ABSTRACT
At the worst possible time, in 1940, early in World War Two, a symposium, African Political Systems, announced the advent of a new model in social anthropology. Its editors, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, were lieutenants of RadcliffeBrown, who had been appointed to the newly established Oxford chair in social anthropology in 1937. Both Evans-Pritchard and Fortes had spent long periods in Africa in the 1930s among large, dispersed, loosely-organised populations without traditional centralised authorities. Their field experience was therefore quite different from that of the earlier generation of British ethnographers who had worked on islands in the Pacific, or among small bands of Australian Aborigines. Their initial topic was government, which had been generally ignored by the generation of Rivers and Boas and also by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. After the war they published studies of kinship, heralded by another symposium, African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, but they paid little attention to kinship terminologies or to systems of exchange marriage, the mainstays of kinship studies from Morgan to Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown.
