The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard wrote The Nuer from a historical and ideological context rooted in the British colonial enterprise in Africa.

While Evans-Pritchard’s work in some ways represented a rebuff of the colonialist project, an understanding of that context is nonetheless essential to understanding his anthropological research. The British colonial empire reached its greatest extent in the early 20th century, when Evans-Pritchard received his education and prepared to undertake research surveys in Africa. The United Kingdom exercised control over much of eastern and southern Africa at this time, and Sudan—the area in which Evans-Pritchard worked with both the Azande and Nuer people—was under joint British and Egyptian rule. The name for this government, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is somewhat misleading, as Egypt itself was essentially functioning as a British protectorate during the period in question. Sudan had been under British administration since the 1898 defeat of the Sudanese Mahdist state at the hands of an Anglo-Egyptian army under Lord Kitchener. The Anglo-Egyptian rule over Sudan (which was essentially a gloss for British administration) lasted until 1956.

The Nuer experienced two different levels of colonialism, often simultaneously. The most direct level was from the national government in Khartoum, Sudan, exercised over them by ethnically Sudanese Arab groups in the 19th century and by the Anglo-Egyptian regime in the 20th century. Over this was a second level, that of the British imperialist influence and power over their territory. As an Indigenous people group living in their own territory, they thus came under colonial pressures from both the national and international levels. The Nuer homeland, however, was remote enough, and the Nuer themselves populous and powerful enough to ensure a relative degree of independence throughout the period. Still, they experienced and resented colonial attempts to conduct censuses, surveys, and taxation upon them. The initial resistance Evans-Pritchard encountered on entering Nuer territory denotes their reflexive reaction against these colonial incursions.

Evans-Pritchard is somewhat atypical for a British colonial anthropologist, and his work introduced changes in the field which helped move it away from some of the ethnocentric assumptions of earlier models of European anthropology. Rather than approaching Indigenous cultures as self-evidently “primitive” or “backward,” Evans-Pritchard championed an approach that tried to accept each culture on its own terms. Nonetheless, some of Evans-Pritchard’s reactions to Nuer culture are problematic relics of a colonial age, in which the perceived “quirks” of an Indigenous culture (such as the Nuer resistance to survey questions) are held up as a subject of annoyance or amusement. His observations were still based on his own biases and understanding as a British man, and many of his attempts to characterize societies such as the Nuer fail to capture the cultural complexity, instead using Western modes of characterization to explain and understand social structures and cultural values. Thus, despite Evans-Pritchard’s attempts to shift the discussion on Indigenous African societies and allow the complexity of each culture to speak for itself, his work still represents the attempt of an outsider to describe another society, a methodology which is necessarily prone to misperception and error.