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The Manchester School

"From the start, it is highly important to realize that British Social Anthropology in the post-war years was a highly contested field. It was not the monolithic form so often depicted in historical accounts. The common opposition between American cultural anthropology and the British one belies, as Gluckman might have said, many cross-cutting interests between anthropologists in Britain and America and similar internal divisions"(Bruce Kapferer's Max Gluckman Memorial Lecture 1997, Manchester).

The works that came out of the Manchester school represents such diversity.

Soon after WW II a number of anthropologists who were engaged in research in what was then the British Central African region, developed a coordinated research project through the department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and the Rhodes-Livingston Institute (an institute for African Studies in Zambia). This research project was lead by anthropologist Max Gluckman who played an instrumental role in establishing the characteristic theoretical and methodological approaches that have now been labeled as the Manchester School. While Gluckman followed the general structural-functionalist framework set out by Radcliffe-Brown, he developed a very different approach by focusing attention on conflict within social systems as opposed to cohesion. At that time, Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes had been exploring issues of opposition within larger social and political units. Gluckman, however, believed that opposition between individuals in certain fields of relations as well as the social change that often ensues from such conflict were of critical importance to anthropology. He argued for the recognition of conflict within order: the inconsistency and contradiction inherent in the social system and the ways in which such conflict is resolved. The methodological focus of this school was on the analysis of individuals in specific social situations ("situational analysis"). Topics included: the articulation of different domains of social relationships, management of social roles, political power and allegiance, urban-rural spheres, shifting beliefs and identities, ritual and judicial processes. While the school is most associated with Max Gluckman, his students, and African research, the theories, concepts and methodologies have had vast influence throughout anthropological circles.

Gluckman's anthropology of crisis necessitated a very different notion of culture. Culture was not something static and bounded as presented by Malinowski and other early functionalists. Culture was not represented as a unitary whole at the level of society, rather culture was seen as fragmented within society. Even at the individual level, cultural values (often defined as customs or habits) were susceptible to contextual variation and personal manipulation.

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