Anthropology

If there is any anthropological generalization that is generally accepted by anthropologists, it is the one about the importance of diffusion in the culture process. What is true of culture in general is no less true of scientific method. Anthropology, as a body of methods and of intellectual interests, is itself a heritage, or rather a number of heritages. As the contact of cultures is favorable to culture change and to the development of civilization, in the same way the meeting of different anthropological traditions may be expected to result in changes in method and viewpoint and to favor the development of anthropology. Professor Radcliffe-Brown brought to this country a method for the study of society, well defined and different enough from what prevailed here to require American anthropologists to reconsider the whole matter of method, to scrutinize their objectives, and to attend to new problems and new ways of looking at problems. He stirred us up and accelerated intellectual invention and variations among us.

The importance of his contribution has been indicated by the amount of discussion that has gone on about him and his work. Few of the American anthropological brotherhood have been entirely indifferent, and many have found it necessary to emphasize their agreement, or disagreement, with his views. One could assemble a small anthology of papers and chapters written recently each with an eye out to Radcliffe-Brown, the writer feeling called upon to define or declare his position in a field in which Radcliffe-Brown appears as leader, adversary, or challenger.

Developments in the field, however, have not been entirely clear, partly because of the fog rolled up by multitudinous pronouncements of the word “functionalism” in a wide range of half-understood senses. As a matter of fact, Professor Radcliffe-Brown does not think or speak of himself as a “functionalist,” although he makes frequent use of the word “function.” His own use of this word is special and precise: it stands for the activity of an organ as it contributes to the persistence of the organism of which it is a part, and is usually explained by him with reference to an example from physiology. A society is regarded, in some sense, as an organism, and the usages and institutions to be found in the society are described with reference to the role played by them in maintaining the society as a whole. The employment of this conception does not necessarily involve an interest in the development of generalizations as to the nature of society. One might confine oneself to “functional” ethnographic accounts-depictions of unique societies, without comparison, but each presented as an organic whole composed of functionally interrelated and integrating parts. One would then be, in the broad sense,” a historian, not a generalizing scientist. Conversely, there is nothing to require a social scientist-one interested in the development of competent general propositions as to society and human behavior-to adopt the concept of function, and indeed many attempts in the direction of social science get along without it.

Whatever may be left of “function” in American anthropology when the fog lifts, it may now be declared that Radcliffe-Brown’s signal contribution is not derived from his use of the concept of function, but rather, quite simply, from his emphasis on a strictly non-historical, sharply scientific method in anthropology. The objective of social anthropology is the formulation of general propositions as to society. The social anthropologist deals with classes of societal phenomena; early he names the class with which he deals-sanctions, totemism, Omaha type of kinship system, or whatever; the particular society or institution with which he deals is then of significance only as it represents or modifies the class, type, or declared general proposition. History, on the other hand, has a logical nature essentially different; its nature is “not the dealing with time sequences, though that almost inevitably crops out where historical impulses are genuine and strong; but an endeavor at descriptive integration.”3

Kroeber, in the paper already cited, goes on to say that, although the historical and scientific approaches should ultimately, and so far as possible, supplement each other, nevertheless, “precisely if they are to co-operate, it seems that they should recognize and tolerate each other’s individuality. It is hard to see good coming out of a mixture of approaches whose aims are different. They need intellectual differentiation, precisely because we shall presumably penetrate further in the end by two approaches than by one.”

It was the nature and result of Boas’ teaching, as Kroeber ably points out, that the two approaches were, in a sense, mixed. Boas’ great strength lay in two aspects of his intellectual nature that are the reverse and obverse of each other: his rigorous and critical analytic treatment of specific, segregated data, and his unwillingness to pursue any single method or point of view. Boas analyzes particular phenomena, without any elaborate conceptual paraphernalia, to see what elements or events, whether in the present or in the past, bear upon-”explain” -the facts studied. He secures special knowledge of particular fact by critical methods such as a historian would use and analyzes phenomena with the rigorousness of the laboratory scientist. But-and this is said in repetition of Kroeber and with awareness that Boas replied to Kroeber on the point6-he does not write histories, and he does not prepare scientific systems.

At the time when Boas introduced his methods they were precisely what were needed. They freed anthropological interest from speculative theory and cleared the ground and lad the foundations for both a critical history and an empirical science. But ambiguity of methodological approach is no longer essential; it is no longer even advisable. With the further development of procedures, on the one hand historical, on the other scientific, and with the confidence achieved by the mastery of ordered fact, it is desirable that the logical character of the objective, the nature of the approach, be made explicit.

“There is no Boas school, and never has been.” The work of some of his students has gone off in one direction and that of others in other directions. Yet a reluctance to clarify the historical and social anthropological (”scientific”) approaches has remained, and, more important, no one in America has offered a strictly non-historical scientific method equipped with a self-consistent body of concepts and procedures for getting specific jobs done in relation to ultimate scientific objectives. Radcliffe-Brown has done just that.

It is on this scientific side that emphasis has been needed in American anthropology in recent years. Boas does not write histories, but some of his students do. The development of archeology, the full realization of its relationship with ethnology,” the utilization of procedures by which to infer history from data other than document or buried artifact, have made it possible for American anthropologists to write histories, tentative enough of course they are, of American and other cultures. But in the direction of science, such later developments as have occurred have been in the first place exploratory and without system, and second-as in part of the work of Sapir and Mead-with reference to the individual in society rather than with reference to society alone (”psychological” rather than “sociological”).

Radcliffe-Brown has offered an explicit and systematic method for the scientific study of societies. Grant that the method is too systematic to provide in itself a single road to understanding and is too special to represent all interests or to admit all insights. But then let us also grant that it clarifies sharply the distinction between the historical and the scientific approaches in anthropology and that it affords one procedure and one set of concepts for pursuing the scientific approach.

Too much emphasis has been placed on the question of the validity or the importance of the general propositions issuing from this approach to the study of society. It is said that the generalizations of Radcliffe-Brown are vague. Worse, it is declared that they are commonplace, that these formally guided investigations of special fact yield only the familiar general propositions which common knowledge provides. The effect of these allegations is reduced if emphasis is laid not on the general laws which are achieved by the method, or are hoped to be achieved by it, but on the general formulations, whether substantive or relational, which are offered the student as guides to research. No scientific problem can be attacked at all without some tentative guiding formulation; these are either implicit and undeclared, and correspondingly uncertain and personal, or else they are declared and subject to logical criticism. You cannot have science without concepts. It is in the concepts and in the classification of problems (as, for example, with reference to law and social sanctions”) that the more important contribution of Radcliffe-Brown to a scientific social anthropology is to be found. This contribution is called for in American anthropology as a counter-emphasis to the analytic and non-conceptualized procedure of Boas. The effort at scientific synthesis arranges the problems in some order, exposes the implicit postulates, and makes it possible to discover if different workers are talking about the same things. The propositions are not to be treated as final but are to be challenged, revised, or abandoned as the investigation into special fact guided by them proceeds.

The influence which Radcliffe-Brown has exerted on American anthropology is represented in the pages that follow not merely by the extent to which the viewpoints of the seven authors resemble his own but also by the extent to which, stimulated by his teaching, their viewpoints differ from his, being developments out of, or even away from, his own. We are not to assume that the scientific views of the seven contributors are identical with the views of Professor Radcliffe-Brown any more than we are to suppose that Professor Radcliffe-Brown (who had no part in the preparation of the book) would, if we asked him, agree with everything that appears in the following pages. A teacher is successful to the degree, not that he inculcates, but that he stimulates. And Professor Radcliffe Brown has stimulated many American anthropologists besides those who have written this book, and caused them to alter and improve their work and methods. His influence will be read between the lines of many American books already written and to be written even by those who do not realize that they write as they do in no small degree because of the work of Radcliffe-Brown.