The Andaman Islanders

The Andaman Islanders by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown is an anthropological monograph written in the early 20th century. It offers a systematic ethnographic account of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands—especially the Great Andaman tribes—covering social organization, ritual and religion, myths, language, and material culture, and pairing description with comparative interpretation based on fieldwork. The opening of this study sets out the research context: funding and extended fieldwork, an initial but abandoned focus on the Little Andaman due to language barriers, and a shift to the Great Andaman tribes later aided by a skilled interpreter; it also notes unpublished physical anthropology, interrupted linguistic publications, and a new interpretive approach to customs and beliefs. The Introduction surveys the islands’ geography, climate, and monsoons; recounts early outside notices and the penal settlement at Port Blair; and explains sporadic historical contacts (including shipwrecks and the adoption of iron) amid persistent hostility, especially from the J̌a̤rawa. It distinguishes two cultural-linguistic divisions (Great Andaman and Little Andaman), lists the tribes, discusses the likely migration that produced the J̌a̤rawa in South Andaman, and remarks on the isolation of North Sentinel. It then gives population areas and estimates, emphasizing drastic recent decline from introduced disease and low births, with ensuing cultural change and mobility under colonial administration, and briefly reviews prior work by E. H. Man and M. V. Portman. At the start of Chapter I, the social structure is presented as small, autonomous local groups aggregated into tribes defined mainly by language (the aka- “speech” prefix), crossed by a coast/forest way-of-life divide and lacking clans. The text outlines land ownership by local groups, semi-nomadic camp types and village layout, seasonal subsistence cycles, gendered labor, hunting and gathering routines, and norms of property, gift exchange, and food sharing. (This is an automatically generated summary.)