Edward Evan ('E-P') Evans-Pritchard
| Edward Evan ('E-P') Evans-Pritchard MA PhD | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1902 | ||||||||
| Died | 1973 | ||||||||
| Residence |
8 Queens Road, Worthing Mon Abri, Crowborough, Sussex [1927] 4 Fitz William Avenue, Richmond, SW [1929] Flat 18, I rue Mouillard, Cairo, Egypt [1931] 86 Selim el Anwal, Hilmiyat el Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt [1933] Royal Societies Club, St James's Square, SW1 [1935] All Souls College, Oxford [1949] | ||||||||
| Occupation | anthropologist | ||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
RAI Council 1930-31 Member
RAI Council 1931-32 Hon. Secretary
RAI Council 1936-37 Member
RAI Council 1937-38 Member
RAI Council 1938-39 Member
RAI Council 1940-41 Member
RAI Council 1945-46 Member
RAI Council 1946-47 Member
RAI Council 1947-48 Member
RAI Council 1948-49 Vice President
RAI Council 1949-50 President
RAI Council 1950-51 President
House Notes
1924.10.21 proposed by C.G. Seligman, seconded by E.N. Fallaize
Prof. of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
Report of the Council for 1931-32 Owing to his acceptance of an appointment in Egypt, Dr. E. E. Evans-Pritchard was compelled to resign the position of Honorary Secretary, in which he was succeeded in January, 1932, by Dr. C. O. Blagden.
1937 Rivers Memorial Medal
1963 HML The Zande state Delivered 27th June, London
1973.10 death noted
Notes From Elsewhere
Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, FBA (21 September 1902 – 11 September 1973), known as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, was an English anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of social anthropology. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970.
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). At Oxford he was part of the Hypocrites' Club.[1] There he came under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937). Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande and Bongo[2] land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer.[3]
This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism. As a result, his trilogy of works on the Nuer (The Nuer, Nuer Religion, and Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation. His worked focused in on a known psychological effect known as psychological attribution. Evans-Pritchard recorded the tendencies of Azandes to blame or attribute witchcraft as the cause of various mis-happenings. The most notable of these issues involved the deaths of eight Azandes due to the collapse of a termite infested door frame. Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and "rationality" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn and especially Paul Feyerabend.
During the Second World War Evans-Pritchard served in Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In Sudan he raised irregular troops among the Anuak to harass the Italians and engaged in guerrilla warfare. In 1942 he was posted to the British Military Administration of Cyrenaica in North Africa, and it was on the basis of his experience there that he produced The Sanusi of Cyrenaica.[3] In documenting local resistance to Italian conquest, he became one of a few English-language authors to write about the tariqa.
After a brief stint in Cambridge, Evans-Pritchard became professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. He remained at All Souls College for the rest of his career. Among the doctoral students he advised was the late M. N. Srinivas, the doyen among India's sociologists who coined some of the key concepts in Indian sociological discourse, including "Sanskritization", "dominant caste" and "vote bank." One of his students was Talal Asad, who now teaches at the City University of New York. Mary Douglas's classic Purity and Danger on pollutions and uncertainty — what we often denote as 'risk' — was fundamentally influenced by Evans-Pritchard's views on how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally specific conceptions of misfortune and harm.
Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, the son of an Anglican clergyman.[4] He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1944.
Known to his friends and family as "EP", Evans-Pritchard had five children with his wife Ioma. His youngest son, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is a former foreign correspondent in Latin America, the US, and Europe, and became International Business Editor for the London Daily Telegraph. His younger daughter, Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, PhD, is an expert on folklore and Middle Eastern studies. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship. His eldest daughter, Shineen Evans-Pritchard, is a businesswoman. He also had two other children, twins: Nicky Evans-Pritchard, who works in computers, and John Evans-Pritchard, an economics teacher and author of several books.
Evans-Pritchard died in Oxford on 11 September 1973.
Publications
External Publications
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., p. 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. .
(July 1953), "The Sacrificial Role of Cattle among the Nuer" (PDF), Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Edinburgh University Press, 23 (3): 181–198, 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. .
(1971), "Sources, with Particular Reference to the Southern Sudan", Cahiers d'études africaines, 11 (41): 129–179, retrieved 20 November 2011
House Publications
Some collective expressions of obscenity in Africa 1929
The Zande corporation of witch doctors 1932, 1933
1937.01.26 read his paper on The Nuer Family
Related Material Details
RAI Material
Other Material
PRM: papers
