Beyond Nature and Culture: Radcliffe-Brown Lecture In Social Anthropology

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concepts of nature and culture. It reveals that Radcliffe-Brown had a poor opinion of the concept of culture; he neglected to consider that the concept of nature was no more concrete or directly observable than ‘culture’. The chapter shows that other civilisations were able to adopt a variety of ways to distribute qualities to beings in the world, thus resulting in forms of discontinuity and continuity between humans and non-humans. It stresses that people should treat the modern ontological grid — moral singularity versus physical universality — as one of several other formulae employed to describe the structures of the world.