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
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