Max Gluckman

Max Gluckman was a South African-born British social anthropologist who founded the Manchester School of anthropology, bringing conflict, rather than equilibrium, to the center of British structural-functionalist analysis. He developed the extended case method, tracing particular social conflicts and disputes through their full unfolding to reveal the actual social structures and cross-cutting loyalties at work, rather than relying only on generalized normative description of a society's rules. In his essay on peace in the feud among the Zulu and related Southern African societies, Gluckman argued that ritualized conflict and cross-cutting ties of kinship and allegiance could paradoxically hold a society together and limit violence, an analysis that shaped the department he built at the University of Manchester into one of the most influential centers of British social anthropology in the mid-twentieth century.