An anthropological textbook recently published in Cambridge states that “hardly anyone in social anthropology today claims to be a follower of Radcliffe-Brown” (Barnard 2000: 7). It would be hypocritical for a French anthropologist with a structuralist inclination to challenge this kind of opinion, seemingly quite common in the very country of birth of the great scholar whose name this lecture is honouring. On the other hand, the present circumstance affords me perhaps the only appropriate opportunity for confessing that there is at least an aspect of Radcliffe-Brown's work which I found quite stimulating, although it led me astray for a while. Radcliffe-Brown's sociological theory of totemism inspired me some years ago when I was trying to make sense of the peculiar treatment of animals by Amazonian Indians: although actively hunted for food, or feared as predators, animals are nevertheless considered as persons with whom humans can, indeed should, interact according to social rules.

The standard model available at the time for conceptualizing relationships between humans and natural kinds was the Lévi-Straussian theory of totemism, that is, the idea that discontinuities between species function as a mental model for organizing social segmentation among humans. However, that was patently not the case in Amazonia where the differences between humans and non-humans are thought to be of degree, not of nature, thus echoing Radcliffe-Brown's depiction of totemism, in which, to quote his words, “the natural order enters into and becomes part of the social order” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 130).