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

Case 9: From Sapir to Radcliffe-Brown

At the time he left Chicago, Sapir was supervising an extensive research program with funding from five different sources. The problems ranged from "phonetic symbolism" and the relation of voice to personality to Athabaskan ethnology and the comparative linguistics of Yucatan - the latter carried on by Manuel Andrade, who had a joint appointment in the Department and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Although a number of his best students accompanied Sapir to Yale, the momentum of his interest continued to be felt in Chicago anthropology after his departure, particularly in relation to the American Southwest, where Sapir himself had carried on fieldwork in 1929. At the same time, a sense of theoretical disorientation was manifest in at least one prominent Chicago student (John Provinse), as he tried to orient himself to the various anthropological viewpoints then impinging on American historical ethnology. The impact of one of them was more directly felt when the Chicago anthropologists succeeded in bringing from Sydney, Australia, one of the two leading representatives of the British "functionalist" schoolwhich their sociological colleague, Robert Park, described as "nothing more or less than sociology, with the qualification that it is mainly concerned with primitive peoples."

Still affecting an Edwardian Cambridge style, Radcliffe-Brown had a more narrowly focused intellectual personality than Sapir, and his undeniable charisma tended to polarize response. But for students interested in a more "scientific" study of social and cultural phenomena, his finelyhoned recension of Durkheim had a great appeal. R-B (as he came to be known during his American years) rejected historical ethnology as based largely on conjecture. He sought instead to develop a taxonomy of social forms which would make possible the derivation of "general laws" governing the "synchronic' functioning of human society, as a necessary prerequisite for any "diachronic" study of social change or evolution.

Soon after his arrival R-B embarked on the project of bringing order to the materials of Boasian ethnography. He undertook a comparative study of American Indian kinship terminologies, interpreting them in terms of sociological principles ("the equivalence of siblings," etc.) which had been "proposed and tested" in his recent Australian work. Employed as Research Assistant under the Rockefeller grant, Fred Egganset about abstracting information on social organization for a series of typescript volumes on different cultural regions. He and other students began to collect field data in terms of problems posed by R-B's project - which "turned out to be somewhat greater in magnitude than was anticipated."

The contrast between R-B's rather ahistorical scientism and Sapii s humanistic search for symbolic "meaning" was quite dramatic. It became an issue in relation to the publication of Navajo materials collected under Sapir's auspices by the missionary Berard Haile - one of a number of Research Associates whose work was supported by the Department in this period. R-B, who had "never used such texts to contribute to wider problems, either historical or scientific," wanted to be shown "just how" they might add to our understanding of Navajo "thought and culture." Sapir, on the other hand, had no doubt that "there is an enormous amount of misunderstanding in current ethnological literature for the very reason that source materials are not obtained and published."

In this context, Chicago students tended to relate to Radcliffe-Brown in various ways other than complete conversion. Morris Opler, who had published a paper criticizing R-B on the relation of kinship terms and social behavior, had to be convinced by Robert Redfield that it was not inappropriate for him to be represented in the Festschrift presented to R-B prior to his departure for Oxford in 1937. Even Fred Eggan, who edited The Social Organization of North American Tribes, and who was later to be viewed as the chief spokesman of British social anthropology in the United States, conceived his work in retrospect as an attempt to synthesize the historical and scientific approaches in terms of a "Method of Controlled Comparison." Nevertheless, as Redfield pointed out, R-B's insistence on the possibility of a "strictly nonhistorical scientific method" was an important factor in a more general reorientation then going on in American anthropology.

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