Extended Case Method

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The origin of ECM goes back to the 1940s. It was the then newly established Manchester School of Social Anthropology, led by South African-born British social anthropologist Max Gluckman, that invented and used the method to describe and theorize how everyday practices in specific places were related to larger structures and processes. Gluckman, and his students such as V. Turner as well as his associates, including J. C. Mitchell, observed and analyzed the actions of individuals and groups to arrive at an understanding of social structure. For example, Gluckman used an event of the ceremonial opening of a bridge in Zululand, South Africa, to illustrate the extent to which Zulus and Whites were involved in a single system rather than being solidly separated as Blacks and Whites. The Manchester School called events such as the bridge opening ceremony “situations,” and their analysis of such situations was therefore referred to as situational analysis. Thus, sometimes the term ECM is used interchangeably with situational analysis, which is itself sometimes referred to as processual analysis by Gluckman's students, for example, B. Kapferer.

It was not the use of case study as such but how the case studies were used that gave ECM and situation analysis a place of pride in the history of qualitative analysis. The Manchester School used extended cases separated by time and micro-contexts to produce an image of social life, even of village communities, that is messy, conflictual, and changing. Such a view of social life upset the seamless equilibrium model of society that was established by the then dominant paradigm of structural functionalism that thought of society as generally orderly with every part (persons, institutions) playing its role to ensure the overall smooth functioning of the system. In contrast, ECM and situational analysis focused ethnographic attention on “trouble cases” such as situations of conflict and individual actions that did not conform to presumed societal norms. By doing so, Gluckman and his students opened themselves to the messy actualities of social life and thus ventured into the possibility of discovering unforeseen insights on social processes.

Their generalizations emerged from an examination of series of interconnected case studies, not from the application of a grand theory. Thus, theory was built from the ground up, as it were. Looked at from today's perspective, the Manchester School's approach remained by and large structural analysis and thus did not fully allow the discursive practices inherent in case studies, but it clearly opened up an analytic horizon that found its fuller expression in later works.

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