Scarlett Grunwald, a fellow member of the “Manchester School”, who had completed fieldwork for her pioneering account of Economic Development and Social Change in South India (1962). He spent a year in preparation at the London School of Economics and his research on the urban courts established on the Copperbelt led to the publication of The Administration of Justice and the Urban African (1953).He joined the new Anthropology Department at Manchester University as a PhD student and later became a lecturer In 1957 he married T. In 1948 he realised a long ambition to study anthropology and was awarded a Colonial Social Science Scholarship. After his discharge he was called to the Bar but never practised law.

But it also put Africans on a footing of equality and this, the authorities feared, would demolish the delicate political balance. The subversion was to have dared to act as an anthropologist within towns rather than in a rural location.Arnold Leonard Epstein was born in 1924, took a law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1944 and joined the Navy as a coder. To talk to Africans, to share their festivals and join them in queues, and to value their interpretations of custom and social relations were essential to anthropological enquiry. The research led to important theoretical contributions – in his Manchester University PhD thesis later published as Politics in an Urban African Community (1958) – in Urbanisation and Kinship (1981), and Scenes from African Urban Life (1992).It was not Epstein as an individual who had challenged the system in colonial central Africa but his strong advocacy, by example, of the craft of anthropology.

Postgraduate students attending his “Manchester School”, and then Sussex, seminars in the 1960s and 1970s greatly appreciated the detailed accounts of central African urban life and marvelled that his many insights were ever achieved given the restrictions placed on him. He was approachable and known for his even-handedness in seminar debates and for stressing the importance of ethnographic context. He did not ignore their changing role within the colonial and newly independent state but this was not his special interest.He was no firebrand. In his accounts of subsequent fieldwork in New Guinea he stressed the resilience of the Tolai people’s cultural institutions and their ability to signify external economic and political changes within a set of meanings distinctive to the Tolai. In his anthropology and his person Epstein emphasised continuities in social relationships rather than changes. He needed co-operation from the trade-union movement and relied on good fortune and his invariably open, tactful approach to obtain it. Following meetings with trade-union leaders he was invited to address, in Bemba, a public meeting.

This was an excellent opportunity to explain his research to a large gathering Unfortunately his speech was reported in a garbled fashion. He was accused of siding with the trade union and told he could not continue his research as intended.
His branding as a subversive in these early years was at odds with his gentle manner and his careful scholarship and method. It was a volatile period before Central African Federation, and rolling strikes were used to air grievances at the copper mines, where many Africans worked, as part of a campaign of political opposition by the African National Congress. “Bill” Epstein had returned to the Copperbelt in 1953 (after completing a study of its urban courts in the previous two years) to study the new organisations and social relationships forming among migrant African labourers. Epstein carried out his pioneering research from 1950 to 1956 in the towns of what is now Zambia, the authorities treated him as a subversive. WHEN THE social anthropologist A L. The whole business will become even more nasty, fraught and expensive than it is now.Friends, Britishpersons, what’s it to be? Cartopia, or Reclaim the Streets?.

And certainly, when I pushed him on it, that’s what the AA man admitted.You can see what happens next My car is good, and your car is a menace. Communities will construct zones in which outsider vehicles will be made to feel unwelcome. Rat runs will be closed off, residents-only parking will be enforced, wardens will harass the school-runners, and the young guy in the red car will bash in the windscreen of the woman in the white one. The very same people who argue that councils in the South-east should be able to forbid new home-building in their back yards, now assert that locally levied congestion charges constitute an attack on freedom.What’s this? Love cars, hate houses? Might we describe this as a “vendetta” against house-livers? Does Mr Redwood also “hate” walking schoolchildren, asthmatics, cyclists, parents, and blind people who need clear pavements?My fear is that it’s all too late; that we have organised life around the car to such an extent that there’s no persuading us back Cartopia is coming whether we like it or not. We rage, speed, park illegally, and pollute, terrify and intimidate our non-driving selves Encased and enmotored, we’re a bloody menace.