19-548: African Political Systems is an academic anthology edited by the anthropologists Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard which was published by Oxford University Press on the behalf of the International African Institute in 1940. The book contains eight separate papers produced by scholars working in the field of anthropology , each of which focuses in on a different society in Sub-Saharan Africa . It
38-578: A reader at the University of Cambridge and was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology there from 1950–1973. In 1963, Fortes delivered the inaugural Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester , considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology. Fortes was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964,
57-510: A knowledge of general sociological laws or principles", believing that before this, all known societies must be "reduced to some order of classification". Meyer Fortes Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI (25 April 1906 – 27 January 1983) was a South African -born anthropologist , best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana . Originally trained in psychology , Fortes employed
76-716: A lectureship at Oxford. In 1949, Gluckman became professor of anthropology at the University of Manchester , founding the department there. Later, he worked under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia (esp. on the Barotse law, in what is now the Western Province, Zambia ). He directed the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (1941–1947), before becoming the first professor of social anthropology at
95-480: The London School of Economics . Fortes also trained with Bronisław Malinowski and Raymond Firth . Along with contemporaries A. R. Radcliffe-Brown , Sir Edmund Leach , Audrey Richards , and Lucy Mair , Fortes held strong functionalist views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society. His volume with E. E. Evans-Pritchard , African Political Systems (1940) established
114-530: The University of Manchester (1949), where he founded what became known, including many of his Rhodes-Livingstone Institute colleagues along with his students, as the Manchester school of anthropology. One feature of the Manchester School that derives from Gluckman's early training in law was the emphasis on "case studies" involving analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions. He
133-577: The British school of structural-functionalism with a Marxist focus on inequality and oppression, creating a critique of colonialism from within structuralism. In his research on Zululand in South Africa, he argued that the African and European communities formed a single social system, one whose schism into two racial groups formed the basis of its structural unity. Bruce Kapferer described Gluckman as " perhaps
152-666: The anthropologist par excellence whose own personal life, history and consciousness not only embodied some of the critical crises of the modern world but also demanded that the anthropology he imagined should confront and examine them " (in " The Crisis in Anthropology " on the occasion of the first Max Gluckman Memorial lecture.) Gluckman was of considerable influence on several anthropologists and sociologists Lars Clausen , Ronald Frankenberg , Bruce Kapferer , J. Clyde Mitchell , Victor Turner , Johan Frederik Holleman , and other students and interlocutors. Most of them came to be known as
171-403: The attention it deserves." Proceeding to argue that the "comparative method" can be used "as an instrument for inductive inference", he believed that doing so would allow scholars to "discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present and future". Despite this, he did note that scholars must be careful not to "pass directly from empirical observations to
190-431: The development of these systems under the influence of European rule." The preface to African Political Systems was authored by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), then Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford , who argued that the "comparative study of political institutions, with special reference to the simpler societies, is an important branch of social anthropology which has not yet received
209-706: The granddaughter of Fortes donated these letters to the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv. Max Gluckman Herman Max Gluckman ( / ˈ ɡ l ʌ k m ə n / ; 26 January 1911 – 13 April 1975) was a South African and British social anthropologist . He is best known as the founder of the Manchester School of anthropology. Gluckman was born in Johannesburg in 1911. Like many of
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#1732856052167228-561: The notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship , the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard for studies on African social organization . His celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology . He also wrote extensively on issues of the first born , kingship , and divination . Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman at
247-489: The other anthropologists he later worked with, he was Jewish . He was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand , where he obtained a BA in 1930. Although he intended to study law, he became interested in anthropology and studied under Winifred Hoernle . He earned the equivalent of an MA at Witwatersrand in 1934 and then received a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Exeter College, Oxford . At Oxford, Gluckman's work
266-551: The principles of segmentation and balanced opposition, which were to become the hallmarks of African political anthropology. Despite his work in Francophone West Africa, Fortes' work on political systems was influential to other British anthropologists, especially Max Gluckman and played a role in shaping what became known as the Manchester school of social anthropology, which emphasized the problems of working in colonial Central Africa. Fortes spent much of his career as
285-441: The subject of African political organization and are even made use of in administrative practice; but no one has yet examined this aspect of African society on a broad, comparative basis." They expressed their hope that the anthology would prove to be "the first stage of a wider enquiry into the nature and development of African political systems", which would ultimately include not only "native political systems" but also "the study of
304-747: Was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from 1965–67 and recipient of the Institute's highest honour, the Huxley Memorial Medal in 1977. He was also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . Meyer Fortes corresponded with his close friend Jerry Berman , who in the early 1930s worked in the USSR as a civil engineer and documented the famine in his private letters. In 2021,
323-597: Was supervised by R.R. Marett , but his biggest influences were Radcliffe-Brown and Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard , who were proponents of structural functionalism . Gluckman conducted his Ph.D. research in Barotseland with the Lozi . In 1939 he joined the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and in 1941 became its director. He developed the institute into a major center for anthropological research, and continued to maintain close connections there after he moved to England in 1947 to take up
342-415: Was the intention of the editors to bring together information on African political systems on a "broad, comparative basis" for the first time. Describing the purpose of African Political Systems , Fortes and Evans-Pritchard related that it offered "both an experiment in collaborative research and an attempt to bring into focus one of the major problems of African sociology. Many dogmatic opinions are held on
361-467: Was widely known for his radio lectures on Custom and Conflict in Africa (later published in many editions at Oxford University Press), being a remarkable contribution to conflict theory . Gluckman was a political activist, openly and forcefully anti-colonial. He engaged directly with social conflicts and cultural contradictions of colonialism, with racism, urbanisation and labour migration. Gluckman combined
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