E. E. Evans-Pritchard

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Evans-Pritchard was educated at Winchester College and studied history at Exeter College, Oxford, where he was influenced by R. R. Marett, and then as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics (LSE). His doctoral thesis (1928) was titled "The social organization of the Azande of the Bahr-el-Ghazal province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan".^[1]

At Oxford, he was part of the

Evans-Pritchard's later work was more theoretical, drawing upon his experiences as an 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 what at the time were called "primitive" religious practices. Arguing along the lines of his theoretical work of the 1950s, he claimed that anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they were 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.

Life and family

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born in

Known to his friends and family as "EP", Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma, one of which is journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. His notable grandchildren include Ruth Galloway of the Midieval Babes choral group and Suriya Jayanti, a diplomat and journalist.

Evans-Pritchard died in Oxford on 11 September 1973.

Honours

A Rivers Memorial Medal recipient (1937) and of the Huxley Memorial Medal (1963) he was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from 1949 to 1951. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958 and the American Philosophical Society in 1968.^[6][7] Evans-Pritchard was knighted in 1971. A number of Festschriften were prepared for him:

• Essays in Sudan Ethnography: presented to Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard^[8]
• The Translation of Culture: Essays to E. E. Evans-Pritchard (London: Tavistock, 1973)^[9][10][11]
• Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of E. E. Evans-Pritchard by His Former Oxford Colleagues (eds. J. H. M. Beattie and R. G. Lienhardt; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)^[12]

Gallery

• 
  Eleusine, used in Amatangi magic, drying by a small tree. Photo by Evans-Pritchard
• 
  Bust of Evans-Pritchard

Bibliography

• 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford University Press. 1976 abridged edition:
  ISBN 0-19-874029-8
• 1940a
  The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
  . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1940b "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan". in African Political Systems. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds., London: Oxford University Press., pp. 272–296.
• 1949 The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. London: Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1951a Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1951b "Kinship and Local Community among the Nuer". in African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and D. Forde, eds., London: Oxford University Press. p. 360–391.
• Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (July 1953), "The Sacrificial Role of Cattle among the Nuer" (PDF), Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 23 (3), Edinburgh University Press: 181–198,
  S2CID 145328497
  , retrieved 20 November 2011
• 1956 Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1962 Social Anthropology and Other Essays. New York: The Free Press. BBC Third Programme Lectures, 1950.
• 1965 Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 0-19-823131-8
• 1967 The Zande Trickster. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• 1971 La femme dans les societés primitives et autres essais d'anthropologie sociale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• "Sources, with Particular Reference to the Southern Sudan",
  Cahiers d'études africaines
  , 11 (41): 129–179, 1971, retrieved 20 November 2011

References