Question

Explain the perspective of Evans-pritchard on social structure.

Answer 1

Evans-Pritchard (E-P) is one of the significant students of the structural functionalist school of British social anthropology. Though, E-P found the ahistoricism promoted by structural functionalists problematic. For him, there was a distinction between history and anthropological study: the former described when, how and what happened, while the former speculated at historical events based on analysis of circumstantial evidence. Yet, social anthropology should engage in a form of historicism, provide its set of tools drawn from direct observation and discursive analysis. He displays this historicism in the ethnographies he conducted in central Africa, on the Nuer and Azande, in which he provides insight into people without written history. His ethnographies, based on participant observations, offer explanations of their political systems, belief systems, and social hierarchies, alongside interpretations concerning their understandings of time, human/animal distinction, and magic. Grounding explanation and interpretation in direct observation of actions by interlocutors was integral, he argued, to social anthropology. E-P’s methodology, nevertheless, offers us a conundrum. On one hand, he is interested in understanding the ways in which both subjectivity and the economic-base shape cultural mores and belief, while having a function in social organizations. Yet, on the other hand, he considers each of these domains individually, often leading him to distort, or simply leave out, aspects of, say, the political domain which did not fit into his model of the Nuer’s or Azande’s political systems. Still, an enduring aspect of E-P’s work is how he unsettled the epistemological grounds of anthropological theory, and what counted as evidence; by trying to understand the meaning behind a social fact, like magic beliefs. There was, for E-P, a limit to knowledge, because magic beliefs, for example, may manifest in social action and have social functions, yet ultimately have an inner life that can only be approximated by the anthropologist. By challenging the epistemological assumptions of the discipline, E-P offered a reconfiguration in the basis of comparative analysis between sociocultural groups, evident in the volume co-published with Fortes on African Political Systems.

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