Manchester School (Anthropology)

The Manchester School is the anthropological movement founded by Max Gluckman, who established the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in 1947 and built it into one of the most influential centers of social anthropology in the mid twentieth century. Drawing on his own legal training, Gluckman pushed the school toward detailed case studies of specific disputes and social situations, using them to work out the underlying rules and assumptions that structured a society, and the school engaged closely with Marxist and economic thought to study conflict, class tension and, in southern Africa, the workings of apartheid. Manchester anthropologists including John Barnes, Elizabeth Bott and J. Clyde Mitchell were instrumental in developing social network analysis as a method for anthropology and sociology alike. Victor Turner, closely associated with the school through his work at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, and students such as F. G. Bailey, Abner Cohen and Bruce Kapferer carried its case study and conflict focused approach forward, with Cambridge's Edmund Leach an important outside interlocutor.