Radcliffe Brown

Radcliffe-Brown's functionalism was somewhat different in focus from Malinowski's. Whereas Malinowski was concerned with the ways in which social institutions functioned to meet individual needs, Radcliffe-Brown sought to demonstrate the role that institutions played in maintaining social structure and social solidarity. A key example of this difference can be found in the writings of the two men on the subject of magic and religion. Malinowski had argued that beliefs and practices connected with the supernatural served to allay fears and anxieties resulting from the inevitable limits of practical knowledge. Garden magic, for example, steps in to reassure farmers there will be a crop, assuming that everything technically possible has been done and one is now at the mercy of luck and the weather. Radcliffe-Brown disagreed with Malinowski concerning the function of religion. Radcliffe-Brown argued that religious beliefs generate at least as many anxieties as they assuage; one example of religiously-generated anxiety is the state of mind of a person who has sinned and fears eternal damnation or of one who has angered a neighbour and fears witchcraft or sorcery. The explanation offered by Radcliffe-Brown for religion was much closer to Durkheim's: Religion existed primarily to enhance social solidarity. "Ceremonies" said R-B, "are the glue which holds society together." Radcliffe-Brown explained taboos by remarking that people can be united as effectively by common hates as by common loves.

Radcliffe-Brown explained totemism in two ways in two different essays. In his first essay, "Totemism", published in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Radcliffe-Brown, though he agreed with Malinowski that edible species were likely to become totems, took a straightforward Durkheimian position and argued that totems were foci of clan solidarity for each individual clan. In his second essay, "The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology," Radcliffe-Brown employed a far more complex argument: the totems were related to each other in similar ways to the relationships which pertained between the clans. This, of course, situates totemism within a total system and implies some degree of organic, not merely mechanical solidarity. This argument brought Durkheim and Mauss's notions of classification and exchange into full play, and was an important source of Lévi-Strauss's highly influential work "Totemism Today."

The essay which is contained in McGee and Warms, "The Mother's Brother in South Africa" has been the subject of much controversy. Specifically, its argument was employed by George Homans and David Schneider as an explanation for prescribed or preferred cross-cousin marriage, and both works were vociferously attacked by Rodney Needham in Structure and Sentiment. The MB in SA is an exemplar of what has come to be known as descent theory. le Needham, along with Edmund Leach, became proponents of alliance theory, which argued that relationships formed by marriage were as important as clan membership (descent) in articulating systems of belief, sentiment, exchange, and social relationships.

In the MB in SA, R-B argues that the strong ties between a man and his mother's brother in patrilineal society were not a holdover from some previous phase of matriliny or matriarchy. Rather, he suggests, that in patrilineal societies the father tends to be a strong authority figure, and the mother to be comparatively nurturing and indulgent. The deep ties between a man and his mother's brother (which often include a great deal of license on the part of the younger man) are seen as an extension of the sentiments a man in a patrilineal society feels toward his mother. In this essay R-B is trying to argue for a present, rather than an evolutionary, cause for what seemed to him to be an anomalous relationship, and also to strike a Durkheimian blow by explaining an alleged pattern of sentiment in sociological terms. Needham argued that one could be more Durkheimian still: individual sentiments needn't play a part at all - all that was needed was to posit a classificatory distinction between lineal kin and affines (in-law lineages), and that the opposing behaviour toward fathers from that toward mother's brothers reflected the system of exchanges and other obligations existing between wife giving and wife taking lineages.

What can be usefully said about this debate, more than thirty years after it led to an incredible level of invective from proponents of both arguments in anthropology journals during the 1960s? First of all, by the time the argument raged, Radcliffe-Brown's main point, namely the improbability that matriliny had preceded patriliny in all cases, was so established as to be taken for granted. The idea that society shapes individual emotions is also much more widely accepted, and thus tends to fade from the foreground in evaluating the MB in SA, though it was an important point to reiterate at the time (1924).

The pattern of emotions which R-B remarked upon in the South African ethnographic sources is certainly a common one in patrilineal African societies - we observed it in Benin City as recently as 1984. It is by no means clear; however, whether such a pattern can be seen in all patrilineal societies where special relationships pertain with the mother's brother - in all such societies, however, the mother's brother is, by definition, an affine - a kinsman of a woman who has married into one's lineage. It is, certainly, more elegant to construct an argument which does not depend on perhaps localized sentiments for an explanation of a widely distributed phenomenon. As a footnote to the whole controversy, one might mention that toward the end of their careers, both Rodney Needham and David Schneider (who argued that the special relationship between men and their mother's brothers led to marriage with the mother's brother's daughter) had entirely rejected the notion that "kinship" constituted a meaningful set of facts, which could be usefully isolated from other social facts in anthropological analysis, but continued to argue about which one had rejected it more thoroughly!