Anthropology After Gluckman

Placing the Manchester School at the vanguard of modern social anthropology, this book reveals the cosmopolitan distinctiveness of the intimate circle around Max Gluckman. Such distinctiveness, Richard Werbner argues, was driven by creative difference, travelling theories and innovative, interdisciplinary approaches. The expansion of social anthropology as a dynamic, open discipline became the hallmark of the Manchester School. The remarkable careers and legacies of the Manchester School anthropologists are shown for the first time through inter-linked social biography and intellectual history, to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Werbner reveals that members of the circle engaged in deep dialogue, enduring friendships, and creative collaboration. The re-discovery of the complexity of their engagement and their lasting impact illuminates the exploration of the frontiers between ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, and the anthropology of colonial to postcolonial change.

This title places the Manchester School in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. Werbner reveals not only the cosmopolitan distinctiveness but also the force of creative difference in the ideas, interdisciplinary approaches, and travelling theories of the intimate circle around Max Gluckman.

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The Enigma of Max Gluckman examines one of the most influential British anthropologists of the twentieth century. South African-born Max Gluckman was the founder of what became known as the Manchester School of social anthropology, a key figure in the anthropology of anticolonialism and conflict theory in southern Africa, and one of the most prolific structuralist and Marxist anthropologists of his generation. From his position at Oxford University as graduate student and lecturer to his career at Manchester, Gluckman was known to be generous and engaged with his closest colleagues but brutish and hostile in his denunciations of their work if it did not contribute to the social justice and activist vision he held for the discipline. Conventional histories of anthropology have treated Gluckman as an outlier from mainstream British social anthropology based on his career at the University of Manchester and his gruff manner. He was certainly not the colonial gentleman typical of his British colleagues in the field. Gluckman was deeply engaged with field research in southern Africa on the Zulus, in Barotseland with the Lozi, and also in connection with his directorship of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute from 1941 to 1947, which obscured his growing critique of anthropology's methods and ties to Western colonialism and racial oppression in the subcontinent. Robert J. Gordon's biography skillfully reexamines the colorful life of Max Gluckman and restores his career in the British anthropological tradition.

In social anthropology, as in other branches of science, there is a close relationship between research methods and theoretical problems. Advancing theory and shifts in orientation go hand in hand with the development of techniques and mutually influence one another. If the development of modern social anthropology owes much to its established tradition of fieldwork, it is also clear that the procedures that anthropological fieldwork should follow in the laboratory can never be prescribed in absolute terms nor become wholly standardized. Yet as anthropological analysis is refined, it becomes increasingly important that students in the field be aware of the need to collect basic kinds of data, and know how to set about doing so. In this volume, anthropologists who have worked closely together for many years at the Rhodes- Livingstone Institute for Social Research, Lusaka, and/or in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, discuss within a common framework modern fieldwork methods as tools for examining a number of problems of current anthropological interest. Elizabeth Colson, J. Clyde Mitchell, and J. A. Barnes stress aspects of the role of quantification in social anthropology and indicate a range of problems that can be illuminated by the use of quantitative techniques. Equal importance is attached by all contributors to the collection and analysis of detailed case material, a topic explored in J. van Velsen's essay. A. L. and T. S. Epstein, V. W. Turner, and M. G. Marwick consider the kinds of data relevant to anthropological discussion in the fields of economics, law, ritual, and witchcraft, and the methods by which such material may be collected. The volume is introduced by Max Gluckman, former director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and former head of the department of social anthropology and sociology, University of Manchester.

The scientific study of human evolution and culture is about a hundred years old. This volume surveys its achievements and methods. Originally published more than forty years ago, the volume's contributors include people who have shaped anthropology's future. As Gluckman says in his Preface, the contributions "point to the horizons of increasing understanding of man, his evolution and his social setting, as seen by a rising generation of scholars." The book includes chapters on how man gradually became different from other primates--on the origin and nature of language and its contribution to our peculiarities as human beings. It surveys the long history of human culture and societies and the theories about their similarities and differences; it discusses human equality and inequality, and it considers, from the anthropologist's point of view, economics, politics, law, religion, medicine, and the arts. In recent decades the various branches of anthropology--physical, cultural, psychological, and social--have become more specialized, and each branch is increasingly linking itself to its appropriate cognate, biological, psychological, or social sciences. Yet there remains a central common field to anthropology, as the science of man, for practitioners in all its branches. This book develops that common interest and deals with the specific problems of various parts of the field. The book brings out the basic nature of anthropology and the extraordinary fascination that lies in the systematic study of the exuberant variety of human societies and customs.

Pioneered by Max Gluckman to demonstrate the way in which social practice and structure together constitute and are themselves constituted by the situational flow of social life, the extended case method became diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. Anticipating practice theory, and implicitly politically charged, it was developed as a tool to bring into account what orthodox structural functionalism was ill-equipped to address, namely, problems such as change, conflict, deviance, and individual choice. Edited by two students of Gluckman, the volume comprises reprinted pieces by Gluckman and his colleague Clyde Mitchell, a Coda by Mitchell’s student, Bruce Kapferer, contributions by Gluckman’s students and/or friends and colleagues, including Ronnie Frankenberg, Kapferer, Evens, Handelman, and Sally Falk Moore, as well as a number of contributions from other practitioners of the extended case. Apart from the reprinted pieces by Gluckman and Mitchell, all the contributions have been written for this volume. These essays, historical, theoretical, and ethnographical, serve to highlight and critically examine the fundamental features of the extended-case method, in order to advance its substantial, continuing merits.

An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technology From legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.

What can we learn from tribal societies about the ways in which, in a variety of social settings, groups of men resolve their conflicts with other men? In order to answer this question, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society compares nearly forty case study societies, most of them in Africa, in their reconstructed pre-colonial tribal condition, comparing their small-scale social relations to their large-scale social context. At the outset Gluckman explains to the reader that custom is the focus of interest of all types of anthropology. Yet his approach manifests a strong interest in economy, politics, and social relationships.In the volume, Max Gluckman offers a succinct version of a lifetime of opinionated analysis. This material is organized by theme and the ethnographic examples appear as brief illustrations of theoretical questions. Discussed here also is the relation between disputes and struggles for power within the context of mechanisms of social control and stability.In addition, Gluckman presents a step-by-step survey of the cumulative development of the anthropological analysis of tribal institutions, from the nineteenth century to the present, and supports the argument that anthropology is a science rather than an art. The new masterful introduction by Sally Falk Moore, along with a new postscript of Gluckman's professional activities and publications, provides newcomers to the work of Gluckman with deep insights into the contents as well as contexts within which the great anthropologist worked.

Non Aboriginal material.

Every year, leading social anthropologists meet to debate a motion at the heart of current theoretical developments in their subject and this book includes the first six of these debates, spanning the period from 1988 to 1993. Each debate has four principal speakers: one to propose the motion, another to oppose it, and two seconders. The first debate addresses the disciplinary character of social anthropology: can it be regarded as a science, and if so, is it able to establish general propositions about human culture and social life? The second examines the concept of society, and in the third debate the spotlight is turned on the role of culture in people's perception of their environments. The fourth debate focuses on the place of language in the formation of culture. The fifth takes up the question of how we view the past in relation to the present. Finally, in the sixth debate, the concern is with the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of aesthetics. With its unique debate format, Key Debates in Anthropology addresses issues that are currently at the top of the theoretical agenda, which register the pulse of contemporary thinking in social anthropology. It will be of value to students who are not only introduced to the different sides of every argument, but are challenged to join in and to develop informed positions of their own.