The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Strait and Social Anthropology
The CETS and functionalist ethnography; the two sides of British social anthropology
The CETS and functionalist ethnography; the two sides of British social anthropology
To grasp what the functionalist revolution in modern anthropology was about, it is necessary to focus on the word function which refers principally to what people do. Exotic peoples had previously been studied as evidence for what western societies may have been like before we began writing our own history. They were primitive in that sense. Their customs were taken out of context and arranged in taxonomic sequences illustrating various grand narratives of human progress that culminated in the achievements of the white race. Favorite themes were religion, marriage, and technology.
The CETS protagonists—as Henrika Kuklick has persuasively shown in her recent American Ethnologist article—while remaining committed to Darwinian evolution as a broad framework for anthropology, wanted to place the island cultures in real history, both as present victims of western expansion and as the outcome of previous migrations whose character could only be inferred from contemporary evidence. Haddon, Rivers, and Seligman believed that the islanders’ current way of life had integrity, but it was under threat from a more powerful one and had already absorbed previous cultural influences, situated as they were at a crossroads between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They proposed therefore that the internal consistency of Pacific island cultures had to be set against their interaction with the rest of the world, in a process that might eventually be made part of the story of human history in real time.
Rivers went on to compile The History of Melanesian Society in two volumes (1914) which sought to explain cultural variation within the region in part as the result of successive waves of migration. He eventually aligned himself with Eliot-Smith and Perry whose revival of diffusionist world history featured Egypt as the single source of a widely distributed cultural complex—an echo of the Lost Tribes of Israel discourse of the previous century. There is no doubt that Rivers and his colleagues generated some wild stuff in reconstructing the history of human movement along lines unconsciously imitating the British imperialism of the day (“navigators in search of precious metals” and so on). And this provided a convenient target for functionalist ethnographers.
Malinowski published his functionalist manifesto in a series of short pieces that came out between 1922 and 1926: the introduction to Argonauts, two papers in Nature and an encyclopedia article. It boils down to this. Culture is something people everywhere generate as a vehicle through which they live their everyday lives. It must work for them and that includes the requirement that the different parts add up to something reasonably coherent. It does not matter where the bits of culture come from; what matters is the integrity of the pattern expressed in the here and now. It is worth recalling that 1922 was the year when audiences everywhere queued up to watch Flaherty’s movie, Nanook of the North. After the slaughter of the trenches, confidence in western civilization was shaken. The resilience of an Eskimo pitted against nature underscored the message that ways of life we may once have dismissed as primitive had their own legitimacy and might even be a source of inspiration for a West on its knees.
Malinowski persisted in calling his Pacific islanders “primitive”; but his message too was that their way of life had an integrity that could offer some positive lessons to the West. His functionalist method thus consisted of joining in the life of an exotic community to study intensively how the various aspects of everyday routine worked for the natives and added up to a coherent whole. He used his own exaggerated linguistic competence and long-term immersion in the field as a model. In contrast to the example set by the CETS of a team quizzing informants in Pidgin English on a quick dash through several ports of call, Malinowski advocated prolonged fieldwork by single ethnographers willing to experience life as it was lived by others. He later developed a theory—A Scientific Theory of Culture was published posthumously in 1944—where the function of an institution, the purpose of its existence, lay in its contribution to the biological survival of individuals within an interlocking matrix of such institutions.
Armed with this approach, Malinowski supervised a program of field research in the 1930s, mainly in Africa and with Rockefeller funding. This launched British social anthropology as a viable collective enterprise. But, if his style was romantic, a lone adventurer finding himself through encounters with the exotic other and writing vivid novel-like descriptions of faraway places, the most pressing need of his followers was to establish a professional base for themselves within the home universities. And this is where the other half of the founding duo came in.
British social anthropology’s two sides and the nation-state
Radcliffe-Brown must hold the record for geographical coverage of the world’s universities. Starting out as Rivers’ student in Cambridge, he spent more than two decades outside England, mainly in Australia, South Africa and the United States. Then, no sooner was he established in the Oxford chair, as the undisputed leader of British social anthropology from around 1940, retirement forced him to set off on his travels again—to Brazil, Egypt, Manchester, South Africa and finally to an isolated death in London. Radcliffe-Brown brought British social anthropology firmly within Durkheimian sociology as the synchronic comparative study of primitive societies (not cultures). His functionalism also stressed the concrete activities of living people observed in the field; but the purpose of these activities lay in their contribution to social order, conceived of as an integrated rule system or social structure. Hence the hyphenated expression, structural-functionalism. He made kinship the core of this study and, in elaborating what Malinowski called “kinship algebra,” he gave to the neophyte profession a special expertise with which to mystify their own students and outsiders.
Radcliffe-Brown put his efforts into conceptual refinement and systematic taxonomy. If this comparative approach was reminiscent of a Tylorian evolutionism, he called his own method “a natural science of society” in which “primitive” peoples were used not to construct a ladder of progress, but to clarify through their greater simplicity the abstract principles underlying social order everywhere. He was aided in this task by his junior colleagues, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes, who by virtue of controlling the Oxbridge chairs during the post-war academic boom ensured that the British school remained identifiably structural-functionalist long after social conditions in the wider world had undermined its basic assumptions.
The American anthropologist G.P. Murdock, cited by Stocking, wrote a critique of the British school in 1951 as follows: he found their interests narrow, their theories parochial and their ethnographies too specialized; they had neglected history and cultural change and were indifferent to psychology; they had all the characteristics of a school that had lost touch with the wider international community of scientific anthropologists. Be that as it may, when the intellectual history of the 20th century is written, my guess is that a considerable place will be found in it for the monographs produced by the British school over four decades. Chief among them will be the books of Evans-Pritchard, Firth and Fortes; my own favorite is Nadel’s magisterial Nigerian study, A Black Byzantium. For ours was the century in which the colonized peoples of the world began to join universal society on their own terms. In doing so, they eventually found their own voice, as novelists, poets and politicians; but before that, if future generations want to know what they were like, they must turn to the disciplined, readable ethnographies of the British school.
It is paradoxical that British anthropologists often wrote of African peoples as if they lived in bounded, timeless units outside the currents of modern history, on metaphorical islands, as it were, to set against the real historical islands that Haddon and Rivers studied. For the ethnographers of the interwar period were also heavily engaged with the problem of social change (which they called “culture contact”). Without exception they were forced to come to grips with the concrete realities of their colonial field situation, even as they also constructed insular laboratories in home universities detached from the movement of 20th century society. It is notable that the principal source of their funding, by Rockefeller, went under the rubric of “social change in Africa”, harbinger of American intention to repace the British as owners of a world emp/ire. Even more than most, these ethnographers had to struggle with the contradictions of doing intellectual work in the modern world. It is convenient, but lazy to typify them as just one thing. They themselves recognized that they were trying to reconcile at least two things—hence the double descent mythology personified by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.
If ideology is classically the attempt to derive life from ideas, the British school sought to derive ideas from life, devising a special style of writing in which concrete descriptions of live activities were used to support generalizations whose debt to western intellectual traditions was never made explicit. In the hands of Malinowski this could be a romantic literary exercise, linking individual actors and concrete events to a self-conscious narrative. Radcliffe-Brown’s influence was based on professional consolidation, the promulgation of a scientific ethos, objectifications of structure, abstract concepts. The truth is that the functionalist ethnographers had to mediate between contrasting social situations—their own isolation as individual fieldworkers exposed to the lives of exotic peoples and their collective reproduction in an academic milieu as a caste of professional experts. They were pulled in two directions: towards joining the peoples of the world and back into the insularity of academic bureaucracy.
This commitment to the outside world, however half-hearted, was more than any expressed by the other inmates of the ivory tower, who remained resolutely locked up in their libraries, lecture halls and seminar rooms. And it was, CETS symbolized the initial breech with academic insularity and launched the most distinctive feature of 20th century social anthropology, a willingness to make up stories about humanity based on living with real people. Modern ethnographers are a synthesis of fieldworker and theorist, two roles that were kept separate by the Victorians. The aspiration to combine life and ideas, experience and reason in one intellectual personality would not be remarkable if it did not go against the whole trend of the academic division of labour in our times. It is unlikely that the monographs of British social anthropology will be remembered for their ideas: the vivid analytical descriptions they offer of life on the periphery of western civilization more than compensate for their lack of scruple in acknowledging their own theoretical antecedents.
Perhaps also these monographs will be valued retrospectively as a specific genre of anthropological writing that captured, if only allegorically, something essential in 20th century world society. For ours is (or has been) a world of nation-states divided against each other; so much so that human unity has normally been buried in a welter of national and even ethnic consciousness. It has long been assumed that the social relevance of British social anthropology must be found in the functioning of colonial empire, where most of the field research was carried out, following the logic of indirect rule and of Lugard’s dual mandate. But I prefer to emphasize how modern social anthropology has reproduced the dominant worldview of this century that has all of humanity pigeonholed as separate tribes, each the owner (or would-be owner) of a nation-state.
The idea of a nation represents an escape from modern history, from the realities of urban industrial life, into the timeless rural past of the volk, of the people conceived of as a homogeneous peasantry, living in villages near to nature, unspoiled by social division, the very archetype of a community united by kinship. Before nationalism, western intellectuals compared their societies with the city states of the ancient world. Now they fabricated myths of their own illiterate ethnic orgins in primeval forests (Martin Thom Republicans, Tribes and Nations). The Malinowskian pole of the British school has more than an echo of that, which is unsurprising given the Polish adventurer’s personal connection to Central European nationalism.
The other half, Hegel’s vision of the state as both antidote to and vehicle for capitalism, conceives of society as a discrete, bounded territorial unit, governed from the centre according to impersonal rules administered by scientific experts, itself the very embodiment of social order and main employer of a university-trained professional class of bureaucrats whose dominance is specific to our century. It is not difficult to see this aspect of modern society represented in Radcliffe-Brown’s influence as the arch structural-functionalist. British social anthropology flourished in the period of the corporate state and it is this pole, rather than the Malinowskian impulse to romantic nationalism, which took root in the discipline’s adaptation to postwar expansion in the universities.
It would be idle to pretend that today’s academic practitioners of anthropology are free of this contradiction, even if habitual denigration of our predecessors as tools of colonial empire helps to obscure the point. But the story of the unraveling of functionalist ethnography, which is also a story of the unraveling of the nation-state as the universal form of human society, belongs to another talk. This one is concerned with how British social anthropology made it from the 19th to the 20th century; it is time at last to place Rivers in the history of that transition.
Very clear and important article on the dominant tracks of anthropology since its evolution, especially referring to British anthropology. The colonialism of ideas and ideologies seems to follow the earlier colonialism of trade and conquest, to which it adds the support through legitimation or at least normalisation.