The Manchester Department of Social Anthropology, 1949 – 1975

This thesis explores the development and operation of the Manchester Department of Social Anthropology from its creation in 1949 to the death of its founder, Max Gluckman, in 1975. It uses an archivally based methodology to examine the everyday, practical realities of academic life in the mid-twentieth century and to situate the Manchester anthropologists within their multiple contexts. While Manchester anthropology has been closely associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), this thesis focuses instead on the group’s development within the University of Manchester, highlighting the ways in which the Department was shaped by the traditions of its host university and by cross-disciplinary exchange between scholars. It also uses three cases studies of large-scale research projects undertaken by Manchester anthropologists – into urbanisation and industrialisation in Northern Rhodesia; productivity in Lancashire factories; and agricultural communities in Israel – to highlight the range of locations in which anthropology was happening. The thesis argues that, while anthropology can partly be understood in terms of the circulation of ideas between colony and metropole, with ideas about British life in the mid-twentieth century impacted in important ways by ideas formed in the colonial field, it was also embedded in British life, as well as in international networks, in ways that had little connection to empire. By highlighting the complex networks of which social anthropology was part, as well as the varied geographic locations in which it was active, this thesis decentres anthropology from a strictly colonial perspective and demonstrates its multiple connections and influences. Secondly, this thesis highlights the cross-disciplinary potential of social anthropology: it was a subject that was understood to be well-equipped to draw connections and comparisons across disciplinary boundaries, because its ideas and methods offered exciting new ways to think about the world. By stressing cross-disciplinary work, and by adopting an expansive definition of ‘anthropology’ that better reflects the attitudes of practitioners themselves at the time, this thesis demonstrates the value of going beyond disciplinary histories in order to better situate academic work in its wider contexts, notably university cultures. Thirdly, this thesis emphasises the extent to which practical issues – around, for example, funding, access, institutional structures and academic norms – played a role in shaping academic knowledge. This approach, which more accurately takes account of the everyday realities of academic career-making, accentuates the extent to which social scientific ideas were the product of circumstance as much as of inspiration or ideology. Finally, this thesis demonstrates how social anthropologists felt themselves to be well-equipped to draw comparisons between western and non-western societies in the postwar period, seeking to destabilise ideas about the differences between ‘modern’ or ‘complex’ societies and those that were categorised as ‘traditional’ or ‘simple’. This study of Manchester anthropology demonstrates how contested and diverse ideas about ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ were in postwar intellectual culture