E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Encyclopedia
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (21 September 1902 – 11 September 1973) was an English
anthropologist
who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology
. He was also Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford
from 1946 to 1970.
, East Sussex
, England, he was educated at Winchester College
and studied history at Exeter College, Oxford
, where he was influenced by R. R. Marett
, and then as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics
(LSE). There he came under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman
, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande
, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande and Bongo
land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer.
This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes
and A. R. 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 Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation. Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and "rationality" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn
and especially Paul Feyerabend
.
During WWII Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia
, Libya
, Sudan
, and Syria
. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass 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 tariqa. Near the end of the war, in 1944, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
After a brief stint in Cambridge, Evans-Pritchard became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. He remained at All Souls College for the rest of his career. Among the doctoral students he advised was the late M. N. Srinivas
, the doyen among India's sociologists who coined some of the key concepts in Indian sociological discourse, including "Sanskritization," "dominant caste" and "vote bank." One of his notable students is Talal Asad
, who now teaches at the City University of New York
. Mary Douglas
' classic Purity and Danger
on pollutions and uncertainty — what we often denote as 'risk' — was fundamentally influenced by Evans-Pritchard's views on how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally-specific conceptions of misfortune and harm.
He was knight
ed in 1971, and died in Oxford
on 11 September 1973.
, 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 the highly influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, 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. He also argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being quicker 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.
, is an investigative reporter for the London Daily Telegraph and author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
. His younger daughter, Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, PhD, is an expert on folklore and Middle Eastern studies. She is also a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. His eldest daughter, Shineen Evans-Pritchard, is a successful businesswoman. He also had two other children, twins: Nicky Evans-Pritchard, who works in computers, and John Evans-Pritchard, an economics teacher and author of several books.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology
Social anthropology
Social Anthropology is one of the four or five branches of anthropology that studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology investigate, often through long-term, intensive field studies , the social organization of a particular person: customs,...
. He was also Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
from 1946 to 1970.
Life and field work
Born in CrowboroughCrowborough
The highest point in the town is 242 metres above sea level. This summit is the highest point of the High Weald and second highest point in East Sussex . Its relative height is 159 m, meaning Crowborough qualifies as one of England's Marilyns...
, East Sussex
East Sussex
East Sussex is a county in South East England. It is bordered by the counties of Kent, Surrey and West Sussex, and to the south by the English Channel.-History:...
, England, he was educated at Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
and studied history at Exeter College, Oxford
Exeter College, Oxford
Exeter College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England and the fourth oldest college of the University. The main entrance is on the east side of Turl Street...
, where he was influenced by R. R. Marett
Robert Ranulph Marett
Robert Ranulph Marett was a British ethnologist from Jersey.Exponent of the British evolutionary school, he dealt with religious ethnology. In this field he modified the evolutionary scale of religion fixed by E. B. Tylor, which placed animism in the first place...
, and then as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
(LSE). There he came under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS was a British ethnologist. Born in London, Seligman studied medicine at St. Thomas' Hospital....
, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande
Azande
The Azande are a tribe of north Central Africa. Their number is estimated by various sources at between 1 and 4 million....
, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande and Bongo
Bongo Country
Bongo Country is referred to an entry in the All Saints, Poplar, parish register of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The entry records the baptism of Samuel Crighton, son of William Fernandez who claimed to be King of the Bongo Country on the Western Coast of Africa.There is no known kingdom of...
land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer.
This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
and A. R. 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 Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation. Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and "rationality" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
and especially Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
.
During WWII Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
, Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
, and Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass the Italians
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and engaged in guerilla warfare. In 1942 he was posted to the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica
Cyrenaica
Cyrenaica is the eastern coastal region of Libya.Also known as Pentapolis in antiquity, it was part of the Creta et Cyrenaica province during the Roman period, later divided in Libia Pentapolis and Libia Sicca...
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
History of Libya as Italian Colony
The History of Libya as an Italian colony began in the 1910s and lasted until February 1947, when Italy officially lost all the colonies of the former Italian Empire.-First years:...
, he became one of a few English-language authors to write about the tariqa. Near the end of the war, in 1944, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
After a brief stint in Cambridge, Evans-Pritchard became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. He remained at All Souls College for the rest of his career. Among the doctoral students he advised was the late M. N. Srinivas
M. N. Srinivas
Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was an Indian sociologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of 'Dominant Caste'.- Career :...
, the doyen among India's sociologists who coined some of the key concepts in Indian sociological discourse, including "Sanskritization," "dominant caste" and "vote bank." One of his notable students is Talal Asad
Talal Asad
Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York.Asad has made important theoretical contributions to post-colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and ritual studies and has recently called for, and initiated, an anthropology of secularism...
, who now teaches at the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
. Mary Douglas
Mary Douglas
Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
' classic Purity and Danger
Purity and Danger
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo is the best known book by the influential anthropologist and cultural theorist Mary Douglas. In 1991 the Times Literary Supplement listed it as one of the hundred most influential non-fiction books published since 1945...
on pollutions and uncertainty — what we often denote as 'risk' — was fundamentally influenced by Evans-Pritchard's views on how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally-specific conceptions of misfortune and harm.
He was knight
Knight
A knight was a member of a class of lower nobility in the High Middle Ages.By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior....
ed in 1971, and died in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
on 11 September 1973.
Later theories
Evans-Pritchard's later work was more theoretical, drawing upon his experiences as anthropologist to philosophize on the nature of anthropology and how it should best be practiced. In 1950 he famously disavowed the commonly-held view that anthropology was a natural scienceNatural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
, 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 the highly influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, 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. He also argued that believers and non-believers approached the study of religion in vastly different ways, with non-believers being quicker 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.
Family
Known to his friends and family as "EP," Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma. His youngest son, Ambrose Evans-PritchardAmbrose Evans-Pritchard
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the international business editor of the Daily Telegraph.A long-time opponent of the EU's constitution and monetary union, he was the Telegraph's Europe correspondent in Brussels from 1999 to 2004....
, is an investigative reporter for the London Daily Telegraph and author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
. His younger daughter, Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, PhD, is an expert on folklore and Middle Eastern studies. She is also a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. His eldest daughter, Shineen Evans-Pritchard, is a successful businesswoman. He also had two other children, twins: Nicky Evans-Pritchard, who works in computers, and John Evans-Pritchard, an economics teacher and author of several books.
Partial bibliography
Evans-Pritchard, E. E.- 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford University Press. 1976 abridged edition: ISBN 0-19-874029-8
- 1940a The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- 1940b "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan". in African Political Systems. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Prtitchard, eds., London: Oxford University Press., p. 272-296.
- 1949 The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. London: Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1951a Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- 1951b "Kinship and Local Community among the Nuer". in African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and D.Forde, eds., London: Oxford University Press. p. 360-391.
- 1956 Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- 1962 Social Anthropology and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. BBC Third ProgrammeBBC Third ProgrammeThe BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
Lectures, 1950. - 1965 Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-823131-8
- 1967 The Zande Trickster. Oxford: Clarendon Press.