Social Structure
The concept of social structure has been described by Radcliffe-Brown in his book “Structure and Function in Primitive Society“ (1952). According to him the concept of structure refers to an arrangement of parts related to one another in some sort of larger unity. He has defined ‘social structure as the complex network of actually existing relations’ (1952, p. 190). For instance, the structure of a house reveals the arrangement of walls, roofs, rooms, passage, windows, etc. In social structure the ultimate components are the arrangements of persons in relation to each other.
The Functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)
Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) was a key figure in the development of functionalism, specifically associated with the branch known as structural-functionalism. Despite disavowing the label functionalism in favour of structuralism, his perspective was more comprehensive than Malinowski’s and influenced a generation of functional analysis in anthropology.
Recognizing that the concept of function applied to human societies is based on an analogy between social life and organic life, Radcliffe-Brown emphasized the need to avoid teleological implications in functional analysis. He suggested substituting the term ‘needs’ with ‘necessary conditions of existence’ (1952, p. 178) to prevent the assumption of universal human or societal needs. Instead, he proposed that the necessary conditions for survival should be empirically determined for each social system, acknowledging the diversity of these conditions among different systems.
Radcliffe-Brown’s legitimate structural-analysis proceeded from several assumptions:
(1) One necessary condition for survival of a society is minimal integration of its parts
(2) The term function refers to those processes that maintain this necessary integration or solidarity
(3) In each society structural features can be shown to contribute to the maintenance of necessary solidarity
In his analytical approach, social structure and the conditions necessary for its survival are considered irreducible.
Similar to Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown viewed society as a reality in itself, often explaining cultural items like kinship rules and religious rituals in terms of social structure, particularly its ‘need’ for solidarity and integration. For example, analyzing a lineage system involved assessing processes associated with it in terms of their consequences for maintaining the necessary solidarity in societies where families owned land.
However, Radcliffe-Brown’s approach raised challenges. While acknowledging that the “functional unity of a social system is, of course, a hypothesis” (1952, p. 181), he did not specify criteria for assessing the amount of functional unity necessary for system survival. Moreover, his ethnographic descriptions sometimes inadvertently slipped into circular reasoning, where the existence of a system required its parts to be viewed as contributing to the system’s existence.
References
Turner, J. H. (1978). The Structure of Sociological Theory. Dorsey Press. (Pp. 48-50)
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