Robert J Gordon - The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a Luckyman in Africa

Regna Darnell

Stephen O. Murray

Max Gluckman (191175) is a fascinating as well as an influential figure in the history of anthropology, especially Africanist anthropology and legal anthropology. Drawing on archival material only recently made available to researchers, Robert J. Gordon places Gluckman the fieldworker and incipient administrator in both disciplinary (South African and British anthropology) and local (colonial southern Africa) contexts, though primarily focusing on Gluckman before 1947, when he physically left Africaalthough he remained preoccupied with African matters and research by his protgs on African subjects. In 1949 Gluckman founded an anthropology program at Manchester University and built the so-called Manchester School as a sort of family in which he attempted (often successfully) to exercise patriarchal authority, demanding personal loyalty and acquiescence to his dogmas from his professional offspring (mostly sons, though he had a female undergraduate mentor, Agnes Winifred Hoernl, and had high regard for some female agemates).

Though he participated in the famed Malinowski Thursday afternoon seminars at the London School of Economics while he was an Oxford graduate student and was being nominally supervised by R. R. Marett, Gluckman was more appreciative of Radcliffe-Browns rule-structured functionalism than of Malinowskis more processual functionalism (rebalancing equilibrium was the result both saw). Though respecting Malinowskis commitment to fieldwork, Gluckman later (1947) famously attacked Malinowksis theories of social change and generalizations Malinowski based on a single culture.

Gluckmans friend E. E. Evans-Pritchard had pioneered analysis of social order through processes of disputes in his 1937 book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. An American anthropological (seemingly) independent invention of processual analysis by way of case study analysis was provided by Karl Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel in The Cheyenne Way (1941). Gluckmans (1940 and subsequent) work on situations of conflict thus appears to have been in the Anglophone anthropology zeitgeist of the late 1930s that arguably also included Isaac Schaperas 1938 A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom, though Gordon is more focused on the (colonial African) Platzgeist (spirit of place) than on international anthropological zeitgeist.

While contemptuous of American anthropologists focus on cultural traits in work on acculturation as well as in North American salvage anthropology, Gluckman appreciated the general books written by Robert Lowie. And for examining the complex situation of marginalized populations, American sociologists W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki had pioneered the study of continuous first-hand intergroup contacts with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns in the 191821 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In the Anglophone Africanist tradition Isaac Schapera (1937) also provided an early instance of analysis that included white colonialists and black African natives. As Gordon documents, it was Schapera who took Gluckman into the field for the first time in 1930, when Gluckman was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Schapera continued to be a patron to Gluckman.