E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Works

• 1937Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande

  Study of the Azande of the southern Sudan: witchcraft, a substance believed to sit in some people’s bodies, explains why misfortunes strike; oracles, above all poison given to chickens, identify witches and guide decisions, and failures are explained within the system.

• 1940The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

  First of his three books on the Nuer of the Upper Nile: it relates their cattle economy, seasonal movements and sense of time to a political system without chiefs or state, held together by the balanced opposition of lineages and territorial segments.

Position

Evans-Pritchard is on the map as one of the figures who shaped the British school of social anthropology (A. Kuper, 1973) and as the author whose study of Zande witchcraft became a test case in the philosophy of the social sciences. In “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande” (1937) he argued that witchcraft beliefs do not replace knowledge of natural causes but explain why a misfortune strikes a particular person at a particular time, and that oracles and their interpretation form a system in which failures are explained away: the Azande, he wrote, reason well in the idiom of their beliefs but cannot reason against it. At the same time he stated that witches as the Azande conceive them cannot exist. Michael Polanyi used the oracle as an example of a self-confirming framework of belief; Peter Winch objected in 1964 that Evans-Pritchard had measured Zande beliefs against a scientific idea of reality foreign to them, which opened the rationality debate that MacIntyre, Habermas and others took up. In “The Nuer” (1940) he described a people without chiefs or state whose order rests on the balanced opposition of lineage segments, a model for the study of stateless societies. From 1950 he described social anthropology as closer to history than to natural science, and “Theories of Primitive Religion” (1965) criticised explanations of religion from Tylor to Durkheim. How far the colonial setting shaped his Nuer studies is debated.

Life & context

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born on 21 September 1902 in Crowborough, Sussex, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He studied history at Exeter College, Oxford, and then anthropology at the London School of Economics with C. G. Seligman and Bronisław Malinowski, taking his doctorate in 1927 with a thesis on the Azande. Between 1926 and 1930 he spent about twenty months among the Azande in the south of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan; from 1930 to 1936 he worked among the Nuer. He taught in Cairo (1932–34) and from 1935 in Oxford. During the Second World War he served in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria and Cyrenaica, and in 1944 he became a Roman Catholic. From 1946 to 1970 he was professor of social anthropology at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College. He was knighted in 1971 and died in Oxford on 11 September 1973.

Further main works

• African Political Systems (ed. with Meyer Fortes, 1940)
• The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949)
• Nuer Religion (1956)
• Theories of Primitive Religion (1965)