He held academic appointments at universities in Cape Town, Sydney, Chicago, and Oxford, and sought to use model the field of anthopology after the natural sciences.

He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1905; M.A., 1909), graduating with first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos.

[1] While still a student, he earned the nickname "Anarchy Brown" for his close interest in the writings of the anarcho-communist and scientist Peter Kropotkin.

At the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Melbourne, Bates accused him of plagiarising her work, based on an unpublished manuscript she had sent him for comment.

While at the University of Sydney, he was a cultivator of the arts and championed Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Haddon led him towards the comparative method in specific societies in anthropology, classification and morphology, inductive generalization, and to sympathize with Durkheim's approaches.

[11] Radcliffe-Brown brought French sociology (namely Émile Durkheim) to British anthropology, constructing a rigorous battery of concepts to frame ethnography.

In 1906, one of Alfred's primary focuses in the field [Andaman Islands] was kinship and familial relations of Western Australians.

Within these communities, he uncovered distinct social organizations that proved adaptation and fusion were essential in keeping the system functioning.

(On Social Structure, 190)  He also clarifies that “We may define it as a condition in which all parts of the system work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency, i.e., without producing persistent conflicts which can neither be resolved nor regulated”.

While Malinowski's functionalism claimed that social practices could be directly explained by their ability to satisfy basic biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown rejected this as baseless.

[19] Radcliffe-Brown claimed that all research on social structure is based on observations, what anthropologists see and hear about individual peoples.

Instead, he argued for the use of the comparative method to find regularities in human societies and thereby build up a genuinely scientific knowledge of social life.

On the basis of this research, he contributed extensively to the anthropological ideas on kinship, and criticised Lévi-Strauss's Alliance theory.

He also produced structural analyses of myths, including on the basis of the concept of binary distinctions and dialectical opposition,[22] an idea later echoed by Lévi-Strauss.

According to Radcliffe-Brown, the function of religion is to install a sense of dependence on fear and other emotional strain on the human body into a society.