Max Gluckman | |
|---|---|
| Herman Max Gluckman | |
| Born | (1911-01-26)26 January 1911 |
| Died | 13 April 1975(1975-04-13) (aged 64) |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Conflict theories |
| Spouse | Mary Gluckman |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Social anthropologist |
| Institutions | Manchester school |
| Part ofa series on |
| Anthropology |
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Herman Max Gluckman (/ˈɡlʌkmən/; 26 January 1911 – 13 April 1975) was a South African andBritishsocial anthropologist. He is best known as the founder of theManchester School of anthropology.
Gluckman was born inJohannesburg in 1911.[1] Like many of the other anthropologists he later worked with, he wasJewish.[2] He was educated at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand,[3] where he obtained a BA in 1930.[1] Although he intended to study law, he became interested in anthropology and studied underWinifred Hoernle. He earned the equivalent of an MA at Witwatersrand in 1934 and then received aRhodes Scholarship to attendExeter College, Oxford.[4]
At Oxford, Gluckman's work was supervised byR.R. Marett, but his biggest influences wereRadcliffe-Brown andEdward Evan Evans-Pritchard, who were proponents ofstructural functionalism. Gluckman conducted his Ph.D. research inBarotseland with theLozi. In 1939 he joined theRhodes-Livingstone Institute and in 1941 became its director. He developed the institute into a major center for anthropological research, and continued to maintain close connections there after he moved to England in 1947 to take up a lectureship at Oxford. In 1949, Gluckman became professor of anthropology at theUniversity of Manchester, founding the department there.
Later, he worked under the British Administration inNorthern Rhodesia (esp. on theBarotse law, in what is now theWestern Province, Zambia). He directed theRhodes-Livingstone Institute (1941–1947), before becoming the first professor of social anthropology at theUniversity of Manchester (1949),[5] where he founded what became known, including many of his Rhodes-Livingstone Institute colleagues along with his students, as theManchester school of anthropology. One feature of the Manchester School that derives from Gluckman's early training in law was the emphasis on "case studies" involving analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions. He was widely known for his radio lectures onCustom and Conflict in Africa (later published in many editions at Oxford University Press), being a remarkable contribution toconflict theory.
Gluckman was a political activist, openly and forcefully anti-colonial. He engaged directly with social conflicts and cultural contradictions of colonialism, with racism, urbanisation and labour migration. Gluckman combined the British school of structural-functionalism with aMarxist focus on inequality and oppression, creating a critique of colonialism from within structuralism. In his research on Zululand in South Africa, he argued that the African and European communities formed a single social system, one whose schism into two racial groups formed the basis of its structural unity.
Bruce Kapferer described Gluckman as "perhaps the anthropologist par excellence whose own personal life, history and consciousness not only embodied some of the critical crises of the modern world but also demanded that the anthropology he imagined should confront and examine them" (in "The Crisis in Anthropology" on the occasion of the first Max Gluckman Memorial lecture.)
Gluckman was of considerable influence on several anthropologists and sociologistsLars Clausen,Ronald Frankenberg,Bruce Kapferer,J. Clyde Mitchell,Victor Turner,Johan Frederik Holleman, and other students and interlocutors. Most of them came to be known as the "Manchester School".Richard Werbner, along with his wifePnina (Gluckman's niece), assumed the role of continuing Gluckman's legacy at the Manchester school after his 1975 death.[6]
