Gluckman, Max (1911–75)

BRUCE KAPFERER
University of Bergen, Norway

Max Gluckman is a major figure in the establishment of British social anthropology and,
more especially, the key intellectual inspiration for what became known as the Manch-
ester School. The Manchester School developed around a research program that was
concentrated in southern Africa, mainly at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in North-
ern Rhodesia (later Zambia), where Gluckman was the director (succeeding Godfrey
Wilson in 1942) before taking up the chair in social anthropology at Manchester in
1949. Gluckman’s ideas were inspirational for a group of brilliant scholars whom Gluck-
man gathered around him in the immediate post-World War II years. These included
Elizabeth Colson, Clyde Mitchell, Bill Epstein, John Barnes, Victor Turner, Ian Cunni-
son, Bill Watson, and Jaap van Velsen, whose intellectual coherence as the main exem-
plars of Gluckman’s Manchester School was facilitated by their southern African focus
and their often critical engagement with Gluckman’s thought (Werbner 1984). Gluck-
man was later influential in the development of social anthropology in Israel through
a research scheme based at Manchester and directed by Emanuel Marx, which built on
ideas initiated in Gluckman’s African research.
Gluckman’s key view (1955a, 1963, 1965a) was that conflict and contestation are cen-
tral to the ordering and transformation of sociocultural processes. This stance became
the hallmark of his Manchester School and its relative distinction within the small aca-
demic field of anthropology in the United Kingdom at the time.
Gluckman’s ([1940] 1958) field experience in Zululand, South Africa, was the basis
of his early formulation of a distinct methodological and theoretical perspective in
anthropology broadly described as situational analysis (see Evens and Handelman 2006;
Kapferer 2005). In his landmark account and analysis of a bridge opening, Gluckman (1)
adapted the anthropological ethnographic method developed in small-scale traditional
societies (and exemplified by Malinowski) to the analysis of contemporary large-scale
systems; (2) demonstrated a perspective that necessitated locating the events and pro-
cesses of anthropological observation within the historical context of the larger global
forces (generally of a capitalist/industrial kind), of which they were a part, if often
unconsciously so; (3) initiated an approach stressing the heterogeneity of practices (the
logic of the situation) rather than the homogeneity of form, which he replaced by the
notion of social structures as dynamic process sustained through conflict based in vir-
tually irresolvable contradictions of principle underpinning the totality of relations. In
his famous analysis of a bridge opening in Zulu Natal, Gluckman ([1940] 1958) intro-
duced the idea that the dominant class and racial cleavage in South Africa was pervasive
throughout the sociopolitical order. They were its fundamental contradictions, which
were ameliorated but far from overcome by cross-cutting ties. This was a concept that
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2107
2 G L U CK M A N , M A X ( 1 9 1 1–7 5 )

Figure 1 Max Gluckman.

Source: © RAI.

he developed from E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s study of the traditional Nuer and which he

extended as a general sociological principle.
Broadly influenced by Hegelian and Marxist perspectives, Gluckman argued that it
is the fundamental contradictions in systems and their expression in conflict at the sur-
face of life that are integral to both continuity and change. This claim was central to his
idea of dynamic equilibrium and the related concept of process, whereby the logic of
systems repeated themselves over time. He distinguished such repetitive systems from
revolutionary ones (or dramatic changes of the system principles and the contradic-
tions on which they were based), attacking perspectives that confused such distinctions.
This insistence was an extension from his situational perspective, which argued for irre-
ducible differences, as evidenced in the recognition of ethnic identity in urban industrial
situated practice, as distinct from those in the different socioeconomic circumstances
of rural villages in Central Africa. How situations of repetitive change become reconfig-
ured into ones of revolutionary change occupied much of his thought both in the study
of so-called traditional societies such as the Zulu and in industrialized systems.
Gluckman’s best-known studies, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern
Rhodesia (1955b) and The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence (1965b), based on fieldwork
in Barotseland, Zambia, continued his interest in conflict in the field of law. Gluck-
man rightly regarded his work on legal process to be among his more important con-
tributions. His ethnographies of the material circumstances of the Barotse and their
political economy (see Gluckman 1941, 1943) exemplify the influence of Marxism on
his thought, which he mixed with an abiding interest in the L’Année school of Émile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.
Overall Gluckman was to anticipate later developments in social anthropology, for
example, the orientations to globalization and postmodernity. However, he insisted (see
Gluckman 1964) on an ethnographic rigor, which he argued was the basis of the distinct
scientific knowledge of anthropology and should be the ground for its articulation with
other disciplines. His position initially attracted sharp criticism. He was interpreted as
recommending a blinkered anthropology unaware of other approaches in the sciences
and humanities relevant to the study of human beings. This was not the point of this
widely read scholar who was concerned with establishing the distinctive bases for an
 G L U CK M A N , M A X ( 1 9 1 1–7 5 ) 3

anthropological authority founded in ethnographic method. Gluckman was averse to

careless eclecticism.
Gluckman problematized, if he did not dissolve, conventional contrasts and dualisms
(e.g., traditional and modern, order and disorder, rebellion and revolution, stasis and
change) and was fascinated by how certain forms of life could descend or transform into
their contrary form. He was suspicious of the concept of culture (or of idealist cultural
abstraction and culturological determinism), preferring the notion of custom, whereby
ideas and value were continually negotiated through practice into existence. Perhaps his
most important initiative was his particular reorientation of anthropology to the study
of social dynamics and process in the structuring of social and political institutions,
their continuities and transformations.

SEE ALSO: Africa, Sub-Saharan, Emergence of Anthropology in; Anthropology: Scope

of the Discipline; Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth
(ASA); Conflict and Security; Cultural Brokers; Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
The / Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse; Extractive Industries and Develop-
ment; Functionalism; Geertz, Clifford (1926–2006); Globalization; Gossip; Initiation;
Interviews with Eminent Anthropologists: An Online Resource; Israel, Anthropology
in; Law and Anthropology; Marxism; Migration; Postcolonialism; Postcoloniality;
Privatization; Property; Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1881–1955); Religion, Marxism, and
Ideology; Research Traditions on Law in Anglo-American Anthropology; Resistance;
Ritual; Social and Cultural Anthropology; South Africa, Anthropology in; States; Struc-
tural Functionalism; Turner, Victor (1920–83); United Kingdom, Anthropology in;
United States, Anthropology in; Wilson, Monica (1908–82); Worldviews

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Evens, T. M. S., and Don Handelman, eds. 2006. The Manchester School: Practice and Ethno-
graphic Praxis in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Gluckman, Max. (1940) 1958. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Rhodes-
Livingstone Institute Paper 28.
Gluckman, Max. 1941. “Economy of the Central Barotse Plain.” Rhodes-Livingstone Paper 7.
Gluckman, Max. 1943. “Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property.” Rhodes-Livingstone Paper 10.
Gluckman, Max. 1955a. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gluckman, Max. 1955b. The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gluckman, Max. 1961. “Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolu-
tion.” In Social Change in Africa, edited by A. W. Southall. London: Oxford University Press.
Gluckman, Max. 1963. Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen & West.
Gluckman, Max, ed. 1964. Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naïvety in Social Anthro-
pology. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.
Gluckman, Max. 1965a. Law, Politics and Ritual in Tribal Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gluckman, Max. 1965b. The Ideas in Barotse Juriprudence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. “Situations, Crisis, and the Anthropology of the Concrete.” Social Analysis
49 (3): 85–122.
Schumaker, Lyn. 2001. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cul-
tural Knowledge in Central Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Werbner, Richard P. 1984. “The Manchester School in South-Central Africa.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 13: 157–85.