THE BRITISH TRADITION IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Donald G. MacRae

A title of this kind implies several assumptions and raises some ques-
tions.  Given that there is a specifically British tradition in Social

Anthropology-.and the phrase itself is very British--we may ask what is

this tradition; is it legitimate; is it important; whence has it come; what
is its future, and so on.  We will also ask, if we are wise, more fundamen-
tal questions:  what is a tradition in social science, and what is the sig-
nificance of traditions?

A tradition may perhaps be taken as a. kind of institution. Patterns of
thought and behavior, no matter how established in the first place, form a
tradition as they form all institutions.   But traditions are loose sorts of
institutions: where some institutions lay down in advance every act, every
detai 1, every word--are in fact prescriptive and ritual--others permit or
demand interpretation and permit choice. Such permissiveness within very

wi-de limits is one of the most characteristic features of a tradition as of
several other kinds of institution.

In addition traditions acquire their legitimacy and the sanctions of
their authority from time.  This prestige of time, the authority of antiq-
uity, is a persistent and odd fact of social psychology. Bacon's maxim,

1M4tiuitas saeculi, juventus mundi', might seem a cogent anti-antiquarian
principle, but though legitmnation by novelty is not even uncommon, it is

less frequent and less cogent in practice than its converse. One result of

this is the invention of a false past to justify a tradition--rather like the
faking of genealogies which is so common among some peoples--or, more often,
the selection of facts to falsify history and suggest immemorial antiquity.
I hope I shall engage in neither of these.

But time of itself is not enough to legitimate-a tradition--certainly

not a, scientific one.  Success of some kind is also required (we will examine
some of the varieties of success rather later), and one might even say that
for a tradition to survive and flourish it must also be functional:   if you
like a functional constituent of culture. It is this which makes the exis-

tence of tradition and of "schools" within traditions, a necessary constitu-
ent of all science and scholarship. This point needs no elaboration; nor,
I am sure, does its converse:  the fact that any tradition in the world of

learning which goes unexamined and unquestioned is bound to become decadent,
sterile and in the end pernicious-

Now one form of questioning is by comptarison., Anthropology flourishes

in both the United States and the Commonwealth. If we leave aside so far as
is. SPossible physical anthropology, archaeology and the study of material

culture we are left with what is on the whole referred to in America as Cul-
tural and in Britain as Social Anthropology. It may help to define the

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British tradition and to criticize it if we begin, rapidly and superficially
enough, by comparing these. I have tried to list in parallel columns a num-
ber of descriptive adjectives and affiliations which seem to me typical and
frequently used of the two traditions. Here, subject to a proviso or two,
is the inventory:

British           American
Social            Cultural

Descriptive       Structural        Historical

adjectives        Sociologistic     Psychologistic

Analytic          "Holistic"

Administration    Biology

Affilliations     Economics         Archaeology
and interests     Politics          Linguistics

Kinship           Symbolic systems

Such a listing is, of course, arbitrary. I am well aware of the many

exceptions and qualifications to which any such a crude procedure is subject--
for example the importance of Indian administration and affairs to the devel-
opment of American anthropology, of Darwinism to the growth of British inves-
tigation, etc. Nor am I unmindful of the fact that neither propositions in
the social sciences nor those about them are often of a simple true/false,
either/or variety. Far more often and more profitably are they of a more

than less kind--and my inventory is of this species. In providing it ITave
perhaps gone some way to defining what the British tradition is today and
how it differs from other possible ways of approaching the same field.

It is easy to give this tradition its historical roots.  Behind all

modern anthropology lies the legacy of the culture history of the eighteenth
century--of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Condorcet; of Diderot who i's too often
neglected; of Vico and Herder who are in some sense peripheral. But the

foundation is the age of reason and British social anthropology is specific-
ally British--I am as a Scot and lokal-patriot, even inclined to say specif-
ically Scottish.  Hume in religion, Adam SniiTh in economics and comparative
morals, Adam Ferguson in politics and kinship, Lord Monboddo in the antici-
pation of biological evolution and anthropological diffusionism--damnnosa
hereditaslI--are the true progenitors of an unbroken lineage.

The continuation of their concerns before and throughout the time of

Darwin and Spencer can be seen in a variety of writers. Lane's Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the extensive comparative studies of`
Maine, are only highpoints in a range of proto-scientific speculation and

ethnographic results of pro-consular leisure in the rapidly expanding British
empire and of increasing missionary endeavor. It is easy to praise a Lane,
a Meadows or a Maine and to dismiss the present importance of the rest of

this material, but it often possesses a candor, a directness and a clarity

which are some guarantee of objectivity--and when these men wrote accultura-
tion had not proceeded very far, and that too was an advantage. (The impor-
tance of this was brought sharply home to me in West Africa. Sources on

Ashanti a century older than Rattray proved sometimes more useful than his
classic and remarkable work.)

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A short paper like this is no place to discuss the rise and decline of

social Darwinism or to assess its contribution, though the stimulus given to
anthropological researches is beyond all question. But something must be
said of that Spencer whom no one reads, all abuse, and to whom all are

indebted. It is not the macro-sociology of Spencer that matters today. What
is important as I have pointed out elsewhere is his conceptual apparatus--

"structure," "function" and "institution" all derive their modern usage from
him--and his analysis of the movement of societies from "undifferentiated
homogeneity" to "heterogeneity" which gave so central a clue to Durkheim's

study of the role and significance of the division of labor in society. And
from Durkheim the theory of nearly all modern British social anthropology
descends through two major lineages.

Before examining these lineages and the contemporary situation some-

thing should be said in passing of the age of Tylor and Frazer. Their direct
influence has been small and, indeed, Tylor through the concept of culture
has played a larger part in American than in English work. But they simul-

taneously brought social anthropology into the universities and to the atten-
tion of the public.  Marrett certainly continued their concerns, but their
real influence was perhaps on classicists from Gilbert Murray to Cornford,
and in the excitement they engendered. Jane Harrison has described this
charmingly:

We Hellenists were in truth at that time a "people who sat in dark-
ness,tt but we were soon to see a great light, two great lights--

archaeology and anthropology. Classics were turning in their long

sleep. Old men began to see visions, young men to dream dreams.    I had
just left Cambridge when Schliemann began to dig at Troy. Among my own
contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, soon to light the dark world of savage
superstition with a gleam from The Golden Bough. The happy title of

that great book . . . made it arrest the attention of scholars. They
sa-w in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable of
elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken;

Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in
vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes;
but at the mere sound of the magical words "Golden Bough" the scales
fell--we heard and understood.

The Tylor Festschrift and the symposium on Anthropology and the Classics
are other witnesses to this influence, and the Golden Bough has become a

very successful paperback. Perhaps Frazer is due for an academic revival,
but he will probably have to wait for it. His technical contribution was

small, and it is technique that gives prestige more certainly than any other
factor in British social anthropology today. His friend and predecessor,

Robertson Smith, has perhaps survived better owing to the fact that his work
still concerns both theologians and orientalists.

With Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski we enter the modern world, though
the lush prose of the latter is sometimes more eloquent than successful and
has an odd nineteenth century ring. Essentially, Radcliffe-Brown had the

more sociological, Malinowski the more psychological approach to data. Yet
in the perspective of history they look increasingly similar in their

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-contributions however different in their personalities and pupils. Durkheim's
concern with segmentary organization, with mechanical social solidarity, with
the concept of function, and--less centrally--with collective representations
and religion provide the framework of their thought. However much the name
"functionalismtt may be repudiated, it not unfairly describes their position.

It can, I think, be rapidly summarized. It is the doctrine that all

institutions and practices in society subserve needs of which the actors in
society are not themselves necessarily aware nor capable of describing cor-
rectly. These needs may be biological, psychological, or social--this is

never clear in Malinowski who shifted his ground: for Radcliffe-Brown, more
Durkheimian, they were essentially social and structural.  Probably this is
true for Malinowski also, for to both writers the perpetuation of a given
social system as such was the central end of social action. There is an

intermeshing of functions into a unique institutional-functional configuration
for each society which is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating--an idea par-
ticularly attractive to Malinowski, derived perhaps ultimately from Burke in
the eighteenth century. Societies are seamless, consistent, logical. His-
torical questions cannot therefore expect answers of much explanatory value,

hypothetical history is (rightly) condemnedj but it is difficult to understand
how any kind of endogenous social change can take place within the terms of
such an analysis.

As a sociologist I think functionalism a form of error--though not all

error; far from itl --and if it is error it is at least fruitful error. Func-
tionalism has one thing in common with the more sophisticated forms of Marx-
ism:  it concentrates attention on the non-obvious, the latent and difficult
in social structure. And it is far more flexible, more realistic than Marx-
ian in every respect save its anti-historicism.  In the field it has found
its justification, though there it may have tempted some workers to stress

social unity and ignore schism in an unrealistic fashion.  Yet it is hard to
think of a better tool for research among peoples without documentation to
whom quantitative techniques cannot be applied.

And with fieldwork we enter on another element of the tradition. Haddon,
Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski all pioneered what has become almost a rite de
passage andla caste mark. To become a social anthropologist one must have

done fieldwork in an approved way; to be recognized as one this fact should
have appropria.te monographic record. Professor Evans-Pritchard's inaugural
lecture in Oxford most clearly establishes the ideal--and therefore rare--

pattern of the ritual. And it has proved itself in two ways: the scientific
contribution-has been and continues to be great; bound together by ritual and
recognition anthropologists in Britain form a formidable academic clan,

divided into two descent groups, fierce and active in internal feud, but

united in a common pride, for a common scientific endeavor, and for defense
against all external attack.

To drop the metaphor this means that social anthropology is, among other
things, tiow a small but I think flourishing profession.v The subject, like
social work and unlike sociology, has high statis.  It is associated with

colonial administration--traditionally a career for a gentleman, and entrance
into the profession and acceptance by it confers Status in Britain whatever

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the social or geographical origins of the entrant. This, too, is an aspect
of the tradition, and a fact tending to its perpetuation.

Andl the tradition is alive.  There are certain obvious threats in the

future and the present, but they are not I think serious:   certainly when I
survey nry anthropological friends and colleagues (it would be invidious to
name them) I feel confidence in their power to adapt, and the writings of
the leaders of the clan suggest that adaptation to meet these threats is
already well under way. One threat is external: the fact that the old

world of anthropology is becoming used up:   the monographs have. largely been
written, and culture change and industrialization proceed apace. The world
of "under-development" is open to everyone, not merely to anthropologis.ts.
Secondly there is the inadequacy of functionalism.   This-is only partial,

but'It is increasingly apparent, and a revision of theory is perhaps over-
due. Yet neither of these is very serious.

Whether or not fieldwork can hold its old place the anthropologist can
bring highly specific skills to social research in the underdeveloped ter-

ritories; he can try to give his work a temporal articulation by documentary
research--the amount of documentation about primitives is underestimated and
underexplored--and he can seriously engage in comparative sociology.   In
fact, in a lively and encouraging way, all these things are already going
forward.

In the study of modern society through his concern for kin relation-
ships and his skill in small societies--rural or specialized urban indus-
trial groups--the anthropologist can contribute independently of and in
supplementation to the sociologist or social administrator. His feeling
for the gemeinschaftlieh is particularly important in stressing what the

other specializing most neglect, and there should be no bar to any contri-
bution to our understanding of the complex and imperfect factors of indus-
trial society. Work in these directions should of itself revivify theory
without the recourse to a neo-marxism which .is sometimes evident. And for

those. who are disconsolate at the prospect of change within tradition there
will still, for a long time, be monographs (important and yet fully tradi-
tional) to be written!

Yet I expect, and believe I see taking place on the one hand, a new

rapprochement of social anthropology and sociology--a tendency always pres-
ent; on the other a new concern with the past and with culture history and
the practical and theoretical problems of the comparative method. Whether
this should be regarded as a restoration or as a renewal of the tradition
is a point which hardly matters. Certainly I believe the American and

British traditions are growing more alike. We should not forget that they
can be seen not 'Just as reflecting differences and errors, but also as evi-
dence of a division of labor, and that both still flourish into our new and
different age.

ENDNOTE

(1) A paper read to the third annual meeting of the Kroeber Anthropological

Society, May 16, 1959, Berkeley, California.

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