Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The 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.
Introduction
“The Nuer” appeared in Oxford in 1940, the first of a trilogy completed by “Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer” (1951) and “Nuer Religion” (1956). According to its preface, the research was undertaken at the request of the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which largely financed it; the fieldwork, between 1930 and 1936, followed military operations against the Nuer. The book starts from ecology: cattle, floods and drought shape settlement and what Evans-Pritchard called “oecological” time. It then describes a political order without a state, in which tribes and their sections unite or divide according to the level of conflict, and in which feuds are mediated by the leopard-skin chief, a figure without power to command. The introduction describes the difficult conditions of the fieldwork.
More works by E. E. Evans-Pritchard
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made