"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 13: In the Aftermath of Radcliffe-Brown

Debate on the nature of social science was part of the crackling intellectual milieu at the University in the mid1930s. President Hutchins' neo-Thomist protege Mortimer Adler, who was causing some to worry that students might convert to Catholicism, argued that "systematic social science" must be grounded in the categories of Aristotelian psychology. In response, Radcliffe-Brown gave a valedictory seminar in the spring of 1937, in which he defended the possibility of a "theoretical natural science of society" which "was in no sense a psychology." Although for some years his chef d'oeuvre had been a course called "The Comparative Science of Culture;" R-B decided (at Eggan s urging) that it was necessary to distinguish his enterprise from that of the American "ethnologists," who also studied an encompassing set of phenomena which they called "culture." Criticizing the looseness of prevailing American usage, R-B argued that culture should be restricted to "a set of rules for behavior," "a body of accepted symbols," and associated "sentiments and beliefs." He insisted that "culture" could not be studied scientifically except in relation to social structure (from which, nevertheless, it must be conceptually distinguished).

The "nature of culture" - on which A. L. Kroeber lectured as visitor in the year after R-B's departure - was a matter of some concern at Chicago in this period, as Redfield's contribution to the general examinations of 1936 suggests. Although not inclined to fol low R-B in subordinating culture to social structure, American anthropol ogists were becoming dissatisfied with the trait-distribution approach popular in the 1920s. Suggesting a Sapirian distinction between "function" and "meaning; " Redfield in 1934 defined culture as the organized totality of "the conventionalized meanings char acteristic of groups." However, his usage of the term "culture" elicited a charge of inconsistency from Warner's student Leo Srole, who was disturbed by Redfield's tendency to see it in im plicitly quantitative terms as some thing that was progressively lost in the transition to its polar opposite, civili zation. But if Redfield resisted the attempt to develop systematic concep tual terminology "faster than it is needed," he defended Radcliffe-Brown's distinction between ethnology (which was historical) and social anthropology (which was scientific). Upon R-B's departure, this distinction was em bodied in the definition of anthropology at Chicago as consisting of five, rather than the traditional four, fields.

In replacing Radcliffe-Brown, Cole moved to redress imbalances which he felt had developed among the subfields of the discipline. In 1937, he finally succeeded in bringing back Krogman, who had spent the years since his Chicago Ph.D. carrying on work in human growth at Western Reserve, to develop a program in physical anthropology. On several occasions, Cole tried unsuccessfully to find a position elsewhere for his junior linguist, Harry Hoijer, in order to open up a position in Old World archaeology, in which Hoijer was regularly forced to double. In politely rejecting the proposal that Hoijer might succeed Sapir at Yale, George Murdock suggested that the Chicago graduate program was "doing the best job of any in the country." Although the departmental secretary's feeling that social anthropologists were "rarely much good in an archaeology camp" was doubtless reciprocated by members of Warner's cadre, there were some, like John Bennett, who had no trouble working in both fields. In general, the sense of shared commitment to a "science of man" seems to have been quite strong on the eve of the world crisisif one can judge from an account of the Department's activities published in the Maroon.

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