Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald (AR)

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born on 17 January 1881 at Aston, Warwickshire, England, second son of Alfred Brown, manufacturer's clerk and his wife Hannah, nee Radcliffe. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A. 1905, M. A. 1909), graduating with first class honours in the moral sciences tripos. He studied psychology under W. H. R. Rivers, who, with A. C. Haddon, led him towards social anthropology. Elected Anthony Wilkin student in ethnology in 1906 (and 1909), he spent two years in the field in the Andaman Islands. A fellow of Trinity (1908 - 1914), he lectured twice a week on ethnology at the London School of Economics and visited Paris where he met Emily Durkheim. At Cambridge on 19 April 1910 he married Winifred Marie Lyon; they were divorced in 1938.

Radcliffe-Brown (then known as AR Brown) joined E. L. Grant Watson and Daisy Bates in an expedition to the North-West of Western Australia studying the remnants of Aboriginal tribes for some two years from 1910, but friction developed between Brown and Mrs. Bates. Brown published his research from that time in an article titled “Three Tribes of Western Australia”, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 43, (Jan. - Jun., 1913), pp. 143-194. At the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Melbourne, Daisy Bates accused Brown of gross plagiarism.

Brown taught at Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) before becoming director of education in Tonga (1916-19).

From 1921 he was foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In 1922 he published 'The Andaman Islanders'.

In 1926, Radcliffe-Brown changed his name by deed poll from Brown to Radcliffe-Brown and accepted the new chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, which was partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. He soon had a dozen scholars in the field in Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, was prolific in delivering papers before various conferences, and founded the journal 'Oceania' in 1930, its first monograph being his 'Social organisation of Australian tribes' (1931). With the financial difficulties during the Depression years, it seemed likely that the Department of Anthropology would no longer receive funding, and Radcliffe-Brown left in 1931 to take up a chair at the University of Chicago.

In 1937, he moved to a new chair at Oxford, from which he retired in 1946. He died in London on 24 October 1955, survived by his daughter.

Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1891 - 1939: Ian Hogbin, 'Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald (1881–1955)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/radcliffe-brown-alfred-reginald-8146/text14233  published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 27 April 2016. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, (MUP), 1988