). d I·ff Brown 1881-1955. Am, nt· .
vas), as well as from occasional conversational reminiscences from many others. '\dRacle- ,
Eggan, F. 1956. Alfred Regina. 6 , .239-51.
I have p~fitted also from seminar papers by my students, including All~n -. 1971. Seminar diSCUSSion,May . 1880 l.licl-1955. Oceama 24.. 2.
Berger, LIsa Brusewicz, Tom Marett, Ed Martinek, Philip Stafford, and Bill Elk' A P 1956: A. R. Radchffe-Brown, stscript. RAIN 57.
In, . . h I A premature po
Stamets. I am grateful to Peter Lloyd for access to early minutes of the Asso- Ellen, R. E 1983. The Bridsh sc 00:
 IB6 GEORGE W. Sroceneo, JR. RADCLIFFE- BROWN A NO BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 187

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1929. The study of kmshlp in primiti"f: societies. Man 148:

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