The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a "Luckyman" in Africa
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The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a "Luckyman" in Africa
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Overview
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
The Enigma of Max Gluckman examines one of the most influential British anthropologists of the twentieth century. South African–born Max Gluckman was the founder of what became known as the Manchester School of social anthropology, a key figure in the anthropology of anticolonialism and conflict theory in southern Africa, and one of the most prolific structuralist and Marxist anthropologists of his generation. From his position at Oxford University as graduate student and lecturer to his career at Manchester, Gluckman was known to be generous and engaged with his closest colleagues but brutish and hostile in his denunciations of their work if it did not contribute to the social justice and activist vision he held for the discipline.
Conventional histories of anthropology have treated Gluckman as an outlier from mainstream British social anthropology based on his career at the University of Manchester and his gruff manner. He was certainly not the colonial gentleman typical of his British colleagues in the field. Gluckman was deeply engaged with field research in southern Africa on the Zulus, in Barotseland with the Lozi, and also in connection with his directorship of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute from 1941 to 1947, which obscured his growing critique of anthropology’s methods and ties to Western colonialism and racial oppression in the subcontinent.
Robert J. Gordon’s biography skillfully reexamines the colorful life of Max Gluckman and restores his career in the British anthropological tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496207432 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 522 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Making the Very Model of a Modern Liberal
Unlike most other anthropologists of his era, Max Gluckman always listed his school, KES, on his CV. Clearly he felt that it had been important both in shaping him and as a status symbol. When the school was founded in 1902, Lord Milner, the British High Commissioner, wanted it to be "another Winchester College," stressing values, manners, and that difficult-to-define quality: tone — generally taken to mean courage and self-control, best developed institutionally through Houses, Prefects, cadets, and sport. It was known in the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg as "Harrow on the Hill" — and not without reason (Cartwright 1974).
Typically such schools were run by a long-serving, powerful, autocratic, and often eccentric headmaster, in this case Desmond Davis, known as "Dezzie," who was headmaster from 1909 to 1931. Trained in the classics at Oxford and a life-long bachelor, he was known as a strict disciplinarian who abhorred slovenliness and ill-manners and inspired respect rather than affection. Sport was so important that the school could boast a professional cricket coach as early as 1911. The tone of the school is perhaps best epitomized by the prominent war memorial, erected in 1922 in the central "quad," to honor the 66 Old Boys who had died during the First World War (and later the 198 who died during the Second World War). Yet at the same time there was not a word of sympathy in the school magazine for the first Old Boy to die in the war or to be taken prisoner (Cartwright 1974; Hawthorne and Bristow 1993). As Max's near contemporary Cecil Margo put it, KES provided an education with "God Save the King," "Land of Hope and Glory," Sir Henry Newbolt's "Vitaï Lampada," Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, "and similar sources, as the cornerstones of our patriotism and the watchwords of our faith" (Margo 1998, 11). Of course the school did have its periods of antisemitism (Tatz 2003), but that would probably not have worried a star athlete like Gluckman. According to Randall (1982, 10), KES was the third highest ranked school attended by the English-speaking elite in South Africa. The old school chum network was to prove invaluable to Gluckman when he was doing fieldwork in Zululand and was faced with official recalcitrance to provide data and assistance (Gluckman 1969a). At least two of the technical officers had been to school or university with him, and his intervention at the brutal beating of a Zulu by the regent's underlings for allegedly insulting the Regent Mshiyeni was partly at the behest of a school friend, the Native Labor Recruiter, who — unlike Gluckman — did not speak Zulu. This intervention was to be a significant factor in 1939 when Gluckman was refused government permission to return to do fieldwork in Zululand.
In his final year at high school, Max became friends with Hilda Kuper (née Beemer), who was also to become a prominent anthropologist. She remembered him as a "tall, skinny young youth leaping along with vitality, and interested in everything." He never doubted his own ability, nor that he would get a first-class pass in every subject, as he did, but he also wanted to help others. As a Boy Scout he had achieved the highest rank, that of Rover. Kuper commented to Raymond Firth:
His "cubs" adored him and with them he showed infinite patience and a lovely sense of humor. He would read Kipling to them and AA Milne to those who enjoyed it. He really enjoyed reading almost anything aloud. I remember hours in which we read Swinburne and Browning interspersed with Frazer's "Golden Bough," and notes which he took in great detail (I must confess I very often fell asleep).
He affectionately called her "Piglet," and she called him "Heff," references undoubtedly to Winnie the Pooh. Max's character was evident in the way he drove cars, she reminisced: "a fast driver at times reckless but skillful over rough roads." She cited an incident when she visited him while he was doing fieldwork in Zululand — they hit a calf while he was driving. Thinking the animal injured, Max had chased after it, driving madly over the fields despite Hilda's protestations that if it had been injured it would not have been able to run so fast. When they did catch up with it, they found the calf was simply exhausted (HK to RF, October 10, 1975, LSEFP).
Gluckman came from a family that was surprisingly close-knit, or perhaps able to cover up its internal conflicts rather well. He dedicated his first book (Gluckman 1954b) to his parents, and his Storrs Lectures at Yale (Gluckman 1965a) to his older brother Colin and his wife, and two books (Gluckman 1963b, 1965b) to his own wife, Mary. Indeed, his family decisively influenced his anthropological praxis.
In 1896 Max's father, Emanuel Gluckmann (1881–1953), emigrated from eastern Europe to South Africa with his family. They settled near Potchefstroom, a religiously conservative town in the erstwhile South African Republic latterly known as Transvaal. Max's grandfather bought a farm and ran a mill, and he made such an impression in the town that they named a street after him. Max had fond memories of spending his school vacations on the farm and swimming in the large earthen-wall dam. During the Boer War, as Max tells it, twenty-year-old Emanuel fought on the British side and adopted English as his language of preference (although he later offered his services as a sworn translator in Russian). He was known to his military comrades as "the Rabbi" because while they were burning Boer farmhouses and looting valuables, Emanuel looked for books — and recovered a surprising collection of English classics, which he then used to improve his English.
After the war, Emanuel attended the South African College, later named the University of Cape Town, where he studied law, and from which he graduated in 1906. Here he made lifelong friends with (later Judge) Philip Millin, whose wife, Sarah Gertrude Millin, was a notable South African writer and who was to provide a reference for Max's applications both for a Rhodes Scholarship and for an International Africa Institute (IAI) Fellowship. As a lawyer, Emanuel enjoyed only moderate success, sometimes bordering on bankruptcy, a situation aggravated by his wife's somewhat expensive tastes. His Johannesburg colleagues thought him "somewhat eccentric," and he was known as a rather litigious lawyer of sharp wit (Maisels 1998). Politically Emanuel was decidedly left-wing, egalitarian in outlook, and an atheist in belief. When he visited Oxford in 1949, he got into an argument with Evans-Pritchard, the professor of social anthropology, and when an exasperated Evans-Pritchard (EP) shouted, "Why don't you go back to Moscow?" Emanuel retorted, "Why don't you go back to Rome?" — referring to EP's recent conversion to Catholicism.
Max recalled hearing his father talk about a heroic case when he had tried to sue the Tsehkedi Khama on behalf of the Birwa people (Ababirwa) in Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana). The administration and Khama did not take this challenge lightly, referring disparagingly to Emanuel as "an insignificant Jew," and the resident commissioner made Gluckmann wait on the residency veranda while he entertained Khama inside. Protectorate officials disposed of the case as it proceeded, by defining the judicial process in their own interests. Gluckmann was forbidden to sell the four hundred head of cattle the Birwa had paid him as a deposit. It was then ruled that the Birwa did not have the right to sell cattle for the purposes of hiring a lawyer, and finally the imperial secretary denied the Birwa the right to any legal representation whatsoever. Hearings were held, not in a neutral venue, but in Khama's capital, Serowe, with Gluckmann forbidden to be present, and Malema, the Birwa chief, was threatened with arrest by the resident commissioner if he boycotted the enquiry. After protests by Emanuel, an administrator from Basutoland (Lesotho) was asked to investigate the matter and found Khama's son-in-law had indeed been guilty of maltreating the Birwa and recommended his removal — but this was rejected by the resident commissioner, who instead banished Malema from the protectorate until 1944.
The Birwa had failed not so much on points of law as the fact that the resident commissioner, McGregor, believed Emanuel was a money-grubber rather than a serious advocate for oppressed subjects (Wylie 1990; N. Parsons 1992, 205). So outraged was Emanuel that he wrote a series of articles, later published as a pamphlet on the Birwa case (Gluckmann 1922). The case would undoubtedly have made a deep impression on the young Max. Max also recalled his father's defending the pioneer African trade unionist, Clements Kadalie, and later remembered Emanuel's indignation on behalf of his African clients and his efforts to create a cooperative to fund African legal defenses, despite government threats. This failed because Africans claimed they could not afford to make the required regular contributions (Gluckman 1969b, 374).
The choice of KES as Max's school was clearly influenced by his father. Emanuel reared his progeny on English books and only rarely referred to literature from his native eastern Europe. Hilda recalled that Max loved to quote Shakespeare "with gusto." The pattern continued at KES, where Max was taught the same history curriculum as was taught in British schools, and which glorified the British and South African pioneers and saw blacks as barbarians (Gluckman 1959, 99). Certainly he got on well enough with his father to lend him a copy of D. H. Lawrence's banned Lady Chatterley's Lover, which Emanuel thought was a "beautiful book" (MG to MBG, December 26, 1941, RAIGP).
It was mostly his father's influence too, Max claimed, that led him to support blacks, notably during his time at Wits and while serving on the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) Executive. Whereas Max would refer to his father in his writings and kept copies of his father's letters to him, he hardly mentions his mother, nor did he keep copies of his correspondence with her. She was, despite this, a remarkable and strong person. Katie (née Cohen, 1884–1968) was born in Odessa but was raised in South Africa, in Paarl, and married Emanuel in 1903. In 1928 she became the first woman to sit on the South African Zionist Council and agitated for the formation of a South African Women's Zionist Council, which was created in 1932 in the wake of Chaim and Vera Weizmann's visit. Katie served for many years as its vice-chairman, anxiously seeking to arouse the national consciousness of Jewish women, and by 1948 the Women's Council could boast a membership of 112 societies and 44 correspondents, with approximately 16,000 individual members. Even more impressive though was her fund-raising. In 1946 South Africa boasted the largest number of formal members in the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO) as measured by shekel (paying) membership: some 40,000 members out of 104,000 Jews (Shimoni 2003). According to one account, when Katie assumed leadership of the Jewish National Fund in 1936,
she saw unprecedented increase in the fund-raising efforts. ... Her chairmanship has provided the inspiration, which was from her single-minded devotion to her task. She has addressed meetings in practically every town and village in the Union of South Africa and has established close contacts with the Zionist Women's Societies amongst whom we find the most devoted workers of the Keren Kayemeth (the largest fund of the Zionist Movement). ("Celebrating 50 Years of Zionism," South African Zionist Record, December 18, 1948, 35)
So well organized was the South African Zionist Federation that in 1933 they were already setting up Chalutz training camps near Klerksdorp for aspiring Palestinian settlers (Shimoni 2003, 69). Katie and Emanuel emigrated to Israel in 1949, when he was sixty-seven. Emanuel was not much of a linguist though: he made little progress in learning Hebrew, even with two teachers and working for a six hours a day. Perhaps partly as a result, he struggled to survive in Tel Aviv — as a general agent selling insurance — despite generous assistance from Max.
Emanuel and Katie respected Jewish religious tradition and held a bar mitzvah for Max, though primarily for social reasons. Max was to remain fundamentally agnostic, and like his father, he did not develop much proficiency in Hebrew. He did, however, visit Palestine in 1936 with his mother and worked on a kibbutz for a short period (Firth 1975, 486–87), an experience later emulated by two of his sons — and indeed at least one of them converted to Judaism. In the late 1960s Max played a key role in establishing social anthropology as a field of study at a number of universities in Israel.
Max's brothers, Colin and Philip, also went to KES and initially studied law like their father and developed strong Israeli ties of a decidedly Zionist flavor. The eldest son, Colin (1909–61), was one of the founders of the Zionist youth movement Habonim in South Africa in 1930. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he joined the paramilitary organization Haganah and fought in the Mahal (a grouping of volunteers who went to Israel to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War). In 1952 he became Israel's second state attorney and, at Ben-Gurion's insistence, hebraized his surname to Gillon when he was the lead prosecutor against some Israeli soldiers who had massacred almost fifty Palestinian villagers at Kafr Qasim during the Suez War of 1956. His son, Carmi, was to become head of Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency, but resigned after the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish right-winger, and his daughter married the son of the founder of Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency.
Philip (1913–2003), or "Figgy" as he was called, matriculated with a first-class pass two years after Max and, like Colin in 1930, was one of the founders of Habonim. He served in North Africa during the Second World War and after the war had a brief and not very successful career as a lawyer in partnership with Emanuel, an experience that provided the basis for his novel Frail Barrier (1952), which was published in both the United States and the UK and was dedicated to his father. With his wife, Ethel-Haddassah ("Bobsie") — writer of a trailblazing botany doctorate at Wits University — and their daughters, Pnina (later a prominent anthropologist in her own right) and Hava, he emigrated to Israel in 1951. After spending two years on Kibbutz Kvutzat Schiller, Figgy became a founder and city manager of the newly renamed city of Ashkelon before moving to Jerusalem and achieving prominence as a "sunshine Zionist" of liberal persuasion, writing columns for the Jerusalem Post frequently railing against narrow-minded Zionist bigotry. Like Max, he was a lifelong sportsman, playing cricket and tennis even in retirement.
Max's sister, Joyce (1919–2009), served as secretary to the Zionist Socialists and married Dr. Louis Miller, later a prominent psychiatrist. In 1947 the Millers too emigrated to Israel, where she taught and promoted theater at the Hebrew University.
Although the family stressed loyalty and solidarity, it was not without its internal stresses and conflicts, exacerbated undoubtedly by financial insecurity. Indeed, by late 1941, Emanuel, suffering from Bright's disease and on the brink of bankruptcy, asked Max in desperation to lend him £300 — despite having vowed that he would never borrow from his children. Max's wife, Mary, agreed to provide the money out of her trust fund, but in a letter to the solicitor who controlled the fund, perhaps significantly, she said the money was for one of Max's brothers, not his father. As Max wrote to Mary,
I'm too unhappy about Dad's illness to write. 2 sons in law [practice] & none to take over! I'm anxiously waiting for news. Poor Dad! No rest for him. He married too young in this cursed system, & his wife was extravagant; he gave too much to his children. And they make poor return. (MG to MBG, January 2, 1942, RAIGP).
Wits University during the Gluckman Era
Max attended the University of the Witwatersrand on a Johannesburg Municipality scholarship, studying for a BA degree, a prerequisite for studying law. In his first year, Max became deeply interested in philosophy and was taking courses with Professor R. F. A. Hoernlé, but he needed one more course to fulfill the requirements for his second year. When Hilda said she was going to do a course in social anthropology taught by Mrs. Agnes Winifred Hoernlé, Max joined her, and they both found it so beguiling, so crucial, that they continued with the subject.
Max was a dedicated scholar and never missed a class. As soon as he decided to do the two-year major in social anthropology, he began to take Zulu classes, and although he did not have a good ear for languages, he mastered its intricacies and was never shy to speak it. Some people called his lack of inhibition brashness, but Hilda preferred to consider it "a readiness to expose himself and his ideas, a sort of experimental adventureness." While in later years Max was to develop a sensitivity to criticism, Hilda remembered he was also ready to laugh at himself (HK to RF, October 10, 1975, LSEFP).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Series Editors’ Introduction Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Chronology Introduction: The Enigma of Max Gluckman 1. Making the Very Model of a Modern Liberal 2. London Calling 3. How the Guinea Pig Burnt His Own Bridge 4. Return to Oxford and Intellectual Ferment 5. Landing and Living in Livingi 6. Mary, Max, and the Mongu Masquerade 7. Getting to Grips with the Lozi 8. Running the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute 9. The Seven-Year Plan 10. The African Undertow Notes References Index