ABSTRACT
A half-century has now passed since Radcliffe-Brown published his paper ‘On Social Structure’ (1940). In that paper, he wrote (taking Australian Aborigines as his example) that ‘these human beings are connected by a complex network of social relations’, and for that ‘network of actually existing relations’ he proposed to use the term ‘social structure’. It is to the idea of networks of social relationships that I will return here-even though that idea has gone through changes since then, the context will be very different, and my ultimate concern, in a disgracefully un-Radcliffe-Brownian manner, is actually with culture.
