Social Anthropology

Social anthropology was an influential British social science that fused theoretical aspects of anthropology and sociology while conducting empirical research on the structural forms of indigenous societies. Through fieldwork, social anthropologists produced detailed accounts of society and social structure that did not depend on a real or imagined history but on how society and social structure actually functioned from day to day. Social anthropology established society, function, and structure as prominent topics in the social sciences. Research in social anthropology often focused on kinship systems, political institutions, trade networks, and localized epistemological frameworks (whether those be religion, mythology, or magic).

Keywords Fieldwork; Function / Functionalism; Kinship; Social Structure; Society; Structural-Functionalist; Structuralism; Synchrony

Social Anthropology

Overview

Social anthropology, since its inception in England between the World Wars, has been something of a British institution, the genius of which has been best recognized by those reading it from afar. During its heyday at the London School of Economics, Oxford, and Cambridge, social anthropology was a minor and marginal academic discipline in the British University system Spencer, 2000). While its handful of notable proponents published ethnographically rich monographs of a remarkably similar vein, they never could reach a working agreement on what social anthropology was, what the aim of its research should be, or even its place in the social sciences. The founders of this contentious school of thought spent the lion's share of their careers ruthlessly disagreeing with one another (e.g. Leach, 1984). And yet, while this pugnacious bunch was at the helm, social anthropology solidified the primacy of fieldwork in American anthropology, sparked the resurgence of structuralism in French sociology, introduced Emile Durkheim to American sociology, and paved the way for the reintroduction of Karl Marx to the Anglo-American social sciences. More recently, the field of cultural studies was formed on the conceptual framework laid by social anthropology. The discipline of social anthropology that emerged in postwar England, it might be said, has been immensely productive elsewhere.

Social anthropology initially sought to bring the global variety of human societies into a single analytical optic that did not rest on a speculative reconstruction of their pasts (i.e., social evolution) but on their witnessed forms in the present. This initial, evolutionary paradigm suggested that there was a single origin to all of humanity and that one should explain different human societies according to the distance they had achieved from that origin (Tylor, 1920[1871]; Marx, 1974[1883]; Frazier, 1996[1890]; Durkheim, 1997[1893]). When it came to non-literate societies, this paradigm was criticized on both sides of the Atlantic for reducing them to speculations about their pasts rather than seeking to understand them through the directly observable facts that comprise a proper science. Franz Boas (1940) and what became cultural anthropology spearheaded the American reaction to this paradigm. The British reaction, led by Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1984[1922]) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's lectures on a "nature science of society"(1957[1937]), became the discipline of social anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s.

Both the American and British rejections of evolutionary thinking focused on the comparative study of non-literate social groups and emphasized the necessity of fieldwork over the armchair reflections of previous scholars. Fieldwork at this time consisted of living in a small community (often a village) for at least one year, becoming conversant in the local language and taking descriptive notes on the everyday lives of community residents (e.g. Evans-Pritchard, 1973). The aim of fieldwork was to formulate a scientific understanding of a specific society based on descriptions of its functioning from day to day, a scientific understanding that could then be compared and contrasted with other societies (Radcliffe-Brown, 1951; cf. Evans-Pritchard, 1950; Leach, 1958). Malinowski famously wrote that the goal of fieldwork is to "grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world" (1984[1922], p. 25).

While fieldwork remained pivotal to the development of cultural anthropology and social anthropology, differences in the theoretical aim of fieldwork quickly splintered them into two distinct academic disciplines - cultural anthropology saw fieldwork as a method to inscribe and interpret the contents of culture, while social anthropology saw fieldwork as "an empirical discipline" that examined the structural organization of society according to how it actually worked (Kroeber, 1963; Geertz, 1976; Forte, 1978:9). Fieldwork in social anthropology has focused on the structural forms of social organization through detailed studies of kinship systems, political institutions, systems of trade and localized epistemological frameworks - whether those be magic or religion.

Social anthropology not only shares a theoretical foundation with sociology, it also helps establish that foundation. Long before they became the theoretical trinity of sociology, social anthropology turned to the writings of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber for conceptual grounding (Fortes, 1978, p. 5). In its formative years, social anthropology was often regarded and read as a specialized branch of comparative sociology (Radcliffe-Brown, 1951; Evans-Pritchard, 1951). Talcott Parsons, who attended Malinowski's seminars at the London School of Economics before he became the most influential American sociologist in the postwar period, remarked: "Social anthropology and sociology are, as conceptualized disciplines, so close together as for many purposes to be almost fused" (1948 p. 246). The prominence of structure and function in the postwar research agenda of sociology (e.g. Merton, 1949; Parsons, 1949) can be directly attributed to the influence of social anthropology. The essential difference between social anthropology and sociology was found not in the theories that shaped research agendas but in the actual object of research. Social anthropology, one adherent recollected, was "hardly distinguishable in its scope from that of the professed theoretical sociologists, though its different ethnographic base gives it a different illustrative content and a different - sometimes sharper - focus"(Firth, 1951, p. 477). Whereas sociology examined various aspects of cities and nations in Europe and the United States, social anthropology was focused on a holistic examination of small indigenous communities (often located somewhere in the British Empire). Social anthropology theoretically aligned itself with sociology's interest in conducting research in existing communities (which it further conceptualized as synchrony), but it calibrated such an approach to the practical considerations of non-literate, homogenous societies (Evans-Pritchard, 1976, p. 245-51).

Applications

While Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific provided the model text for social anthropology, Radcliffe-Brown provided the theoretical framework of social anthropology (Stocking, 1984). Radcliffe-Brown, reading and reiterating themes in the work of Èmile Durkheim, forged "a triad of crucially important theoretical concepts, namely society, function, and structure" (Langham, 1981, p. xiii). While many of the proponents of social anthropology vehemently disagreed with Radcliffe-Brown's formulation of these concepts (not to mention one another's reformulations), they remained doggedly committed to them. Social anthropology, during the period of its greatest influence (1930-1960), consisted of several dozen monographs that used society, function, and structure in a remarkably similar fashion and a growing set of fierce debates about these very same concepts between the departments of social anthropology at Oxford (A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, E.E. Evans-Pritchard), Cambridge (Meyer Fortes), and the London School of Economics (Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach). These overlapping monographs and very public debates brought the concepts of structure and function into the research agendas of adjacent disciplines like cultural anthropology, sociology, and even history.

Society

Society is the basic unit of social anthropology-it is what frames research in social anthropology (Radcliffe-Brown, 1949, p. 322). So what is society? "Individual human beings," wrote Radcliffe-Brown, "are connected by a definite set of social relations into an integrated whole" (1935, p. 396). This integrated and bound whole - society - is a general system that is not obvious at the beginning of research but rather becomes empirically perceptible through focused observation. Society is a domain whose systematic form only becomes intelligible through fieldwork (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940). Fieldwork defines society first by describing patterned activities and prominent positions in the everyday life of a given locale and then by logically extending such configurations into a general system. Society, then, is the general system of organization that specific patterns of thought and action manifest, that established roles and relations enact. Society, as such, is outside the awareness of its members who daily abide by it but know next to nothing of its systematic functioning (Evans-Pritchard, 1976[1937]; Radcliffe-Brown, 1957[1937]). Once established through research, society becomes "the analytic frame" of that research (Fortes, 1978, p. 11). Society, Radcliffe-Brown once wrote, is really just "any convenient locality" at the onset of fieldwork (1940; quoted in Leach, 1959, p. 5). It only becomes a substantive matter in the course of fieldwork.

Function

"What is new," wrote Evans-Pritchard about the analytical framework social anthropology inaugurated, "is the insistence that a society can be satisfactorily understood without reference to its past" (1950, p. 120). This fundamental break with the existing modes of explanation was guided by a reworking of the concept of function. Initially lifted from Èmile Durkheim (1997 [1893]) on deviance and social solidarity, function has been put to various uses in social anthropology. In Malinowski's description of life on the Trobriand Islands, function is the normative relation of everything to everything else (1922). In Radcliffe-Brown's more precise formulation, function is the initial assumption of "interconnections" that enables the fieldworker to see links between the "standardized mode of activity or mode of thought" and the systematic form of society (1949, p. 322; 1940, p. 10). Function is the hypothesis of causal link between observable social structures and the general system of society (Firth, 1955). Function, in this, offers a way to investigate and explain a society that does not resort to a real or imagined history but resolutely stays within its actual workings.

While critiques of this concept - namely that it is a teleology that mistakes the effect for the cause - abound, social anthropology deployed the notion of function not as a final explanation of society but as a heuristic device in fieldwork. Radcliffe-Brown wrote: "This idea of the functional unity of a social system is, of course, a hypothesis (1935). But it is one which, to the functionalist, it seems worthwhile to test by systematic examination of the facts" (p. 397). Or, as Ernest Gellner wrote more recently, "Functionalism as a method rather than as a theory" (1970, p. 115). An impressive array of monographs have used function in this way, finding crucial connections that had otherwise been dismissed or wholly ignored: from otherworldly vocations and the ordering of the world (Evans-Pritchard, 1976[1937]) to linguistic dialects and the production of political distinction (Leach, 1959) to myth and a cognitive system of binary oppositions (Levi-Strauss, 1969[1964]) to the caste system and an ideology of hierarchy (Dumont, 1981[1966]).

Structure

Social structure, as Radcliffe-Brown never tired of saying, is not some theoretical construct but "an actual existing concrete reality" (1940, p. 4). "There is such a thing as social structure" (Radcliffe-Brown, 1949, p. 322). Social structure, consisting of patterns of thought and action and established roles and relations in a given locale, is the empirical object of fieldwork. This concept of structure "grew directly out of repeated, objectively presented field observations" (Fortes, 1978, p. 9). Through the careful observation of social structures like kinship, political institutions, localized epistemological frameworks, or even the circular exchange of seashells in the South Pacific, social anthropology sought to elucidate the systematic form of society from the structured aspects of everyday life.

As individual humans enact the social structure through fulfilling prescribed relations and practices, the social structure equally enacts them as recognizable and potent figures within the society. Social structure is "the formal stage upon which social action takes place" (Leach, 1984, p. 15). The essential aspect in this concept of structure is that while it actually exists in everyday life, it has a separate existence from the individual humans who occupy it (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940). This distinction is crucial to how social anthropologists explained the persistence of social structures across generations.

Research within social anthropology was thus organized according to society (unit), function (method), and social structure (object). This configuration proved immensely productive within social anthropology from the 1930s to the late 1950s. As decolonization and national independence began to take hold across the developing world in the 1950s and 60s, social anthropology slowly came to realize there was one aspect of social life it had critically overlooked: social change (Kuklick, 1984). Although social anthropology was not alone in this - this realization reverberated across the social sciences, fundamentally transforming the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history - it was one of the first disciplines to critically reflect on such changes (largely because its traditional sites of research were spread across the crumbling British Empire).

Social Anthropology & Social Change

In social anthropology, the omission of social change was initially taken to be a result of the pretensions of fieldwork - what the social anthropologist witnessed during his or her sojourn in a community was taken to be the way things were in that community since time immemorial. The temporality of fieldwork never conditioned the general claims made about the society (Leach, 1959). Edmund Leach led this reconfiguration of social anthropology, arguing "while conceptual models of society are necessarily models of equilibrium, real societies can never be in equilibrium" (1959; p. 4). Society, rather, is always in process, but it is a process that is often represented in symbol and ritual (and monographs) as a static system (Firth, 1954, 1959; Leach, 1959). Max Gluckman and what became known as the Manchester School of social anthropology applied this emerging concern with process to sites of outright conflict, bringing the conceptual framework of social anthropology to bear on the splintering processes of urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism (1961).

Viewpoints

Key Debates

Fusing theoretical aspects of sociology with empirical fieldwork on the structural forms of indigenous society, social anthropology became a distinct and influential discipline within the social sciences. Its widespread recognition as a discrete school of thought, however, masks many of the contentious disputes that occurred within social anthropology. While those reading social anthropology from afar found it immensely productive, the key figures of social anthropology never could agree on what social anthropology was, what the aim of its research should be, or even on its place in the social sciences. Two key debates swirled within social anthropology throughout the period of its greatest influence. The first revolved around whether social anthropology should become more like a natural science or a social science. The other focused on whether structure should be approached as an empirical object or as a consequential abstraction.

Radcliffe-Brown (1957[1937]) long argued that social anthropology was "a natural science of society," by which he meant that the practice of social anthropology was akin to the laboratory sciences of the natural world. The primary distinction he allowed between "social science" in the singular and the natural sciences was that while the biologist or chemist had a controlled environment in which to examine the structure of cells or elements, "in human society the social structure as a whole can only be observed in its functioning" (Radcliffe-Brown, 1935, p. 396). In his inaugural lecture after succeeding Radcliffe-Brown as chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford, E. E. Evans-Pritchard debunked the notion that social anthropology was or even could be a natural science (1950). The social anthropology he advocated was "a literary and impressionistic art," albeit one guided by social theory and rigorous fieldwork (Evans-Pritchard, 1950, p. 121). This debate quickly fractured the champions of social anthropology (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown, 1951; Evans-Pritchard, 1951; Leach, 1976, 1984; Firth, 1975a; Fortes, 1978), dividing them into opposing arguments about the status of knowledge derived from fieldwork (whether it was objective data or subjective impressions) and eventually on the practice of fieldwork itself (whether one gathered the facts or actively produce them). The sparks from this debate crossed the Atlantic and ignited the growing crisis of representation in cultural anthropology (e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986).

The other significant debate in social anthropology focused on whether social structure should be taken as an empirical object or as a consequential abstraction. Radcliffe-Brown, as previously noted, resolutely took social structure to be "an actual existing concrete reality" (1940, p. 4). The work of Claude Levi-Strauss fundamentally challenged this position within social anthropology. Staking out a position he called "structural anthropology," Levi-Strauss melded three distinct understandings of structure (Marx, Saussure, and Radcliffe-Brown) into a singular task for anthropology - the critical elucidation of the deep-seated abstract structures that shape everyday activities in indigenous societies (1963[1958]). George Stocking writes of this debate: "In a letter that Levi-Straus made public in 1952, Radcliffe-Brown suggested that their uses of the term 'social structure' were so different as to make discussion 'unprofitable': while for himself, social structure was a 'reality' as immediately perceptible as that of seashells lying on the beach, for Levi-Strauss, social structure had 'nothing to do with reality but with models that are built up'" (1984, p. 345). Once again the adherents of social anthropology splintered into opposing camps, arguing over the empirical or ideal components of social structure (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940; Levi-Strauss, 1963[1958]); Leach, 1964) as well as the status of native conceptions of those structures (Levi-Strauss, 1963[1958], pp. 277-323; Firth, 1975a).

Enduring Influence

Two major theoretical positions in the social sciences emerged through social anthropology; the first, structural-functionalist, has been relegated to the archives of the social sciences while the second, structuralism, continues to reverberate across social sciences. The most prominent theoretical position associated with social anthropology is structural-functionalism. Structural-functionalism argued that the significance of social structures lay in their contribution to social solidarity. While this position only gained wide recognition through the pen of Talcott Parsons (1949) in American sociology, it originated in the lectures of Radcliffe-Brown (1957[1937]). Largely dismissed now, structural-functionalist reigned supreme within American sociology and social anthropology in the postwar period.

Structuralism, the second major theoretical position of social anthropology, emerged in dialogue with Saussurian linguistics and Marxist social analysis. Incited by the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, structuralism quickly established itself as a counter to structural-functionalists in social anthropology. Structuralism focused on the patterned ways that groups think about the material and metaphysical world and communicate that knowledge (Bloch, 1999). These cognitive structures are analyzed as a sort of social grammar, not according to any use or ultimate function they might serve. Although structuralism was initially limited to patterns of social cognition in regards to mythology, it soon came to include explicitly Marxist analyses of economic structure in indigenous societies. The post-structuralism of Foucault emerged in critical conversation with these forms of structuralism, applying their method to modern forms of knowing, including, crucially, the expertise of the social scientist. After its widespread and varied application within social anthropology, structuralism spread to the other social sciences and the humanities.

While the founders of social anthropology might not recognize today's departments of social anthropology, the thematic currents they established remain active and influential. While the object of structuralism has transformed itself again and again from the initial formulation within social anthropology, it remains central to the research agendas of the social sciences. Social anthropology's adamant starting point of actual, empirical relations and their durable configurations has made a revival under the banner of network analysis (White et al., 1976; Watts, 1999). Social anthropology's insistence on the interconnectedness of things is a prominent theme in both studies of globalization and the emerging field of science studies (Appadurai, 2001; Strathern, 2004; Latour, 2005). While social anthropology as a discrete way of doing social science has all but disappeared, its central preoccupations remain at the cutting edge of the social sciences.

Terms & Concepts

Fieldwork: The predominant method in social anthropology. Produces a conceptual understanding of a society by witnessing how it actually works. Typically consists of living in a small community (often a village) for at least one year, becoming conversant in the local language, and taking descriptive notes on the everyday lives of community residents. Also referred to as Ethnography.

Function / Functionalism: A methodological hypothesis that initially assumes a variety of interconnections between social structure and the systematic form of society in order to deduce the actual working connections between them. Often critiqued as teleology.

Kinship: An established network of family relations. Dictates the role and appropriate relations of an individual based on his or her position within the family unit. Often modeled in graphs by the social anthropologist.

Social Structure: Patterns of thought and action as well as established configurations of roles and relations in a given locale. It is the empirical object of fieldwork. Mythology and kinship are prominent examples.

Society: The general system of organization that social structures manifest. It is the spatial unit or analytical frame of research in social anthropology.

Structural-Functionalist: The theoretical position most often associated with social anthropology although it was also popular in American sociology under Talcott Parsons. Suggests that the significance of social structures lies in their contribution to social solidarity.

Structuralism: The theoretical position that emerged in French Anthropology under Claude Levi-Straus. Suggests there is a deep-seated universal structure to how groups process knowledge. Became popular in the humanities when it was applied to the interpretation of texts.

Synchrony: The study of an existing society without reference to its real or imagined history but in terms of how it actually functions from day to day. Often opposed to diachrony.

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Suggested Reading

Elie, S. (2012). The production of social science knowledge beyond Occidentalism: The quest for a post-exotic anthropology. Third World Quarterly, 33, 1211-1229. Retrieved October 29, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocIndex with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=77508962

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976[1937]). Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. London: Oxford University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1951). Social anthropology and other essays. London: Free Press.

Leach, E. (1984). Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 1-23. Retrieved July 29, 2008 from EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=11238384&site=ehost-live

Malinowski, B. (1984[1922]). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1940). On social structure. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 70 , 1-12. Retrieved July 29, 2008 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=15283688&site=ehost-live

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