Max Gluckman

Hugh Macmillan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781805391746, 9781805391722
• eBook ISBN: 9781805394631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This handy, concise biography describes the life and intellectual contribution of Max Gluckman (1911-75) who was one the most significant social anthropologists of the twentieth century.

Max Gluckman was the founder in the 1950s of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. He did fieldwork among the Zulu of South Africa in the 1930s and the Lozi of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia in the 1940s. This book describes in detail his academic career and the lasting influence of his Analysis of A Social Situation in Modern Zululand (1940-42) and of his two large monographs on the legal system of the Lozi.

From the Introduction:
Max Gluckman was the most influential of a group of social anthropologists who emerged from South Africa during the 1930s into what was essentially a new academic discipline. His description and analysis of events in real time implied a rejection of contemporary social anthropological practice, of the 'ethnographic present', and of hypothetical or conjectural reconstructions and an acceptance of the need to study 'primitive' societies in the context of the modern world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Early Years
• Chapter 2. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’
• Chapter 3. Max Gluckman at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, 1939–47
• Chapter 4. From Oxford to Manchester
• Chapter 5. The Judicial Process among the Barotse and The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence
• Chapter 6. Later Years
• Conclusion
• Selected Works by Max Gluckman
• References
• Index