This was the prevalent founding myth of the development of a scientific
basis for anthropology during the major part of the twentieth century, at
least in the milieu of British social anthropology. A dominantfigure in the
discipline, Sir James George Frazer, was supposedly toppled from his place
as an icon of scholarship in part as a result of this shift in perspective. It is
interesting to reflect that Frazer was a long-term Fellow of Trinity College
Cambridge, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the individual who became linked
to the opposing idea of‘fieldwork’, also was a shorter term research fellow
of the same college. Frazer was aware of Radcliffe-Brown’s work, just as he
was of thefieldwork of Bronislaw Malinowski of the London School of
Economics. Rather than seeing his work as eclipsed by that of either of
these two scholars, Frazer perhaps simply viewed their work as operating
on a different scientific frontier, but one not incompatible with his own
aims. True, it has for long been commonplace, and not without justifica-
tion, to see the work of Frazer as superseded by that of the‘functionalist’
school, as it came to be known. But such a frame of perspective, itself
heralding the breaking of a frame and its replacement by another, leaves
out a considerable area of overlap and indeterminacy.
First, as has often been pointed out (and recently by ourselves, Stewart
and Strathern 2014 ), the synthesizers and generalizers, such as Frazer,
depended absolutely on thefield reports of investigators who had actually
visited and spent time in out of the way corners of the world working as
missionaries, government officers, and travelers. They would naturally,
then, have embraced the quality of information brought in by investiga-
tors who identified themselves simply as anthropologists, once this label
became available and legitimate. Besides, the traditions offieldwork had
already been set in Cambridge by the Torres Straits expeditions led by
Haddon and Rivers.
Second, neither Malinowski nor Radcliffe-Brown was in fact content
with simply writing the ethnography of a single group or area, even
though their reputation was linked with their fieldwork, Malinowski
with the Trobrianders of Papua, and Radcliffe-Brown with the Andaman
Islanders (e.g., Malinowski 1922 ; Radcliffe-Brown 1922 ). They both,
rather, sought to make generalizations, Malinowski basing his ideas on a
hierarchy of needs that each society or culture had to meet, and Radcliffe-
Brown on the rigorous comparison of cases, intended to lead to valid
typologies of social structures and customary ideas, such as‘lineage’and
‘taboo’. They did not abandon the aim of generalization as such. They
simply developed different generalizations from those of Frazer, Tylor,
2 BREAKING THE FRAMES