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Evans-Pritchard and the Anthropology of Religion A EVANS-PRITCHARD AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts of the Australian National University by Peter Alexander Vidot LY January, 1991. / DECLARATION I certify that the content of this thesis is my own work and that all sources used have been acknowledged. I zt&r' \J U A ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go first of all to Drs. D.S. Gardner and J.J. Fox for their painstaking supervision of this thesis, and to Professor J.A.W. Forge for his encouragement. I received some invaluable initial suggestions from Emeritus Professor Kenelm Burridge, and Drs. R.G. Lienhardt and J. Urry. I owe a great debt of gratitude also to my family, especially my parents, Conrad and Marjory, and to my friend Ann for her valiant and patient efforts in fashioning the manuscript. My thanks also go to Stephen, Juliana and John for their thorough proofreading, and to many other friends and colleagues from the Dominican Order, the Australian National University and elsewhere for their good- humoured support. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................3 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION...............................................................................5 Purpose and scope of this thesis...........................................................5 D e fin itio n s...................................................................................................... 6 Social fact..............................................................................................7 D eterm in ism ................................................................................... 13 In tellectu alism ............................................................................... 14 Functionalism......................................................................................15 R atio n alism ...................................................................................... 16 Empiricism........................................................................................ 16 P rag m atism ..................................................................................... 17 Materialism.......................................................................................... 18 Collective representation............................................................ 19 C h allen g es.....................................................................................................21 Chronology of development..........................................................................25 Outline of chapters..........................................................................................25 CHAPTER TWO — WITCHCRAFT, ORACLES AND MAGIC AM ONG THE A Z A N D E .......................................................27 Introduction......................................................................................................27 Sorcery and Native O pinion.................................................................31 The 'Cairo' Papers..........................................................................................41 The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of M agic.................................. 42 Levy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality................................................53 Science and Sentiment.................................................................................... 64 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande...............................70 CHAPTER 3 — THE SANUSI OF CYRENAICA........................................80 Introduction......................................................................................................80 Evans-Pritchard and the Study of Religion.........................................83 The concept of 'religion' as it is used in The Sanusi of Cyrenaica......... 89 CHAPTER 4 — NUER RELIGION.......................................................................110 Introduction....................................................................................................110 Evans-Pritchard and Dürkheim....................................................................116 Dürkheim........................................................................................... 123 Evans-Pritchard and His Use of Christian Theological Language.......135 CHAPTER 5 — CONCLUSION.............................................................................144 B IB L IO G R A PH Y ...................................................................................................152 5 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THIS THESIS The purpose of this thesis is to explore the development of Evans-Pritchard's approach to the anthropological study of religion. This study is both an exegesis and an analysis of the formulation of his theoretical framework. Evans-Pritchard's perspective is complex, due in part to the range of people who had significant influence on his development as a thinker and to his evolving response to them. This thesis will focus primarily on the intellectual influences in Evans- Pritchard's life as an anthropologist, but will touch briefly on the more personal aspects of his life when these have direct bearing on an issue. One feature of his life that is important to his intellectual enterprise is his becoming a Catholic in 1944, at the age of forty-two. The effects of this will be considered later, especially in relation to his study of Nuer religion. I will attempt to demonstrate in this thesis that Evans-Pritchard's Catholicism was incidental to the development of his historical perspective in anthropology. It is true that a number of people who taught and studied at the Institute in Oxford were Catholics. From a textual point of view, however, it is very difficult to find objective evidence of an idealist influence of Catholicism on the anthropological enterprise engaged in at Oxford by Evans-Pritchard. In the later writings that will be considered there is evidence that he uses a Christian theological framework as an analytical tool. I will also show that the basic idealist influence is Durkheimian.* The major intellectual influences to be considered in this thesis are Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Levy-Bruhl, Hubert and Mauss. Although * Adam Kuper in Anthropology and Anthropologists (revised edition, 1983:127), however, suggests a link between the idealist position built up by Evans-Pritchard upon his historical perspective and his use of the writings of the L'Annee Sociologique, and Catholicism, but he presents no evidence for this. He also offers no evidence for the claim that it was '...an odd fact that several members of the department were converts to Roman Catholicism'(127). I will concentrate on the evidence regarding the degree of intellectual influence that may be attributed to Catholicism, as that influence emerges in Evans-Pritchard's writings. 6 eventually Evans-Pritchard rejected much of Durkheim's position on the sociological analysis of religion (Nuer Religion, 1956:313), he did not move very far from Durkheim’s methodology. This poses many questions and problems which I will attempt to address. The intellectual relationship that Evans-Pritchard had with Dürkheim provides the principal area of enquiry in this thesis. The pattern of thought formed through the use of Durkheim's ideas is never simple. In exploring Evans-Pritchard's development as a theorist, I will concentrate on three of his major monographs, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937a), The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949a), and Nuer Religion (1956),and a number of his important papers in order to demonstrate the degree to which his analytical framework developed in response to those who influenced him. This response is complex as it comprises elements of agreement with and divergence from his sources, including his oral sources, the Zande, the Bedouin, and the Nuer. Evans-Pritchard's writings are primarily ongoing, but largely implicit, debates with Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Levy-Bruhl, and Dürkheim in which his own theoretical perspective unfolds. The papers to be examined in relation to the monographs listed above fall into two groups : those published during, and shortly after, his Professorship at the Egyptian University in Cairo (1932-34), and, those published during the early and middle stages of his Professorship at Oxford University (1946-1970). The significance of these papers is that they act as a map of Evans-Pritchard’s development as an anthropological theorist. In them he presents his position in a more detailed fashion than he does in the monographs. DEFINITIONS Much of the discussion in this thesis revolves around various understandings and uses of certain terms. These include : 'social fact', 'collective representations', 'determinism', 'intellectualism', 'functionalism', 'dualism', 'empiricism', 'rationalism', 'materialism' and 'pragmatism'. Evans-Pritchard uses these terms in diverse ways. This gives rise to the need for clarification of his use of them. In that need lies the substance of this thesis. Paradox and ambiguity will be apparent but, as will be seen in the next section, there is a unity in Evans-Pritchard's perspective which emerges in much the 7 same way as that of a mosaic. Individual elements of a mosaic considered separately from the whole often appear partial and perplexing. The purpose of this clarification of terms is to help bring some of the asymmetrical factors in Evans-Pritchard's discourse
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