Bio: (1902–1973) British anthropologist. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard studied history at Oxford University and moved to the London School of Economics (LSA) for his postgraduate studies in anthropology. His approach to anthropology was influenced by his teachers at the London School of Economics, Charles G. Seligman and Bronislaw Malinowski. Evans-Pritchard defended his Ph.D. thesis in 1927, based on his field study of the Azande kingdoms from Sudan. After that, he was a teaching assistant at the LSE from 1923 to 1931. He did several field studies in 1930is on Nuer, Shilluk, and Anuak populations of White Nile regions in modern Sudan, Congo, and Kenya. He taught at King Fuad University in Cairo from 1930 to 1934 and had Lectureship in African Sociology at Oxford from 1935-1940.  During World War II he was posted in Lybia, where he researched Beduin tribes, the results of which are presented in the book Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949. After the war, Evans-Pritchard was a professor at Oxford University (1946–1970), president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1949–1951), and co-founder of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA).

Evans-Pritchard was influenced in his early career by the structural-functionalism of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, which is focused on the stability of social structure. Over time Evans-Pritchard focused more on the question of how long-term historical processes influence relational structures and the creation of meaning through language and interaction. In the article “Social Anthropology: Past and Present” (1950) and the book Social Anthropology (1951), he makes official his break from structural-functionalism and moves his focus to ethnohistorical interpretation. He states that history and anthropology are closely related since their theory and methods are similar. Unlike Radcliffe- Brown, who saw anthropology as a natural science, Evans-Pritchard came to see anthropology more as a humanistic field of study, incorporating approaches of history, art, literary criticism, and philosophy.  

He also argued that anthropologists, in order to fully comprehend other cultures have to accurately translate and understand the concepts that are used in those cultures. To do so anthropologists have to learn the languages, ideas, and concepts of the people they are researching. The dialogue that takes place between people and researcher, and between subjects of research themselves, is the focus of the analysis of knowledge and beliefs of the researched population. While the analysis of Malinowski and Radcliffe- Brown depended more on researchers' “objective” conclusions about researched peoples, Evans-Prichard placed more value on informants’ own subjective beliefs, thoughts, and values.

                          Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion

In the book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), Evans-Pritchard studies witchcraft, sorcery, and magic in the Azande population. He rejected Malinowski’s approach to magic and argued that social structures influenced the functions that magic has in some societies. The Azande used practical technical knowledge in raising crops and other everyday tasks, and only in the instances where that everyday practical knowledge failed, did the Azande people turn to the magical way of thinking. Failing crops were often, and illnesses and death were almost always, attributed to conscious sorcery or unconscious witchcraft. There were two types of magical influences. First was witchcraft, which relied on a patrilineally transmitted force named mangu, which was an unconscious supernatural power used to attack others. Other type of magic was sorcery, and it relied on conscious manipulation of materials and formulas, for both benefitial and detremential uses.  

Witchdoctors and oracles were used to determine who was a witch that caused misfortune. Both women (who constitute a larger proportion of the accused) and men could be witches, and the ones identified were supposed to undo the witchcraft. If the outcome of the process was unsuccessful blame could be put on a fraudulent witchdoctor, bewitched or unclean oracle, or the fault may be on the victim itself due to his or her own witchcraft. The only consistent thing relating to every outcome of this whole process was that all explanations of outcomes were related to the core belief in magical influences. Not all Azandes were satisfied with these witch-trials, as kings, princes, and other powerful and privileged individuals were the majority of accusators while most accusations fell on privilegedless and helpless individuals. Evans-Prichard showed that these apparently irrational beliefs could be understood in rational terms of historical power relations between Azandes.

In the book Nuer Religion (1956), Evans-Pritchard deviates from Durkheim’s theory of religion and analyses religion as a model for explaining the mysteries of the world. He uses the term Weltanschauung to reveal the religious consciousness, rituals, and sacrifices from the subjective viewpoint of the believers, as their lived and shared reality. The Nuer believe in kwoth, the Spirit of the above and he sees their whole religion as a mental state that depends on an awareness of kwoth. He finds a correlation between the Nuer’s social structure and aspects of kwoth and explores Nuer’s ritualistic sacrifice according to the theoretical model of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. He, also, tried to translate Nuer concepts into Judeo-Christian categories. Nuer’s religion is defined by sacral confrontation between God and Man. Lived experience and perception of this relation varies across Nuer society.

In Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), Evans-Pritchard rejects sociological and psychological explanations of the religion. He argues that anthropologists since they don’t believe in the religions they explore, attribute sociological, psychological, or existential explanations for the formation and continuance of religions. Believers, on the other hand, perceive religion in the context of their own reality and categories.  Religion for believers serves as a way to organize their daily activities and endure bad times. Religious thought creates concepts and social institutions that facilitate the understanding and dealing with reality.

In the paper The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (1948), Evans-Pritchard rejects Frazer’s explanation of the ritualistic sacrifice of godlike Shilluk royalty. Frazer argues that those sacrifices are the consequences of the decline of the sacred powers of the kings, which necessitates that the old king be put to death to allow ancestral spirit to imbed itself in a new and more powerful body. On the other hand, Evans-Pritchard states that the ritualistic regicide is actually a mode of resolving ingroup conflicts.  

                              African Political Systems

Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes co-edited the book African Political Systems (1940b) which contributed to the birth of the subdiscipline of political anthropology.  Evans-Pritchard and Fortes devised a political model for societies without complex political centralization (states) that was based on segmentary lineage. The political organization of both states and segmentary lineages have spatial (territorial) foundations. Editors used the "comparative method…as an instrument for inductive inference" in order to create classification scheme for different political systems. Articles in the book examine eight African societies and look into areas of kinship, territorial boundaries, demography, and lifestyle of those societies. Evans-Pritchard and Fortes argue that the transition from a stateless form of segmentary lineage to states occurs as a consequence of territorial conquest.

                                               The Nuer

In The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940a), Evans-Pritchard depicts the lives, modes of time-keeping, kinship relations, economic activities, and political organization of Nuer, cattle-farming society in Sudan. He uses the social ecology approach to explain their seasonal morphology. Reminiscent of the way Mauss explained the seasonal dynamics of the Inuit, Evans-Pritchard shows how the group dynamic of the Nuer depended on the seasonal changes between rainy and dry periods. During the rainy season, people lived on higher ground separated from other villages by the flooded plains, while in the dry season, everybody gathered by the watering places in the lower pastures.

The Nuers had very close relationships with their cattle, as boys took names and nicknames based on cattle, marriage transfers, and homicide compensation were done in cattle, cattle were used for sacrifices, and their body parts, milk, blood, and dung were used for numberless subsistence needs. Seasonal dynamics coupled with the subsistence based on their close relationships to their cattle, determined their social structures and their relations to the natural world. The socio-political organization of the Nuer was based on segmentary lineage, smaller groups that related to the other groups like the branches of a tree, with every branching attributed to the ancestral splits between patrilinear lines of common descent. That is, the social-political distance was based on generational separation from the common patrilinear ancestors.

Every individual branch or group was in a state of constant hostility toward other groups, but when faced with the hostility of lineages that were further up the line of descent, then the closest groups would unite. These interlocking oppositions function as the structural principle of political and social organization. Evans-Pritchard defines their political organization as ordered anarchy, as they lacked centralized government or permanent chiefs, but the order came out of those oppositions between segments.

The only political authority, although sporadic, among the Nuer, were so-called leopard-skin chiefs, who came from structurally minor kin groups, and whose role was to mediate conflicts between different segments. The charismatic prophets could also emerge during times of distress, and they had their own followers and served as their religious-political leaders. The political structure of the Nuer also had age grades for both genders, and they were universal for all the Nuer and crossed over genealogical and territorial boundaries.

While in the book The Nuer Evans-Pritchard focused on patrilinear lines of descent, in Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951), he focused more on matrilateral and affinal kinship and the role of women in Nuer society. He shows that maternal ancestors could be inserted into the paternal line of descent. Specific female-focused cultural customs such as woman-to-woman marriage and ghost marriage also existed among the Nuer.

Main works

Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937);

The Nuer: a Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940a);

African Political Systems (1940b);

The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (1948);

The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949);

Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951a);

Social Anthropology (1951b);

Nuer Religion (1956);

Essays in Social Anthropology (1962);

Theories of Primitive Religion (1965);

 The Zande Trickster (1967);

The Azande: History and Political Institutions (1971);

Man and Woman among the Azande (1974).