Edward E. Evans-Pritchard

Life

Sir Edward Evan (E. E.) Evans-Pritchard (born on September 21, 1902; died on September 11, 1973) was a significant figure in the British anthropology, contributed toward the development of the social anthropology in that country. He was professor of social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1970.

Born in Sussex, England, Evans-Prichard studied history at the Exeter College in Oxford, where he bacame familiar with the work of R. R. Marett, famous moral philosopher and historian at the time. As a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE), Evans-Prichard came under the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski, and especially C. G. Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudanese culture. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande people of the upper Nile and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic work Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande land until 1930, when he began new research project among the Nuer people of southern Sudan (The Nuer). He was appointed to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on primitive religion that bore Seligman's influence. It was about this time that he first met Meyer Fortes and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism. As a result his trilogy of works on the Nuer (The Nuer, Nuer Religion, and Family and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology.

During the Second World War Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In the Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harrass the Italians and engaged in guerilla warfare. In 1942 he was posted to the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica in North Africa, and it was on the basis of his experience there that he produced The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. In documenting local resistance to Italian conquest, he became one of a few English-language authors to write about the tarika that some believe to be the predecessors of today's radical Islamist cults.

During the end of the war, in 1944, he converted to Roman Catholicism. This was a very unusual step for a British to do. It was probably that the mysticism of Catholic sacraments and rites matched better to Pritchard's own experience of religion, what motivated him to this move. Also, because of his academic training he was open to other religious traditions "In the last few years of his life [Evans-Pritchard] became interested in mysticism and, in a remarkable paper read to a student audience, argued in almost lyrical language that, in some important sense, mystics of all religious persuasions, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Jewish as well as Christian, experience the same transcendental reality" (Barnes, 1987).

His conversion to Catholicism was not well received in academic circles, which were still influenced by the conflict between Evans-Prichard and Malinowski. Malinowski did not agree with Evans-Pritchard ideas that the later published in his work Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, Amongst the Azande (1937), so Malinowski publicly dissociated himself from Evans-Pritchard. Being a highly respected person, Malinowski influenced most of the scholarship, preventing Evans-Pritchard from obtaining an academic post. It was only after the death of Malinowski in 1942, and with the help of his good friend Radscliffe-Brown, that Evans-Pritchard got the professorship. In 1946 he bacame a professor of social anthropology at Oxfard, where he spent the rest of his life.

He was pronounced a knight in 1971, and died in Oxford two years later.

Work

His early works, especially those he has done among little studied cultures of central Africa - Azande and Nuer, made Evans-Pritchard famous among anthropologists. However, it is his later writings that made him famous outside the anthropologists circles. Much of the principles he used there he draw after his experiences working in the field. In 1950, for example, he famously disavowed the commonly-held view that anthropology was a natural science, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities, especially history.

He argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation - finding a way to translate one's own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one's own culture.

In 1965, he published his seminal work Theories of Primitive Religion, where he argued against the existing theories of primitive religious practices, that dominated antrophological literature up to that time. Such, he claimed that anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they are studying. On that way antrophologists bias and distort their own theories about other peoples and cultures. Evans-Pritchard also argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being more quick to come up with biological, sociological, or psychological theories to explain religion as an illusion, and believers being more likely to come up with theories explaining religion as a method of conceptualizing and relating to reality. For believers religion is a special dimension of the reality.

The fieldwork he made with both Azande and Nuer gave Evans-Pritchard a good reputation. In his later writings, he turned more toward theoretical exegesis of the relationship between anthropology and other social sciences.

Legacy

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard played a significant role in the development of the social anthropology in Britain, but with his work he influenced the 20th century views of religion and anthropology in general. He caused the sway in the predominant belief that saw anthropology as a natural science toward seeing it more as a part of humanities. In that regard, anthropologists started to study cultures "from within", entering the minds of the people they study, trying to understand the background of why people believe something or behave in a certain way. Subsequently, the way toward modern anthropology and ethnography was opened.

As a professor at Oxford, Pritchard's influence was considerable. Under his supervision, the School of Social Anthropology grew, attracting students from all around the world. As a member of the Colonial Social Science Research Council Pritchard sponsored research and fieldwork on African, but also other continents. Under his guidance, the Oxford School of Anthropology become one of the most influential schools of anthropology in the world.

Bibliography

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. The Clarendon Press

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford University Press

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1945). Some aspects of marriage and the family among the Nuer. Rhodes-Livingstone Institute

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1955). The position of women in primitive societies and in our own: The Fawcett lecture, 1955-56. Bedford College (University of London)

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1964). Social anthropology and other essays: Combining Social anthropology and Essays in social anthropology. Free Press of Glencoe

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1965). The position of women in primitive societies, and other essays in social anthropology. Free Press

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1965). Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford University Press

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1967). The intellectualist (English) interpretation of magic. Bobbs-Merrill

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1974). Political System of the Anuak of the Anglo Egyptian Sudan. Ams Print (Reprint ed.)

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1975). Nuer Religion. Oxford University Press. Original work published 1937

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1990). Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. Oxford University Press (Reprint ed.), Original work published 1938

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1999). The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. ACLS History E-Book Project.

Additional Reading

Barnes, J.A. (1987). Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, 1902-1973. Proceedings of the British Academy, 73:447-490.

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