Social structure: Radcliffe-Brown and Nadel's problem of role analysis

1. Radcliffe-Brown: background

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was a British social anthropologist who did fieldwork in the Andaman Islands (The Andaman Islanders, 1922) and among Australian Aboriginal groups. With Bronisław Malinowski he founded British functionalism, though he called his approach structural-functionalism to separate it from Malinowski’s biological needs theory. His key statements are the presidential address “On Social Structure” (1940) and the collection Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952). He drew directly on Durkheim.

2. The concept of social structure

Radcliffe-Brown defined social structure as the network of actually existing social relations that link human beings in a given society. Its components are persons, and persons considered as occupying positions in the network.

• Social structure is real and observable. He rejected the idea that structure is only a model in the anthropologist’s head (the view later taken by Lévi-Strauss). One observes concrete relations: a man’s relation to his mother’s brother, to his chief, to his clan.
• Dyadic relations. Every relation between two persons (father and son, master and servant) is part of the structure.
• Differentiation of roles and classes. The structure includes the differentiation of individuals and classes by social role: men and women, chiefs and commoners, employers and employees.
• Institutions regulate relations. Institutions are the established norms of conduct that govern relations between persons in the structure.

Actual structure and structural form

Persons die and are replaced; particular relationships change. What persists is the structural form: the general pattern of relationships abstracted from the concrete ones. A tribe keeps the same form of kinship relations across generations though every individual in it is new. Radcliffe-Brown compared this to a living organism, whose cells are constantly replaced while its structure continues.

Structural continuity

Structural form is not static. It is a dynamic continuity, like the continuity of an organism. It can change gradually, through war, migration or internal development, while retaining its general shape.

3. Function and the organic analogy

Radcliffe-Brown took Durkheim’s idea that a social institution must be explained by its contribution to social life. He defined the function of any recurrent activity (a funeral ceremony, a punishment for crime) as the part it plays in the social life as a whole and therefore the contribution it makes to the maintenance of the structural continuity.

The organic analogy has three parts:

1. Morphology: the study of structure, like anatomy.
2. Physiology: the study of how the structure works, like the functioning of organs.
3. Development: the study of how structures change.

He noted where the analogy breaks: unlike an organism, a society can change its structural type without ceasing to exist, and its structure cannot be observed apart from its functioning.

4. Criticism

• Static and conservative: the stress on continuity leaves little room for conflict and change.
• Teleology: explaining an institution by its effects (maintenance of the structure) risks circular reasoning.
• “Actual relations” are too many to observe; in practice he described structural form, which is an abstraction. Nadel and Lévi-Strauss both pressed this point.
• Built for small, stable, pre-literate societies; harder to apply to complex industrial ones.

5. S.F. Nadel and the problem of role analysis

Siegfried Frederick Nadel (1903–1956), an Austrian-born anthropologist trained under Malinowski, worked among the Nupe of Nigeria (A Black Byzantium, 1942). His The Theory of Social Structure was published posthumously in 1957.

Nadel agreed that social structure is an abstraction but tried to make it rigorous. He argued that the role, not the person or the relation, is the basic unit. Social structure is the orderly arrangement of roles and of the relationships between their occupants. Structure is abstracted from roles in the way a grammar is abstracted from speech.

The problems he identified

1. Defining a role. A role is a set of expected behaviours attached to a position. But expectations differ among members of a society; where does a role begin and end?
2. Role attributes. Roles have core (pivotal) attributes without which the role disappears, and peripheral ones that may vary. Distinguishing the two is a matter of judgement.
3. Role summation. Every individual holds several roles at once (son, farmer, clan elder, church member). Some roles cluster together in predictable bundles; others do not. The structure must capture these combinations.
4. Ordering of roles. Roles are arranged in hierarchies of command, of dependence and of logical implication (being a father implies being a husband). Nadel tried to represent these orderings formally, even with matrices and diagrams, but admitted that a complete map of a society’s roles is not achievable.
5. Abstraction versus reality. The more one abstracts, the further the structure moves from what people do; the less one abstracts, the more the structure dissolves into particular cases.

Nadel’s honesty about these problems influenced later role theory, including Merton’s concept of the role-set (1957): the complement of role relationships a person has by virtue of occupying a single status.

How this is examined

“Explain R.C. Brown’s concepts of social structure” (August 2024) and “Explain the concept of social structure by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown” (October 2023) are the 10-mark essays: definition, actual structure and structural form, the organic analogy, function, and criticism. “Problem of role analysis” (April 2022) is the six-mark note on Nadel: role as the unit, then the five problems in a list.