A distinguished British anthropologist, Max Gluckman (1911-1975) pioneered the study of traditional African legal systems. His research stressed social conflict and mechanisms for conflict resolution while studying urbanization and social change in colonial Africa.

A member of the second generation of great British anthropologists, Max Gluckman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1911. His parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants to South Africa, later resettled in the newly-formed state of Israel, where Gluckman died in 1975. Originally intending to study law, he chose instead to pursue a degree in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1936 Gluckman, a lifelong scholar-sportsman, was awarded a Transvaal Rhodes Scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford. Though he attended Kaspar B. Malinowski's famous seminars at the London School of Economics, it was the structural analyses of Edward Evans-Prichard and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown that most strongly influenced him. Gluckman was trained in structural analysis of social systems as...