Radcliffe-Brown's contributions to the study of social organization

It is astonishing to conclude from some of the reviews of this selection of Professor Radcliffe-Brown’s essays and papers [i] that there are pro-fessional sociologists who owe their first acquaintance with his work to this publication. For it can be categorically asserted that each of the papers here reprinted has been a major landmark in the growth of social anthropology over the thirty years since the publication in 1924 of the famous “ Mother's Brother ” paper (Chapter I in the present collection). They embody a series of discoveries and hypotheses which changed the course of anthropological study, at any rate in Great Britain, and have only been fully appreciated by anthropologists in the past decade or so. Readers of American anthropological journals [2] will find that some of the most influential anthropologists there have recently isolated a contemporary “ British ”, or as some prefer to say 1 “ structuralist ”, school of social anthropology. The measure of aptness there is in this label refers to a frame of analysis that has grown primarily fron: the assimilation of Radcliffe-Brown’s ideas and theories into the body of British anthropological research. This assimilation is so complete that one often repeats Radcliffe-Brown’s arguments, even his examples, without realiz¬ing it. How often have I, and other social anthropologists, not used the example of a Court of Law to illustrate the assumption that order and consistency in its institutions are necessary for the social life of a community’ to go on smoothly ? But we seldom recollect that it was first used to illustrate this very argument by Radcliffe-Brown in his paper on “ Methods of Ethnology and Social Anthropology ” (South African Journal of Science, 1923).