Edwards Evans-Pritchard
Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) may be regarded in many ways as the anthropologists’ anthropologist. Malinowski, with his proverbial seminar at the LSE before the Second World War has often grabbed the headlines, and there has been a great deal more written about him. However when his theories are looked at in detail, it turns out that he has few followers in the later generations, and even fewer today, however important he may appear as a figurehead. E-P however is different; his extraordinary ethnographic fieldwork in multiple locations, his great linguistic facility, his ever-changing theoretical approach – above all his shift toward history and interpretation – and his benign oversight over the institute of social anthropology in Oxford has served to ensure that his reputation remains as high as ever. Over and above this, he was the founder of the ASA, the main professional association for social anthropologists in university positions in the UK. His faults, often remarked upon sotto voce don’t seem to have marred his reputation, as the recent publication of an appreciation of his life edited by Andre Singer entitled A Touch of Genius has shown.
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Yet, for all this, I am not at all convinced that his work is correctly interpreted today. The great group of work that centres around the Nuer, which puts emphasis on the segmentary lineage theory model and mediation by holy figures, has often been regarded as being erroneous. This seems to me quite wrong. A careful reading of The Nuer easily illustrates that the ethnography is much better and more convincing than such a rejection implies, whilst my own fieldwork in Turkey amongst the Alevis has equally convinced me that the model can be immensely powerful as an explanatory framework. I have explained this occasionally in various places, but most recently in the first of the two chapters in A Touch of Genius.
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E-P had a better relationship with the previous generation of anthropologists than is sometimes maintained, above all with his teacher and moral tutor at Exeter College, R. Marett. The archive there shows that Marett was instrumental in obtaining him his first teaching position at Oxford, to which he returned after the war to take up the chair at All Souls. It also shows how social anthropology coalesced at Oxford under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown, and not at the LSE, whose understanding of science E-P felt he was later rejecting.
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References
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940 The Nuer, Oxford: OUP.
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Shankland, D. 2023 'Segmentary lineage systems re(re)considered: The example of the Alevis of Anatolia', in A Touch of Genius, Edward Evans-Pritchard, edited by Andre Singer: RAI Book Series Volume 4. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, pages 281-288.
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Shankland, D. 2023 ‘Evans-Pritchard and Marett: or how E-P found a job’ in A Touch of Genius, Edward Evans-Pritchard, edited by Andre Singer: RAI Book Series Volume 4. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, pages 115-129.