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THE DIRECTOR AS SIGNIFICANT OTHER Max Gluckman and Team Fieldwork at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute LYN SCHUMAKER Max Gluckman, the well-known South African social anthropologist, conducted extensive fieldwork in South Africa and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) from the mid-1930s to 1947. In 1941, he became the second director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in Northern Rhodesia, and after World War II, led its first team of researchers. He left the RLI for Oxford in 1947, and in 1949 became the first chair of social anthropology at the University of Manchester . There he founded the “Manchester School” of social anthropology, based on the approaches he and his team pioneered in their RLI work. The products of Gluckman’s individual fieldwork, both in South Africa and Northern Rhodesia, included not only his publications but also a photographic collection preserved at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in London. A skilled amateur photographer, Gluckman recorded the everyday life of the Zulu and Lozi peoples he studied. He also frequently captured his own and other Europeans’ presence in the field (Schumaker 2001:49–50). His interest in Europeans in the field developed out of his particular style of anthropological reflexivity , expressed in his famous work, “The Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” (Gluckman 1958). There he analyzed his own movements and those of others—European and African—within and between the Zulu Lyn Schumaker is a lecturer in the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester . Her book on the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa, was published in 2001. She is currently researching the history of mining and medicine in Zambia. 91 and European groups that had gathered to celebrate the opening of a bridge. Then he used this reflexive analysis to paint a picture of South Africa as a racially diverse but single interconnected society, in what was a politically radical and anthropologically innovative move in the context of South Africa between the world wars. Gluckman’s reflexivity also extended to the profession of social anthropology itself. While in Barotseland in Northern Rhodesia (studying the Lozi people), he photographed his field camp and titled the picture “The Ethnographer ’s Tent.” This image and its title made a conscious reference to Bronislaw Malinowski’s photographs of his tent in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, and perhaps also to Audrey Richards’s photograph of her tent in a village as the frontispiece to her book, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (Malinowski 1922:16, 481; see also Stocking 1983:55; Richards 1939). For Gluckman and other social anthropologists in the 1930s, Malinowski stood as the founder of modern fieldwork methods, while Richards was his most famous protégé and pioneer of those methods in the Northern Rhodesian field. Like them, Gluckman intended to shape the future of the discipline’s new fieldwork methods. This fieldwork revolution, generally credited to Malinowski (but see Kuklick 1991), ushered in participant observation by a lone ethnographer as the model for functionalist anthropology. Prior to Malinowski, the fieldworker usually did not work alone, but as part of a team of two or more members, as in the 1898 Cambridge Torres Straits Expedition, an exemplar of fieldwork in latenineteenth -century anthropology (Kuklick 1991). By the 1930s, however, Malinowski had transformed the image of anthropological fieldwork into that of an enterprise that not only allowed, but also demanded that the ethnographer work alone in order to produce valid results. Professional anthropologists came to believe that true understanding of another culture could be achieved only through total immersion in that culture and the continuous observation of the self undergoing the process of adaptation to an alien form of life—the main constituents of the participant observation method. But this ideal could not be achieved in the presence of significant numbers of anthropological (or other European) others. This led to the image of the anthropologist as a “lone ranger with a notebook,” which has dominated twentieth century conceptions of fieldwork (Grimshaw and Hart 1993:15). The legitimation of this new form of singular observing—participant observation —took place not through the corroborating testimony of one’s anthropological team mates, as it would on an expedition, but through textual innovations like those found in Malinowski’s published work. These included passages that invited readers to imagine themselves in the field as witnesses to the events described...

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