Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 1881–1955, British anthropologist. He did fieldwork in the Andaman Islands and in Australia. Radcliffe-Brown fostered the development of social anthropology as a science, and contributed to the study of kinship and social organization.

Bibliography

See M. Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (1969).

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Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald 

Born Jan. 17, 1881, in Birmingham; died Oct. 24, 1955, in London. British anthropologist.

Radcliffe-Brown was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1939 and 1940. He was a university professor in England, the USA, the Republic of South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Egypt. A theorist of ethnographic structuralism and functionalism, he established a school of social anthropology in British ethnography; the chief purpose of this school was to study the structure and functions of primitive social institutions. Radcliffe-Brown conducted fieldwork on the Andaman Islands (1906) and in Australia (1910) and Africa (1916).

WORKS

The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge, 1922.
Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London, 1952.
A Natural Science of Society. Glencoe, 1957.