This biography of Max Gluckman (1911-1975) is part of a series of pocket introductions to major figures in Euro-American Anthropology. From what I can gather, having now read a couple of them, its editor, Aleksandar Bošković, does not ask authors for much more than a clear, concise life and thought narrative of its hero, which Hugh Macmillan certainly delivers.

Robert Gordon’s brilliant biography (2018), which casts a rather meticulous shadow over this book, should not go unacknowledged, not only because Macmillan relies on it but also because of how they differ. The title of Gordon’s biography, “The Enigma of Max Gluckman,” foregrounds a mysterious figure, whose self-fashioning struggled to overcome obstacles that might have done lesser men in. Macmillan also recognizes his hero’s personal and political ambiguities, but what nevertheless develops is somewhat less puzzling. Here is a sketch of the remarkable life that emerges in the book’s six chapters.

It begins in South Africa in 1911 when Gluckman was born into a middle-class family who had arrived from Lithuania about fifteen years earlier. His father was a liberal, Jewish lawyer, who regularly represented African clients, such as Clements Kadalie, a leader of the groundbreaking Black trade union, and his mother was the first female executive member of the South African Zionist Federation. When the time came, the young Gluckman opted to study law at Witwatersrand, and, like his father, became politically active on behalf of Black students. But, together with Hilda Kuper (née Beemer), he became enthralled with social anthropology in courses taught by Winifred Hoernlé, who had come under Radcliffe-Brown’s influence. Having been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1934, Gluckman then spent several years at Oxford, where the evolutionary anthropologist R. R. Marett supervised his 732-page, library-based PhD thesis on religion in southern Africa. He eagerly rode the train to the LSE during these years to attend Malinowski’s famous Thursday seminars, where he met Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, who became lifelong friends. Upon finishing his dissertation in 1936, Gluckman returned to southern Africa to do village-based fieldwork among the Zulu. Back at Oxford in 1938, he married Mary Brignoli, who came from an upper middle-class background and was a member of the Italian Communist Party. Rumors continuously circulated about Gluckman’s relationship to the Party, and his openly admitted Marxism. But Macmillan strongly claims that from a theoretical perspective, the man maintained a strong commitment to a functional view of the relationship of conflict to the reproduction of socio-moral order rather than to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

Having clarified that Gluckman was no card-carrying Communist, Macmillan turns to the vicissitudes of his fieldwork, which ended in his expulsion from the field for offending a Zulu prince as well as a colonial official, but which also resulted in a groundbreaking achievement: his much heralded article “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand” (1940). The piece centered on a day Gluckman spent at the opening of a new bridge that spanned the Black Umfolozi river. The implicit methodology in the piece introduced a new form of episodic data, the extended case study, in which named actors took part in an event-centered narrative that provided the basis for analysis of broader sociopolitical trends (in this instance, that the Blacks and Whites attending the ceremony constituted a single community). The article apparently did not give rise to much like-minded work in South African anthropology, but it might be said to have accomplished nothing less than to usher functionalist social anthropology out of an unchanging “ethnographic present” and into a conflict-riddled and state-based modernity.

Research among the Lozi people in Barotseland in Northern Rhodesia then commenced in 1939 and Gluckman became associated with the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) in 1941. Colonial officials mistrusted his pro-African sympathies and views about WWII and colleagues viewed him as arrogant and aggressive. Nevertheless, while he served as RLI director for six effective years, he also did a lot of fieldwork on the legal system, economy, and land tenure in relation to the political system (1941).

Gluckman resigned from the RLI in 1947 and once again went back to Oxford, where he was joined by RLI students Elizabeth Colson, John Barnes, and J. C. Mitchell, who were writing up their research. With the encouragement of Evans-Pritchard, Gluckman accepted an offer to move to Manchester University two years later to found a new joint department of social anthropology and sociology there. Lecturers from all over the world made their way to Manchester, including Eric Hobsbawm, who gave talks that eventually resulted in his Primitive Rebels (1959), as well as Edward Shils, George Homans, and Erving Goffman. Gluckman had formed an alliance with a pair of wealthy, left-wing, Manchester media entrepreneurs, Sidney and Cecil Bernstein, that enabled him to sponsor the visitors and “dispense patronage” (98) to his students. Fredrik Barth praised the “enormous vitality” with which he led the new department (102) and Elizabeth Colson lauded the department’s ethos of “probing discussion of whatever anyone was working on” (105). But Macmillan also cites Adam Kuper’s opinion that it was an “empire” whose loyalty to Gluckman and his “macho and paranoid atmosphere” brooked little dissent (103).

During his early years at Manchester, Gluckman finished his magnum opus, The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (1955), which concluded that, despite differences of social structure and scale as well as technology, the way African judges assessed evidence and applied rules was similar to their Western counterparts. The claim was received with mixed reactions. Paul Bohannan criticized him for forcing Barotse legal concepts into English categories, while Sally Falk Moore praised his use of case studies and Martin Chanock credited him with essentially inventing African legal anthropology.

In 1959, the Bernstein brothers asked him to lead a project on immigrants in Israel, and together with Emrys Peters, Gluckman recruited graduate students to do research projects on kinship and ethnicity in the Holy Land. He supervised the dissertation writing and had a hand in editing the consequent books (Deshen 1970; Marx 1975). Gluckman visited Israel regularly in the 1960s (where his parents and his two brothers had emigrated) and the project established social anthropology there (Shokeid 2004).

As Gluckman’s health began to deteriorate in the late ’60s, tensions enveloped him. Social anthropology was attacked amid the rising decolonizing ethos. Gluckman defended the discipline, saying it was far “too complex” to be reduced to being seen as a “product of colonialism” (136).  He never lost “his social egalitarianism,” Peter Worsley observed, but left-wing activism aggravated him to the extent that he “had to be physically restrained” at one point when militant students tried to “prevent him from going through a door of the senate they were picketing” (138). He retired in 1971 and died of a heart attack four years later while in Israel on a visiting professorship.

Although Macmillan’s fascinating biography mainly focuses on its hero’s research, intellectual career, and disciplinary influence, it also offers broader perspectives on the relationship of anthropology to apartheid South Africa and the history of twentieth century British social anthropology. Its portrait of Gluckman, who was obviously quite a character, is both affective and persuasive. Regional specialists will surely perceive ethnographic issues that I do not (e.g., Webster 2025), but one biographical omission does stands out, at least to me.

With respect to Gluckman’s familial roots, Macmillan seems somewhat diffident. He readily outlines the fraught historical moment in southern and central Africa in which Gluckman came of age, acknowledges the Marxist influence of his wife, Mary, as well as the impacts of Freudianism, literary modernism, and, of course, many social and legal anthropologists. But, except for one brief remark on page 5, he largely ignores the extent to which Max Gluckman’s success as an academic leader, his interest in legal issues, his theoretical orientations, and his later regard for Israel all seem to derive from having been his father’s son—the father having been a liberal lawyer who defended Black activists and communities and emigrated to Israel. I think that despite all that Macmillan does achieve in this slim volume, there is little doubt that quite a bit more might be said about the relationship of Gluckman’s enormous career and personality to his father (and his mother) than the little bit to which he alludes. But perhaps this is asking more than the series format allows.

Works Cited

Deshen, Shlomo. 1970. Immigrant Voters in Israel: Parties and Congregations in a Local Election. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gluckman, Max. 1940. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Bantu Studies 14 (1): 147-174.

Gluckman, Max. 1941. The Economy of the Central Barotse Plain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gluckman, Max. 1955. The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gordon, Robert. 2018. The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a “Luckyman” in Africa. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1959. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Abacus.

Marx, Emanuel. 1976. The Social Context of Violent Behaviour: A Social Anthropological Study in an Israeli Immigrant Town. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Shokeid, Moshe. 2004. “Max Gluckman and the Making of Israeli Anthropology.” Ethnos 69 (3): 387-410.

Webster, Anjuli 2025. “Max Gluckman and Anthropology’s Objects.” Anthropology Southern Africa 48 (1): 55-58.