Edward Evans Pritchard and Anthropology Insights

I've often been asked whether, when I was among the Azande, I got to accept their ideas about witchcraft. I suppose you can say I accepted them. I had no choice. In my own culture, I rejected Azande notions of witchcraft. In their culture, I accepted them. In a kind of way, I believed them. Those words were written by Edward Evans Pritchard, one of the most famous of British anthropologists. In many ways his background was one of privilege, certainly as far as his education was concerned. Born in 1902 he went to the English public school Winchester and then up to Oxford. He read history at Exeter College but found it tedious. However, Exeter also happened to be the home of Oxford anthropology and as he later admitted he was attracted by the sense of adventure involved in studying exotic cultures. Evan Pritchard's experience of life among cultures very different from his own was to produce a finer understanding of apparently irrational behaviour and ideas. But the anthropology being taught in his day was still largely that of the of a subject that thought of itself as a science. Students were asking what certain social institutions did in order to find out how a society worked. Evans Pritchard was remarkable for focusing his attention on the mental... of those cultures that anthropologists go off and study. He ended up examining their beliefs and ideas, and not just as isolated examples of some kind of pre-logical thinking, but as entire systems of thought. And the results were startling. He was sure that it was a mistake to treat the thinking of other societies, let's call them primitives or tribes, they were different from us because they were making a mistake, because they hadn't got it right, because perhaps their mental functions weren't so developed as ours, or because their emotions got in the way so much that they couldn't think straight. So he was sure that there was a different solution and a different explanation of why they have different beliefs than we have. Where students went and who they studied were strongly influenced by the colonial interests of the day. In the colonies you could expect hospitality and some support and rely on administrators and some of the natives to speak your own language. from France, Germany, America and Britain tended to go to parts of the world where their own nationality was represented. But that colonial presence wasn't always as useful as it might be, for the budding anthropologist had to deal with the type of men... represented those colonial, commercial or missionary interests. And they weren't always as sensitive to native culture as they might have been, especially in the area that Evans Pritchard was encouraged to study. I never much cared for nor admired the administrators in the Northern Sudan as much as they admired themselves. There was too much Gordon-Haler round their heads and too much of the overgrown schoolboy about them, the rowing blue and the president of the junior common room type. The Sudan was described as the country of blacks governed by blues. In my day, the officials, when I first went to the south, were of a very different type and lived in different circumstances. I came to know several of these men very well and liked and respected them. And they accepted me, which they need not have done if they hadn't wanted to. With a large colonial presence in Africa, it was natural that British anthropologists should expect to go and study there. For Evans Pritchard, the peoples of the Nile Basin and the Sudan were a logical choice. Evans Pritchard, like other aspiring anthropologists of his generation, had been taught that fieldwork was no longer a question of just going and visiting another people. It involved living with them, sharing their lives, speaking their language, and generally learning their culture. The mundane details of everyday life were as important as the dramatic and the ceremonial. In 1926, Evans Pritchard was ready to start his own fieldwork. It was, in fact, the first... intensive field study of an African people by a trained anthropologist. The people he came to study were the Azandi, who still live here in remote and scattered homesteads in a wide region that spans Zaire, the Central African Republic and the Sudan. Early on, Evans Pritchard realised that the only way to get inside Azandi's social life was to live among the people, so he had himself a house built just like this. He intended from the start to live as far as possible as the Zandy did. But part of the achievement of fieldwork in his day was actually getting to where you intended to work. Students of today may not realize that in 1926 it took a long time... to reach the place to which one wanted to go. A week by train and ship to Egypt, several days by train and boat to Khartoum, then ten days by paddle steamer up the Nile, and finally a three-week trek by foot to the heart of Sudanese Zandiland. In all, it took some seven weeks. He spent about 20 months among the Azandi and very little escaped his attention. The layout of their villages and the distribution of the clans, the way they cultivated and prepared their food, their social organisation, their amorous adventures, the raids they made on neighbouring tribes and the stories they told each other. Evans Pritchard was interested in more than just the facts about his Andi life. He was interested in their ideas. He wanted to see if they fitted together to form a coherent system of belief. And if so, how did this system compare with our own? own. He recorded their cultural life by taking his own photographs and writing down what the natives said in their own language about the topics that they found important. Is Zandi thought so different from ours? that we could only describe their speech and actions without comprehending them? Or is it essentially like our own, though expressed in an idiom to which we are unaccustomed? What are the motives of Zandi behaviour? What are their notions of reality? How are these motives and notions expressed in custom? I've tried to keep these major sociological problems always before me so that my account may be a description rather than a bare record of fact. In Evans Pritchard's day, educated Europeans largely assumed that so-called primitive peoples had a primitive mentality. One that was not just different from that of so-called civilized man, but one that was probably inferior as well. The evidence cited was the widespread belief among among societies like the Azandi, of the power of witchcraft and the practice of magic. Now these two words, witchcraft and magic, were rather loosely used by colonial administrators, missionaries and some anthropologists in an attempt to describe sets of ideas that they thought were ridiculous, misguided, frankly primitive. But Evans Pritchard realised that Zandi belief in witchcraft wasn't ridiculous at all. Zandi notions were logical enough. It was their point of departure, their underlying assumptions, that were so different from our own. One of the examples that Evans Pritchard used to contrast Zandi with Western systems of thought involved a building just like this. This is a granary. It's used to store maize up here, and underneath, in the shade, people generally... past the time of day. It's supported by these wooden posts which in this part of the tropics like most other things gradually get eaten away by termites. What that means is that these buildings regularly collapse and sometimes when they collapse people are sitting underneath and sometimes people get hurt. Why a particular person should To be hurt by a falling granary is something that we'd call bad luck, something that happened by chance, an unfortunate coincidence. The Azandi say that that kind of misfortune is caused by witchcraft. We must bear in mind that a serious misfortune, especially if it results in death, is normally attributed by everyone to witchcraft. especially by the sufferer and his kin. It is in connection with death that Zande belief in witchcraft is most coherent and is most intelligible to us. For it is death that answers the riddle of mystical beliefs. This is not a happy song. The words say, you are dead, I must cry, I will not see you again. Last night in this village, a young woman of about 30 died. She's being mourned by her friends and relatives. Apparently she'd been ill for some time. She had the obvious signs and symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. But people here aren't happy with that explanation on its own. They say that something else was involved. They say she was bewitched. I had no difficulty in discovering what Azande think about witchcraft, nor observing what they do to combat it. These ideas and actions are on the surface of their life and are accessible to anyone who lives for a few weeks in their homesteads. Every Zande is an authority on witchcraft. Mangu, witchcraft, was one of the first words I heard in Zandiland, and I heard it uttered day by day throughout the months. It was soon clear that if I could gain a full understanding of the meaning of this word, I should have the key to Zande philosophy. To understand more about their notions of witchcraft, Evans Pritchard studied case histories of people who suspected that witchcraft was being directed at them. The only source of witchcraft that Zandi recognised was other human beings. These people were seen as unconscious agents for this malevolent force. To find out who was the source of their misfortune, the Zandi consulted oracles. These were procedures which enabled them to get answers to those nagging suspicions involving witchcraft. The first step was usually the iwa or rubbing board oracle. This is still used today in an attempt to find out who is causing misfortune and what you can do about it. Gaguda has a sick mother and he's come to consult the Oracle. But before looking into the cause of the illness, the diviner first wanted to establish why a white film crew was in Zandiland in the first place. Was this likely to be the source of any of the illness? I am a man of faith. Once it was established that we weren't up to any mischief, he got down to the real purpose of Guguda's visit. He was a very good man. What is your name? My name is Mbinga Chipa. I am a farmer. I am a farmer. I am a farmer. I am a farmer. What is your name? My name is Nengugudo. I am a farmer. Nengugudo is a tree that grows when it is wet. When it is wet, it grows again. That is Mungiwa. Mungi. Zerayekaza is a tree that grows when it is wet. I am a farmer. Evans Pritchard found that the world of Zandi ideas was beginning to make sense by following up case histories just like Gaguda's. He's asked whether she's going to die and if anyone is bewitching her. He's been told she's not going to die and that it's not obvious that anyone is bewitching her, but if he performs certain magical practices, he'll be sure that she won't die. In Zandiland, there's a hierarchy. of oracles and to make absolutely sure he's consulting the poison oracle or the bengi now bengi is a strychnine based poison that is administered to small chickens and depending on the question asked and whether the chicken I have to go to the hospital. The poison oracle has given its answer. Cucuta asked if his sick mother got the appropriate magic, would she live? Now the first question was posed in such a way that if the chicken died, the answer was yes. The chicken has died. But just to make doubly sure, he asked the question again of a second chicken, who was also given poison. If my mother, who is sick, gets the appropriate medicine, will she live? If so, the chicken itself was to live, and it has. so he obviously now has to get hold of the right kind of magic. For the right magic, Gaguda has to go to another kind of expert. White colonials named this type of ritual specialist the witch doctor, and his job is to combat witchcraft. To achieve this, he has a large repertoire of magic at his disposal in the form of spells, substances and procedures. Like so much medical advice around the world, it's dispensed with a certain amount of magic. amount of ceremony. The Azande witch doctor is both diviner and magician. Since Azande believe that witches may at any time bring sickness and death upon them, they are anxious to establish and maintain contact with these evil powers, and by counteracting them control their own destiny. Azande believe that witches can injure them by virtually killing them. virtue of an inherent quality. A witch performs no rite, utters no spell, and possesses no medicines. An act of witchcraft is a psychic act. Azande believe that witchcraft is a substance in the bodies of witches. It has been described to me as an oval blackish swelling or bag attached to the edge of the liver. They say when people cut open the belly they have only to pierce it and witchcraft substance bursts through with a pop. Azande need not live in continual dread of witchcraft, since they can enter into relations with it, and therefore control it by means of oracles and magic. By oracles they can foresee the future dispositions of witchcraft, and change them before they develop. By magic they can guard themselves against witchcraft and destroy it. The witch doctor is an important person in Zandi society. He has called on to locate and combat the ever-present menace of witchcraft. And it's his magic that gives him the power to see the evil intentions of others. I am sorry. I am sorry for the people who have lost their lives. In spite of following the witch doctor's advice and finding the right medicine, Kaguda's mother did die a week later. But his faith is unshaken. Evans Pritchard realised that the Azandi didn't think of witchcraft as ridiculous, and they still don't. It isn't disproved or invalidated by its failures any more than astrology, Marxism or Christianity. His published findings were to... a whole series of new questions about what could be considered rational thinking in any culture. I think that in this generation, with good reason, we appreciate that we're not as rational as our grandfathers were. thought they were. David Pocock, like Evans Pritchard's other students, took up this new enthusiasm for other people's sets of ideas. We realized perhaps we've got to live with a darker side of the human nature. In order to live with it, we've got to understand it as best we can. And that witchcraft is not about funny old women with pointed hats, but it is precisely an expression, it's one of the ways in which this... human envy, human hate, human spite is expressed and managed. Before Evans Pritchard started the field of African studies of religion, anchoring all the religious beliefs in the social life of the people, there wasn't any study of African religions. There was mythology and there was odd beliefs and there was fetishism. and magic and such like, but there was nobody ever thought that you could take the metaphysical ideas of African people which were not written down and treat them with the same seriousness and same philosophical questioning as you might the ideas of a great religion of one of the world religions. So this was revolutionary. Having discovered that witchcraft was a practical way of organising life for the Azandi, Evans Pritchard even tried running some of his own affairs in the field along the lines of Zandi beliefs. If I wanted to go on a journey, for instance, no one would willingly accompany me unless I was able to produce a verdict of the poison oracle that witchcraft did not threaten our project. And if one goes on arranging one's affairs, organising one's life in harmony with the lives of one's hosts, one must eventually give way. If one must act as though one believed, one ends in believing as one acts. In 1932, Evans Pritchard took up the offer of a university post in Egypt. He was becoming an expert field worker, but because of a personality clash with his former professor Malinowski at the London School of Economics, he found it difficult to get a teaching job back home. Whilst here, he was developing a great interest in Arab culture, an enthusiasm that remained with him all his life. I never got on with Malinowski, so on my return to England, I found myself barred from the London School of Economics, and such was Malinowski's influence, it appeared, from anywhere else. However, I was appointed to a chair in philosophy and sociology in the Fouad I University in Cairo. This gave me a chance, in addition to gaining teaching experience, to improve my Arabic. In Cairo, Evans Pritchard took a long hard look at a topic at the centre of anthropological attention. Primitive mentality. To formulate his new ideas, he looked at the history of human thought. For a university unaccustomed to anthropology, the lectures he gave must have seemed particularly ambitious. It was quite a good time to be away from England because Malinowski was holding court and it was probably difficult to get new ideas heard. Malinowski had never been particularly impressed with how much history could contribute to anthropology. Evans Pritchard, who trained as a historian, was. And whilst he was out here, he was particularly interested in one branch of history, the history of ideas. years, he'd realized that the sorts of problems that had interested anthropologists had interested other thinkers long before. The course of lectures that he delivered here and developed and later expanded were to place anthropologists in a position where they could be interested in the problems of the past, and in the present. in a much larger historical context. Evans Pritchard felt that anthropology should be built on a wider historical perspective, and this should include writers who had been philosophers and historians, as well as the social... theorists. One of his students, Isa Ali, remembers that Evans Pritchard took his lecturing duties very seriously. I remember one day the mob came into the college and wanted to take all the students out to join the demonstration. Heapy stood in this room, in this place, and addressed the students. Anyone who disturbs my lecture, I... knocking down. The funny thing that all of them were frightened and went away you see. Isa Ali went on to become an authority on the anthropology of his own people, using the methods that Evans Pritchard taught at those early seminars in Cairo. The EP used to treat sociology as something based on observation, participant observation, going into the villages, going in the heart of the desert, which was something very new to us. By now, Evans Pritchard was becoming well accustomed to Arab life. He relished the idea of immersing himself in another culture, and his experience as an anthropologist enabled him to enter these new social worlds with a keen eye and a genuine interest. He was indulging this interest in Islamic culture by making journeys out into the desert. I suppose I was very isolated in those days, though I did not feel lonely. And anyhow, I like solitude. My happiest days have been in deserts with a couple of Arabs, our camels, and no footsteps but our own. Throughout his stay in Cairo, he continued his anthropological field trips up the Nile into Zandiland. Never forgetting the debt he owed the people whose lives he described so extensively. I have left a part of my heart in the southern... My gratitude to my African friends can never be obliterated or repaid. Those who were my personal servants were naturally closest to me, and we shared our lives in ups and downs, fortunes and misfortunes, joys and laughter, sickness and sorrows. Evans Pritchard's work as an anthropologist in Africa had earned him a reputation as someone who could shed light on the difficulties of native administration. In 1930, the Anglo-Egyptian government had asked him to transfer his attention away from the Azan. and do some work in another part of the Sudan, with the people who were giving them problems. The people who were causing problems still live here today in the flooding marshes of the Upper Nile. They're called the Nua. To the colonial officers, they were a warlike tribe who were strongly resisting any attempt at being governed. But for Evans Pritchard, they were a complex and fascinating society. CHANTING Newer are very prone to fighting. People are frequently killed. Indeed it is rare that one sees a senior man who does not show marks of club or spear. A Newer will at once fight if he considers that he has been insulted, and they are very sensitive and... easily take offense. Perhaps the most dramatic factor in all this was that a district commissioner in Western Europe was killed, this was in 1928, deliberately assassinated by the... manure with some kind of plot which was cooked up at the time and that the government wished gain control by what in fact were punitive expeditions patrols of troops sent in they bombed the manure from the air not very effectively they didn't bomb the people they bombed their cattle which is regarded and probably rightly regarded as the quickest way to a new reaction you and there were, it was, some people could regard it and perhaps do regard it as a very repressive kind of policy, but this in fact was what was happening. MacMichael, who was a man of Imagination, in my opinion anyway, the head of the administration felt that if this policy was being pursued, then it was only right that the government should know more about the way... that newer society operated, the way that it's... what were causing these problems, more about the newer. It was for that reason that he brought Evans Pritchard in, and Evans Pritchard came rather reluctantly because he didn't want to abandon his... his work with Zan did that particular period. In the only surviving recording of his voice, made late in his life, Evans Pritchard recalled some aspects of his experiences as an anthropologist among the newer. Government were more or less at war with the newer at the time, and I was dumped down there among them, and there was no grammar, no dictionary, no interpreter, and one just had to do the best one could to make friends with them. And how do you go about doing that, you may ask? I was wrong. by myself. I had no police, I had no soldiers or anything. The newer saw that being intelligent and charitable people that I was all alone and helpless and they just accepted me as a guest. Took me some months to learn the language adequately. I learned usually through the children. I used to go out fishing with their little sons and so on. If the children accept you soon or later their parents will accept you too. The newer slowly came along bit by bit to my tent and used to come and talk to me and I think they regarded me as rather an oddity really. I mean I was living in the very centre of their cattle camps or their villages and they got used to me. I lived right in the middle of them you see and nothing which went on could have been missed by me because I was one of them really. It's clear from his elegant description of their attitudes to life that Evans Pritchard identified closely with the newer. The newer is a product of a hard and egalitarian upbringing. He is deeply democratic and is easily roused to violence. His turbulent spirit finds any restraint irksome and no one can stop him. No man recognizes a superior. That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which indeed they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God's noblest creation. Their respect for one another contrasts with their contempt for all other peoples. As with the Azandi, Evans Pritchard emphasized the sorts of things that constrained their existence and one was the harsh environment. A people whose material is as simple as that of the Nuer are highly dependent on their environment. At heart they are herdsmen and the only labor in which they delight is the care of cattle. They not only depend on cattle for many of life's necessities, but they have the herdsman's outlook on the world. Cattle are their dearest possession, and they gladly risk their lives to defend their herds or to pillage those of their neighbours. The newer are involved with their cattle in a detailed and elaborate fashion. Certainly their lives depend on their livestock, but they enjoy their cattle in an intellectual and emotional way as well. Young boys, for example... take the names of their favourite bulls. And the names the cattle are given themselves are taken from a vast vocabulary of terms used to describe type of colour, pattern of marking, shape of horns, and so on. Song. songs are composed about the beauty of particular beasts and actually sung to the animals themselves. And of course, Nua folklore is full of stories about splendid cattle. The Nua love their cattle. Cattle can also be seen as links in certain social relationships. They certainly trace the ties of kinship. A dead man's herd, for example, is divided up among his sons who have tended that herd all their lives. Cattle are also at the centre of the of certain social processes. They're used in payment, in compensation, for settling certain feuds. And if a man wants to marry, he has to recompense his wife's family for the loss of a daughter. This bride wealth, as it's called, consists of a certain amount of money, of a gift of cattle. Evans Pritchard said that cattle were the idiom through which the newer think. They stand for so many things in the lives of these people. The newer, like most pastoral peoples, are poetic, and most men and women compose songs. which are sung at dances and concerts, or are composed for the Creator's own pleasure and chanted by him in lonely pastures and amid the cattle in camp crowds. When they feel happy, youths break into song praising their kinsmen, sweethearts and cattle wherever they may be. Girls of the Nuer area will know you only when you have these big bulls because you will enjoy life. You will go around advertising, showing yourself up to the people. Only when you have bulls that you can go around and sing your own songs. show you can dance the traditional way. Otherwise, if you don't have bulls, you cannot go around dancing in the cattle camp. Why do boys compose songs about their cattle? Yeah, to express their being important in the society. Their importantness is based on that, honing these big bulls, and because of their... to these big bulls. They are loved by girls and they are known, they are nicknamed after them. And they also show up important occasions. Now you mentioned that a boy gets his bull name and his bull when he's marked. Are you referring to these scars on your forehead? Yes, indeed. What do they mean? To me they are called gar, meaning that I'm a man. I'm now free from boyhood, but I'm a man now. As a man I'm entitled to be killed by an homicide, and I'm entitled to marry now a girl or to be loved by a girl, or to own a big bull. This is my life. This is what it means to know your life. I cannot easily fear you because I'm a man nowadays. Simon, do you remember your bull song? Yeah. Can you sing it? What does that mean? It means this cattle camp of Danyangwak, Tiyangyot, Chagi, Nyapan, I had a... I'm a girl lover in it. I'm Mark and being a man having my bulls, I fought Saburo, second war in it and my manhood is known by everyone here. This is what, how it means. So I have bulls, people know me after. I had girlfriends because being a man, my generation and I also faced dangers with my colleagues in my era. This is how it means. Not now, but sometimes they go anyway. Evans Pritchard's first study focused on the political organisation of newer society. He found the lack of any easily recognisable form of government remarkable. A state of affairs he called ordered anarchy. Evans Pritchard did identify a number of people who were classified as chiefs. Certainly the administration talked about them as chiefs, but these people were really spiritual experts who had a particular role. role to play, in particular the Lepiduskin chief. The Lepiduskin chief was a man who had a role in arbitration between parties but he really didn't have a sanction of force or authority behind him. He was the man who brought in to come to compose a feud and he had to carry out the processes of negotiating for the cattle which were going to be handed over in compensation in order to compose the field and so on but there were no people in authority his writings on the newer have become some of the most famous in all anthropology but what are the reasons for this success it was important at the time because it challenged the received view of african political society ...which were derived from Hollywood and Conrad and Kipling and and Ryder Haggard most particularly of abject slaves being ruled by a chief with three feathers in his head you know and a bone through his nose. probably. And to have this detailed account of a society which cohered, was entirely orderly, but had no central institutions of government, none of the institutions of government were institutions which we would recognize as being legal institutions, this was important. And of course it was to the extent that the lesson was taken by people in the Sudan political service and perhaps in the East African colonial service, this one hopes may have been a bit beneficial to the people who were being governed because it meant that they would have a new look at some of the other naive notions they had about indirect government. It's 50 years since Evans Pritchard's last visit to the Newar, and life has changed considerably for some of the descendants of the people he studied. Gabriel Jow is researching colonial history, covering the period of Evans Pritchard's work in the field, and he is particularly conscious of some of those changes. I would say there has been a change, and there has been no change, because the Newar has now two societies, the intellectual urbanized. group has somehow changed and the newer in the country have changed a bit in terms of appreciation of modern ways of health for example for human and their beasts for agricultural activities and so on but in terms of their structure of the society and in term of the way of their life I don't think that has been a much change in their way of life. Because when Sir Ibn Fischad went to the New Zealand 30 years ago, in 1930, he found them, the basic economy was the cow. And the cow is still there playing the same role as described in his book, the New Earth. In 1935, Evans Pritchard returned to his old university, Oxford, as a lecturer in African Sociology. When war broke out, I made attempts to join the Welsh Guards, but I was prevented from training by the university on the grounds pointless as it was. it seemed to me, that I was in a reserved occupation. So I went to the Sudan on the excuse of continuing my ethnographical researches there, and on arrival joined the Sudan Auxiliary Defence Force. This was the first time I had been to the Sudan. I was a student of the Sudanese military, and I was a member of the Sudanese was just what I wanted and what I could do. The ever-increasing aggressive raids by our patrols have compelled the enemy to flee almost without a struggle, in spite of their superiority in numbers. The frontier from the Sudan to Abyssinia is marked by barbed wire entanglements, but these are pierced by our patrols like matchwood in their onward thrust to gain new territory. The presence of British military experts in the heart of Abyssinia, advising Patriot leaders and their rising against the Italians. lends special significance to the flaring up of British activity on this front. The deep mountain gorges have given excellent daily cover for our advancing troops. They have inflicted severe casualties on the enemy at incredibly low cost. Evans Pritchard's knowledge of the Sudan in the area bordering Abyssinia enabled him in command of a group of Anuak tribesmen to cause serious disruption to the garrisons of the occupying Italian forces. He got on well with the various tribesmen he served with, relations weren't always as smooth with his seniors. Later, with the Long Range Desert Group in Syria, he fell out with his superiors and was posted back to North Africa just at the time of El Alamein. He was next made governor of the Cyrene district in Libya. I was quite hopeless as an administrator, and as I knew I should be happy in the tents of the Bedouin, I asked whether I might act as a liaison officer. Thus I spent over two years wandering with my camels and horses, in desert and semi-desert, with interludes in the forest. I don't suppose I did much to assist the war effort, but at least I did nothing to retard it. Though I could not conduct any serious anthropological research in the circumstances, I got to know Saranaika, its peoples, and their history well enough to be able to tell the story of the war effort. enough to write later my book, The Senussi of Cyrenaica. In that book, Evans Pritchard fused his two interests. Here was a work of historical importance with the insight of an anthropologist into the tribal structure of the Bedouin. When the war was over, Evans Pritchard returned to academic anthropology. In many ways, it had changed a great deal. Marinovsky was now dead and there was no one holding the centre of the stage. A whole new generation were going to go on and take on the senior university posts. Evans Pritchard became Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford. He came to live in this house. This is where he brought up his large family, and this is where students, colonial administrators and anthropologists of all kinds called on him. In the post-war years Oxford under Evans Pritchard developed a reputation for excellence as a center for anthropological studies. As with Boas and Malinowski his students went out to study cultures all over the world and then on to fill senior teaching posts themselves. Anthropology had an influence on colonial attitudes at a time when independence was being sought all over the empire. His services to anthropology were recognised by a knighthood, but it was his style of anthropology... a fellow at All Souls College in Oxford that was largely responsible for its influence on other university disciplines. His work on witchcraft found philosophers asking what could be considered rational thinking in any society, and tribal organisation was intriguing political theorists. Evans Pritchard's attention to the sophisticated religious sentiments of the people he studied also had a strong influence on theologians and indeed religious experience played an increasingly important part in his own life for during the war he had been converted to Catholicism, a faith that he maintained till his death in 1973. I think was his genius as an anthropologist was that by opening himself to people, the Nuri, Zandi, whoever, by letting them talk, by letting his view of what made their society tick or whatever, assume some authority, he shifted authority from the scientific anthropologist to the native in the field, so that the object of study now became the authority. on itself and the anthropologist became ideally a translator and interpreter. The study of human social life has come a long way since Walter Baldwin Spencer searched for the origins of his own society among the Australian Aborigines. Anthropology nowadays doesn't waste time on speculative theories about how societies evolved but follows the Spencer's example it does at least go out into the field for its own facts. Franz Boas in America emphasized that good anthropology depended on systematically collecting every aspect of a culture and understanding it through its own language. However, anthropology hasn't become the science that William Rivers anticipated, but because of his attention to method, it took a more scientific approach to analysing cultural life in the field. With Bronislaw Malinowski, fieldwork became a process of total saturation, immersion in the culture being studied, and produced masterpieces of anthropological description. Margaret Mead recognized... that the topics anthropologists investigated had great popular appeal and her writings gave it a relevance for a much wider public. By turning anthropology away from the search for universal laws of human behaviour, Edward Evans Pritchard changed its direction. He emphasised that the anthropologist was to be seen as an interpreter rather than a scientist, and the task was the translation of culture. One of the main ambitions of this series has been to show how our understanding of other societies, and incidentally of our own, has improved over the past hundred or so years. This deeper insight has obviously not been reached by people just... sitting around and exchanging ideas. Rather it's been gained by anthropologists going to live in remote societies, often in extreme hardship, but coming back with a special kind of evidence. Facts which they'd gathered first first-hand for themselves. But if anthropologists are interested in studying the workings of human social life, why do they need to go to such isolated communities, such unfamiliar societies? Why, you may ask, don't they just stay at home and study their own culture? Well some anthropologists have studied their own culture but as everyone knows, they are not alone. As Pritchard pointed out, there are certain advantages in studying other peoples. Firstly, if anthropologists do live and work among different societies, they tend to be more objective. It's somehow easier to make correlations and observations. in societies unlike your own. Secondly, remote societies like the Nua tend to be distinct from their neighbours. This means they can be studied in their entirety. The whole of social life can be evaluated. It was this objective study of all aspects of social life that Evans Pritchard stressed. In social anthropology you are studying not just as an observer but also as a participant. You are not just a member of the audience, you are also on the stage. To understand the noir you've got to learn to think as a noir, to feel as a noir, in a kind of way to be a noir. And this is kind of the way I see it. be done by any kind of scientific technique. And this is why the anthropologist I think is in a very peculiar position because he's trying to interpret what he sees not just with the head but with his whole

In a kind of way, I believed them. Those words were written by Edward Evans Pritchard, one of the most famous of British anthropologists. In many ways his background was one of privilege, certainly as far as his education was concerned.

Born in 1902 he went to the English public school Winchester and then up to Oxford. He read history at Exeter College but found it tedious. However, Exeter also happened to be the home of Oxford anthropology and as he later admitted he was attracted by the sense of adventure involved in studying exotic cultures.

Evan Pritchard's experience of life among cultures very different from his own was to produce a finer understanding of apparently irrational behaviour and ideas. But the anthropology being taught in his day was still largely that of the of a subject that thought of itself as a science. Students were asking what certain social institutions did in order to find out how a society worked. Evans Pritchard was remarkable for focusing his attention on the mental...

of those cultures that anthropologists go off and study. He ended up examining their beliefs and ideas, and not just as isolated examples of some kind of pre-logical thinking, but as entire systems of thought. And the results were startling.

He was sure that it was a mistake to treat the thinking of other societies, let's call them primitives or tribes, they were different from us because they were making a mistake, because they hadn't got it right, because perhaps their mental functions weren't so developed as ours, or because their emotions got in the way so much that they couldn't think straight. So he was sure that there was a different solution and a different explanation of why they have different beliefs than we have. Where students went and who they studied were strongly influenced by the colonial interests of the day.

In the colonies you could expect hospitality and some support and rely on administrators and some of the natives to speak your own language. from France, Germany, America and Britain tended to go to parts of the world where their own nationality was represented. But that colonial presence wasn't always as useful as it might be, for the budding anthropologist had to deal with the type of men...

represented those colonial, commercial or missionary interests. And they weren't always as sensitive to native culture as they might have been, especially in the area that Evans Pritchard was encouraged to study. I never much cared for nor admired the administrators in the Northern Sudan as much as they admired themselves.

There was too much Gordon-Haler round their heads and too much of the overgrown schoolboy about them, the rowing blue and the president of the junior common room type. The Sudan was described as the country of blacks governed by blues. In my day, the officials, when I first went to the south, were of a very different type and lived in different circumstances. I came to know several of these men very well and liked and respected them. And they accepted me, which they need not have done if they hadn't wanted to.

With a large colonial presence in Africa, it was natural that British anthropologists should expect to go and study there. For Evans Pritchard, the peoples of the Nile Basin and the Sudan were a logical choice. Evans Pritchard, like other aspiring anthropologists of his generation, had been taught that fieldwork was no longer a question of just going and visiting another people. It involved living with them, sharing their lives, speaking their language, and generally learning their culture.

The mundane details of everyday life were as important as the dramatic and the ceremonial. In 1926, Evans Pritchard was ready to start his own fieldwork. It was, in fact, the first... intensive field study of an African people by a trained anthropologist. The people he came to study were the Azandi, who still live here in remote and scattered homesteads in a wide region that spans Zaire, the Central African Republic and the Sudan.

Early on, Evans Pritchard realised that the only way to get inside Azandi's social life was to live among the people, so he had himself a house built just like this. He intended from the start to live as far as possible as the Zandy did. But part of the achievement of fieldwork in his day was actually getting to where you intended to work. Students of today may not realize that in 1926 it took a long time...

to reach the place to which one wanted to go. A week by train and ship to Egypt, several days by train and boat to Khartoum, then ten days by paddle steamer up the Nile, and finally a three-week trek by foot to the heart of Sudanese Zandiland. In all, it took some seven weeks.

He spent about 20 months among the Azandi and very little escaped his attention. The layout of their villages and the distribution of the clans, the way they cultivated and prepared their food, their social organisation, their amorous adventures, the raids they made on neighbouring tribes and the stories they told each other. Evans Pritchard was interested in more than just the facts about his Andi life.

He was interested in their ideas. He wanted to see if they fitted together to form a coherent system of belief. And if so, how did this system compare with our own?

own. He recorded their cultural life by taking his own photographs and writing down what the natives said in their own language about the topics that they found important. Is Zandi thought so different from ours?

that we could only describe their speech and actions without comprehending them? Or is it essentially like our own, though expressed in an idiom to which we are unaccustomed? What are the motives of Zandi behaviour? What are their notions of reality?

How are these motives and notions expressed in custom? I've tried to keep these major sociological problems always before me so that my account may be a description rather than a bare record of fact. In Evans Pritchard's day, educated Europeans largely assumed that so-called primitive peoples had a primitive mentality.

One that was not just different from that of so-called civilized man, but one that was probably inferior as well. The evidence cited was the widespread belief among among societies like the Azandi, of the power of witchcraft and the practice of magic. Now these two words, witchcraft and magic, were rather loosely used by colonial administrators, missionaries and some anthropologists in an attempt to describe sets of ideas that they thought were ridiculous, misguided, frankly primitive. But Evans Pritchard realised that Zandi belief in witchcraft wasn't ridiculous at all.

Zandi notions were logical enough. It was their point of departure, their underlying assumptions, that were so different from our own. One of the examples that Evans Pritchard used to contrast Zandi with Western systems of thought involved a building just like this.

This is a granary. It's used to store maize up here, and underneath, in the shade, people generally... past the time of day. It's supported by these wooden posts which in this part of the tropics like most other things gradually get eaten away by termites. What that means is that these buildings regularly collapse and sometimes when they collapse people are sitting underneath and sometimes people get hurt.

Why a particular person should To be hurt by a falling granary is something that we'd call bad luck, something that happened by chance, an unfortunate coincidence. The Azandi say that that kind of misfortune is caused by witchcraft. We must bear in mind that a serious misfortune, especially if it results in death, is normally attributed by everyone to witchcraft.

especially by the sufferer and his kin. It is in connection with death that Zande belief in witchcraft is most coherent and is most intelligible to us. For it is death that answers the riddle of mystical beliefs.

This is not a happy song. The words say, you are dead, I must cry, I will not see you again. Last night in this village, a young woman of about 30 died. She's being mourned by her friends and relatives. Apparently she'd been ill for some time.

She had the obvious signs and symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. But people here aren't happy with that explanation on its own. They say that something else was involved.

They say she was bewitched. I had no difficulty in discovering what Azande think about witchcraft, nor observing what they do to combat it. These ideas and actions are on the surface of their life and are accessible to anyone who lives for a few weeks in their homesteads. Every Zande is an authority on witchcraft. Mangu, witchcraft, was one of the first words I heard in Zandiland, and I heard it uttered day by day throughout the months.

It was soon clear that if I could gain a full understanding of the meaning of this word, I should have the key to Zande philosophy. To understand more about their notions of witchcraft, Evans Pritchard studied case histories of people who suspected that witchcraft was being directed at them. The only source of witchcraft that Zandi recognised was other human beings. These people were seen as unconscious agents for this malevolent force.

To find out who was the source of their misfortune, the Zandi consulted oracles. These were procedures which enabled them to get answers to those nagging suspicions involving witchcraft. The first step was usually the iwa or rubbing board oracle. This is still used today in an attempt to find out who is causing misfortune and what you can do about it.

Gaguda has a sick mother and he's come to consult the Oracle. But before looking into the cause of the illness, the diviner first wanted to establish why a white film crew was in Zandiland in the first place. Was this likely to be the source of any of the illness? I am a man of faith. Once it was established that we weren't up to any mischief, he got down to the real purpose of Guguda's visit.

He was a very good man. What is your name? My name is Mbinga Chipa.

I am a farmer. I am a farmer. I am a farmer.

I am a farmer. What is your name? My name is Nengugudo. I am a farmer.

Nengugudo is a tree that grows when it is wet. When it is wet, it grows again. That is Mungiwa.

Mungi. Zerayekaza is a tree that grows when it is wet. I am a farmer. Evans Pritchard found that the world of Zandi ideas was beginning to make sense by following up case histories just like Gaguda's.

He's asked whether she's going to die and if anyone is bewitching her. He's been told she's not going to die and that it's not obvious that anyone is bewitching her, but if he performs certain magical practices, he'll be sure that she won't die. In Zandiland, there's a hierarchy.

of oracles and to make absolutely sure he's consulting the poison oracle or the bengi now bengi is a strychnine based poison that is administered to small chickens and depending on the question asked and whether the chicken I have to go to the hospital. The poison oracle has given its answer. Cucuta asked if his sick mother got the appropriate magic, would she live? Now the first question was posed in such a way that if the chicken died, the answer was yes.

The chicken has died. But just to make doubly sure, he asked the question again of a second chicken, who was also given poison. If my mother, who is sick, gets the appropriate medicine, will she live? If so, the chicken itself was to live, and it has.

so he obviously now has to get hold of the right kind of magic. For the right magic, Gaguda has to go to another kind of expert. White colonials named this type of ritual specialist the witch doctor, and his job is to combat witchcraft.

To achieve this, he has a large repertoire of magic at his disposal in the form of spells, substances and procedures. Like so much medical advice around the world, it's dispensed with a certain amount of magic. amount of ceremony. The Azande witch doctor is both diviner and magician. Since Azande believe that witches may at any time bring sickness and death upon them, they are anxious to establish and maintain contact with these evil powers, and by counteracting them control their own destiny.

Azande believe that witches can injure them by virtually killing them. virtue of an inherent quality. A witch performs no rite, utters no spell, and possesses no medicines.

An act of witchcraft is a psychic act. Azande believe that witchcraft is a substance in the bodies of witches. It has been described to me as an oval blackish swelling or bag attached to the edge of the liver. They say when people cut open the belly they have only to pierce it and witchcraft substance bursts through with a pop. Azande need not live in continual dread of witchcraft, since they can enter into relations with it, and therefore control it by means of oracles and magic.

By oracles they can foresee the future dispositions of witchcraft, and change them before they develop. By magic they can guard themselves against witchcraft and destroy it. The witch doctor is an important person in Zandi society. He has called on to locate and combat the ever-present menace of witchcraft. And it's his magic that gives him the power to see the evil intentions of others.

I am sorry. I am sorry for the people who have lost their lives. In spite of following the witch doctor's advice and finding the right medicine, Kaguda's mother did die a week later.

But his faith is unshaken. Evans Pritchard realised that the Azandi didn't think of witchcraft as ridiculous, and they still don't. It isn't disproved or invalidated by its failures any more than astrology, Marxism or Christianity. His published findings were to...

a whole series of new questions about what could be considered rational thinking in any culture. I think that in this generation, with good reason, we appreciate that we're not as rational as our grandfathers were. thought they were. David Pocock, like Evans Pritchard's other students, took up this new enthusiasm for other people's sets of ideas.

We realized perhaps we've got to live with a darker side of the human nature. In order to live with it, we've got to understand it as best we can. And that witchcraft is not about funny old women with pointed hats, but it is precisely an expression, it's one of the ways in which this... human envy, human hate, human spite is expressed and managed. Before Evans Pritchard started the field of African studies of religion, anchoring all the religious beliefs in the social life of the people, there wasn't any study of African religions.

There was mythology and there was odd beliefs and there was fetishism. and magic and such like, but there was nobody ever thought that you could take the metaphysical ideas of African people which were not written down and treat them with the same seriousness and same philosophical questioning as you might the ideas of a great religion of one of the world religions. So this was revolutionary. Having discovered that witchcraft was a practical way of organising life for the Azandi, Evans Pritchard even tried running some of his own affairs in the field along the lines of Zandi beliefs. If I wanted to go on a journey, for instance, no one would willingly accompany me unless I was able to produce a verdict of the poison oracle that witchcraft did not threaten our project.

And if one goes on arranging one's affairs, organising one's life in harmony with the lives of one's hosts, one must eventually give way. If one must act as though one believed, one ends in believing as one acts. In 1932, Evans Pritchard took up the offer of a university post in Egypt.

He was becoming an expert field worker, but because of a personality clash with his former professor Malinowski at the London School of Economics, he found it difficult to get a teaching job back home. Whilst here, he was developing a great interest in Arab culture, an enthusiasm that remained with him all his life. I never got on with Malinowski, so on my return to England, I found myself barred from the London School of Economics, and such was Malinowski's influence, it appeared, from anywhere else. However, I was appointed to a chair in philosophy and sociology in the Fouad I University in Cairo. This gave me a chance, in addition to gaining teaching experience, to improve my Arabic.

In Cairo, Evans Pritchard took a long hard look at a topic at the centre of anthropological attention. Primitive mentality. To formulate his new ideas, he looked at the history of human thought. For a university unaccustomed to anthropology, the lectures he gave must have seemed particularly ambitious.

It was quite a good time to be away from England because Malinowski was holding court and it was probably difficult to get new ideas heard. Malinowski had never been particularly impressed with how much history could contribute to anthropology. Evans Pritchard, who trained as a historian, was.

And whilst he was out here, he was particularly interested in one branch of history, the history of ideas. years, he'd realized that the sorts of problems that had interested anthropologists had interested other thinkers long before. The course of lectures that he delivered here and developed and later expanded were to place anthropologists in a position where they could be interested in the problems of the past, and in the present. in a much larger historical context. Evans Pritchard felt that anthropology should be built on a wider historical perspective, and this should include writers who had been philosophers and historians, as well as the social...

theorists. One of his students, Isa Ali, remembers that Evans Pritchard took his lecturing duties very seriously. I remember one day the mob came into the college and wanted to take all the students out to join the demonstration. Heapy stood in this room, in this place, and addressed the students. Anyone who disturbs my lecture, I...

knocking down. The funny thing that all of them were frightened and went away you see. Isa Ali went on to become an authority on the anthropology of his own people, using the methods that Evans Pritchard taught at those early seminars in Cairo.

The EP used to treat sociology as something based on observation, participant observation, going into the villages, going in the heart of the desert, which was something very new to us. By now, Evans Pritchard was becoming well accustomed to Arab life. He relished the idea of immersing himself in another culture, and his experience as an anthropologist enabled him to enter these new social worlds with a keen eye and a genuine interest. He was indulging this interest in Islamic culture by making journeys out into the desert.

I suppose I was very isolated in those days, though I did not feel lonely. And anyhow, I like solitude. My happiest days have been in deserts with a couple of Arabs, our camels, and no footsteps but our own.

Throughout his stay in Cairo, he continued his anthropological field trips up the Nile into Zandiland. Never forgetting the debt he owed the people whose lives he described so extensively. I have left a part of my heart in the southern... My gratitude to my African friends can never be obliterated or repaid. Those who were my personal servants were naturally closest to me, and we shared our lives in ups and downs, fortunes and misfortunes, joys and laughter, sickness and sorrows.

Evans Pritchard's work as an anthropologist in Africa had earned him a reputation as someone who could shed light on the difficulties of native administration. In 1930, the Anglo-Egyptian government had asked him to transfer his attention away from the Azan. and do some work in another part of the Sudan, with the people who were giving them problems. The people who were causing problems still live here today in the flooding marshes of the Upper Nile. They're called the Nua.

To the colonial officers, they were a warlike tribe who were strongly resisting any attempt at being governed. But for Evans Pritchard, they were a complex and fascinating society. CHANTING Newer are very prone to fighting. People are frequently killed. Indeed it is rare that one sees a senior man who does not show marks of club or spear.

A Newer will at once fight if he considers that he has been insulted, and they are very sensitive and... easily take offense. Perhaps the most dramatic factor in all this was that a district commissioner in Western Europe was killed, this was in 1928, deliberately assassinated by the... manure with some kind of plot which was cooked up at the time and that the government wished gain control by what in fact were punitive expeditions patrols of troops sent in they bombed the manure from the air not very effectively they didn't bomb the people they bombed their cattle which is regarded and probably rightly regarded as the quickest way to a new reaction you and there were, it was, some people could regard it and perhaps do regard it as a very repressive kind of policy, but this in fact was what was happening. MacMichael, who was a man of Imagination, in my opinion anyway, the head of the administration felt that if this policy was being pursued, then it was only right that the government should know more about the way...

that newer society operated, the way that it's... what were causing these problems, more about the newer. It was for that reason that he brought Evans Pritchard in, and Evans Pritchard came rather reluctantly because he didn't want to abandon his...

his work with Zan did that particular period. In the only surviving recording of his voice, made late in his life, Evans Pritchard recalled some aspects of his experiences as an anthropologist among the newer. Government were more or less at war with the newer at the time, and I was dumped down there among them, and there was no grammar, no dictionary, no interpreter, and one just had to do the best one could to make friends with them. And how do you go about doing that, you may ask? I was wrong.

by myself. I had no police, I had no soldiers or anything. The newer saw that being intelligent and charitable people that I was all alone and helpless and they just accepted me as a guest.

Took me some months to learn the language adequately. I learned usually through the children. I used to go out fishing with their little sons and so on.

If the children accept you soon or later their parents will accept you too. The newer slowly came along bit by bit to my tent and used to come and talk to me and I think they regarded me as rather an oddity really. I mean I was living in the very centre of their cattle camps or their villages and they got used to me.

I lived right in the middle of them you see and nothing which went on could have been missed by me because I was one of them really. It's clear from his elegant description of their attitudes to life that Evans Pritchard identified closely with the newer. The newer is a product of a hard and egalitarian upbringing. He is deeply democratic and is easily roused to violence.

His turbulent spirit finds any restraint irksome and no one can stop him. No man recognizes a superior. That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which indeed they consider themselves to be.

There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God's noblest creation. Their respect for one another contrasts with their contempt for all other peoples. As with the Azandi, Evans Pritchard emphasized the sorts of things that constrained their existence and one was the harsh environment. A people whose material is as simple as that of the Nuer are highly dependent on their environment.

At heart they are herdsmen and the only labor in which they delight is the care of cattle. They not only depend on cattle for many of life's necessities, but they have the herdsman's outlook on the world. Cattle are their dearest possession, and they gladly risk their lives to defend their herds or to pillage those of their neighbours.

The newer are involved with their cattle in a detailed and elaborate fashion. Certainly their lives depend on their livestock, but they enjoy their cattle in an intellectual and emotional way as well. Young boys, for example... take the names of their favourite bulls. And the names the cattle are given themselves are taken from a vast vocabulary of terms used to describe type of colour, pattern of marking, shape of horns, and so on.

Song. songs are composed about the beauty of particular beasts and actually sung to the animals themselves. And of course, Nua folklore is full of stories about splendid cattle. The Nua love their cattle.

Cattle can also be seen as links in certain social relationships. They certainly trace the ties of kinship. A dead man's herd, for example, is divided up among his sons who have tended that herd all their lives. Cattle are also at the centre of the of certain social processes.

They're used in payment, in compensation, for settling certain feuds. And if a man wants to marry, he has to recompense his wife's family for the loss of a daughter. This bride wealth, as it's called, consists of a certain amount of money, of a gift of cattle.

Evans Pritchard said that cattle were the idiom through which the newer think. They stand for so many things in the lives of these people. The newer, like most pastoral peoples, are poetic, and most men and women compose songs.

which are sung at dances and concerts, or are composed for the Creator's own pleasure and chanted by him in lonely pastures and amid the cattle in camp crowds. When they feel happy, youths break into song praising their kinsmen, sweethearts and cattle wherever they may be. Girls of the Nuer area will know you only when you have these big bulls because you will enjoy life.

You will go around advertising, showing yourself up to the people. Only when you have bulls that you can go around and sing your own songs. show you can dance the traditional way. Otherwise, if you don't have bulls, you cannot go around dancing in the cattle camp. Why do boys compose songs about their cattle?

Yeah, to express their being important in the society. Their importantness is based on that, honing these big bulls, and because of their... to these big bulls.

They are loved by girls and they are known, they are nicknamed after them. And they also show up important occasions. Now you mentioned that a boy gets his bull name and his bull when he's marked. Are you referring to these scars on your forehead?

Yes, indeed. What do they mean? To me they are called gar, meaning that I'm a man.

I'm now free from boyhood, but I'm a man now. As a man I'm entitled to be killed by an homicide, and I'm entitled to marry now a girl or to be loved by a girl, or to own a big bull. This is my life. This is what it means to know your life.

I cannot easily fear you because I'm a man nowadays. Simon, do you remember your bull song? Yeah.

Can you sing it? What does that mean? It means this cattle camp of Danyangwak, Tiyangyot, Chagi, Nyapan, I had a...

I'm a girl lover in it. I'm Mark and being a man having my bulls, I fought Saburo, second war in it and my manhood is known by everyone here. This is what, how it means. So I have bulls, people know me after.

I had girlfriends because being a man, my generation and I also faced dangers with my colleagues in my era. This is how it means. Not now, but sometimes they go anyway.

Evans Pritchard's first study focused on the political organisation of newer society. He found the lack of any easily recognisable form of government remarkable. A state of affairs he called ordered anarchy.

Evans Pritchard did identify a number of people who were classified as chiefs. Certainly the administration talked about them as chiefs, but these people were really spiritual experts who had a particular role. role to play, in particular the Lepiduskin chief.

The Lepiduskin chief was a man who had a role in arbitration between parties but he really didn't have a sanction of force or authority behind him. He was the man who brought in to come to compose a feud and he had to carry out the processes of negotiating for the cattle which were going to be handed over in compensation in order to compose the field and so on but there were no people in authority his writings on the newer have become some of the most famous in all anthropology but what are the reasons for this success it was important at the time because it challenged the received view of african political society ...which were derived from Hollywood and Conrad and Kipling and and Ryder Haggard most particularly of abject slaves being ruled by a chief with three feathers in his head you know and a bone through his nose. probably.

And to have this detailed account of a society which cohered, was entirely orderly, but had no central institutions of government, none of the institutions of government were institutions which we would recognize as being legal institutions, this was important. And of course it was to the extent that the lesson was taken by people in the Sudan political service and perhaps in the East African colonial service, this one hopes may have been a bit beneficial to the people who were being governed because it meant that they would have a new look at some of the other naive notions they had about indirect government. It's 50 years since Evans Pritchard's last visit to the Newar, and life has changed considerably for some of the descendants of the people he studied.

Gabriel Jow is researching colonial history, covering the period of Evans Pritchard's work in the field, and he is particularly conscious of some of those changes. I would say there has been a change, and there has been no change, because the Newar has now two societies, the intellectual urbanized. group has somehow changed and the newer in the country have changed a bit in terms of appreciation of modern ways of health for example for human and their beasts for agricultural activities and so on but in terms of their structure of the society and in term of the way of their life I don't think that has been a much change in their way of life. Because when Sir Ibn Fischad went to the New Zealand 30 years ago, in 1930, he found them, the basic economy was the cow.

And the cow is still there playing the same role as described in his book, the New Earth. In 1935, Evans Pritchard returned to his old university, Oxford, as a lecturer in African Sociology. When war broke out, I made attempts to join the Welsh Guards, but I was prevented from training by the university on the grounds pointless as it was. it seemed to me, that I was in a reserved occupation. So I went to the Sudan on the excuse of continuing my ethnographical researches there, and on arrival joined the Sudan Auxiliary Defence Force.

This was the first time I had been to the Sudan. I was a student of the Sudanese military, and I was a member of the Sudanese was just what I wanted and what I could do. The ever-increasing aggressive raids by our patrols have compelled the enemy to flee almost without a struggle, in spite of their superiority in numbers. The frontier from the Sudan to Abyssinia is marked by barbed wire entanglements, but these are pierced by our patrols like matchwood in their onward thrust to gain new territory.

The presence of British military experts in the heart of Abyssinia, advising Patriot leaders and their rising against the Italians. lends special significance to the flaring up of British activity on this front. The deep mountain gorges have given excellent daily cover for our advancing troops. They have inflicted severe casualties on the enemy at incredibly low cost.

Evans Pritchard's knowledge of the Sudan in the area bordering Abyssinia enabled him in command of a group of Anuak tribesmen to cause serious disruption to the garrisons of the occupying Italian forces. He got on well with the various tribesmen he served with, relations weren't always as smooth with his seniors. Later, with the Long Range Desert Group in Syria, he fell out with his superiors and was posted back to North Africa just at the time of El Alamein. He was next made governor of the Cyrene district in Libya.

I was quite hopeless as an administrator, and as I knew I should be happy in the tents of the Bedouin, I asked whether I might act as a liaison officer. Thus I spent over two years wandering with my camels and horses, in desert and semi-desert, with interludes in the forest. I don't suppose I did much to assist the war effort, but at least I did nothing to retard it.

Though I could not conduct any serious anthropological research in the circumstances, I got to know Saranaika, its peoples, and their history well enough to be able to tell the story of the war effort. enough to write later my book, The Senussi of Cyrenaica. In that book, Evans Pritchard fused his two interests. Here was a work of historical importance with the insight of an anthropologist into the tribal structure of the Bedouin.

When the war was over, Evans Pritchard returned to academic anthropology. In many ways, it had changed a great deal. Marinovsky was now dead and there was no one holding the centre of the stage. A whole new generation were going to go on and take on the senior university posts. Evans Pritchard became Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford.

He came to live in this house. This is where he brought up his large family, and this is where students, colonial administrators and anthropologists of all kinds called on him. In the post-war years Oxford under Evans Pritchard developed a reputation for excellence as a center for anthropological studies.

As with Boas and Malinowski his students went out to study cultures all over the world and then on to fill senior teaching posts themselves. Anthropology had an influence on colonial attitudes at a time when independence was being sought all over the empire. His services to anthropology were recognised by a knighthood, but it was his style of anthropology... a fellow at All Souls College in Oxford that was largely responsible for its influence on other university disciplines.

His work on witchcraft found philosophers asking what could be considered rational thinking in any society, and tribal organisation was intriguing political theorists. Evans Pritchard's attention to the sophisticated religious sentiments of the people he studied also had a strong influence on theologians and indeed religious experience played an increasingly important part in his own life for during the war he had been converted to Catholicism, a faith that he maintained till his death in 1973. I think was his genius as an anthropologist was that by opening himself to people, the Nuri, Zandi, whoever, by letting them talk, by letting his view of what made their society tick or whatever, assume some authority, he shifted authority from the scientific anthropologist to the native in the field, so that the object of study now became the authority. on itself and the anthropologist became ideally a translator and interpreter. The study of human social life has come a long way since Walter Baldwin Spencer searched for the origins of his own society among the Australian Aborigines.

Anthropology nowadays doesn't waste time on speculative theories about how societies evolved but follows the Spencer's example it does at least go out into the field for its own facts. Franz Boas in America emphasized that good anthropology depended on systematically collecting every aspect of a culture and understanding it through its own language. However, anthropology hasn't become the science that William Rivers anticipated, but because of his attention to method, it took a more scientific approach to analysing cultural life in the field. With Bronislaw Malinowski, fieldwork became a process of total saturation, immersion in the culture being studied, and produced masterpieces of anthropological description. Margaret Mead recognized...

that the topics anthropologists investigated had great popular appeal and her writings gave it a relevance for a much wider public. By turning anthropology away from the search for universal laws of human behaviour, Edward Evans Pritchard changed its direction. He emphasised that the anthropologist was to be seen as an interpreter rather than a scientist, and the task was the translation of culture. One of the main ambitions of this series has been to show how our understanding of other societies, and incidentally of our own, has improved over the past hundred or so years.

This deeper insight has obviously not been reached by people just... sitting around and exchanging ideas. Rather it's been gained by anthropologists going to live in remote societies, often in extreme hardship, but coming back with a special kind of evidence. Facts which they'd gathered first first-hand for themselves. But if anthropologists are interested in studying the workings of human social life, why do they need to go to such isolated communities, such unfamiliar societies?

Why, you may ask, don't they just stay at home and study their own culture? Well some anthropologists have studied their own culture but as everyone knows, they are not alone. As Pritchard pointed out, there are certain advantages in studying other peoples. Firstly, if anthropologists do live and work among different societies, they tend to be more objective.

It's somehow easier to make correlations and observations. in societies unlike your own. Secondly, remote societies like the Nua tend to be distinct from their neighbours. This means they can be studied in their entirety. The whole of social life can be evaluated.

It was this objective study of all aspects of social life that Evans Pritchard stressed. In social anthropology you are studying not just as an observer but also as a participant. You are not just a member of the audience, you are also on the stage. To understand the noir you've got to learn to think as a noir, to feel as a noir, in a kind of way to be a noir. And this is kind of the way I see it.

be done by any kind of scientific technique. And this is why the anthropologist I think is in a very peculiar position because he's trying to interpret what he sees not just with the head but with his whole

Transcript for:Edward Evans Pritchard and Anthropology Insights

Transcript for:
Edward Evans Pritchard and Anthropology Insights