Radcliffe-Brown on Colonialism in Australia

Introduction

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, unlike many of his contemporaries,¹ did not thrust himself into the political controversies of his day. Perhaps as a result, the picture that emerges is that he dedicated his energies to the development of the discipline, limiting his insertion into the larger political world to promoting the value of anthropology for "men of practical affairs" and offering practical advice to colonial authorities (Kuper 1977, 1983, 2005; Stocking 1984).² As Kuper says, like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown "tended to insist that there should be a division of labour. The anthropologist presented the facts, the colonial official decided what was to be done" (Kuper 2005:53). "But," as Kuper adds, "both men broke this rule at times and wrote critical, occasionally intemperate, commentaries on aspects of colonial government in the 1920s and 1930s" (2005: 53).

What is well reported of Radcliffe-Brown's political location is that under the influence of Peter Kropotkin he became an anarchist who, as his friend and colleague E. L. Grant Watson states, was known as an undergraduate at Cambridge as "Anarchy Brown" (Kuper 1983:39; Stocking 1984:143).³ What is less well reported is that, while "he later became something of an intellectual aristocrat,"⁴ according to Watson, Radcliffe-Brown eventually

renounced his doctrine of Anarchism. Anarchism is an ideal, he said, the freedom of the kingdom of Heaven, and not the rule of earth. Socialism, that was the best we could hope to achieve, but there were dangers; anything that exalted the state above the individual, that was evil.

(Watson 1946:85)

Thus, Radcliffe-Brown understood himself to have a considered location within the larger politics of his day that placed him as a realist who, despite the limitations and dangers he saw in it, adopted socialism as his political location.

But I think we can go further and specify that Radcliffe-Brown's politics included a profound critique of colonial rule in Australia.⁵ Here I provide two sources of evidence upon which I invite this proposition. The first is a letter that he wrote to the Times of London in 1937 concerning the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Australia. It likely serves as an example of one of the instances to which Kuper refers in which Radcliffe-Brown "broke the rules and wrote critical, occasionally intemperate, commentaries on aspects of colonial government."⁶ If nothing else, it provides evidence to counter the oft-repeated assertion that criticizes Radcliffe-Brown for "failing to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied, in particular changes brought about by colonialism."⁷

The second is his 1935 article "Patrilineal and Matrilineal Succession," which I interpret as constituting a profound critique of the racist, ethnocentric ideology on the basis of which British colonial rule in Australia and elsewhere was legitimated. If I am correct, this interpretation raises the possibility that, proclaimed or not, Radcliffe-Brown saw his anti-colonial political location as being intimately connected with his theoretical orientation and his scholarship.⁸ As such, it adds to the evidence already assembled (e.g., Berman 1996; Goody 1995; Kuper 2005; Srivastava 1993) that calls into question the following oft-repeated assertion (e.g., Pels 1997) regarding the political commitments of British social anthropologists such as Radcliffe-Brown in Talal Asad's introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter:

If the anthropologist sometimes endorsed or condemned particular social changes affecting "his people," did he in this ad hoc commitment, do any more or any less than many colonial Europeans who accepted colonialism as a system? If he was sometimes accusingly called "a Red," "a socialist" or "an anarchist" by administrators and settlers, did this not merely reveal one facet of the hysterically intolerant character of colonialism as a system, with which he chose nevertheless to live professionally at peace.

(Asad 1975:18)

In other words, my reading will suggest that this assertion misjudges Radcliffe-Brown's political commitment; at least with respect to Australia, far from living at peace with colonialism, Radcliffe-Brown actively sought to undermine it in public debate and in scholarly discourse.⁹ [End...