Search Results

The introduction seeks to add to, but also move beyond more sociological analyses of elder authority by reviewing classic works on the eldership complex through the category of sovereignty. The work of scholars like E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer, Monica Wilson, and Paul Spencer constitute a platform for an historical anthropology of elderhood in their mutually supplemental attempts to define elderhood substantively, relationally, and diachronically. The introduction makes a case for the continued relevance of historical and critical approaches to the study of religion and politics. By attending to how Kenyans have popularly understood sovereignty over time, and how different social actors have attempted to exclusively protect, usurp, inhabit, and enact particular forms and processes of power and authority, the book asserts the ethnographic and historical basis for anthropological theory production.

This chapter explores the historical background surrounding the origins and evolution of human society within the context of Africa. The earliest, most sparsely settled human societies, for example, showed organization that was based on kinship and descent. It would only be later on, under dense population settlements, that forms or organization based on territorially defined polity emerged. In Africa, however, most societies combined the principles of kinship and territorial polity somehow in organizing loyalties and authority. For instance, in places like Nuer in East Africa, or Tallensi in West Africa, some indigenous political groupings are based more on location of residence than biological affiliation. Some Euro-American commentators—such as Evans-Pritchard, for instance—have been attempting to play up kinship and play down territorial polities as if to say that they are primitive. The chapter thus proposes the argument that segmentary lineages are not less modern forms of civilized than territorial polities with a centralized bureaucracy.

While this book has followed Richerson and Boyd in positing an evolved tribal social instinct, it is argued that societies require further symbolic means to instillprosociality in the course of development. The muting of sexual reproduction and the creation of symbolic kinship through shared culture helps achieve this. The origin of prosociality in individuals is traced to attachments formed during the lengthy mother-infant bond, leading to affect hunger that persists through life. This is redirected to wider social groups in the course of development; illustrative cases offered are the Kaingang and the Ache. The prevalence of childbirth symbolism in initiation rituals, and the role of genital surgery is discussed. The symbolism of Nuer ox sacrifice is discussed and analyzed in some detail.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) was the leading anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the mid-twentieth century and the greatest British anthropologist of his generation. He obtained his doctoral training at the London School of Economics where Bronislaw Malinowski reigned, and did his fieldwork in the southern Sudan. Evans-Pritchard’s landmark study, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, challenged the existing assumption that ‘primitive’ people were ‘pre-logical’. An adult convert to Roman Catholicism, Evans-Pritchard launched a counter-attack against the rationalistic anthropologists, including Tylor and Frazer, who had dismissed religion as erroneous. His Nuer Religion was a defence of the theological sophistication and inherent worth of a traditional African religion. Evans-Pritchard himself was particularly drawn to mysticism as his own way of practising his Christian faith and as a valid source of authentic spiritual insights.

The starting point for this chapter is the observation that the photographs that Evans-Pritchard took of the Azande are quite different in nature from those he took of the Nuer. This opens up a complex area of photographic investigation. Why should they be so different, given that they were taken by the same fieldworker, and at a similar time? The argument put forward is that Evans-Pritchard’s fieldwork photography is marked by differently patterned indigenous responses to the camera. The chapter argues that such differences as exist boil down to very different historical and cultural relations to outside influences within Zande and Nuer society in the early 1930s, and that this is inscribed within the archival record, played out in modes of self-presentation to Evans-Pritchard’s camera.

Chapter 5 examines the relationship between Evans-Pritchard’s use of photographs in The Nuer, the way he draws upon such visual evidence in his texts as part of the overall argument, and whether such visual material asserts the ‘ethnographic authority’ of the anthropologist, as argued by James Clifford. The suggestion by Geertz of a link between the visualizable as a dimension of Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic writing, and the visual presentation of photographs within The Nuer, is an important interplay with which this chapter grapples. I argue for a material history approach that reveals the influence of wider contexts, such as anthropological book production in the 1940s. I also argue that a closer examination of the relative costs and restrictions in sharing or making plates for book illustration during World War II is important to understanding image selection for The Nuer, with many plates reused from journals that had carried his earlier articles.

Chapter 7 examines Evans-Pritchard’s photographic record of the Nuer rite of gorot, witnessed in 1936, and raises questions about the relationship between photography and participant-observation as a core research method in early twentieth-century anthropology. The chapter explores the question of why Evans-Pritchard’s record of this ritual is characterized by a sustained visual engagement with two distinct stages of the rite, and why other aspects of the ceremony are not recorded. In order to explore this question, the chapter proposes the model of Evans-Pritchard as ‘participant-photographer’—a model that understands his involvement with the ritual as being composed of periods of photographic engagement interposed with observation and note-taking. Placing Evans-Pritchard back into the field through a careful examination of his fieldwork records of a particular event enables us to gain a new insight into not just his fieldwork methods, but his proximity, involvement, and perspective on key elements of the ritual as they unfolded.

Using an episode from Swazi resistance to British colonial power as an example, this chapter shows how narratives can be elevated to mythic status in order to achieve desired political results. Alternatively, familiar myths can be renarrated and reinterpreted to advance specific interests, as is shown by close study of rival variants of the Nuer creation myth or the way the Shi’a Karbala narrative was reworked in the Iranian Revolution.

Chapter 4 examines the available evidence for an actual readership of Fabri’s texts in the first century after their appearance, via an analysis of their manuscript transmission, marginalia, and printing history. In exploring the lines of transmission (where they exist), this chapter traces the movements of the extant manuscript copies for each of Fabri’s writings, with special attention paid to the copyists and their adaptations. The second section of this chapter briefly examines the marginalia evidence for how late-medieval readers may have approached Fabri’s texts. The final section of the chapter examines the printing history of Fabri’s Pilgerbuch in order to discover information about readers of Fabri’s pilgrimage narratives up until the late sixteenth century, when pilgrimage became mainly a literary and metaphorical trope.