Manchester School

"The book accomplishes admirably its stated aim, namely 'to highlight and critically examine the fundamental features of the extended-case method, in order to advance its substantial, continuing merits'. Its editors and chapter contributors demonstrate that the extended-case method is more than a 'method', it is a sophisticated mode of research and analysis arising from the long-standing political, institutional and epistemological concerns of Gluckman and his students...This book is a timely addition to the ongoing rethinking of practice theory after Bourdieu. With its ethnographic grounding, attention to situated process, and stress on the latent potentialities of social interaction for the structuring of social life (cf. Giddens 1984), the renewal of this social anthropological tradition signaled by the present study has much to offer cultural anthropologists in the United States and elsewhere." * Ethnos ...Everyone will welcome this renewal of the extended case / situational analysis approach. Recovering the original reasons for doing things that one otherwise takes for granted not only recovers an earlier richness and generosity of intellect but makes for a very spirited and reinvigorating contemporary exercise...this is an important enterprise in charting the development of anthropology, and indeed social science more broadly. * Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA, University of Cambridge< Misunderstood and neglected for decades, the Manchester School's influence on contemporary social anthropology is considerable, even if often unacknowledged. This excellent book shows that Gluckman et al. were years ahead of their time in formulating methodological and theoretical questions of crucial importance to anthropology today. A timely book indeed! * Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo/Free University of Amsterdam T. M. S. (Terry) Evens, Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received his Ph.D. in 1971 at Manchester University. He is author of Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and co-editor of Transcendence in Society: Case Studies (JAI Press, 1990). His work reflects an abiding interest in the philosophical underpinnings of anthropology. Don Handelman, Sarah Allan Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester. He has published Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Berghahn Books, 1998) and Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (Berg 2004). He is the coauthor with David Shulman of Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge (Oxford, 2004), and the coeditor with Galina Lindquist of Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation (Berghahn Books, 2004).