Africanist Memorial
Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. By Max Gluckman. (Cohen and West, 32s.)
PROFESSOR HERSKOVITS, who died very recently, was the dominating figure of African studies in America. This textbook of African culture and history from early times up to 1960 gives less indication of his greatest abilities than other works, especially his excellent studies of Dahomey-. One human factor in changing Africa is poverty. This book might with advantage have been shorter and therefore cheaper. Yet I think . there is no other work of comparable range, and the task which Herskovits undertook would have - daunted anyone, with less energy, industry and .sense of inellectual mission. An inevitably selec- tive, even patchy, survey of the African tradi- tional scene is accompanied by chapters on foreign importations—schools, books, fermenta- tions of various kinds. There are useful references to modern literature and art, and the book as a whole has the great virtue of associating the past with the present in a truthful manner. There are mistakes in points of detail and, occasionally, slapdash expressions of ideas (e.g., 'The ritual uses of cattle also help to solidify social struc- tures'). The choice of quotations, and not from familiar secondary sources, is very good; the opinions expressed are sensible and humane, and will not provoke thought.
What Professor Herskovits was to America, Professor Gluckman has been to Manchester, where he has established a flourishing depart- ment with an orientation towards African (and
more particularly Rhodesian) studies. In his autobiographical introduction to this collection of essays published already he refers to the en- thusiasm with which his friends and colleagues have received his numerous ideas, and gives generous praise to theirs. His understanding of traditional rebellions in African States which for years have been under foreign domination, and with which he concerns himself in several of these essays, has been in his own eyes his most original contribution to anthropological theory. He defends himself against any charge of plagiarising: 'I myself, in fact, was in the field when 1 wrote my first ideas on the Zulu "cycle of rebellions," and hence could not have looked up Aristotle, Weber et al., and acknow- ledged that they had anticipated this idea.' The book includes a most useful assessment of ad- vances made in the anthropological study of politics, law and some kinds of ritual since the time of Malinowski, to whose intellectual obituary three essays are devoted. At his most theoretical, Professor Gluckman never loses the common touch, and his unpretentiousness may be judged by his pleasure that his broadcast talk, `The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law,' had Third Programme ratings which, but for the standards set by Sir Arthur Grimble, might have been suitable for the Home Service.
GODFREY LIENHARDT
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