The invention of the case study method in anthropology: first steps to decolonise knowledge in colonial and postcolonial societies

The case study in anthropology enabled new theoretical work into social conflict and ethnic integration by recording ethnographic facts about a changing world. This chapter takes Max Gluckman’s claim that the anthropological case study rests on ‘the ethnographic fact’ as a departure point for a fuller discussion of the place of the case study method in social anthropology’s first steps towards the decolonisation of social science knowledge. It shows colonial jurisprudence’s aim to understand case studies of contestations over the duty of care owed by citizens of new states to each other arose in critical discussions of their uses of the legal fiction of the ‘reasonable man’. As such, the case study method in anthropology appears as one of the first steps towards a fundamental epistemic change to the miasma of colonialism over the mind and knowledge of the colonised.