Max Gluckman

Max Gluckman, born Herman Max Gluckman on 26 January 1911 and died on 13 April 1975, was a South African and British social anthropologist who became the founding figure of the Manchester School of anthropology. He earned his undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Witwatersrand before a Rhodes Scholarship took him to Exeter College, Oxford, where his doctoral research, supervised by R. R. Marett, focused on the Lozi people of Barotseland in what was then Northern Rhodesia. He joined the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1939 and became its director in 1941, building it into a major center for anthropological research in Africa before moving to England in 1947 and becoming the first professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 1949, where he founded the department. Gluckman's most influential contribution to legal scholarship came from his fieldwork on Barotse law in what is now Zambia's Western Province, where he developed a case-study method that analyzed specific disputes to infer the underlying rules a customary court actually applied, treating African customary law as a genuine, internally reasoned legal system rather than mere custom. His radio lectures, published as Custom and Conflict in Africa, extended this legal case-study approach into a broader theory of social conflict, and his method of reading customary legal reasoning from actual case records became a defining feature of the Manchester School's approach to law.