ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century anthropology in Great Britain was restricted to structural-functional research strategies. Structural-functional studies made social science ideas safe and kept the colonial world tidy for those in power. Evans-Pritchard's analysis emphasized how the principle of complementary opposition functioned to maintain the corporate structure of communities based on segmentary lineages. Anthropologists demonstrated how the principle of complementary opposition enabled people with segmentary systems to retain the corporate integrity and to unify and expand against perceived or real outside threats despite internal divisive conflicts. The field of legal anthropology developed in response to concerns regarding how native people enforced conformity to social norms and resolved disputes and trouble cases. Political anthropology was only one focus of functional analysis. Age-set/age-grade systems were identified as politically integrating structure.
