Defining “the Manchester School of Anthropology”

Bruce Kapferer, in his chapter in The Manchester School (p. 312), asks whether those associated with Manchester ever formed anything as cohesive as a school. He makes an interesting point. Certainly, in its search for commonalities, The Manchester School omits many who worked at Manchester and much of the work that began there. Contributors to the volume pay homage to Max Gluckman, who founded the Manchester department in 1949 and chaired it for many years. They are his students or descendants of his students or claim affinity through common methodology. My review is a response to the volume as a whole rather than an evaluation of the individual essays. On the whole, these are well-written appraisals of the strengths and limitations of certain methodologies considered characteristic of the department, though they tend to underrate the diversity of its interests, including Gluckman’s own. They most often cite the article known as “The Bridge,” published in 1940 at the beginning of Gluckman’s career, probably because it is an early instance of what came to be known as situational analysis. Gluckman’s (1941, 1955a, 1955b, 1955c, 1958 [1940]) later work on economy and ecology, law, ritual, gossip, conflict, and the importance of crosscutting ties influenced the research of others but did not inspire his own students, who may have feared being seen as intellectual rivals. This book, therefore, is about practice rather than theory. Contributors write of social networks, the extended case method, situational analysis, and the social drama as defining characteristics of Manchester, but these were neither unique to nor invented at Manchester. Gluckman himself advocated rather than used them, for his fieldwork after 1947 was confined to a brief return to Barotseland in 1965. Kapferer provides a critique of the volume that rings true to my own memories of the department as it was in 1951–53, when I was there as Simon Fellow and senior lecturer. But whereas I remember most the probing discussion of whatever anyone was working on, which at times seemed to be regarded as a joint enterprise, Kapferer (p. 119) locates its distinctiveness in an openness to experimentation and a recognition that if anthropology were to continue to find inspiration in ethnographic studies, it would have to study “crisis and change” resulting from what is now called “globalization.” Gluckman’s early recognition of this was implicit in the seven-year research plan he drew up in the early 1940s for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), which he directed from 1940 to 1949. Inspired by Karl Marx and by his own experience in southern Africa, he stressed the transformative effects on even the most remote villages of industrialization, international markets, and the exercise of increasing control by centralizing governments. Here he followed in the footsteps of Godfrey Wilson, his predecessor as director, who studied African miners in the town of Broken Hill. For work with mobile populations or those variously affected by the play of external influences, ethnographers needed to find new ways of conceptualizing, investigating, and presenting their subject matter. Though Gluckman may not have thought this through explicitly, this called for an anthropology that defined its subject matter as individuals making decisions rather than as social structures composed of interconnected social roles: hence the search for field methods that focused on individual actors, a criterion met by social networks, situational analysis, the extended case method, and the social drama. In his early years at Manchester, Gluckman continued to maintain links with the RLI, which looked to him to provide training for many who joined its staff. This affected the workings of the department, as many contributors to this volume emphasize, but from the beginning students’ interests also lay elsewhere. In 1951, other than three RLI appointees, the department had only a handful of graduate students: F. G. Bailey, William Newell, and Ronald Frankenberg, whose dissertations focused on India, Malaysia, and Wales, respectively. Scarlet Epstein, one of two undergraduates, already planned work in India. The first permanent appointment other than my own was of Emrys Peters, a specialist on North Africa and the Near East. My replacement was Kathleen Gough, whose research had been in India. In the early days of the department, students were also encouraged to explore across disciplinary lines. Eli Devons and Arthur Lewis from economics, William Mackenzie from government, Dorothy Emmet and Michael Polanyi from philosophy, and Werner Stark from social history might attend our seminars, and we attended some of theirs. Gluckman’s own research interests were eclectic and empirical. Case studies, situational analysis, etc., were tools for gathering, organizing, and presenting information, not ends in themselves. He was not interested in theory for theory’s sake, and it was taught largely in the context of working through bodies of ethnographic data. In the early 1950s he read and talked about the work of legal theorists in conjunction with his study of Lozi jurisprudence. He encouraged students to read Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Arnold Van Gennep; Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Vilfredo Pareto were not mentioned. He knew something of Freudian psychology but considered it irrelevant to social