Social Analysis

The ethnographic extended-case method, also known as situational analysis, was a diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology—and today it remains an ethnographic practice of remarkable relevance and promise. Originated by Max Gluckman, the method was intended to use case material in a highly original way. Instead of citing examples from ethnography in apt illustration of general ethnographic and analytical statements, as was common in the discipline, Gluckman proposed to turn this relationship between case and statement on its head: the idea was to arrive at the general through the dynamic particularity of the case. Rather than a prop, the case became in effect the first step of ethnographic analysis. Underlying this methodological reversal, though, was a theoretical pursuit pertaining to an enveloping, indeed a suffocating, problem endemic to structural functionalism and implicating a social ontology radically different from this dominant paradigm.

The essays composing this section vary in their purport and approach, but nonetheless address in common a number of questions that cut across at least any two of the essays, thus exhibiting what Wittgenstein spoke of as family resemblance for the lot. These include the question of dualism, of the relation between the micro and macro realms of social life, of the differences among the variants of the Manchester case method, of the determination of the boundaries of a case, of the part played by conflict theory in the development of the extended-case method, of the importance of the creative or emergent moment in the unfolding of a case, of the nature of the logic involved in analyzing a case, and, above all, of the intimate connection between the social-scientific turn to process and the creation of the extended-case method.

The central concern of this article is the relationship between ethnography and social theory. With the help of 'consequent processualism', a social ontology that centers on the co-constitution of people, cultural forms, social relations, and the built environment, this essay makes an argument for what should be at the core of social theorizing: the principles underpinning the dynamics of processes in the nexus between actions and reactions, igniting social formation in webbed flows of effects across time and space. The article shows how consequent processualism is able to implode time-honored, reifying conceptual dichotomies, such as micro-macro, event-structure, agency-social structure, to open new vistas on the social. Building on consequent processualism, the essay argues on the one hand for the significance of theory for the practice of ethnography in identifying and delimiting fruitful field sites. Conversely, it advocates ethnography as the method of choice for developing social theory.

This essay argues that the Manchester case study method or situational analysis has theoretical implications more radical than Gluckman was in a position to see, implications bearing on the nature of the reality of society. In effect, the essay is an anthropological exercise in ontology. It maintains that the problems situational analysis was designed to address were integral to, and hence irresolvable in, the Durkheimian social ontology then characterizing British social anthropology, and that situational analysis insinuated an altogether different ontology. The latter is adumbrated here by appeal to certain Heideggerian concepts in an effort to bring into relief the unique capacity of situational analysis to capture social practice in its dynamic openness and, correlatively, in relation to human agency as a distinctively creative force.

The extended case is inherently processual, continuously becoming prospective history. Therefore, the dynamics of the extended case are necessarily temporal; there is no separation between the practice of social life and micro history. Here I ground the emerging temporality of the extended case in interpersonal interaction, in the dynamics of the creation and emergence of micro forms that Erving Goffman called encounters. An extended case emerges from a series of encounters as it moves into its own futures. Therefore, the extended case opens time/space to the practice of process, to the foregrounding of practice as intrinsically dynamic. The prospective perspective of the extended case pays close attention to how social life is practiced into existence as emergent phenomena, without assuming or presuming how social order holds together and falls apart. The extended case argues for a dynamic rather than a structural anthropology.

Gluckman and the Manchester School pioneered approaches in anthropology that are now commonplace. But they were interested in achieving generalizations of both a local and more global kind. Their central methodology was that of situational analysis and extended-case analysis, which are examined here as attempts to make anthropology, via its ethnographic field method, a scientific discipline that opened out to novel ideas and theories concerning the human condition. This essay critically assesses the thinking that underpinned the methodology of situational analysis and suggests some areas of redirection. The overall idea is to impart some sense of the spirit that motivated various aspects of the Manchester innovation, especially the politics that gave it some coherence, and the wider importance of its directions that are occasionally overlooked in reflections on the history of social anthropology.

In 1949, Gluckman was appointed to the new Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, with the intention of founding a new department. At the time, he was teaching at Oxford, in Evans-Pritchard’s department. During the visit there of a Dutch colleague, Gluckman was introduced to him as leaving shortly for Manchester. He responded: “Ah, in the same way as X has left the department at ______ to go to ______.” Evans-Pritchard remarked: “No, not in the same way. X is a refugee; Gluckman is a colonist” (Gluckman 1972: x). Gluckman, the colonial and colonist, remained devoted to Evans- Pritchard, his mentor, and hankered from time to time to find his way back to the Oxbridge ecumene.

In this article, I demonstrate how Max Gluckman used his forceful and charismatic leadership to build the reputation of the Manchester School through collective research and writing practices. He created a distinctly anthropological genealogy for the case-study method that elided its earlier development within American sociology. He also championed a balanced use of ethnographic and quantitative research methods and a team-based approach to carrying out social research. While the case-study method has received much attention, both of these latter aspects of the work carried out within the Manchester Department are a neglected part of its intellectual legacy.

This article examines the question of whether the notion of the 'Manchester School' functions as a description of a separate type of anthropological practice. Basic historical aspects of this school's tradition are scrutinized. These are as follows: its Africanist roots, its Oxford lineage, the personal leadership of Max Gluckman, and the Manchester seminar, renowned as a hotbed of innovation in social anthropology. Elucidating the significance of the extended-case method as theoretically laden, the article seeks to clarify what could turn Mancunian anthropology into a scientific 'school' in the strict sense of the term.

Gluckman's paper, "The Bridge," challenged received social anthropology, initially in segregated South Africa, at the LSE, and more generally, by illustrating that professional observers and participants in social situations are profoundly mutually interinvolved with one another despite wide cultural differences. While retracing his own history within it, the present writer relates this new anthropology to the methods of modernist literature (and to changing natural science approaches) in which writers such as Joyce and Woolf, and more recent successors, revealed the culture of an epoch in the closely analyzed incidents of even a single day. They paralleled Freud's methods in psychoanalysis and the specific analyses of discrete political situations in Marx, as well as in later developments of television, film, and the visual arts. After Gluckman's move to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Oxford, and finally Manchester, he and his colleagues and students are shown as developing this interpretive method in very varied contexts.

Extended-case studies originated and flourished in multiple sites in Central Africa as British colonialism waned. The extended-case study method was created and shaped in response to complex social situations that emerged from and through ongoing and at times profound changes in the ways in which social and moral orders were put together. The extended case and situational analysis have from their very beginnings been cognate with complexity in social ordering, with the non-linearity of open-ended social fields, and with recursivity among levels of social ordering. Manchester methods originated as a result of profound shifts in the practice of anthropology and contributed to turning these changes into the practicing of ethnographic praxis. Yet over time, the explicit valuing and evaluating of Manchester perspectives disappeared from view. Witness the inane, reductionist comment by George Marcus (1995: 110) (a member of the American lit-crit hit mob of the 1980s), limiting “the extended-case method” (with no mention of Manchester) to “small-scale societies,” where it has been “an established technique … in the anthropology of law” (with no mention of Gluckman).

In this essay, two cases are constructed in order to highlight the seemingly distinct yet intertwined problems of how realities shape the construction of a case and how the constitution of a field in time and space, as well as experiences of fieldwork, contribute to the formation of a case. The ethnographic material described concerns two different social realities of Kosovo Albanian refugees in Sweden and their confrontation with Swedish bureaucracy and the uncertainties to which this gives rise, both for the refugees and the anthropologist. A main aim is to explore the blurred line between the apt illustration and the extended case in relation to processes of bureaucratization and, in turn, the implications such processes have for the way in which the field is circumscribed and conceptualized.

The article deals with two competing explanations advanced by local people in a Zambian village to make sense of the presence of man-eating crocodiles in the area. One faction explains the events in rational terms, while the other sees them as the work of witches, as a result of which they demand the return of a witchfinder, whose activities a decade ago had left 16 people dead. The article shows how the competing explanations are reflections of political rivalry between the local chieftainess and her detractors, who perceive her attempts to modernize the area as a way to line her own pocket. The rationalized versus enchanted definitions of events form the point of departure for examining some of the underlying premises of the extended-case method, namely, those of perceiving social phenomena as constituting an interrelated whole, and for determining when to close the flow of events for analysis.

The crisis engendered by the appointment of a female chiefto succeed her father in southern Zimbabwe is used to discuss how anextended case can inform us about the politics of ethnicity and its conflicts. The formation of the case demonstrates a cross-section of socialand cultural dynamics through which the protagonists negotiated andpracticed their values and interests. Thus, the protagonists to the crisisinvoked histories and nationalisms, manipulated ethnic affiliation, andquestioned gender hierarchies to ground and substantiate their differentclaims. Through these optics, Fredrik Barth's constructivist understanding of ethnicity is critiqued. Ethnicity is not an elementary identity;instead, its form and substance must be related to other social phenomena and to historical changes that contextualize ethnic identification.This approach, no less social than that of Barth, does not obviate culture,which is referred to here as the ideas, experiences, and feelings thatinfuse persons through their existential practices.

Gluckman's approach to case studies is seen as a pivotal moment in the history of social anthropology. The shift was from normative accounts of structure to the tracking of sequences of events. An example from the author's study of happenings on Kilimanjaro illustrates the complex factors that enter a processual approach. Some dimensions of a century of social history can be seen to surround the struggle over a piece of property.

I find this collection a Proustian experience. It excites memories regarding events and significant others who for some of us writing here continue to be poignantly influential in the different courses that we have taken in the constantly forming subject of anthropology. Most of us who were involved with Gluckman’s Manchester circle have different recollections of what it was and the scope of its influence, such recollections (or imaginings of the past) gathering their import through our different standpoints and projections in a moving present. In this regard, I find the two historical essays (Mills, Kempney) useful for the general confirmation that they give to a large amount of received opinion in this volume and elsewhere. Frankenberg’s essay imparts a strong sense of the spirit of the main period of Manchester and reminds us of important emissaries of ideas that had their source in the department during Gluckman’s time. There is a difficulty with collections such as this for they always run the risk of excluding scholars who were influential (and there are many who were at Manchester at the time who possibly have received insufficient mention). Here I stress that the Manchester of Gluckman’s idea was very much a collective event. Gluckman may have stamped his personality on things, but there was, I think, a powerful notion that those gathered at Manchester—and earlier at the RLI—were participating in the exploration of new possibilities for the then still very young discipline of anthropology. In both settings, Gluckman grouped around him scholars with diverse intellectual interests and skills, and he strove to exploit this synergy.

Notes on contributors