Speech, writing, and the history of British social anthropology


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward
Abstract. Jacques Derrida's claim that the Western tradition has privileged speech over writing runs into an objection from the history of British anthropology: the functionalist rejection of oral history.
Draft version: Version 1 (26th July 2023 - note the specific example of a myth function is not Malinowski's).
PDF available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372629363_Speech_writing_and_the_history_of_British_social_anthropology

        Jacques Derrida is famous for a claim about how speech has been privileged. I shall work from an explanation I often use. Sarah Richmond writes:
"According to Derrida, Western thought, from at least Plato onwards, has repeatedly propagated a false hierarchy, placing speech above writing. Philosophers have regarded writing with suspicion, as a dangerous repository of thought, in which the speaker’s intentions are likely to be betrayed." (1996: 39)
In this paper, I wish to present a challenge to Derrida from the history of British social anthropology. It may be said that this is anthropology, not philosophy, but the arguments that will concern us are as much philosophy of social science as they are social anthropology, and furthermore were probably influenced by positivist trends in philosophy.


        The founders of British functionalist anthropology were against trying to explain the existence of certain practices amongst a people studied as remnants from an earlier stage of their society. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown asserted that we just do not have written records to justify such historical conjectures, describing them as worse than useless given this absence (1952: 3). What about oral histories provided by people studied? He does not appear to even consider this, dismissing history without written records as unscientific history.


        The other founding figure, Bronislaw Malinowski, attended to oral histories and myths but not as sources of information about earlier stages of a society, rather as having a contemporary function: as part of a social system the components of which all function to meet the needs of society members (see Cheater 1989: 24). Making a myth about how great your predecessor was, for example, functions to get you to do your job better.


        Both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski privilege written sources, to the point of excluding oral histories as sources of information about what a society was like. This does not cohere well with Derrida's claim.


References
Cheater, Angela.P. 1989 (second ed.). Social anthropology: an alternative introduction. London: Routledge.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. Available at:
https://monoskop.org/images/b/b6/Brown_Radcliffe_Alfred_Structure_and_Function_in_Primitive_Society_1952.pdf
And:
https://archive.org/details/structurefunctio00radc/page/n7/mode/2up
Richmond, Sarah. 1996. Derrida and Analytical Philosophy: Speech Acts and their Force. European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 38-62.