A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), British social anthropologist, born in Birmingham, England, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He was a follower of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who believed that scientific methods should be applied to the study of a society and its common values, otherwise known as its “collective consciousness.” Radcliffe-Brown did much of his early work among primitive peoples; his first book, The Andaman Islanders, was published in 1922. He also studied the Aboriginal Australians, describing his own conclusions and the findings of other researchers in his important work The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1931). Radcliffe-Brown served as a professor at the University of Cape Town, the University of Sydney, and the University of Chicago before becoming (1936) the first professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford.