ABSTRACT
Radcliffe-Brown’s presidential address of 1931 was memorable for the formulation he gave in it of the principles of theory and method which have inspired the best field work in social anthropology during the past thirty years. The triumphs of ethnographic field work during the past thirty years have been the result of approaching the tasks of description and analysis of field data in terms of this principle. The new ethnography introduced by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown is quite explicit on this point. Ethnographic facts are meaningless, except in the colloquial sense of compatibility or incompatibility with the observer’s commonsense categories, unless they are examined in the light of theory. Functionalist ethnography has been so fruitful in matters of theory because the principles which guide it in looking for significance in ethnographic observations require an analytical, as opposed to a descriptive mode of investigation.
