ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the major school that rejected the Boasian idea of culture as a hodgepodge of unrelated traits: functionalism, which dominated British anthropology from the 1930s to the late 1950s. Indeed, their feud is an apt illustration of a memorable observation, attributed to Columbia University professor Wallace Sayre, that academic conflicts are "the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low. Malinowski, in contrast, was a foreigner without the educational pedigree of Radcliffe-Brown, and was regarded as an outsider by British academic elites associated with Cambridge and Oxford. Radcliffe-Brown is usually identified as the founder of the structural-functional viewpoint in British social anthropology. British anthropologists collaborated in this effort; indeed, prior to World War II the Colonial Office was one of the few major sources of research funding that England's anthropologists could consistently rely upon. Malinowski mocked Radcliffe-Brown's "hyphenated functionalism" and Durkheimian approaches in general that "neglect the individual and disregard biology".
