Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (1902–1973)

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard ranks high among foundational figures in twentieth-century sociocultural anthropology, towering over Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), whose seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE) initiated him into the discipline in 1924.

Born in Sussex, England, of a minister father, Evans-Pritchard had a typical middle-class public school education. Driven, as he later explained, by “tediousness” about history, Evans-Pritchard went from it to anthropology. His tutor at Oxford, R. R. Marett (1866–1943), an expert in religion and early anthropology, further influenced Evans-Pritchard's decision and later interests, which a desire for adventure motivated. Fieldwork could slake that but history could not.

Believing LSE led in anthropology, Evans-Pritchard studied under C. G. Seligman (1873–1940) and joined Malinowski's renowned seminar. His generation would shape anthropology's course in Great Britain and the United States over much of the century by developing structural functionalism, then initiating a process approach that lingers in changed theoretical guises. Evans-Pritchard's eminence issued from his transcending synthesis of functionalist and structuralist frameworks with ethnographical empiricism and history, differentiating him from his more functionalist contemporaries.

Evans-Pritchard's 1927 dissertation was a preliminary survey of the Sudanese Azande. In 1937, he published his masterpiece, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Long scholarly debates on “primitive thought,” inflected through evolutionism, racialized members of non-Western societies by assuming intrinsically inferior cognitive abilities among them. Evans-Pritchard established logic and cognition as cultural phenomena. Rather than irrational or mystical, as others had characterized preliterate thought, the Azande demonstrated a native logic whose cogency lay within the context of their culture. Witchcraft and magic constituted coherent systems of values, beliefs, and practices that gave the Azande the means to understand and act in their society, had complementary political and legal functions, and gave the Azande elite the power to regulate social behavior. Evans-Pritchard challenged prevailing dichotomies that cast non-Western and Western societies as the opposites of primitive and modern, mystical and scientific, and nonlogical and logical.

Evans-Pritchard went on to conduct fieldwork among the Nuer. In his first Nuer book, in 1940, he demonstrated how political principles animated kinship relations of hostility and alliance. As descent lineages fused and segmented, kinship terms and genealogies were not merely classificatory or historical, but provided kin groups with political identities and the means to mobilize alliances contextually and pragmatically. That year, Evans-Pritchard coedited a still-influential volume on African political systems, documenting how all societies established and maintained order through law.

During World War II, Evans-Pritchard served in Libya, where he applied his notion of segmentation to the Sanusi of Cyrenaica. His third significant ethnographical contribution, in 1949, demonstrated how the Sufi Sanusi infiltrated the local clan system as mediators, gaining ascendancy over the society. Evans-Pritchard would similarly apply segmentation principles in his third and final Nuer study, Nuer Religion (1956). By then, he had converted to Catholicism, a circumstance that produced the book's evident theism.

After the war, Evans-Pritchard inherited the Chair of Social Anthropology at Oxford from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) and actively promoted the discipline. Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain acknowledged his role in establishing anthropology as a significant humanistic science with a knighthood in 1971.

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