Biography of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

Name: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
Birth Date: 1881
Death Date: 1955
Place of Birth: Birmingham, England
Nationality: English
Gender: Male
Occupations: anthropologist

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

The English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) pioneered the study of social relations as integrated systems. His analyses of kinship relations in Australia and in Africa have had a powerful influence on modern social anthropology.Alfred Reginald Brown was born in Birmingham, England, in 1881. In 1926 he would add his mother's maiden name to his own, becoming famous as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Born into a family of modest means, he left school at 17 to work in the Birmingham library. On the urging of his brother, Brown began premedical studies at the University of Birmingham. Though he had aspired to a degree in the natural sciences, Brown was convinced by a Cambridge tutor to enter Trinity College as a student in the moral sciences. Among his Cambridge teachers was the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who had recently returned from the Torres-Strait expedition to Melanesia in the South Pacific--the first major anthropological …showed first 150 words…

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…showed last 150 words…anthropology exotic cultures were usually studied as collections of separable customs and cultural anthropology was the history of how such customs were "diffused" between cultures by borrowing or conquest. Radcliffe-Brown was a major part of a movement to understand human society as integrated systems, open to scientific analysis. This elegant and often abstract approach to social analysis has had its critics and its defenders. But Radcliffe-Brown's analysis of social patterns left an important mark on all of modern social anthropology. Further Reading The most influential of Radcliffe-Brown's essays have been published together under the title Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952). The most informative account of Radcliffe-Brown's life and work is contained in the book Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (1983) by Adam Kuper. Other extensive discussions of his impact on anthropology may be found in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968) and in David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology (1967).

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