The Manchester School in South-Central Africa

Abstract

In the decade after World War II, a major, coordinated project of urban and rural research, perhaps the first of its kind in Africa, was carried out by anthropologists working in what was then British Central Africa, now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi (63, 69). Led by Max Gluckman, the anthropologists broke new ground, empirically and theoretically. Their fresh data were about the observed social practice of specific, recognizable individuals; events were given in detail, with a characteristic richness. The arguments they advanced gave theoretical force to such concepts as, to cite a few among the many, the social field, situational analysis, perpetual succession, intercalary roles, situational selection, cross-cutting ties, the dominant cleavage, redressive ritual, repetitive and changing social systems, processional form, processual change. Besides numerous papers, they published more than a dozen monographs in the 1950s and 1960s (3, 24-26, 41, 43, 68, 76, 85, 86, lOOb, 129, 147b, 150). The concern with social process and the theme of conflict and conflict resolution came to be considered most characteristic of their studies. As Turner put it, when he introduced Schism and Continuity in an African Society, his outstanding classic within the mainstream of these studies: