E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973)

Quote
“Anyone can produce a new fact; the thing is to produce a new idea”

Biography and History
Born September 21, 1902 in Crowborough, England, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was an English anthropologist who played a major role in the development of social anthropology in the 20th century. He was the father of five children; his son Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is an investigative reporter for the London Daily Telegraph and known to be the author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton.

Evans-Pritchard studied anthropology at the London School of Economics under the influence of Claude Gabriel Seligman and Brownislaw Malinowski. He conducted fieldwork between 1926 and 1939 in eastern Africa with the Azande, the Nuer, the Anuak, the Shilluk, and the Nilotic Luo peoples, and produced five major ethnographic works and many shorter articles. In the 1930s, he gave series of lecture on religion at the University of Cairo. Evans-Pritchard then returned to Oxford in the mid-40s where he met Radcliffe-Brown and started adopting structural-functionalism as a theoretical framework for continuing his researches on the Nuer.

During the Second World War, British forces used his expertise and connaissances of African tribes in order to organize a guerilla against the Italian army which was established in Ethiopia. In 1942, he became a political consultant for the British army. At the end of the War he became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford where he served as an advisor for many doctoral students who became eminent anthropologists, such as M. N. Srinivas (Indian anthropology), Talal Asad, and Mary Douglas (who wrote Purity and Danger). He occupied this position at Oxford until 1970. He died in 1973, few years after being knighted.

Work
Throughout his academic career, Evans-Prichard mostly conducted researches among the Nuer in Africa. He developed Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism, and was also inspired by Malinowski's idea that the most important group of a society was the nuclear family. He studied kinship among the Nuer, a group organized primarily around unilineal descent and therefore developed, along with Meyer Fortes, a model called decent theory which combined blood lineage and land belonging.

Evans-Pritchard published a trilogy on the Nuer (The Nuer, Nuer Religion, and Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer). He also worked for many years on the topic of witchcraft and magic, by both reading about and conducting observations of magical operations among what he then called the “savages” of Sudan. Consequently, in 1937, he published Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, a major contribution to social anthropology because it denied the otherness and oddness of tribal thoughts. His empirical work became well-known and was brought up in the late-60s-early-70s when debates around rationality, science and philosophy aroused. In his later work, he questioned the nature of anthropology and how it should be practiced by new generation of anthropologists.

Influences
Evans-Pritchard came under the influence of his professor Brownislaw Malinowski (who published Argonauts of Western Pacific), at the London Schools of Economics. Malinowski was then regarded as one of the most eminent anthropologist because of his expertise as a fieldworker and especially because of the method he had then developed; participant observation. Once he graduated, Evans-Pritchard discovered Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalist’s theory and was inspired by it while working on his Nuer trilogy, since it emphasized the importance of social institutions in the functioning of a society.

Few years later, a young wave of anthropologists were, in turn, influenced by Evans-Pritchard’s work in Africa on social institutions, magic, and witchcraft. It is the case of M. N. Srinivas, Indian sociologists who worked on social stratification and caste systems. It is also the case of Mary Douglas who also became an important figure in social anthropology and who worked on comparative religion. Finally, Evans-Pritchard’s work on religion also influenced Talal Assad, who is in part interested in ritual studies among Islamic countries.

Analysis
Evans-Pritchard's work mostly challenged intellectualists theories developed in the late 19th century. His work famously rejected common understanding of anthropology as a natural science and also the “cause and effect” relationship of some beliefs or magic practices among what some anthropologists used to call “primitive societies”. He argued that culture must be understood and analyzed from within, not as an object of study and that what we call “primitive societies” were in fact not primitive at all but simply differently organized. Evans-Pritchard was also concerned with problems of translation while conducting ethnographic work; he was worried that translating one’s own thoughts in order to explain it to one's culture could be problematic at times because of the possibility to misunderstand other cultural practices. Because of our different background, we approach the study of different concepts such as religion and magic according to our own understanding of it, therefore often ascribing false motivations to members belonging to a different culture.

Critique
Evans-Pritchard worked hard in trying to counter misconceptions of “primitive societies” by proposing alternative ways to study culture that involves understanding differences from within, and not through comparison to our own culture. He mostly critiqued the work of intellectualists and evolutionist theorists and hoped to make anthropology a little more open to differences. He is listed among the structural-functionalism school of thoughts, which became prominent in the 20th century. Although his work was generally well accepted in the field, it might be possible to criticize his work on the premise that functionalism in part reinforced boundaries bound up in histories of colonialism, and racism for instance, and that most of the fieldwork at that time was made my middle-class white men, in countries that were previously despised by these anthropologists’ respective countries, reducing people to function or utilities for understanding history, and thus fetishizing the locals being studied.