The Enigma of Max Gluckman: the Ethnographic Life of a 'Luckyman' in Africa by Robert J. Gordon (review)

Sometimes a surprising comparison hits home. This was my experience when reading Robert Gordon's new biography of Max Gluckman. Discussing Gluckman's 1945 article 'Zambezi River Kingdom', Gordon comments: 'In many ways Gluckman was presaging, on a micro-level, what later was heralded as a classic in radical scholarship, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.' This ostensibly slightly off-hand remark actually makes for a brilliant vignette into Gluckman's life and work. In 1941, Gluckman had opened his first monograph with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI), Economy of the Central Barotse Plain, with the question: how was one of the richest kingdoms in Central Africa reduced to poverty? Gordon's summary: 'It had, said Gluckman, to do with the coming of the Europeans – code for integration into the world capitalist system' (pp. 287–8).

Gordon opens the biography by grounding his interest in Gluckman in his own work as an anthropologist of colonialism. He continues to superbly demonstrate the part this major anthropologist of the twentieth century played in the reorientation of anthropology towards a global analysis of colonial and racial capitalist processes.

The book brings to life Gluckman's South African upbringing, his studies in the UK, research in Zululand, and the years he spent in Northern Rhodesia (today's Zambia) as a researcher and director of the RLI.

Gordon gives a rich narration of Gluckman's education and introduction to anthropology. Max Gluckman was born in 1911 in Johannesburg to parents of an Eastern European Jewish background. His mother Katie was instrumental in the establishment of the South African Women's Zionist Council. Most influential in Max's formation was his father Emmanuel, a left-wing lawyer who supported black communities and defended activists in court. Although of a secular orientation, the Gluckman family respected Jewish religious traditions and held a bar mitzvah for their son.

Max planned to study law, yet during his second year at Wits University he and his close friend Hilda Beemer (later Kuper) joined Winifred Hoernlé's social anthropology class, which they both found so captivating that they continued with the two-year anthropology major. Gordon gives detailed insights into Gluckman's academic and extracurricular student life. He emphasizes the influence of Hoernlé and also that of a young Isaac Schapera, who took the senior social anthropology students, including Gluckman, Beemer and Ellen Hellmann, on a field trip. Gordon demonstrates Gluckman's extensive involvement in athletics and student politics at Wits, and also discusses the effects of rising anti-Semitism in 1930s South Africa. Gluckman's brother, for instance, was attacked by the South African Nazi movement, the Greyshirts.

The following chapters feature Gluckman's first sojourn in Britain, where he completed, in 1936, Oxford's first DPhil in Anthropology. In Oxford he created lasting ties with Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, both to become strong influences. Gluckman also regularly travelled to London to attend Malinowski's famous seminar.

The rich narrative continues with Gluckman's fieldwork in Zululand, from 1936 to 1938. The ethnographer wanted to participate and observe as much as possible: he rented a hut with a prominent Zulu family, sometimes dressed in local-style dress, and earned his nickname 'Luckyman', a variation of his surname. The local whites were less pleased with his unconventional behaviour, which led to his eventual expulsion from the Zululand field site in what had grown into a volatile situation in the later 1930s.

Two years after having left Zululand for good, Gluckman published the important essay commonly referred to as 'The Bridge' ('Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand'). Gluckman described in rich detail the events of a single day – a 'social situation' – from which he deduced the social patterns of the wider society. Significantly, his analysis encompassed both blacks and whites; it thus provided both a methodological innovation and...