Evans Pritchard Quotes

Anyone can produce a new fact; the thing is to produce a new idea.

Memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power. The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked it to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic fugure. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten.

Harold adds an important idea to that of Evans-Pritchard. "The state always seems to come down on the little guy," he notes. "Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden'll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they'll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top.

In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to act on the principle of “from each according to their abilities,” at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere and the other knows the way. We so take this for granted, in fact, that the exceptions are themselves revealing. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an anthropologist who in the 1920s carried out research among the Nuer, Nilotic pastoralists in southern Sudan, reports his discomfiture when he realized that someone had intentionally given him wrong directions: On one occasion I asked the way to a certain place and was deliberately deceived. I returned in chagrin to camp and asked the people why they had told me the wrong way. One of them replied, “You are a foreigner, why should we tell you the right way? Even if a Nuer who was a stranger asked us the way we would say to him, ‘You continue straight along that path,’ but we would not tell him that the path forked. Why should we tell him? But you are now a member of our camp and you are kind to our children, so we will tell you the right way in future.”12

we may ask why common sense does not triumph over superstition.

The web is not an external structure in which he is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong.

Someone suggested that the oracle was tired like a chiefwho has been sitting for hours listening to cases in his court and is weary.

In their questions to me they have sought to explain away Zande behaviour by rationalizing it, that is to say, by interpreting it in terms of our culture.

But Azande are dominated by an overwhelming faith which prevents them from making experiments

You cannot deceive one who practisesyour particular brand of deception.

Indeed, as a rule Azande do not ask questions to which answers are easily tested by experience and they ask only those questions which embrace contingencies. The answers either cannot be tested, or if proved by subsequent events to be erroneous permit an explanation of the error.

It will have been noted that Azande act experimentally within the framework of their mystical notions. They act aswe would have to act if we had no means ofmaking chemical and physiological analyses and we wanted to obtain the same results as they want to obtain.

we may ask whether they have any notion that approximates to what we mean when we speak of physical causes. .

Then Azande simply say that the termites refuse an answer and they try another mound.

Their "blindness is not due to stupidity: they reason excellently in the.idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason out'side, or against, their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts.

The reader will naturally wonder what Azande say when subsequent events prove the prophecies of the poison oracle to be wrong. Here again Azande are not surprised at such an outcome, but it does not prove to them that the oracle is futile. It rather proves how well founded are their beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery and taboos. The contradiction between what the or.acle said would happen and what actually has happened is just as glaring to Zande eyes as it is to ours, but they never for a moment question the virtue of the oracle in general

The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions.

toms, and our own doctors have told me that they seldom err in diagnosing early leprosy. They are naturally much less sure in diagnosing diseases affecting internal organs such as the-intestines, the liver, and the spleen.

Moreover, ' it must not be supposed that where part of a treatment is of real therapeutic value it is necessarily the part which Azande stress as vital to the cure.

magical and empirical treatments are employed at the same time when a boy who formed part of my household-was bitten by a snake which-was said to be very poisonous.

In his classic account of the life of the Nuer of the Sudan, British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940:103) noted that the Nuer have no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I don’t think they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.

Evans-Pritchard’s confession reveals the way the power advantage of the subject whose definition of a situation prevails in the larger social context (in this case the majority of the Azande) shapes the environment and behavioral constraints that impact the subject who, although does not define the situation the same way, has to behave according to the former subject’s definition in order to obtain the needed resources (in this case Evans-Pritchard, who is interested in gaining knowledge of the social organization of the Azande). For Evans-Pritchard, while living among the Azande, the actual world is as if there were magical forces around, true oracles and evil witches, as his whole daily life is structured around those nonexistent entities.

Witch-doctors are said to be very carefullest anyone should find out what plants they dig up for magical use. They remove their stalks and leaves and hide them in the bush some way from~here they have dug them up lest anyone should follow in their tracks and learn their medicines.

Unless the medicines are bought with adequate fees there is a danger that they will lose their potency for the recipient during the transference, since their owner is dissatisfied and bears the purchaser ill-will. Also,

All their beliefs hang together, and were a Zande to give up faith in witch-doctorhood he would have to surrender equally his belief in witchcraft and oracles.

Also, witch-doctors are part of the oracle-system.

I have heard even witch-doctors themselves admit that not all members of their corporation are reliable and honest, but only those who have received proper medicines from persons qualified to initiate them.

Hence it is not necessary for one Zande to explain to another his waywardness, for everybody understands the motives of his conduct.

It is important to note that scepticism about witch-doctors is not socially repressed.