ABSTRACT
The greater speculative freedom of the Ideas and the wide ranging content of Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society may be attributable to a profound recasting of his own thought that Max Gluckman experienced. Born in 1911 in South Africa to a Russian-Jewish family, Gluckman grew up intending to study law. His father was a lawyer and, starting in that direction, Gluckman began some formal legal training. After his work on the Zulu, in 1939, Gluckman took a position at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, a research institution, in what was then Northern Rhodesia. And in 1942, after the suicide of Godfrey Wilson, the director of the Institute, Gluckman himself became the Institute's director. When Gluckman returned from his stay at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute he taught for two years at Oxford but then moved on. In 1947 there was a major change in his life. He was invited to found a Department of Anthropology at Manchester University.
