While Malinowski has recently been the subject of at least three celebratory international conferences, his peer, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, has sunk into obscurity, accused of intellectual arrogance, crude objectivism, and being a paralysed conservative, oblivious to the realities of the colonial situation. But the situation is much more complicated, as Isak Niehaus shows in his nuanced, well-researched and deeply insightful historical ethnography of Radcliffe-Brown, which re-examines his contributions as a theorist and public intellectual. Originally undertaken as a project to discover the genealogical roots of his own training, Niehaus faced almost insurmountable obstacles because the peripatetic Radcliffe-Brown left a scanty written archive, scattered over several continents. Additionally, his preferred mode of engagement was the spoken word in lectures and in public talks, so Niehaus scoured newspapers and the archives of colleagues he corresponded with to produce a complex portrait.

Born in a downwardly mobile lower-middle-class Birmingham family, Radcliffe-Brown won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he became the protégé of A. C. Haddon, who arranged for him to serve as secretary to the British delegation attending the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1905 meeting in South Africa, and facilitated his fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in 1906–07 and in Western Australia in 1911–12. Niehaus points out that, despite being dismissed as an armchair theorist, Radcliffe-Brown spent over eighteen months in the Andamans and more than eleven months in Western Australia, which is longer than the renowned fieldworker Malinowski spent in the field. Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown claimed it was useless to theorize about people without having first-hand experience of them.

World War One found him in Australia, where he taught school and later became director of education in Tonga before ill health forced his resignation and move to South Africa, where in 1921 he was appointed to the first chair in Social Anthropology in the Commonwealth at the University of Cape Town. In 1925, he moved to a professorship at Sydney, attracted by generous Rockefeller Foundation funding, and when that dried up in 1931, he took up a professorship at the University of Chicago before accepting the chair at Oxford in 1937. On retirement, he held visiting positions in Cairo and ended his career at Rhodes University in 1951–52.

Of interest to readers of this journal would undoubtedly be his role as a public intellectual in shaping African Studies. His efforts to attract officials and missionaries to his vacation courses in African Studies were singularly unsuccessful, as officialdom believed them unnecessary and threatening. He also played a leading role in local non-racial welfare organizations. In contrast to Malinowski, the influential gatekeeper to International African Institute (IAI) research funding, who, on his visit to South Africa in 1934, argued for ‘complete segregation’, Radcliffe-Brown had a different perspective. Writing in 1940, he developed an argument originally made in 1924 to a government commission that the African population was too diverse to typify them, and that one should look at the interactions between people, not traits. He wrote that South Africa was the example par excellence of a ‘composite society’ that was part of a worldwide process created through migration, conquest and exploitation, and where the fate of the conquered varied from outright extermination, as with the Bushmen, to second-class denizenship. A new society could be created only with the abolition of the colour bar. The analysis of such societies was complex and difficult, as ‘what is happening in a Transkeian tribe, for example, can only be described by recognizing that this tribe has been incorporated into a wider political and economic structural system’. He concluded that Malinowski’s much-vaunted IAI memorandum on ‘Methods of study of culture contact in Africa’ (1938) was simply a way to avoid reality. Perhaps his most subversive argument was his call for a comparative sociology of all societies. This was potentially subversive, as scholars such as Mamdani have argued that the key justifying colonialism is that they are ‘different’.

Recent scholarship has conceptualized the colonial state and its successors as ‘weak’. In such situations, Radcliffe-Brown’s 1940 insight that the state as a ‘fiction’ does not exist as an entity over and above society is relevant. Rather, it was an organization that, while founded on military power, remained ‘a collection of individual human beings connected by complex relations, and these individuals had different roles and held different positions of power or authority’.Footnote ¹ Niehaus points out that seeing society as a network of social relations with indeterminate boundaries provides a valuable counterpoint to the assumption of a discrete unit of study.

Despite being marred by some sloppy copyediting, Niehaus has provided a veritable cornucopia of insights about Radcliffe-Brown’s peripatetic life, personality and intellectual praxis, and a lesson for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.