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Abstract
This article analyses the work of Max Gluckman, the well-known South African-born British social anthropologist during his years in colonial Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). It argues that Gluckman's Northern Rhodesian writings are best understood as an extension of his powerful critique of segregation in South Africa, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’. Instead of appearing as a naïve attempt at ‘applied anthropology’, his work from this period in Northern Rhodesia is as an attempt to imagine the many different futures available to Africans, futures that depended upon the way different African societies had been incorporated into the world economic system. This understanding opens up the possibility of viewing British social anthropology from this period not only as a reflection of the ‘colonial encounter’, but also as offering an important contribution to the analysis of the ways that modernity has had an impact upon the lives of Africans and the futures available to them.
Notes
*This article has developed from a chapter in my PhD thesis ‘Vision, Vocation and the Colonial Encounter: British Social Anthropology in Zambia and Malawi, 1900–1945’, accepted by La Trobe University in 2006. I presented an earlier version at the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP) Conference in Melbourne in 2008. I thank Susan Smith, Katherine Smith, Martin Chanock, Adam Kuper, John Morton, Lyn Schumaker, AFSAAP conference participants and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Southern African Studies for their comments on the various drafts.
1 All biographical detail used here is drawn from Raymond Firth's memoir ‘Max Gluckman’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 61 (1976), pp. 479–96.
2 M. Gluckman, ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’, Bantu Studies, 14 (1940), pp. 1–30, 147–74. The following summary of the significance of this paper is based on my article ‘Max Gluckman and the Critique of Segregation in South African Anthropology, 1921–1940’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27, 4 (2001), pp. 739–56.
3 Gluckman, ‘Analysis’, p. 1.
4 Gluckman, ‘Analysis’, p. 10.
5 Gluckman, ‘Analysis’, pp. 13–14, 15–16.
6 Gluckman, ‘Analysis’, p. 23.
8 M. Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute of Social Studies in British Central Africa’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 4 (1945), pp. 1–32.
7 R. Brown, ‘Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History, 20, 4 (1979), pp. 528–31. The phrase ‘a Jew and a Red’ comes from J. Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 42–57, who provides a useful discussion of the experiences of Gluckman's near contemporaries as ‘Jews’ and ‘Reds’, Paul Kirchoff and Meyer Fortes.
9 T.M.S. Evens and D. Handelman (eds), The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2006).
10 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 540.
11 H. Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 240.
12 M. Gluckman, ‘The Difficulties, Achievements and Limitations of Social Anthropology’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 1 (1944), pp. 22–44; and Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, passim.
13 P. Cocks, ‘The Rhetoric of Science and the Critique of Imperialism in British Social Anthropology, 1870–1940’, History and Anthropology, 9, 1 (1995), pp. 93–119.
14 Northern Rhodesia, Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Disturbances in the Copperbelt, Northern Rhodesia together with the Governor's Despatch to the Secretary of State on the Report (Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia Government, November 1935), paragraphs 90–1, p. 144; F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Labour: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 18.
15 Cooper, Decolonization and African Labour, p. 50.
16 T. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (London, Macmillan, 1978), Second Edition, pp. 218–31; L. Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000), Third Edition, pp. 162, 180.
17 M. Chanock, Unconsummated Union: Britain, Rhodesia and South Africa 1900–1945 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 229–34.
18 H. Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift – Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94, 374 (1995), pp. 41–3.
19 A. Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth Century South Africa (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 76–9; R. Gordon, ‘Serving the Volk with Volkekunde – On the Rise of South African Anthropology’, in J.D. Jansens (ed.), Knowledge and Power in South Africa: Critical Perspectives Across the Disciplines (Johannesburg, Skotaville Publishers, 1991), pp. 79–97; J. Sharp, ‘Serving the Volk? Afrikaner Anthropology Revisited’, in D. James, E. Plaice and C. Toren (eds), Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts (New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2010), pp. 32–43.
20 L. Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, Duke University Press, 2001), p. 69.
21 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 531.
22 Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, South African Institute of Race Relations Papers (hereafter SAIRRP), Gluckman to Saffrey (Secretary, SAIRR) 17/1/40, Saffrey to Gluckman 22/1/40, RJ/Aa 3.1.9 File 3; ‘List of Members Nominating for Election’, no date, RJ/Aa 9.14 File 4; Minutes of Council Meeting of SAIRR 22–25 January 1946, RJ/Aa 8.14 File 1.
23 SAIRRP, Gluckman to Jones 14/1/46, RJ/Aa 8.14 File 1.
24 J.D. Rheinallt Jones, ‘The Director's Letter – Spotlight on Native Policy’, Race Relations News, 8, 12 (1946), pp. 97–8; SAIRRP, Gluckman to Jones 20/2/47, RJ/R6 File 2.
25 M. Gluckman, ‘Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated from Zululand’, African Studies, 1, 4 (1942), pp. 243–60; ‘Zambesi River Kingdom’, Libertas, 5, 8 (1945), pp. 20–39; ‘Human Laboratory across the Zambesi’, Libertas, 6, 4 (1946), pp. 39–49; ‘Barotse Ironworkers’, ISCOR News (August 1946), pp. 402–6. He also published ‘Chief, Commissioner and People’, Trek, 10, 8 (19 October 1945), p. 13 during this period, although it contained no reference to his role or research at the RLI.
26 Libertas was an illustrated monthly published from 1940 to 1947 that was marketed to a liberal, Christian readership. For a discussion of the readership and main issues raised in Libertas, see M. du Toit, ‘The General View and Beyond: Social Documentary Photography, Slum Clearance and State Social Welfare Programmes, ca. 1934–1948’, paper presented to workshop on South Africa in the 1940s, Southern African Research Centre, Kingston, September, 2003 available at http://www.queensu.ca/sarc/Conferences/1940s/Toit.htm, retrieved on 26 March 2005.
27 ISCOR News was a publication of the state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation. For a brief description of the rationale for the founding of ISCOR, see Davenport, South Africa, p. 199.
28 G. Wilson and M. Hunter, The Study of African Society (Livingstone, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No 2, Rhodes Livingstone Institute, 1939).
29 Gluckman, ‘Zambesi River Kingdom’, pp. 33–7.
30 Gluckman, ‘Human Laboratory Across the Zambesi’, pp. 46 & 49. See also Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 79.
31 S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 14.
32 This tendency of Gluckman was noted by acquaintances in Northern Rhodesia at the time. Rhodes House Library, Oxford, M.G. Billing, ‘Crest of a Wave’, Mss. Afr. S1763, p. 66.
33 A. Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, Second Edition), pp. 52–8.
34 M. Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain (Livingstone, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 7, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1941), pp. 105–6.
35 R. Frankenberg, ‘Economic Anthropology or Political Economy? (I): the Barotse Social Formation – A Case Study’, in J. Clammer (ed.), The New Economic Anthropology (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1978), p. 32.
36 M. Gluckman, Administrative Organisation of the Barotse Native Authorities with a Plan for Reforming them (Livingstone, Rhodes-Livingstone Communication No.1, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1943).
37 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, pp. 536–7. See also Billing, ‘Crest of a Wave’, p. 66; Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 8; M. Gluckman, ‘The Lozi of Barotseland in North-Western Rhodesia’, in E. Colson and M. Gluckman (eds), Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (Manchester, Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1959), p. 60.
38 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p.537 citing Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, pp. 120–1 on Gluckman's recognition of growing social cleavages in Lozi society.
39 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 537.
40 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 97.
41 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 537.
42 M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Introduction’, in M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 11; M. Gluckman, ‘The Kingdom of the Zulu’ in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems, pp. 25–55.
43 Frankenberg, ‘Economic Anthropology or Political Economy?’, p. 33.
44 B. Malinowski, ‘Introduction’ in J. Lips, The Savage Hits Back (New Hyde Park, N.Y, University Books, 1966), pp vii–ix cited in G. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 414. Although Gluckman's disdain for Malinowski is well-known, the fact that he was one of the few contemporary British social anthropologists to review Malinowski's posthumously published The Dynamics of Culture Change demonstrates their shared interest in analysing contemporary African society. See M. Gluckman, ‘Malinowski's “Functional” Analysis of Social Change’, Africa, 17, 4 (1947), pp. 103–21.
45 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 120.
46 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 8.
50 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 19.
47 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 11.
48 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, pp. 8 & 29.
49 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, pp. 14–15.
51 Gluckman, Administrative Organisation, p. 6; See Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 29.
52 See P. Cocks, ‘The King and I: Bronislaw Malinowski, King Sobhuza II of Swaziland and the Dynamics of Culture Change in Africa’, History of the Human Sciences, 13, 4 (2000), pp. 30–3.
53 Frankenberg, ‘Economic Anthropology or Political Economy?’, p. 33.
54 L. Gann, A History of Northern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1953 (New York, Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 372–6.
55 Since the 1930s, Gore-Browne had been an articulate and passionate critic of British imperialism in Northern Rhodesia for its failure to effectively fulfil its trusteeship role. From the late 1930s, he became increasingly interested in the lack of land available to Africans and in reforming ‘indigenous notions of usufruct’, and he had himself appointed to a number of commissions of enquiry examining the land question. See R. Rotberg, Black Heart: Gore-Browne and Politics of Multiracial Zambia (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977), pp. 237–40. The quotation is from page 237.
56 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 538. Gluckman himself cites these rumours (based on information from M.G. Billing) in his Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property (Livingstone, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No 10, Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1943), p. 52.
57 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology, p. 70; W. Allan, M. Gluckman, D. Peters and C. Trapnell, Land Holding and Land Usage among the Plateau Tonga of Mazbuka District: a Reconnaissance Survey 1945 (Cape Town, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 14, Oxford University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1948), p. 20. This work was a more detailed write-up of the survey and was published only after Gluckman had left Northern Rhodesia.
58 ‘Notes on the Parish System’, Appendix 3 to the Report of the Native Land Tenure Committee Part I (Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia Government, 1945), pp. 12–13.
59 Report of the Native Land Tenure Committee. Part II – Mazabuka District (Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia Government, 1946), p. 5.
60 ‘Proposals to Establish a System of Controlled and Improved Land-Usage among the Plateau Tonga: Report on a Reconnaissance Survey by W. Allan (Assistant Director of Agriculture), Max Gluckman (Director Rhodes-Livingstone Institute), D.U. Peters (Agriculture Officer) and C.G. Trapnell (Government Ecologists)’, Appendix 5 to the Report of the Native Land Tenure Committee. Part II, pp. 6–7.
61 ‘Proposals to Establish a System of Controlled and Improved Land–Usage among the Plateau Tonga: Report on a Reconnaissance Survey by W. Allan (Assistant Director of Agriculture), Max Gluckman (Director Rhodes-Livingstone Institute), D.U. Peters (Agriculture Officer) and C.G. Trapnell (Government Ecologists’, Appendix 5 to the Report of the Native Land Tenure Committee. Part II, p. 7.
62 ‘Proposals to Establish a System of Controlled and Improved Land–Usage among the Plateau Tonga: Report on a Reconnaissance Survey by W. Allan (Assistant Director of Agriculture), Max Gluckman (Director Rhodes-Livingstone Institute), D.U. Peters (Agriculture Officer) and C.G. Trapnell (Government Ecologists’, Appendix 5 to the Report of the Native Land Tenure Committee. Part II, p. 12.
63 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property; ‘Studies in African Land Tenure’, African Studies, 3, 1 (1944), pp. 14–21; ‘African Land Tenure’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 3 (1945), pp. 1–12.
64 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, p. 7; ‘Studies in African Land Tenure’, p. 14; ‘African Land Tenure’, p. 1.
65 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, pp. 7–69.
66 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, p. 27.
67 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, pp. 28, 34, 37, 41, 42, 44.
68 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, pp. 40–4. The quotation is from p. 44.
69 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, p. 48.
70 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, pp. 58–9.
71 Gluckman, Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property, pp. 45, 59, 64, 65–7.
72 W. Macmillan, Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History (London, Faber and Faber, 1930), p. 8; Africa Emergent: A Survey of Social, Political, and Economic Trends in British Africa (London, Faber and Faber, 1938), pp. 373–9.
73 The phrase ‘common society’ was first used by W.M. Macmillan, and his influence on Gluckman and others has been demonstrated by Hugh Macmillan. See ‘“Paralysed Conservatives”: W.M. Macmillan, the Social Scientists, and the “Common Society”, 1923–48’, in H. Macmillan and S. Marks (eds), Africa and Empire: W.M. Macmillan, Historian and Social Critic (Aldershot, Temple Smith for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1989), pp. 72–90; ‘Economists, Apartheid and “the Common Society”’, Social Dynamics, 17, 1 (1991), pp. 78–100; ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift’.
74 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 71.
75 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 107.
76 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 107.
77 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 109.
78 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 117.
79 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, pp. 117–18.
81 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 120.
80 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 119.
82 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 121.
86 Gluckman, Essays in Lozi Land and Royal Property, p. 62.
83 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 1.
84 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 7.
85 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 8.
87 Brown, ‘Passages in the Life’, p. 540.
88 Gluckman, Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, p. 105; Essays in Lozi Land and Royal Property, p. 53, ‘Human Laboratory Across the Zambesi’, p. 43.
89 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 4.
90 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 5.
91 Gluckman, ‘Seven-Year Research Plan’, p. 9.
92 A. Kuper, Among the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropology (London, Athlone Press, 1999), p. 145.
93 B. Schmidt, Creating Order: Culture as Politics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa (Nijmegen, Third World Centre, University of Nijmegen, 1996; W. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists 1920–1990 (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1997); P. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London, Cassel, 1999); Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology; G. Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).
94 J-B. Gewalt, ‘Researching and Writing in the Twilight of an Imagined Conquest: Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1960’, History and Anthropology, 18, 4 (2007), pp. 459–87. The quotations are from pp. 482 and 484.
95 M. Gluckman, ‘Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution’, in A. Southall (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 67–82.
96 H. Moore and M. Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890–1990 (London, James Curry, 1994); P. Cocks, ‘Musemunuzhi: Edwin Smith and the Restoration and Fulfilment of African Society and Religion’, Patterns of Prejudice (special issue on The History of Anthropology), 35, 2 (2001), pp. 19–32.
97 Kuper, Among the Anthropologists, p. 145.
98 Indeed, I would argue that Gluckman's colleague at the RLI, Godfrey Wilson, did much the same. See P. Cocks, ‘Southern Africa 1900–1945: Colonialism, Urbanisation and Anthropology’, Agora, 43, 4 (2008), pp. 24–30.
99 Frankenberg, ‘Economic Anthropology or Political Economy?’, p. 33.
100 C. Meillassoux, ‘From Reproduction to Production: A Marxist Approach to Economic Anthropology’, in H. Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 198.
101 Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift’, p. 56.
102 H. Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: from Segregation to Apartheid’, in Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production, pp. 295–6.
103 K. Robinson, Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of an Indonesian Mining Town (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 12.
104 Gluckman, ‘The Kingdom of the Zulu’; W. Beinart, ‘Chieftaincy and the Concept of Articulation: South Africa circa 1900–50’, in W. Beinart and S. Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 182.
105 J. Kahn, ‘Anthropology and Modernity’, Current Anthropology, 42, 5 (2001), p. 651.
106 R. Frankenberg, ‘A Bridge over Trouble Waters, or What a Difference a Day Makes: From the Drama of Production to the Production of Drama’, Social Analysis, 49, 3 (2005), pp. 166–84.