Anthropology after Gluckman

The Manchester School, colonial and postcolonial transformations

Richard Werbner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526138026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Placing the Manchester School at the vanguard of modern social anthropology, this book reveals the cosmopolitan distinctiveness of the intimate circle around Max Gluckman. Such distinctiveness, Richard Werbner argues, was driven by creative difference, travelling theories and innovative, interdisciplinary approaches. The expansion of social anthropology as a dynamic, open discipline became the hallmark of the Manchester School.The remarkable careers and legacies of the Manchester School anthropologists are shown for the first time through inter-linked social biography and intellectual history, to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Werbner reveals that members of the circle engaged in deep dialogue, enduring friendships, and creative collaboration. The re-discovery of the complexity of their engagement and their lasting impact illuminates the exploration of the frontiers between ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, and the anthropology of colonial to postcolonial change.

1
Max Gluckman in South Africa: role model, early leadership

A monumental biography, social anthropology as a modern discipline

Max Gluckman is now the subject of one of the most monumental, gossip-rich and finely, even contentiously, documented biographies of a modern anthropologist, The Enigma of Max Gluckman by Robert Gordon (2018).¹ This biography reveals remarkable turns in Gluckman's life, while he played a leading part in the making of social anthropology as a modern discipline. In this chapter, I will draw freely on Gordon's biography, but highlight certain aspects of Gluckman's personal and intellectual history that call into question received wisdom about his contributions and their value for social anthropology in the past and for the future. I will argue that his formative years were highly important for his development and long-term projects as a social anthropologist. For this reason, in this chapter, I consider his formative years closely, in detail, and in relation to his father's significance as a much-admired role model, a public-spirited lawyer, a cosmopolitan and liberal anglophile, who himself fought, documented and analysed a remarkable legal and political struggle under colonial rule.

The son of Jewish immigrants – his father Emanuel from Latvia (1881–1953), his mother Katie (née Cohen, 1884–1968) born in Odessa in Russia but Lithuanian by citizenship – Max was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1911. If Zionism was a difficult mother's milk for Max – and Katie was a founding, highly successful organizer of South African women Zionists – it was under the influence of his father, Emanuel, that talk of legal cases, the law and the public good was the stuff of everyday life in Max's family of three brothers and one sister. Their motivation to excel, to be distinguished, was remarkable. His was a family of liberal, progressive, public-spirited lawyers, with his father and one brother, Philip, in the family firm, defending causes, often with little or no pay, such as that of the pioneer African trade unionist Klements Kadalie. Frail Barrier, Philip's novel inspired by his father's example and his own experience of coping with the quest for justice under the so-called colour bar, tells some of the family story (Gillon 1952). Their elder brother, Colin, became the state prosecutor of Israel, who famously brought Israeli soldiers to justice for their criminal responsibility in the Kafr Kassim massacre of Arab villagers.

Max Gluckman was, in my view, a public intellectual, who throughout his career reached beyond the academic world to speak, especially in many often-controversial radio broadcasts, to very wide audiences. In the 1940s he made it a major goal of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), under his direction, to translate ‘the knowledge gained through research into a form that would be understood by those responsible for policy, and by “everyman”’ (Colson 1977: 288). A liberal and radical during the 1930s in the days of his South African student politics, in colonial Northern Rhodesia he found it necessary as a fieldworker and RLI director to negotiate, to compromise, to avoid political confrontations. He had not only suspicious enemies but also sympathetic allies among those colonial officials who were progressive for their times, some of whom remained his lifelong friends; the colonial administration was, like any bureaucracy, divided. Nevertheless, hardly ever did his findings or suggestions make a significant difference in the implementation of colonial rule. Against a dominant trend among social anthropologists of his time, Gluckman became a political activist, openly and forcefully anti-colonial. When he was based in the University of Manchester, he gave his highly vocal, strong and prominent support to the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements.

Gluckman could be a formidable presence, a big, athletic man, well over six foot two and, as his praise-singer Mundia tells, bald. He was a deeply engaged and charismatic figure, apparently loving a fight or wrestling with his own towering rage, yet wondrously charming, even if sometimes aggressive and fiercely adversarial. To local research assistants and novice fieldworkers, like me as his supervisee, his advice – which he feared he had himself not always followed – was ‘Keep your eyes and your ears open, but your mouth shut.’ He had an Achilles heel which, in reporting on his role in the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Elizabeth Colson has described and perhaps understated: ‘Gluckman did not easily relinquish direction of the work he had initiated’ (Colson 1977: 293). This flaw of trying to keep control of his old Institute and later his Manchester University department, when the time had come for his successors to take over, brought him much grief in quarrels with old friends and close colleagues. My own relations with him as his student and colleague were often stormy, though towards the very end of his life they were full of amity and mutual understanding, after I married his niece, Pnina, in 1971.²

Gluckman's masterpiece in process

Gluckman's masterpiece is, of course, The Judicial Process among the Barotse, published in 1955. A central part of it, from four of his 1954 BBC lectures, appears in an outstanding essay, ‘The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law’, which now speaks very usefully to the growing anthropological interest in ethics and morality.³ We can gauge its wider reception from the warning he was given at the time by George Homans, the American sociologist: ‘You have reached the top now. All that is left is a long, slow, coast downhill’ (Gluckman 1963b: 178). Accompanying Gluckman on this downhill coast were almost none of his Manchester School colleagues. The fact is, as I discuss in Chapter 6, only A. L. ‘Bill’ Epstein, himself a trained lawyer, engaged in any major, serious debate with the ideas and arguments of The Judicial Process among the Barotse.

In The Judicial Process and in later studies, ‘Max influenced the work of others’, Elizabeth Colson argued, ‘but did not inspire his own students’ (Colson 2008a: 335). Her guess is that they did not address his law studies because they ‘may have feared being seen as intellectual rivals’. It is a telling remark, though unpacking the whole story would demand a book in itself, to accompany Gordon's monumental biography. I think it could also be argued that The Judicial Process marked a departure from Gluckman's earlier sociological work that was problematic for his old students and established Manchester School colleagues. At the core of The Judicial Process was an interest in situated logic and reasoning, in ambiguity and semantics, in the importance of imprecision in words. For all its regard for ‘the social framework’ in which judges’ arguments proceed, it seemed to veer too much towards a universalist version of ‘interpretive anthropology’; for example, it argued that all legal concepts have the same five broad characteristics, summed up under the rubric ‘flexible’ (Gluckman 1955: 293–4). More fundamentally, Gluckman asserted, ‘My study of the Lozi judicial process, which is akin to our own judicial process, faithfully depicts modes of reasoning which are probably found wherever men apply norms to varied disputes’ (1955: 33).⁴ Clarifying forensic skill is important throughout Gluckman's exposition of actual cases. Gluckman's motive is unmistakable, and now well known, and yet still worth restating: to honour the intellectual sophistication of Lozi reasoning, which he admired, on a par with practice considered to be judicious in English courts and elsewhere.⁵

It is remarkable that what we now see as the exceptional strength of The Judicial Process – the close analysis through a very substantial body of cases – was held to be a weakness at the time Gluckman was writing. He was under pressure to pare down the cases from Meyer Fortes, Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown, who urged him, remarked Gluckman, ‘to cut down my cases in the book, and I just had to tell them that I cannot do my analysis except out of cases’ (MG to CM, 5 February 1956, MBPL). Gluckman went on to complain that people ‘brought up on abstract analysis which EP does will not appreciate case material’ (MG to CM, 5 February 1956, MBPL).

Writing in 2008, Colson recalled that in the early 1950s, Gluckman was much engrossed in reading and talking about legal realism and the ‘work of legal theorists in conjunction with his study of Lozi jurisprudence’ (Colson 2008a: 335). As Gluckman later explained, this was his view of the American legal realists: ‘they were arguing that a study of the rules of law alone was inadequate; it was essential also to study the processes by which facts in evidence became facts-in-law, and the processes by which problems of uncertainty not covered clearly by specific rules were met’ (Gluckman 1973a: 614, italics mine).

Processes, processes, The Judicial Process – why did Gluckman drum in process? The answer must be obvious: process mattered, and above all. The drumming registered his sense of being embattled, perhaps with very good reason; his approach was later to be caricatured as ‘rule-centred’, and working within a ‘rule-centred paradigm’ (Comaroff and Roberts 1981: 8).⁶ Against that, I think Bruce Kapferer is correct when he discerns a fundamental turn in a lasting preoccupation of Gluckman's: the study of events. It is the turn to ‘processual analysis’, which Kapferer aptly prefers to ‘situational analysis’, the more familiar label attached to much of Gluckman's methodology (Kapferer 2006: 321). For the affinity that Gluckman found between his stance and the legal realists, however, there is a challenge, somewhat beyond Kapferer's recognition – namely, a commitment to science; and to address that, I want to open out, later in Chapter 2, the lasting impact from Gluckman's formative years in the 1930s of ‘process theory’ derived from physicists and philosophers of science.

Gluckman's role model and his celebrated cause

For Max, his father Emanuel was a role model: the much-loved, heroic and esteemed man Max had to live up to. Knowledge of a celebrated cause in Emanuel Gluckmann's career as an advocate is highly significant, and for the sake of my argument about Max's formative years, my account unpacks that closely. It illuminates the emergence of concerns with ethics and the moral imagination, equity and the allocation of responsibility, the rule of law and due process, power and resistance, and race relations that, over Max's lifetime, continued to be fundamental in his anthropology.

This celebrated cause is the one Emanuel as advocate himself publicized for a mass audience in a series of Rand Daily Mail articles, and later his widely distributed booklet, The Tragedy of the Ababirwas, and some Reflections on Sir Herbert Sloley's Report (Gluckmann 1922; see also Tlou and Campbell 1997: 257–60; Molosiwa 2013; Gordon 2018: 25–6). If the family law firm had a manifesto, it was this. The Tragedy of the Ababirwas has two parts, according to the title, starting with narrative history and concluding with analytic argument; for short, I refer to it as The Tragedy. The first part traces the political and legal history of a case that Emanuel as advocate tried and failed to bring to a fair, impartial court on behalf of the Birwa tribe or ethnic group (then called Ababirwas) in the early 1920s Bechuanaland Protectorate; more than a thousand Birwa were violently forced to abandon their looted and destroyed homes in an area known as the Tuli Block. The second part is a critique of a Commission of Inquiry, headed not by an advocate but a colonial official, Sir Herbert Sloley, a former Resident Commissioner in Basutoland, who in an unrelated, earlier inquiry, apparently a whitewash, had already satisfied the Protectorate Administration as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. In the inquiry that was supposed to redress the complaints of the Birwa, Emanuel was not allowed to represent the people as their attorney, and this part of his essay documents and proves a miscarriage of justice – his close analysis exposes shortcomings, contrary to the rule of law, in denied cross-examination, lack of due process, judicial bias, intimidation of witnesses and even the prejudicial theatrics of the inquiry (it appeared to have been more than anything else a pitso, a public assembly called by the chief at the centre of his own court in the midst of a vast multitude of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Praise poem
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Max Gluckman in South Africa: role model, early leadership
• 2 Max Gluckman’s commitments, projects and legacies
• 3 Elizabeth Colson: home town anthropologist, systems sceptic
• 4 Clyde Mitchell and A. L. Epstein: urban perspectives
• 5 Relational thought, networks, circles
• 6 Friendship, interlocking directorates, cosmopolitanism
• 7 A. L. Epstein’s enduring argument: the reasonable man and emotion
• 8 Victor Turner’s ‘voyage of discovery’
• 9 The re-analysis of Chihamba, the White Spirit
• 10 Anthropology and the postcolonial
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index