Max Gluckman

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Max Gluckman (26 January 1911 – 1975) was a South African-born British social anthropologist.

He grew up in South Africa, working later under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia (esp. on the Barotse law, in what is now the Western Province, Zambia). He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and was called to professorship at the University of Manchester and was widely known for his radio lectures on Custom and Conflict in Africa (later published in many editions at Oxford University Press), being a remarkable contribution to conflict theory.

Gluckman was a political activist, openly and forcefully anti-colonial. He engaged directly with social conflicts and cultural contradictions of colonialism, with racism, urbanisation and labour migration. Gluckman combined the British school of structural-functionalism with a Marxist focus on inequality and oppression, creating a critique of colonialism from within structuralism. In his research on Zululand in South Africa, he argued that the African and European communities formed a single social system, one whose schism into two racial groups formed the basis of its structural unity.

"(...) perhaps the anthropologist par excellence whose own personal life, history and consciousness not only embodied some of the critical crises of the modern world but also demanded that the anthropology he imagined should confront and examine them" (Bruce Kapferer on Gluckman in "The Crisis in Anthropology" on the occasion of the first Max Gluckman Memorial lecture)

He was of considerable influence on several anthropologists and sociologists (J. Clyde Mitchell, A. L. Epstein, Bruce Kapferer, Lars Clausen, Victor Turner et al.).

His school of thought has come to be known as the Manchester School.