SOME BRITISH MAVERICKS: EVANS-PRITCHARD, LEACH Durkheim and Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, were intellectual innovators in their own right However, they became a sort of intellectual establishment within anthropology through their teachings And R-B and Malinowski in particular became the acknowledged authorities on their subjects through their teaching and lecturing (Malinowskis seminar at LSE, e.g.), the circle of followers with whom they surrounded themselves, their rather dogmatic positions (esp. R-B), and in R-Bs case his activities in setting up departments of anthropology throughout the English-speaking world But there were reactions to them, even from within their circles, e.g. Evans-Pritchard, Edmund Leach, Max Gluckman (founder of the Manchester School) and Fredrik Barth (a Norwegian anthropologist who studied under Leach at Cambridge) All these figures, if in very different ways, rejected the rather static and tautological character of R-Bs structural-functionalism in particular And instead they placed more emphasis on individual agency (Barth), the dynamics of social systems as more than just restoring social equilibrium (E-P, Leach) and the impact of colonialism and migration in an obviously declining British Empire (Gluckman and the Manchester School) Of course, in their time they too became part of a new orthodoxy, E-P at Oxford, Leach (always in intellectual and other forms of rivalry with Meyer Fortes) at Cambridge, Gluckman at Manchester I will deal with E-P and Leach here, Barth, Gluckman and the Manchester School in a later lecture

E.E. Evans-Pritchard was associated as a student with a number of figures, including Charles Seligman, an evolutionist and diffusionist anthropologist at LSE, and R.R. Marett, a late evolutionist who was also Rector of Exeter College (hence memorial lecture), as well as R-B, whom he succeeded as Chair at Oxford in 1946 Although E-P, as he was known, is perhaps most famous for his work on the Nuer of the Sudan, his first major work was Witchcraft, magic and oracles among the Azande, who straddle the border between what is now South Sudan and Uganda This work is seen as anti-colonialist, in the sense that it treats Zande witchcraft beliefs as involving a logic in their own right, rather than seeing them as primitive mumbo-jumbo In some ways, though, Azande witchcraft is untypical of witchcraft elsewhere in Africa Briefly, unlike so many other cases, close kin are not accused of witchcraft, as here it is seen as inherited (F>S, M>D), so any accusation would amount to an admission that one was a witch oneself Nor are social superiors (princes, nobles) accused, nor do they accuse their subordinates Also, Azande consider that anyone can be a witch and that witchcraft is a matter of insidious psychic attack rather than a form of capture of anothers body (unlike zombie-ism in West Africa) Azande do not fear witchcraft but are rather annoyed by it And they have a number of oracles, especially the poison oracles, to detect witchcraft or its perpetrators And when witches are confronted, they invariably disclaim all knowledge or intention, but also agree to cooperate in the water-blowing ritual that lifts the curse In other words, it is unlikely that any actual practices of witchcraft take place here, though counter-magic certainly does It is the beliefs and accusations that are important to the anthropologist, not the actions themselves One of the implications of E-Ps work here is that, while witchcraft may not objectively exist, Azande are logical or rational in the pursuit of their beliefs, following the suspicion that they have been bewitched through a series of actions designed to identify the witch and get the witchcraft lifted E-P also argues that witchcraft reveals their view of causality to be rational as well Azande dont believe that witchcraft causes accidents, such as a brew of beer or a batch of pottery going bad, a boy stubbing his toe on a rock or a granary collapsing on people sheltering under it; those all have purely physical explanations What witchcraft explains is the aspect of chancewhy a rock that has always been there should hurt that particular boy at that particular moment And chance or luck is a concept the Azande lack, though it is prominent in western thought The Azande are therefore no different from the rational westerner in their ability to think things through in a rational fashion; they just start with different assumptions An argument that recalls the evolutionist idea of reasoning from false premises, perhaps a reflection of Maretts influence But E-P was not an evolutionist in that sense, and it is the intellectualist aspect of 19-cent. anthropology that is prominent here

E-Ps work on the Nuer can be seen as similarly anti-colonialist, in that it shows that a people who perpetually seem to be feuding for no good reason in fact do have reasons for doing so, and that the violence that results actually has a discernible and logical structure The Nuer are divided initially into groups that can be seen as at once territorial (the tribes) and descent-based (patrilineal clans and lineages) However, in either case the structure of groups is segmentary in the sense that sub-, sub-sub- etc. groups emerge from it at lower orders of the structure For example, E-P talks of clans divided into maximal, major, minor and minimal lineages in segmentary fashion Thus two minor lineages may feud in one context, but they come together as a major lineage if a dispute arises between anyone of them and another major lineage Similarly the whole clan may join together, despite its own internal feuding, against another clan, i.e. another such unit at a similar structural level And ultimately one reaches the levels of tribe against tribe, of the Nuer as a people against the neighbouring Dinka or Anuak, and, before the separation of South Sudan, of the whole of the south against the Islamic north (it is significant that Nuer-Dinka fighting has resumed since South Sudan became independent) This has been compared with the Arab dictum, myself against my brother, myself and my brother against my cousin, myself, my brother and my cousin against the world What it means is that no one group can become dominant, as others will gang up on it to prevent this happening There is therefore no permanent leadership: the Nuer are the classic acephelous society And this is, at least in part, a study of the political implications of kinship (as represented here by the descent system) Also, among the Nuer, the level and intensity of violence increases with structural order: no blood to be shed within a local community, but killings of women and children as well as armed men by spearing at the highest levels (of course, today guns are used) E-P was thus able to show that social groups were not just static, permanently in existence, as tended to be true for R-B Instead groups appear differently according to context, and only emerge as groups doing something in conflict, not as part of the process of restoring equilibrium after a conflict, as for R-B Instead conflict resolution among the Nuer is a matter of the so-called leopard skin chief, really the priest of a local earth shrine, and nothing more than a mediator Though another ritual figure, the prophets, who emerged as an incipient leader as a reaction to contact with the British, may have succeeded in uniting the Nuer had the British not removed them as a threat to their own rule

E-Ps most explicit and famous intellectual break with R-B concerned the place of history in anthropology In two lectures, including his inaugural, E-P rejected R-Bs dismissal of history, or at least the speculations of evolutionism and diffusionism, in favour of his pseudo-scientific structural-functionalism For E-P, anthropology was not a science but a form of history This may reflect the influence of Marett again, for whom also the two disciplines were seamlessly connected And E-P put this shift in position to use in his study of the Sanusi of Cyrenaica, an Islamic sect he had encountered while in the army in WWII and which eventually produced the monarchy of independent Libya, only to be overthrown shortly thereafter by Col. Gaddafi But in his study, E-P incorporated history and anthropology in equal measure in a way unthinkable to R-B

Edmund Leach was another figure who broke apart the simplistic equilibrium models associated with structural-functionalism in his book Political Systems of Highland Burma of 1954 And once again there is the coming together of politics and kinshipin this case systems of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage among the Kachin, another group of patrilineal tribes, this time in upper Burma I will not explain cross-cousin marriage in full here, but simply emphasise two of its properties as a system: 1) the asymmetric direction in which spouses are transferred, giving rise to a clear distinction between wife-givers and wife-takers; and 2) the equally clear hierarchical property of the system in that wife-givers are invariably superior to wife-takersthe famous mayu-dama dichotomy of the Kachin, among whom the dama are virtually the slaves of their mayu, who, in giving them women, also give them life Politically, Kachin have two forms of organization: 1) gumsa, or rule by chiefs, whose hierarchical positions in relation to one another depend on their positions within another system of segmentary lineages, in which the youngest lines are the superior ones; and 2) gumlao, a more egalitarian system without chiefs Leach sees these two systems as alternating over time, perhaps several generations, but sooner or later the one system will give way to the other through a process of oscillation Also, combining the chiefly system with the principles of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, it is Kachin chiefs who give wives to their followers, not the other way round At this point another people have to be brought in to explain how this happens: the Shan, a lowland people ruled by minor princes for whom, unlike the Kachin, wife-takers are superior to wife-givers i.e. Shan princes, at the apex of the hierarchy as the rulers, accept women from subordinate chiefs in tribute Shan princes also represent an imitation model for Kachin chiefs But in going Shan, they are confronted with this conflict in the hierarchical structure of marriage and the values associated with it In particular, they are no longer prepared to give their women to their followers as wives, but expect to receive them instead from their followers This sets up a reaction in the form of a rebellion by the followers, who expel their chief and institute the more democratic system However, they continue to marry in the same way, which essentially continues to be asymmetric and hierarchical And sooner or later some lineage head or another is able to re-establish the chiefly system Some, such as the Marxist-oriented Jonathan Friedman, have suggested that there is no oscillation here, but a permanent tendency for democracy to give way to chiefly rule because chiefs are able to exploit both agricultural surpluses and ritual associations of chiefs with supernatural powers or vice versa, i.e. the democratization of chiefly rule (Steven Nugent) but whatever the case, Leach managed to highlight the political dynamics of an aspect of kinship, like E-P, but more explicitly, rejecting structural-functionalist models of equilibrium and its maintenance In neither Leachs nor E-Ps models of the Kachin and Nuer is there any point of rest, but rather a perpetual fluidity of situations Yet neither posits permanent social change; instead we have oscillatory processes in both cases Leach went on to do field research in what is now Sri Lanka, a study arguing that here kinship is completely unimportant as a structuring factor in society compared to economics, in particular the economics of irrigated rice cultivation This rejection of the importance of kinship was seen as undermining one of the foundations of structural-functionalism in the work of R-B and Meyer Fortes And when both Leach and Fortes were in the Cambridge department, this led to some lively debates But Leach also moved closer to structuralism in his analyses of myth (especially Genesis as Myth), of the symbolism of animals, etc. And also took the lead in interpreting L-Ss new structuralism to the British anthropological public

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL; THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER Max Gluckman was the first anthropologist to be awarded a doctorate at Oxford, in 1936, for a study of the supernatural in South Africa However, he is most famous for founding and leading the Manchester School of anthropology at the University of Manchester, which is still an important department, though no longer at all Gluckmanesque Among his followers perhaps the most famous is Victor Turner, but others included Scarlet Epstein, F.G. Bailey (both worked in India), Godfrey and Monica Wilson, J. Clyde Mitchell, Philip Mayer and Abner Cohen, most of whom worked in Africa, especially the south and centre, i.e. South Africa and what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi (Cohen in West Africa) Their unity and identity as a School reinforced by Gluckmans insistence that they all attend the matches of Manchester United on a weekend And also by the fact that he had already worked out their main approach before forming the group Like the other major figures mentioned already, he was clearly a forceful and charismatic personality, and the group of scholars he created was highly integrated when view from the outside, though far from single-minded internally The group was also seen as subversive by the Manchester University hierarchy because of the left-wing politics of many of them Thus Ronald Frankenberg, one of their number, was forced to do fieldwork in a Welsh village, where he could be kept an eye on, rather than in the Caribbean as he had wished, where he might have got up to mischief But as a result he became a pioneer in the study of British communitiesusually rural onesin anthropology Also associated with the School was the Rhodes-Livingstone Research Institute in what is now Zimbabwe, later relocated to Zambia

In many ways there was less of a shift away from equilibrium models than with E-P or Leach, and some early studies still focused on a particular village in isolation

Thus there was still a focus on conflict and its resolution in the tradition of structural-functionalist equilibrium models but greater attention was also paid to ideas of social process, e.g. the ways in which different social groups like lineages were both separated through conflict but also united through cross-cutting ties and greater use was made of survey methods and extended case studies also, attempts were made to take into account irreversible social changes brought about by colonialism among the colonized Thus a lot of work concerned the impact of African migration to the towns and mines in southern Africa, to which was linked considerations of ethnicity, or what was originally called tribalism Godfrey Wilsons original prediction was that migration would detribalise, e.g., African miners, who would become an African working class instead However, it soon became evident that this was not happening, and that while there was some rejigging of tribal identities to make them simpler, migrants still thought in tribal rather than class terms or sometimes in both, depending on context, which Wilson had not allowed for An example of what the School called situational variation which in this case could apply to different situations in the migration area, or to the simple divide between town or mine and rural place of origin, i.e. one acted as a townsman or a tribal respectively Hence also the later notion of the retribalization of migrants in an urban or mining situation (Mitchell here: the Kalela dance as an expression of this; but also Cohen and Mayer) Indeed, the impact of mining, industry and the urban-rural migration it led to was a persistent theme As were the consequences for rural areas, e.g. agricultural under-production because of the loss of labour through migration In itself, this came to be called a dual-sphere model of integration Migration also stimulated studies of inter-tribal or inter-ethnic relations, especially in urban or mining environments, and including relations with the white colonizers, e.g. Gluckmans famous study of the opening of a bridge in Zululand Politics was another sphere of research, originally linked to the politics of office (village headman, district commissioner), but later to men of influence generally E.g. the micropolitics of being a village headman, with conflicting demands from family, other villagers and the colonial state, led to the idea of intercalary roles And related to this were studies of the law and of courts in both tribal and colonial settings

Gluckman himself worked partly on ritual, especially the idea of rituals of rebellion, in which chiefs and kings, perhaps upon installation as such, perhaps periodically during their rule, are abused by their subjects at ritual events, whether verbally or physically or both Gluckman saw these events as cathartic, i.e. as releasing social tensions periodically, whereafter everything returns to the status quo, which is also thereby confirmed This therefore resembled the earlier equilibrium models This was taken further by Victor Turner, working among the Ndembu of Zambia, among whom the tensions were just as much those of a matrilineal people living patrilocally However, he also pointed out that these tensions gave rise to crises, which was precisely when norms are restated and upheld, thus expressing the unity of all Ndembu as transcending these tensions Thus he advanced understanding of the mechanisms whereby equilibrium is re-established and its dialectic with the tensions it overcomes Turner is perhaps more famous for adopting and extending Arnold van Genneps ideas of the structure of ritual, with an initial rite of separation from an old status and a subsequent rite of reincorporation into society with a new status, with a liminal period in between This liminal period came to be known as communitas, a temporary, unstructured situation of a lack of status distinctions, contrasted with the more hierarchical structures of day-to-day life, or societas Except that in, e.g. monastic situations or cultic environments, communitas might become a permanent state of seeking access to the sacred that also involves a turning away from ordinary life And these ideas also fed into Turners later work on pilgrimage, another ritualized phenomenon where transcendence with the divine is more important than everyday affairs

As for Abner Cohen, he emphasised the importance of symbols in political action in a book entitled Two-dimensional man But he also took earlier insights into retribalization further by studies of what he called instead ethnicity Cohen did not define this term, and he often used it in a way that suggested identity in general rather than what we call ethnicity today His approach was also fundamentally functionalist, in that he saw particular forms of ethnicity as reflecting the emergence of political or economic needs in the context of migration For example, in Nigeria Hausa were migrating from the north into the southeast city of Ibadan, where they managed to maintain a separate identity in what was a Yoruba-dominated city Cohen suggested they do this because of their economic interests, as they trade kola nuts with their co-ethnics still in the north, who produce cattle First, the Hausa ethnicity acts to keep the Yoruba and other groups out of the trade, and secondly trading within the Hausa ethnicity allows relations of trust to develop that protects the trade and its financing across several hundred miles of activity Similarly, in Sierra Leone in the colonial period the Creoles, descendants of repatriated slaves from the Caribbean, had an interest in maintaining a separate ethnicity from the African population of the interior as they helped the British run the colony in a subordinate capacity However, at independence this ethnicity became a liability, as politics and administration were both Africanized The Creoles therefore began to stress their African heritage, though they also kept the Masonic organization which had supported their business activities and also provided an alternative source of identity Some other anthropologists of the time were not members of the Manchester School but similarly attempted to go beyond structural-functionalism One who was also interested in identity and ethnicity, but was a product of Cambridge, was Fredrik Barth He anticipated Cohen in certain respects, but also differed from him and was criticized by him Barth worked initially among the Pathans of the Swat valley in Pakistan, long before current conflicts in the area arose (the Pathans are now a mainstay of the Taliban) Here he sought to get away from the traditional anthropological focus on the tribe, each with its own culture, though cultural convergence was recognized in earlier studies For Barth, boundaries had to be problematized, since he found that the boundaries between ethnic groups were not necessarily the same as the boundaries between cultures This insight had probably been influenced by Leach, for the Kachin were not a tribe but a series of tribes, each with its own identity in respect of language and dress, but sharing much in basic social organization and religious ideas However, in the Pathan case it was the other way round: a large and dispersed ethnic group divided internally in the cultural sense, partly reflecting the nature of their relations with neighbouring ethnic groups Thus in Hazara areas Pathans acted aggressively to take over pasture land, a field for the assertion of Pathan values of self-reliance in warfare and internal egalitarianism among men Whereas in Baluchistan they were subordinate to Baluchi chiefs, who protected Pathans defeated in feud or lacking the resources to live in exchange for those Pathans becoming Baluchi in return While for Pathans political subjection to a man of power was a disgrace, for Baluchi it was normative Thus acceptance of protection here meant a shift in ethnicity And this was permanent change: one could practically see the ethnic frontier taking over more and more territory, as more and more Pathans became Baluchi But in other respects Pathans also shared much with their neighbours, e.g. in being Islamic, in being patrilineal, and in protecting the chastity and morality of wives and daughters Thus for Barth, ethnicity was fluid, relational and reflective of situation, with porous boundaries which individuals could cross This was a great advance on the static notion of the tribe and its own, specific culture Another influence on Barth was Erving Goffmans book, The presentation of self in everyday lifehere, the avoidance of disgrace that a defeated Pathan achieves in ceasing to be a Pathan and becoming a Baluchi There is therefore a focus on the individual in Barths work that one does not find in classic structural-functionalism, nor even in the work of the other mavericks to any great extent However, it does recall Malinowskis doctrine than, while we are certainly social animals all right, we also thread our way through our society and the constraints it imposes on us in pursuit of our own individual interests and plans Barth was thus dismissed as a behaviourist, though in fact he fully recognized the dialectics between individual behaviour and the social expectations that drive it Nonetheless of all our mavericks he probably succeeded the most in freeing himself from the constraints of structural-functionalist thought All the othersE-P, Leach, Gluckmanstill thought in terms of social processes rather than social change, and of systems rather than individual interests, however dynamic these systems were And they continued to be infected by theories of equilibrium and its maintenance It was as if the systems moved, not the individualsin large measure it was the opposite for Barth

Other figures and currents to mention more briefly: one was Jeremy Boissevain, who applied similar ideas to Europe, which he felt was being tribalized by the focus on Mediterranean villages in relative isolation from their surroundings What were needed were studies which took full account of regional and national influences, industry, migration, bureaucracies, etc. Another current, to which Barth contributed but can also be identified in the Manchester School, was transactionalism, which essentially sought to say something about the social by tracing the links and exchanges between individuals, whether acting on their own as part of impermanent networks or representing more normative social groups And many of the anthropologists I have mentioned drew on sociology for such concepts as networks, action groups and sets, non-groups and quasi-groups, role sets, etc., all of which highlighted social processes and the ways in which the individual actor could partake in many such processes serially or simultaneously

GENDER

Anthropology originally male-dominated, both anthropologists and informants problem of access to women for male anthropologists but some early female anthropologists, e.g. Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, Phyllis Kaberry, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict In the 1970s Edwin Ardener talked of women as a muted group, though there were other such groups, e.g. Roma but his idea was that women were encompassed within a male discourse that failed to give them a voice which gave rise to the question as to whether there are separate male and female models of society, or just one model viewed from different perspectives in Britain, at least, it was ironic that it had to be Ardener, a man, who made the initial plea for a greater focus of women though behind him stood the figure of his wife, Shirley, who strongly supported gender studies in Oxford for decades initially such studies took the form of studying women as a sort of compensation for their earlier neglect but from about the 1980s it began to be felt that this should be replaced by an approach with emphasised gender relations more, i.e. brought the men back in and in recent years a few studies specifically of masculinities has brought the wheel full circle, though it is now a very different wheel

Initially gender was taken to be social and cultural aspects of differences between men and women, sex the physical aspects but an influential article by Sylvia Yanagisako and Janet Collier suggested that the latter were also subject to variation in cultural interpretation while a further article by Signe Howell and Melhuus drew attention to the merger of gender with studies of kinship and personhood[NOW SEPARATE SHEETS]