Savages Have No Crime!

During 1931, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown gave a popular talk at Columbia University in New York. He maintained that, unlike in the West, savage societies – a term commonly used at the time – had no criminal class and had succeeded in enforcing conformity to social norms. In this article, I suggest that, despite its defects, the talk highlights central themes in Radcliffe-Brown’s thinking about conformity, social sanctions and the law. Drawing on archival sources and on published material, I show how during fieldwork he observed the brutalities of colonial rule in the Andaman Islands, Western Australia and South Africa. I suggest that a critical awareness of how colonial law served as an ally of conquest forms an important sub-text in Radcliffe-Brown’s writing on the effective manner in which Andaman Islanders maintained social order, Indigenous Australians settled disputes and African courts operated. His comparative, sociological approach, which was implicitly critical of Western societies, was a vital influence in the emergence of law as a topic of anthropological enquiry.