Abstract
ALFRED REGINALD RADCLIFFE-BROWN, who has been appointed to the recently instituted professorship of social anthropology in the University of Oxford (see p. 772), was educated at the King Edward High School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Anthony Wilkin scholarship in ethnology, carrying out ethnographical investigations in the Andaman Islands. He was a fellow of Trinity College from 1908 until 1914, and a lecturer in ethnology in the University of London in 1909-10. After the Great War, Prof. Radcliffe-Brown held an educational post in Tonga for a time and was afterwards on the staff of the Transvaal Museum until he was appointed to the chair of social anthropology in the University of Cape Town in 1921. This he held until his appointment as professor of anthropology in the University of Sydney. Here, as at Cape Town, he was active in promoting ethnographical work in the field, and the present activity of anthropological studies in Australia is largely due to his enthusiasm and power of organization. In 1931 he left Australia to join the staff of the University of Chicago. Prof. Radcliffe-Brown was president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association at the centenary meeting in London in 1931, when he dealt in his presidential address with the methods of investigation in social anthropology, of which he had already given a practical demonstration in “The Andaman Islanders”, which is, up to the present, his most important and considerable contribution to anthropological literature.
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Prof. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Nature 138, 751 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138751c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138751c0