Historical Development Anthropology

Niko Cantu

Mr.Roddy

IHSS

9 September


Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown


Radcliffe-Brown was a prominent figure in anthropology during the first half of the 20th century. Radcliffe-Brown had many notable influences in anthropology, including establishing modern social anthropology as a theoretical discipline, which means it was further looked at to find its truth and place in anthropology. However, what is known to be his most notable contribution to the field of anthropology was involvement into primitive societies of some of the ideas of system theory. The system theory being the study of systems that relate to each other and are all in a much larger and more complex system itself. It is used to find answers and create hypotheses of characteristics found in more complex systems that do not arise anywhere else. When Radcliffe was a postgraduate student in the year 1908 he had formed a theoretical approach where he stated the requirements for the science of human society. He believed that there were three, the first being “to treat social phenomena as natural facts and thus subject to discoverable necessary conditions and laws”. The second was “to adhere to the methodology of the natural sciences”. And the final law was “to entertain only generalizations that can be tested and verified”; and while he never changed his opinion on these rules his knowledge and thought process continued to develop. Radcliffes working hypothesis had been that life within a society could be conceived as a dynamic trusting system of interdependent elements where each part was consistent with functioning with one another. Radcliffe being a social anthropologist had found it best to separate social anthropology into two main elements. The first of which was the general theory that connected three different sets of questions and the second was the Central theory. The first set of questions from the general theory dealt with statistics or morphological problems such as what kinds of societies are there, What are their similarities and differences, how are they to be classified and compared? The second set dealt with dynamic problems like how societies function, and how they persist. The third set deals with development problems like how do societies change their types, how do new types come into existence, what general laws relate to the changes? And lastly there was the central theory which dealt with the determinants of all kinds of social relations. Radcliffe-Brown had explained this as the caption or the fitting together or the harmonization of individual interests or values that makes possible “relations of association” and “social values”. Radcliffe_Brown was an fascinating social anthropologist that contributed a lot to the field and has several notable achievements that have changed the way we look at social anthropology.  






 


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