Gourt Home::Gourt :: E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Edward Evan (E. E.) Evans-Pritchard (September 21, 1902 - September 11, 1973) was a British anthropologist instrumental in the development of social anthropology in that country. He was professor of social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1970.
Life and field work
Born in Sussex, England, he 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 Bronislaw Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande people of the upper Nile and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande land until 1930, when he began 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 primitive 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.
During WWII Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In the 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 tarika that some believe to be the predecessors of today's radical Islamist cults. During the end of the war, in 1944, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
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.
He was knighted in 1971, and died in Oxford on September 11, 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 science, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities, especially history. He argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation - finding a way to translate one's own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one's own culture.
In 1965, he published the highly influential work Theories of Primitive Religion, arguing against the existing theories of 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 "E.P." Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma. His youngest son, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 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.
Partial bibliography
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1987 Kinship and the Local Community among the Nuer. In African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, Eds. London: KPI Ltd.
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. Pp. 272-296. London: Oxford University Press.
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. Pp. 360-391. London: Oxford University Press.
1956 Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1962 Social Anthropology and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. BBC Third Programme Lectures, 1950.
1902 births | 1973 deaths | Natives of Sussex | Anthropologists | British anthropologists | Alumni of the London School of Economics | Academics of the London School of Economics | Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford
Edward E. Evans-Pritchard | Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard | E. E. Evans-Pritchard | 艾德華·伊凡-普理查
Links
Photography by Evans-Pritchard in the Southern Sudan held at the Pitt Rivers Museum collection
"E. E. Evans-Pritchard"