Robert Briffault

Robert Stephen Briffault ([ʁo.ˈbɛʁ stə.ˈfɑ̃ bʁi.ˈfo], 1876 – 11 December 1948) was trained as a surgeon, but found fame as a social anthropologist and later in life as a novelist.

Biography

According to one source, Briffault was born in Nice, France.[1] According to others he was born in London,[2][3] though he spent time in France and elsewhere in Europe following his diplomat father.[3] After the death of his father, Briffault and his Scottish-born mother emigrated to New Zealand.

His first wife (m. 1896) was Anna Clarke, with whom he had three children. After her death he married Herma Hoyt (1898-1981), an American writer and translator.[1]

Briffault received his MB, ChB from the University of Dunedin in New Zealand and commenced medical practice.[1] After service on the Western Front during World War I (where he was awarded the Military Cross[3]), he settled in England[1] where he turned to the study of sociology and anthropology.[4] He also lived for some time in the USA,[5] and later Paris.[3]

Briffault debated the institution of marriage with Bronisław Malinowski in the 1930s[6] and corresponded with Bertrand Russell.

He died in Hastings, Sussex, England on 11 December 1948.[1][7]

Asked how to pronounce his name, Briffault told The Literary Digest: "Should be pronounced bree'-foh, without attempting to give it a French pronunciation." [8]

Briffault's Law

Briffault is known for what is called Briffault's Law:

The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place. — Robert Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. I, p. 191

Commentary on works

In 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote the following in his Treatise on the Gods:

Primitive society, like many savage societies of our own time, was probably strictly matriarchal. The mother was the head of the family. ...What masculine authority there was resided in the mother's brother. He was the man of the family, and to him the children yielded respect and obedience. Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother. They belonged, not to his family, but to their mother's. As they grew up they joined their uncle's group of hunters, not their father's. This matriarchal organization of the primitive tribe, though it finds obvious evidential support in the habits of higher animals, has been questioned by many anthropologists, but of late one of them, Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions]. It is hard to escape the cogency of his arguments, for they are based upon an almost overwhelming accumulation of facts. They not only show that, in what we may plausibly assume about the institutions of early man and in what we know positively about the institutions of savages today, the concepts inseparable from a matriarchate color every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things, so that "the societal characters of the human mind" all seem to go back "to the functions of the female and not to those of the male." Thus it appears that man, in his remote infancy, was by no means the lord of creation that he has since become."[9]

Works

Non-fiction

Fiction

Articles

Other

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 McMaster University Archives Briffault, Robert]
  2. Funk & Wagnell's New Encyclopedia 2006
  3. 1 2 3 4 Time Sept 27, 1937 Book Review
  4. Physician Writers A-C
  5. Time Magazine July 18, 1932 People
  6. Marriage Past and Present: A debate between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski (1956) edited by Ashley Montagu
  7. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1949), p. 341
  8. Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936
  9. H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, Blue Ribbon Books, 1930, p. 84.
  10. L. H. Dudley Buxton, "The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions," Eugenics Review, Vol. XX, No. 2, July 1928.
  11. Suzanne Keller, "Does the Family Have a Future?," Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1971.

Further reading

External links

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