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The Manchester-related pictorial history of social anthropology and of social research in Zambia is surprisingly poorly covered at the Internet, which I why I took the trouble to compose the present photographic essay. For the reasons informing this particular selection of figures and photographs, and background details, see my piece on the Manchester School (still is Dutch, soon to be translated into English). The illustrations below are largely available in the public domain; they are cited for purposes of the circulation of scholarly information, and with full references of original provenance (clicking on a particular photograph will take you to its original source; whether these websites are still accessible is beyond my control). I acknowledge my indebtedness to original copyright owners. Whenever the name of the photographer is known to me, I have included it. This selection and captions © 2004 Wim van Binsbergen. Your comments, corrections and copyright claims are most welcome via e-mail.
In order to enhance its value as background information on the Manchester School (and to compensate for this photo essay's shortcomings) this web page includes a PDF copy of an essential historical document of the Manchester School: Max Gluckman's 'Seven-year research plan of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute' (Human Problems in British Central Africa / Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 4, December 1945, pp. 1-32)
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... Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, page 201: The Nuer was a particularly effective and influential description, in terms of interlocking systems of segmentation at the family, and clan level, of the social organisation of a (before colonial conquest) stateless society. The elegance, simplicity and transparence of the book's modelling, enhanced by Evans-Pritchard splendid prose style, were irresistible but (or so the Manchester School thought) too consistent to be true |
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A scale model of a Tallensi homestead, northern Ghana, where Meyer Fortes (1906-1983) conducted fundamental fieldwork on social organisation and religion |
Audrey Richards (1899-1984), a student of Malinowski’s, and the first to write a fully modern ethnography of a community in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia): Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939). |
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Monica Hunter did research among the Pondo of South Africa, and with her husband Godfrey Wilson she studied the Nyakyusa of southwestern Tanganyika (now Tanzania), before the couple embarked on a pioneering study of social relations among the urban migrants in the central Northern Rhodesian town of Broken Hill (now Kabwe), created immediately after the colonial conquest (c. 1899) because of its rich resources in lead and zinc, long before the much more rewarding copper reserves were discovered further up north, in what was to be the Copperbelt. The Wilson's Kabwe research resulted in The Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, 2 vols (1942, so published after Godfrey Wilson's death). Apart from Ellen Hellmann's study of the 'native slum' Rooiyard in South Africa (subsequently to be republished as a Rhodes-Livingstone Paper in 1948), no such study had yet been undertaken in South Central and Southern Africa. Godfrey Wilson was founder-director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, but soon after the outbreak of World War II he committed suicide, allegedly because of his pacifist convictions. This changed the course of Gluckman's life and of the history of anthropology: Gluckman, until then a young Ph.D. exploring Barotseland and relishing the princely status that was accorded him there, became director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. |
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Much of the strength of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute derived from its excellent and diversified publication strategy, comprising four different series (1. cyclostyled Communications; 2. printed Papers; 3. printed books; 4. the journal Human Problems in British Central Africa / Rhodes- Livingstone Journal); most of these were eventually accommodated with Manchester University Press, the Manchester School's house publisher |
The whole of British South Central Africa (present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi) was the work space of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, but given Max Gluckman junior status when he became director in the early 1940s, the earlier anthropological research in this vast territory was by no means controlled by Gluckman and lacked the Manchester School touch. In Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s, Hans Holleman, son of a Leiden professor of Indonesian adat law, developed into one of the most prominent students of African law with, as he declared to me in the late 1970s, only a minimum amount of 'rubbing shoulders with the Manchester crowd'. |
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For the African inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia, a rather different map was drawn up, clearly demarcating, and distinguishing by contrasting colours, the various 'tribal' areas into which the territory was administratively divided; the assumption was that these divisions coincided with linguistic and cultural distinctions, thus reifying (through the cbinary opposition of ethnic names) cultural gradients that were in fact much more continuous, in most cases. Anthropologists used this map with the same enthusiasm as administrators. A copy of it graced Brelsford's Tribes of Zambia (1956, repr 1965) -- written by a colonial administrator dabbling in ethnography (like so many of his colleagues), but also Audrey Richard's splendid, and deservedly classic, ethnography Land, labour, and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1938). As the Kwacha price tag, bottom right, indicates, the map was uncritically reprinted in post-colonial times by the Zambian Survey Department, the country's official producer of maps. It formed the basis of Kashoki's map of Zambian languages in the late 1970s. The fantasms of colonial ethnography and administration have thus continued to be seeded back into postcolonial popular appropriations. |
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Another persistent rumour is that Max Gluckman persuaded his followers to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Considering the (from our present point of view) almost inconceivably exploitative and racialist labour conditions to which African workers were subjected in Northern Rhodesia and throughout the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and also considering the courageous solidary stance which most Manchester School members adopted vis-a-vis their African hosts, friends and junior colleagues in research, communism may well have been the only option of integrity available. At the same time Europe was in the throes of Cold War demagogy, so this option was not chosen lightly, as several Manchester School researchers were to experience in their personal and political careers. |
Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, Sir Ernest Emil Darwin Simon, 1879-1960. After working in the family engineering business Ernest Simon became a Liberal MP in 1923. He joined the Labour Party in 1946 and was a founder of New Statesman magazine. In 1947, the Labour Government gave him a peerage and appointed him BBC Chairman. A respected authority on post-war Britain’s rebuilding, he always kept close connections with Manchester and his family business. He chaired Manchester City Council until 1957. At the University of Manchester, visiting fellowships and a professorship were endowed in his name; the incumbents were housed in the Simon residence near Victoria University, Manchester, and attended on by what remained of Lord Simon's former domestic staff. In the heyday of the Manchester School, several of its members were incumbents of the Simon Professorship, includingVictor Turner and Jack Simons (the South African legal sociologist and freedom fighter). In 1979-1980 I also had that honour. |
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Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), founder of psychoanalysis, in his Vienna study. Concentrating on the small-scale social process at the level of the village and the urban ward, mainly in Africa, the Manchester School never had much of a discourse on the hidden, subconscious drives in human behaviour. Instead it emphasised the explanatory value of agency: the individual actor's conscious strategies of manipulating social norms and inchoate structures on the basis of the preceding historicity (the unique and unpredictable, accumulative unfolding) of the social process. However, psychoanalysis (albeit not by Freud of course, who had died in London before Gluckman ever set foot in Barotseland) was alleged yet to play a role at Manchester as an uninvited guest: as the intended remedy for Gluckman's profound midlife and leadership crises. Rumour (that is, my interview with Jaap van Velsen, Manchester, April 1976) has it that Gluckman's remarkable book production in the late 1950-mid 1960s had much to do with the need to pay his therapist's bills; not unlike the isanusi or isangoma diviners at a Zulu king's court (the setting of Gluckman's Ph.D. research), those involved attributed to this therapist disproportionate influence over the affairs of the anthropology department. |
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While for the analysis of rural settings in South Central Africa the Manchester School relied on the notion of an inchoate social structure full of contradictions and options, gradually emerging in the social process and best visible in conflict situations, for urban settings the pioneering Copperbelt studies of Epstein and Mitchell began to stress the model of the social network between individuals. Here we see Bruce Kapferer's inticate model of the network informing an workshop conflict in Zambia, described in Mitchell's seminal collection on urban networks (1969) |
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page last modified: 08-02-06 13:28:06 | ||