Biography
Radcliffe-Brown was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, England. After studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and Western Australia (1910–1912, with biologist and writer E. L. Grant Watson and Daisy Bates) to conduct fieldwork into the workings of the societies there, serving as the inspiration for his later books The Andaman Islanders (1922) and The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1930). However at the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Melbourne he was accused by Bates of plagiarizing her work.
In 1916 he became a director of education in Tonga, and in 1920 moved to Cape Town to become professor of social anthropology, founding the School of African Life. Further university appointments were University of Cape Town (1920–25), University of Sydney (1925–31) and University of Chicago (1931–37). Among his most prominent students during his years at the University of Chicago was Sol Tax and Fred Eggan. After these various far-flung appointments, he finally returned to England in 1937 to take up an appointment to the first chair in social anthropology at Oxford in 1937, a post he held until his retirement in 1946.
While he founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, according to Rodney Needham his absence from the Institute during the war years prevented his theories and approach from having a major influence on Oxford anthropology.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)