Although
*Radcliffe-Brown carried out fieldwork in western Australia, he worked in an area
where Aboriginal life had been far more severely disrupted by colonial
settlement than had central Australia in the 1890s. While he had the
opportunity to collect detailed genealogies and statements of marriage rules,
he did not observe normal, daily interaction and was unaware of how the
principles he elucidated translated into social behaviour. Instead,
Radcliffe-Brown gained an overview of structural variation in the 130 ‘tribes’
on which he had sufficient information, which was brilliantly conveyed in a
four-part analysis published in the first issues of Oceania (Radcliffe-Brown
1930–1). A limited range of types of Aboriginal society were identified, each
named after a representative tribe: such as the Kariera, Aranda, Mara and
Murgin systems. Adopting a (Herbert) †Spencerian perspective, Radcliffe-Brown
inferred that the more complex types had developed out of the simpler forms as
a consequence of progressive social evolution; indeed, he claimed to have
predicted the existence of the simpler Kariera system from his knowledge of the
Aranda system described by Spencer and Gillen. Whether he had indeed done so,
or learned of systems of the Kariera form from Daisy Bates’s field notes, has
been hotly debated; there is no doubt that Bates already understood, and had documented,
the operation of four-section systems of the Kariera type.
While
Radcliffe-Brown and his followers were later ridiculed by †Edmund Leach for indulging
in ‘anthropological butterfly collecting’ when they classified societies according
to types and subtypes, his imposition of order upon the accumulating ethnographies
of Australia was a substantial achievement. It has nevertheless severe limitations.
The method is almost entirely descriptive. There are no hypotheses to explain why
the variety of human societies should take particular forms, other than an
alleged inherent tendency for systems to develop greater complexity over time.
Unlike
Radcliffe-Brown, his student †W.L. Warner conducted extended fieldwork between
1926 and 1929 at Millingimbi, in northeast Arnhem Land, to produce his classic of
functionalist ethnography, A Black Civilisation (1937). Warner gave the
name Murngin to the indigenous people of Northeast Arnhem Land; today
these people call themselves Yolngu. His ethnography provided an
integrated account of local organization, kinship, *warfare, *religion and
(unusually for the time) the evidence for change and interaction with
Indonesian fishermen.