Social Thinkers »
Together with Malinowski he may be said to have been responsible for the rise of British anthropology. Influenced by Comte,Durkheim and Montesquieu he was an exponent of comparative sociology. That is the structural principles of governing social relationships can be known through comparative study of social systems.
He also advocates the unity of the scientific method claiming that social anthropology-the theoretical natural sciences of human society-should also employ the methods of physical or biological sciences in the investigation of social phenomena. The task of the natural science of society is to discover the nature of social phenomena and explain the regular forms of social life.
He emphasis on the synchronic analysis of social structure -observation and analysis of social structure at a particular point of time. He was influenced by the empirical ethnographic tradition and holistic analytical tradition of British and American anthropology respectively.
To him social structure is not an abstraction but empirical reality. It helps us to see the entire web of social relationships in a systematic way and thus gain insight into the way society works and remains integrated. He mentions two methods for the interpretation of cultural materials-historical methods which narrate the process of historical development of a culture but its application is not possible in tribal societies which lack historical records and functional methods which assume culture as an integrated functional system and tend to discover and verify general laws of function which they assume to be valid for all human societies. Brown specialized in the study of kinship and marriage concentrating on the classificatory kinship terminology.
The Andaman Islanders (1922)
Structure and Function in Primitive Societies (1952)