Understanding and Explanation in Social Anthropology

Abstract

, NY REASONED INQUIRY seeks to understand its subject> matter, and the kind of understanding appropriate in any £ Xparticular case will depend both upon the interests of the inquirer and upon the kind of material he is investigating. Social anthropologists have not always been agreed as to exactly what their subject-matter is or as to the nature of their interest in it. It may therefore be useful to see, first of all, what it is that present-day social anthropologists really study and, secondly, to consider how they attempt to make sense of what they study, that is, to understand it. One way of understanding things is to explain them, so I shall undertake a brief review of some of the types of explanation used in, and appropriate to, social anthropology.l What follows does not purport to be an original contribution to the methodology of the social sciences; its aim is the very limited one of making more explicit certain methods of analysis already commonly used. First of all, how do present-day social anthropologists conceive their own subject? Here are a few fairly characteristic answers. For RadcliffeBrown social anthropology was 'that branch of sociology which deals with primitive or pre-literate societies', 'sociology' being defined as 'the study of social systems', and a 'social system' as consisting of 'individual human beings interacting with one another within certain coniinuing associations'.2 (The same author had earlier defined social anthropology as 'the investigation of the nature of human society by the systematic comparison of societies of diverse kinds'.3) According to Evans-Pritchard social anthropology studies