Before and After Science: Radcliffe-Brown, British Social Anthropology, and the Relationship Between Field Research, Ethnography, and Theory

Abstract

In Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program of social anthropology as a "natural science of society" the ethnographical method was seen as a fundamental research tool useful not only for guaranteeing scientific reliability to the work of recording ethnographic documentation but also for empirically testing theoretical hypotheses. In the first part, I expose some points of debate inside British Social Anthropology before 1960 on how to organize fieldwork research and ethnographic monographs by trying to conciliate the stress put by Radcliffe-Brown on the search for the structural aspects of social life with the Malinowskian imperative of presenting a thorough documentary evidence of every detail of "natives" views, beliefs, discourses, and behavior. In the second part, I focus on the new twist to which these epistemological dilemmas about the aims of ethnography were submitted after Evans Pritchard's turn to a view of social anthropology as a discipline which is closer to history and human...