Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

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Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (born January 17, 1881 in Birmingham , England , † October 24, 1955 in London ) was a pioneer of British social anthropology and co-founder of structural functionalism .

Life

Radcliffe-Brown was from Birmingham and received his bachelor's degree from Cambridge in 1904 . In his youth he was an active anarchist , he was called "Anarchy Brown" by his fellow students. After his studies ( psychology and economics ) he devoted himself to field research in the Andamans and in Western Australia . During the First World War he was the head of education in the Kingdom of Tonga , after which he taught at various universities. Since 1948 he was a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 1951 he was elected a member of the British Academy .

Services

Throughout his life, Radcliffe-Brown dealt with the central question of whether and in what way people can live without rule and without a state.

Influenced by his teacher Émile Durkheim and the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau , he dealt with systems of rule and organizational forms of non-industrial societies. Radcliffe-Brown turns away from Hobbes' point of view (people need a strong central coercive authority, otherwise there will be a war of all against all, bellum omnium contra omnes ) and further elaborates Rousseau's approaches: People can live together very well without a state if they adhere to some agreements once they have been made.

His idea of ​​stateless self-regulation of non-industrialized societies is based on the so-called equilibrium model . He illustrates this idea in the leaf metaphor:

The structure of the veins versus the function of the surfaces interacts and as a whole results in the system sheet.

In detail, Radcliffe-Brown's equilibrium model looks like this: Stateless societies work best when they are composed of similar subsystems that exist in equilibrium with one another. From this a new term developed within ethnology , the so-called segmentary society .

Radcliffe-Brown saw institutions as key to maintaining the global social order of society, analogous to the organs of the body, and his studies of social function examine how rituals and customs help maintain the general stability of society. In doing so, he completely ignored the effects of historical changes. His failure to observe the influences of colonialism was particularly criticized . Today Radcliffe-Brown is seen as the founder of Social Anthropology together with Bronisław Malinowski .

Works

  • The Andaman Islanders , 1922
  • Social Organization of Australian Tribes , 1931
  • Structure and Function in Primitive Society , 1935
  • African System of Kinship and Marriage , 1950

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fortes, Meyer (1956): Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, FBA; 1881–1955: A Memoir. Man 56: 149-153.
personal data
SURNAME Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British anthropologist, founder of structural functionalism
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham , England
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1955
Place of death London