Abstract
In focusing primarily upon the Ambrym episode and the career of Radcliffe-Brown, I have neglected other manifestations of Rivers’s concern to develop the study of kinship. One of these had been C. G. and Brenda Seligman’s 1911 ethnography on The Veddas, in which there are lengthy chapters on “Social Organization”, “Family Life” and “Property and Inheritance”. The first of these chapters begins with Vedda genealogies, and then proceeds to analyze the Vedda kinship system. In making explicit his indebtedness to his old Torres Straits colleague, C. G. Seligman explicitly thanks Rivers for the “unflagging interest” he has shown in the book, “the whole of which he has read in manuscript and discussed with us, to the very great advantage of the work”.1
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Notes and References
C. G. Seligman and Brenda Z. Seligman, The Veddas (Cambridge, 1911), p. xi.
Letter from E. L. Newsom to J. Knox-Shaw dated 4 Nov. [1921?]. Letter from J. D. Newsom to J. Knox-Shaw dated 11 Nov. 1921. Both letters in Haddon Collection, Envelope 12081.
E. L. Newsom, ibid.
Letter from G. St. J. Orde Browne to Haddon dated 8 Feb. 1913, Haddon Collection, Envelope 24.
Letter from G. St. J. Orde Browne to Rivers dated 24 Aug. 1913. Haddon Collection, Envelope 12065.
Sketch accompanying ibid.
Undated letter from Rivers to Orde Browne, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12065.
G. St. J. Orde Browne, The Vanishing Tribes of Kenya (London, 1925), p. 8.
Undated letter from Winifred Tucker to Rivers written at “Sandvorthein [?] Near Walfisch Bay”, Haddon Collection, Envelope 12064.
Gregory Bateson, “Foreword” to Naven (originally published 1936, second edition, Stanford, 1958), p. ix.
Gregory Bateson, “Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River”, Oceania 2 245, 246 (1932).
Ibid.
Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter (New York, 1972), p. 158.
Bateson, op. cit. (note 10), p. x.
I owe this point to Edmund Leach, personal communication.
Bateson, op. cit. (note 10), p. 90.
Ibid., p. 249.
Ibid., p. 257.
Ibid., p. 279.
R. F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu (London, 1932), p. xxiii.
Ibid., p. xxvii.
The fifth passage, for example, occurs as the summation of a chapter with the neoBoasian title: “The Individual in the Social Pattern”.
Fortune, op. cit. (note 20), p. xviii.
Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines. A Portrait of Their Society (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 72.
Ibid., Chapter 4.
Kenelm Burridge, Encountering Aborigines (Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1973), p. 238. 27 Robert F. Murphy, The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthro- pological Theory (Basic Books, 1971), p. 21. Pages 20–23 of Murphy’s book contain a number of brilliantly expressed insights into the nature of British Social Anthropology.
John Layard, The Story of My Life Part IV (begun March 1964), p. 22. Photocopy of typescript kindly supplied by the author’s son, P. R. G. Layard. The site of the Aboriginal encampment is in some doubt. Layard states that the Aborigines “lived near the River Darling in Victoria”. However, the River Darling is located in New South Wales and southern Queensland, so Layard must have misremembered either the name of the river, or the name of the State.
F. C. Bartlett, “Cambridge, England: 1887–1937”, Am. J. Psychol. 50 107 (1937). 3o F. C. Bartlett, The Eagle (Magazine of St John’s College) 62 (1968), p. 160.
Ibid. My attention was drawn to this passage by J. A. Barnes.
J. A. Barnes, “Inquest on the Murngin”, Roy. Anthrop. Inst. Occas. Paper 26 (London, 1967), p. 1. Barnes’s paper is recommended as providing an excellent summary, evaluation and bibliography of this difficult controversy.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 43.
Ibid., pp. 31, 32.
Ibid., p. 19.
It might be suggested that Scheffler’s revaluation of kinship studies via componential analysis represents such a drastic revision of the previous approach that it in fact constitutes what Kuhn would call a “paradigm shift”. On this interpretation, the protracted and indecisive nature of the skirmish would be understandable, since it would represent part of a “scientific revolution” in kinship studies, in which fundamental assumptions and modes of explanation are up for grabs. This interpretation is supported by the observation that something which closely resembles what Kuhn depicts as the “incommensurability” of different paradigms is often in evidence when devotees of componential analysis attempt to engage more traditional anthropologists in debate. Under such circumstances, a good deal of mutual incomprehension occurs, with people talking “through” instead of to each other. However, it seems to me that, in the final analysis, Scheffler’s revaluation of Deacon looks more like a small-scale clash between purported puzzle-solutions, rather than a clash between anything as metaphysically consequential as two distinct paradigms.
M. Fortes, Social Anthropology at Cambridge Since 1900 (Cambridge University Press Inaugural Lecture, 1953), p. 14.
C.f. J. A. Barnes, “Foreword” to L. R. Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict (Canberra, 1965), p. viii.
Phyllis Kaberry, Aboriginal Woman. Sacred and Profane (London, 1939), p. 115 ff.
Barnes, op. cit. (note 40), p. x.
Ibid.
For an account of the issues involved in the Rivers-Kroeber debate see A. R. Rad- cliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Free Press, 1965), pp. 59–62.
Robert Lowie, “Review of Kinship and Social Organization by Rivers”, Am. Anthrop. NS 17, 339 (1915).
Ibid., pp. 332–334.
Lowie gives a similarly weighted evaluation of Rivers’s anthropological career in his The History of Ethnological Theory (New York, 1937), pp. 169–176.
A. L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago, 1952), pp. 172, 173.
J. A. Barnes, Three Styles in the Study of Kinship (University of California Press, 1971).
Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago, 1969), p. 9 ff. George Peter Murdock, “Anthropology’s Mythology”, The Huxley Memorial Lecture 1971, Proc. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (1971), p. 17.
For example, the Lévi-Straussian account of totemism is partly based upon an extension of Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis of the symbolic significance of Eaglehawk and Crow among the Australian Aborigines. This analysis itself relies upon a structural dichotomy of the type invoked by Rivers. See C. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston, 1963), p. 83 ff.
C. Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Anchor, 1967), pp. 158,159,160 fn.
H. W. Scheffler, “Ancestor Worship in Anthropology… ”, Current Anthropology 7, 543 (1966).
Elkin in conversation, 1974.
Cf. John Beattie: “Modern social anthropologists frequently refer to Radcliffe-Brown, but often as not they do so only to point out how wrong he was.” From Timothy Raison (ed.), The Founding Fathers of Social Science (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 178.
Robert Redfield, “Introduction” to Fred Eggan (ed.), Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (Chicago, 1937), pp. vii, viii.
Meyer Fortes, “Preface” to Meyer Fortes (ed.), Social Structure. Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (New York, 1963), pp. vii, v.
George Caspar Homans, writing in the American Anthropologist date unknown. (Quoted on the cover of the 1965 Free Press paperback edition of Structure and Function in Primitive Society.)
Raymond Firth, “Introduction” to reprint of Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization (London, 1968), pp. 21, 22.
John Layard in conversation, 1973.
Sol Tax, “From Lafitau to Radcliffe-Brown. A Short History of the Study of Social Organization”. In F. Eggan (ed.), Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (Chicago, 1937), pp. 471, 472. Originally written as Part I of Tax’s Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1935.
Ibid., p. 472.
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Langham, I. (1981). Conclusion. In: The Building of British Social Anthropology. Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8464-6_8
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