Page "Anthropology" Paragraph 51

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922.

He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction.

However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research ( entitled simply The Andaman Islanders ) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths.

Over time, he developed an approach known as structural functionalism, which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it functioning harmoniously.

( This contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later French structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism.