Introduction

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 his “Manchester School.” The Manchester School developed around a research program concentrated in southern Africa mainly centred at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Northern Rhodesia, later Zambia, where Gluckman was the Director before taking the Chair in Social Anthropology at Manchester in 1949. When at the RLI Gluckman conceived of a program of comparative ethnographic research involving populations that are now part of the national territories of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. The methodological and theoretical inspiration that Gluckman gave to this work had its earliest formulation in Gluckman’s own field experience in Zululand, which also involved a particular expansion of some ideas nurtured in a small group of South African intellectuals and scholars, some of whom are referred to in Robert Gordon’s engaging account of the circumstances of Gluckman’s Zulu research. Isaac Schapera, Meyer Fortes, and Evans-Pritchard (Evans-Pritchard especially from his Oxford days) were close friends and intellectual inspirations. The influence of Evans-Pritchard’s studies in the Sudan on Gluckman’s thought is evident throughout much of his work and in his efforts to demonstrate the relevance of ethnographic work in small-scale societies to socio-political and philosophical/scientific questions of major concern anywhere. I think he saw his own anthropology and that of Manchester to have taken its direction from Evans-Pritchard’s Oxford, although it was more consciously politically radical born, undoubtedly, from Gluckman’s birth and background within the context of South Africa, and directed to issues of change and modernization rather than the study of the supposed pre-modern.

Gluckman’s Manchester School of Anthropology through the 1950s was to become noted, arguably, as the most politically critical branch of a discipline otherwise not especially noted for its radicalism. Gluckman himself suffered being barred for political reasons from continuing his fieldwork among the Lozi in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) for seventeen years until Zambian Independence. The Australian government was to ban him from entering Papua New Guinea on a brief visit. However, despite widespread rumours to the belief, Gluckman was never a member of the Communist Party. His wife, Mary, however, belonged to the Communist Party and played a strong influence (as Gordon documents in his essay here) for his left-leaning stance. I think that Gluckman saw his own approach and that of the RLI and Manchester as being allied with that of Oxford (where he was to accept a partial appointment at the end of his career), and, to a degree, differing from the approach that had developed at the London School of Economics and Cambridge (here by Leach, Gluckman’s life-long intellectual sparring partner) where the tradition established by Malinowski was strong.

Anthropology is often regarded as a subject that not only is the creature of colonialism but embedded, conceptually and ideologically, in colonialist (not to say orientalist) understandings. It is a view that anthropologists still struggle against despite the fact that many have been at the forefront of the critique. One of the distinctions of Gluckman’s approach (and that of many of his colleagues at the RLI and at Manchester) was that it addressed the wider colonial and global orders and processes in which the subject populations were conditioned. His perspective was thoroughly against the analysis of societies as if they were discrete, isolated entities. While alive to the distinction of their practices (which he was concerned to explore comparatively) these were to be set within the broader contexts of embracing local and global systemic interconnections and their historical formation. Gluckman’s objective was thoroughly away from a certain tendency in anthropology to antiquarianism, and was oriented to emphasising the larger forces that were acting upon the societies to be examined.

Gluckman’s entire approach which became the central organizing perspective of his Manchester School finds early concrete expression in his essay on Malinowski’s functionalism.^{Footnote 1} This is a strong critique of a book written by Malinowski, The Dynamics of Culture Change,^{Footnote 2} broadly intended to be of value for the African policies of a white South African government, on the verge of what was to become the Apartheid state. Gluckman’s critique was not well-received by many of the followers of Malinowksi, especially at the London School of Economics. In many ways the critique was Gluckman’s manifesto as to how anthropology might be pursued in a way which would give it positive modern and pragmatic relevance. He did not advocate an anthropology that retreated into the world of the Other ignoring the fact that such worlds were already affected by and reacting in their own positive way to global social and political forces.

A key motivation behind Gluckman’s critical review essay was that he considered Malinowski had betrayed his own great methodological contribution of long-term intensive participant fieldwork. Here is where Gluckman’s “Bridge” essay comes in. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand”^{Footnote 3} is Gluckman’s demonstration of how Malinowski’s methodological innovation could be further turned to the purpose of creating a more scientifically valid ethnography as well as being one which could penetrate into the dynamics of modernity and its effects on the small-scale societies that fieldworkers typically studied.

Gordon describes the social and political difficulties that Gluckman encountered during fieldwork, some of which were even more problematic than Gluckman himself realized. He presents a wonderful sense of the colonial world of Zululand in which Gluckman conducted his fieldwork – much of it resonating with the kinds of gossip, snobbery and prejudice that George Orwell describes in Burmese Days.^{Footnote 4} As with Orwell’s hero, Gluckman’s efforts to enter within the life situation of the Zulu (but as an anthropologist) made him the focus of gossip among the white community and complicated his relationships with colonial officials and Zulu chiefs who were both leaders of their people but also administrators in the interests of White Rule. (The topic of gossip and scandal became a specific sociological concern of Gluckman in later years). Gluckman saw the complexity of his situation and the conflicting processes that it engendered as thoroughly part of the colonial order in which he lived – an order that also created conflicts of interest among the population that he studied. He understood as a function of his own experience that romantic idealized notions of the fieldworker participant observer melding into the worlds of the people being studied – notions that are still not dead among some researchers – is an impossibility. But far more important than this observation was Gluckman’s methodological concern to analyze the nature of the complexity of the fieldworker’s positioning in the processes being observed.

He asserted – in anticipation of similar admonitions in post-modern analyses much later – that this facilitated assessments relating to the objective value and limitations of anthropological observations. (He was to go further than this, indicating to his colleagues that anthropologists would benefit from psychoanalysis to reveal dimensions of their personal subjective bias, perhaps a reflection of his consciousness of his own biases and emotional involvements during his Zulu fieldwork that influenced him to seek psychoanalytic advice as Gordon notes).

What is most innovative in Gluckman’s methodological perspective is his development upon the Malinowskian insistence on the importance of the researcher’s field experience. Malinowski saw this, to be facilitated by linguistic competence and participation in everyday life, whereby fieldworkers could gain an inside view. Gluckman underscores Malinowski’s point and in dress, in his acquisition of language competence, and other behavior he pursued Malinowski’s recommendations. But Gluckman went further. He showed how the systematic analysis of the fieldworker’s problematic encounters in the field revealed for him vital conflicts and contradictions in the whole system of relations involving not just Zulu but other Africans and Whites. The fact that he was an outsider, a member of the dominant ethnic group and always in a marginal situation, however much accepted by his Zulu hosts, became a source of critical insight into the structuring of socio-political relations leading to a greater understanding. To put it another way, Gluckman showed how his often anomalous position as a white anthropologist is in itself vital in the production of sociological insight. The examination of the situation (socially and psychologically) of the anthropologist was, and is, not merely important to correct subjectively based knowledge (in an objectivist scientific sense), and to expose biases buried in an individual consciousness, but crucial for the development of understanding into the structural dynamics of social orders and processes as a whole.

In this last regard, Gluckman saw individual consciousness as sociologically constituted – as formed through historically shaped social institutional processes – and not to be necessarily reduced to individual psychological dynamics although he by no means wanted to exclude their consideration. In Gluckman’s still unpublished work on Shaka Zulu, which he worked on intermittently up to his death, he gave central consideration to psychoanalytic understanding which he conceived as having its effect through the dynamics and potentials of social institutional processes. Gluckman’s view – a specific dimension of his Durkheimian and Marxist-tinged conception of things – is that individual action, including the inner conflicts and tensions integral to individual motivations, have their effects and realize their potential in and through the socio-historical contexts, processes, and structures within which they are born. Furthermore, while he stressed the importance of individual factors these could not be seen as the function of culture somehow conceived as a system of value apart from socio-historical dynamics.