Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of social structure occupies a central place in his structural-functional approach to sociology and social anthropology. Influenced by the natural sciences, particularly biology, he sought to study society in terms of the arrangement of its parts and the functions they perform in maintaining the whole. For Radcliffe-Brown, social structure does not refer to a mere collection of individuals but to an organized pattern of social relationships that exist independently of particular individuals and persist over time. He defined social structure as the network of actually existing relations between persons in a given society. These relations are not random but are ordered and regulated by norms, customs, and institutionalized roles. Thus, the focus shifts from individuals and their subjective experiences to the objective pattern of relations that bind them together. For example, kinship systems, political organization, and economic arrangements are all components of social structure, as they define how individuals relate to one another in stable and predictable ways. Radcliffe-Brown emphasized that social structure is an abstraction derived from empirical observation. While individuals