Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
84
the London School of Economics to engage in a study of kinship in a South London borough,
which resulted in a an important contribution to the intensive study of modern urban society
(Firth 1956; see also Firth, Hubert and Forge 1969). Nonetheless, in the late 1930s the process of
urbanization in many African countries caught the attention of British anthropologists. Although
research carried out in African cities was not really regarded as
urban
research (Grillo 1985), the
Rhodes Livingston Institute, based in the British territory of what was then called Northern
Rhodesia, did give a major contribution to urban African studies. The Institute, established in
1937 and initially directed by the British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson, encouraged a relatively
large number of young researchers to investigate the social transformations that were occurring in
Central Africa, including the process of urbanization. One of the earliest studies was carried out
by Godfrey and Monica Wilson on ‘detribalization’ in Central Africa (see G. Wilson and M.
Wilson 1945). In 1941, the appointment of the South-African-born anthropologist Max
Gluckman to the directorship of the Institute gave new impetus to research in urban areas. In
1940, Gluckman drafted a ‘Seven Year Research Plan’ aimed at stimulating research in both rural
and urban areas with particular reference to the rural areas affected by the migration of the labour
force to the new mining towns. Such intense research activity focused on the mining area known
as the Copperbelt and, under Gluckman’s leadership, addressed the effects of colonialism on
tribal economies and their inclusion in the market, focusing on the different economic structures
and the kind of social relations that were emerging in the new urban areas. Significantly, the
population of the Copperbelt mining towns was made up mainly by immigrants from the
surrounding rural villages, who were employed as cheap labor force. As, according to Gluckman,
these urban immigrants had entered a new web of relationships that were believed to be typical of
the ‘urban system’ (1961), anthropological research in these towns was to be regarded as the
study of processes of social transformation and of the situations in which such processes took
place (Mitchell 1966). The works of Epstein on African politics (1958) and of Mitchell on urban
social relations (1957) exemplify this approach.
Until the mid-twentieth century, the research produced by British anthropologists under
Gluckman’s direction provided the main body of African urban ethnography. Following
Gluckman’s appointment in 1949 to a Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester, this group of anthropologists became known as the ‘Manchester School’. Soon after,
in the 1950s, the Manchester group launched a ‘school in urban anthropology’, which had a
limited impact for, by the late 1960s, the leading scholars who had been engaged in this project
had moved on to other fields. It is important to bear in mind that, although such urban
anthropology was later criticized for its functionalist approach, it did contribute to the
development of new research methods – particularly case- and network-analyses – which are
widely regarded its major legacy (see, for example, Mitchell 1966 and Mitchel ed. 1969).
While attention to the city as an important field of anthropological enquiry grew, urban
research in Western industrial societies continued to be excluded, particularly though not only in
the UK, from the anthropological research agenda. When historical events in the aftermath of the
