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

“Indeed, the Nuer have no government, and their state might be described as an ordered anarchy.”

Taken out of context, this quote could lead to misunderstandings about Nuer culture, as “anarchy” tends to invite suppositions of chaos and lawlessness in many reader’s minds. Evans-Pritchard’s book makes it clear, however, that the Nuer have a highly complex political system which maintains a stable social equilibrium across a group numbering in the hundreds of thousands; it is merely anarchic in the sense that it has no centralized authority.

“The inquiry is directed to two ends: to describe the life of the Nuer, and to lay bare some of the principles of their social structure.”

Here Evans-Pritchard simply states the goals of the book. The two halves of this sentence roughly correspond to the structure of the book’s main chapters: Chapters 1-3 deal with cultural observations of the Nuer’s life and livelihood, and Chapters 4-6 with the social structures evidence in their tribal, lineage, and age-set systems.

“I also knew that a study of the Nuer would be extremely difficult. Their country and character are alike intractable and what little I had previously seen of them convinced me that I would fail to establish friendly relations with them. I have always considered, and still consider, that an adequate sociological study of the Nuer was impossible in the circumstances in which most of my work was done.”

This quote is a reflection of the time in which it was written, when the work of social anthropologists who dealt with Indigenous societies was still in the process of emerging from the genre of colonial explorers’ travelogs. Nonetheless, it provides an important admission of humility and uncertainty to Evans-Pritchard’s conclusions, which he was intending to relate to the reader—an honest appraisal of the difficulties of field study and of the necessary incompleteness of any outsider’s depiction of an Indigenous society.

“Nuer are expert at sabotaging an inquiry and until one has resided with them for some weeks they steadfastly stultify all efforts to elicit the simplest facts and to elucidate the most innocent practices. […] I defy the most patient ethnologist to make headway against this kind of opposition. One is just driven crazy by it.”

As in the previous quote, this is a statement which one would no longer expect to find in scholarly anthropological research. It is important to note two points however: first, that Evans-Pritchard believed that anthropology belonged more to the realm of the humanities than the sciences, and thus an admission of the humanity of the researcher is important; and second, that such observations do not characterize the majority of the text—they are only present in a short section of the introductory passages, and the remainder tends to describe Pritchard’s understanding of Nuer culture in a nonjudgmental tone.

“A people whose material culture is as simple as that of the Nuer are highly dependent on their environment. They are pre-eminently pastoral, though they grow more millet and maize than is commonly supposed. […] at heart they are herdsmen, and the only labour in which they delight is the care of cattle.”

This is one of the book’s first presentations of the theme of the centrality of cattle in Nuer culture. As this quote shows, that centrality is not only practical, but affective—the Nuer express delight in their association with cattle. The quote also reinforces the theme of ecological influences on culture, noting the ways in which the environment shapes their choices of food and livelihood.

“[T]his obsession [with cattle]—for such it seems to an outsider—is due not only to the great economic value of cattle but also to the fact that they are links in numerous social relationships. Nuer tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom.”

This quote underscores the theme of The Centrality of Cattle to Nuer Culture, noting that cattle constitute not only an economic element in Nuer culture, but a structural feature of their social relationships. Even the terminology they employ in social functions and the names given and used for one another are related to their cattle, in much the same way that the language of markets could be said to be the idiom of much Western cultural expression (as, for instance, in time being spoken of as a commodity that can be spent, used, or wasted).

“In truth the relationship is symbiotic: cattle and men sustain life by their reciprocal services to one another. In this intimate symbiotic relationship men and beasts form a single community of the closest kind.”

This quote comes after Evans-Pritchard had suggested that some observers might conclude that the Nuer fixation on cattle could be characterized as a parasitic relationship. While he admits there might be some merit to that idea, he would portray it as symbiotic rather than parasitic, since both the cattle and people serve each other and benefit from that service. He suggests that the union of cattle and people is so intimate as to necessitate considering the cows themselves as integral members of the Nuer community.

“The main characteristics of Nuerland are: (1) It is dead flat. (2) It has clay soils. (3) It is very thinly and sporadically wooded. (4) It is covered with high grasses in the rains. (5) It is subject to heavy rainfall. (6) It is traversed by large rivers which flood annually. (7) When the rains cease and the rivers fall it is subject to severe drought. These characteristics interact with one another and compose an environmental system which directly conditions Nuer life and influences their social structure.”

In several places throughout the book, Evans-Pritchard provides helpful lists of his conclusions, and this quote represents his assessment of the environmental factors which influence Nuer society. The summary sentence after the list points to the theme of Ecological Influence on Human Culture, noting that there are observable effects from the environment on Nuer society.

“[T]he dominance of the pastoral value over horticultural interests is in accord with oecological relations which favour cattle husbandry at the expense of horticulture. Nuer values and oecological relations, therefore, combine to maintain the bias toward cattle husbandry.”

Here is another quote which points toward ecological influences on human culture. In this case, Evans-Pritchard is saying that ecological conditions (namely, the type of terrain and annual floods and droughts) favor cattle husbandry over horticulture, and as such, the ecological conditions align with the Nuer’s own cultural preference for raising cattle rather than for growing crops.

“I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of 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 once again adds a rare piece of his own commentary, this time regarding Nuer culture quite favorably. In contrast to the Western view of time, the Nuer conception of time is ordered by a sequence of relational events, and it is the events themselves (rather than an abstracted numerical measuring system) that gives time its flow and meaning.

“We have remarked that the movement of structural time is, in a sense, an illusion, for the structure remains fairly constant and the perception of time is no more than the movement of persons, often as groups, through the structure. Thus age-sets succeed one another for ever, but there are never more than six in existence and the relative positions occupied by these six sets at any time are fixed structural points through which actual sets of persons pass in endless succession.”

Using the example of the age-set system, Evans-Pritchard explains the Nuer conception of time as a series of events tied to relationship structures. This quote also touches on the theme of Relativity and Equilibrium in Social Groupings, as it notes the relative interrelationships between the age-sets over the passage of time.

“As we have seen, the size of a village depends on the space available for building, grazing and horticulture, and its homesteads are crowded or strung out accordingly, forming in most villages small clusters of huts and byres which we call hamlets, each being separated from its neighbours by gardens and unoccupied land on which calves, sheep, and goats graze.”

One of Evans-Pritchard’s goals in the first three chapters is not only a sociological analysis of Nuer concepts, but also a simple description of their mode of life. This quote is a good example of the latter aim, as it notes the nature and size of Nuer villages. It also relates to the theme of ecological influences, as villages are restricted in size to the constraints of the surrounding land’s ability to support grazing and horticulture.

“A village is the smallest Nuer group which is not specifically a kinship order and is the political unit of Nuerland. The people of a village have a feeling of strong solidarity against other villages and great affection for their site.”

One of the key points in Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Nuer political structures is that affection and loyalty are most strongly concentrated at the local level, here associated with the village. The theme of relativity is at play here, as the Nuer’s affections for their own village is balanced with a “strong solidarity against other villages,” a pattern from which Evans-Pritchard will make his case that group identity markers are expressed most clearly in their relative interrelationships with other group identities.

“A tribe has been defined by (1) a common and distinct name; (2) a common sentiment; (3) a common and distinct territory; (4) a moral obligation to unite in war; and (5) a moral obligation to settle feuds and other disputes by arbitration.”

Here we see another example of Evans-Pritchard’s lists of significant points, which in this case helps the reader to understand what is meant by the term “tribe,” as it stands distinct from tribal segments, clans, lineages, and age-sets. These points highlight Evans-Pritchard’s focus on certain aspects of Nuer political life, such as the centrality of wars and blood-feuds to the ongoing structural dynamics, and the importance of arbitration by such figures as the leopard-skin chief.

“A Nuer is known as such by his culture, which is very homogeneous, especially by his language, by the absence of his lower incisors, and, if he is a man, by six cuts on his brow. All Nuer live in a continuous stretch of country.”

Though this description is tucked into the middle of the book rather than the introductory section, where one might expect it, it very helpfully describes to the reader what makes someone Nuer. Much of Evans-Pritchard’s book illuminates how different segments of Nuer society are differentiated from each other, but the elements listed in this quote help the reader understand not only the segmentation of Nuer society, but its fundamental cultural unity.

“War between Dinka and Nuer is not merely a clash of interests, but is also a structural relationship between two peoples, and such a relationship requires a certain acknowledgement on both sides that each to some extent partakes of the feelings and habits of the other. […] The nearer people are to the Nuer in mode of livelihood, language, and customs, the more intimately the Nuer regard them, the more easily they enter into relations of hostility with them, and the more easily they fuse with them.”

One of the ironies of Nuer society (and, Evans-Pritchard would suggest, of human society in general) is that the groups closest to one’s own are the ones with whom most of the fighting occurs. This takes place at the local level as Nuer villages descend into blood-feuds against each other, but also at the level of the entire ethnic group, where the perpetual adversary is the people group most alike to them in both language and culture, the Dinka. Evans-Pritchard sees this as an expression of the relativity and equilibrium in human society, that each group defines itself partly in opposition to other groups, and particularly those who fill roles balanced near to one’s own in the social structure.

“Hence a man can be a member of a group and yet not a member of it. This is a fundamental principle of Nuer political structure. Thus a man is a member of his tribe in its relation to other tribes, but he is not a member of his tribe in the relation of his segment of it to other segments of the same kind. […] A characteristic of any political group is hence its invariable tendency towards fission and the opposition of its segments, and another characteristic is its tendency towards fusion with other groups of its own order in opposition to political segments larger than itself. Political values are thus always, structurally speaking, in conflict.”

This is a core description of the principle of relativity in human society. Evans-Pritchard notes that a Nuer person will identify as a member of their tribe in a circumstance in which an opposing tribe is in view, but if the opposing group is a smaller segment of their own tribe, then their immediate self-identification will not be as a member of the overarching tribe of which they and the opposing group are both a part, but will rather identify with their own smaller tribal segment in opposition to the other. As such, group-identity markers are relative values, subject to changing circumstances, and most clearly expressed in opposition to other groups.

“Thus there is, as we have pointed out earlier, always contradiction in the definition of a political group, for it is a group only in relation to other segments of the same kind and they jointly form a tribe only in relation to other Nuer tribes […] and without these relations very little meaning can be attached to the concepts of tribal segment and tribe.”

This quote follows on the pattern observed in the quote above, noting that political values—and specifically, group self-identification—is established relative to other groups. Evans-Pritchard makes the case that any group-identification value loses its coherence in the absence of another group which is balanced against it in the equilibrium of the overall social structure.

“We therefore regard the feud as essential to the political system as it exists at present. Between tribes there can only be war, and through war, the memory of war, and the potentiality of war the relations between tribes are defined and expressed.”

Having examined the relative nature of political values, which depend on the interrelationships between groups, Evans-Pritchard examines some of the social functions that define those interrelationships. Principal among those is war (used interchangeably here with feuding), which at the level of the tribe is one of the main social functions, as they defend their territory and cattle against incursions from other tribes. Wartime action thus builds both solidarity within a tribe and a sense of distinction from the other tribes.

“The lack of governmental organs among the Nuer, the absence of legal institutions, of developed leadership, and, generally, of organized political life is remarkable. Their state is an acephalous kinship state and it is only by a study of the kinship system that it can be well understood how order is maintained and social relations over wide areas are established and kept up.”

Here Evans-Pritchard remarks on the unusual nature of the Nuer political state, which, although highly structured in its own way, is atypical in the scope of most human societies. The acephalous nature of their state, shaped in part by ecological influences which push them toward transhumance and egalitarianism rather than a system of fixed residency in which wealth and power can be accumulated, retains its strength and structure from the kinship systems which define the interrelationships between individual people.

“A Nuer clan is the largest group of agnates who trace their descent from a common ancestor and between whom marriage is forbidden and sexual relations considered incestuous. It is not merely an undifferentiated group of persons […] but is a highly segmented genealogical structure. We refer to these genealogical segments of a clan as its lineages.”

This quote provides helpful definitions for the idea of both clans and lineages, which form the structure of Nuer kinship systems. The clan (which is the largest lineage held to be of practical value) is the group of relations, as traced by male genealogical descent, to which exogamous rules apply (i.e., outside of whom one is required to find a spouse). Each clan is composed of multiple branches, and those branches are composed of sub-branches, all of which are referred to as lineages.

“Kinship values are the strongest sentiments and norms in Nuer society and all social interrelations tend to be expressed in a kinship idiom. Adoption and the assimilation of cognatic to agnatic ties are two ways in which community relations are translated into kinship relations: in which living together forces residential relations into a kinship pattern. A third way is by mythological creation of kinship fictions.”

Here Evans-Pritchard shows how the kinship system, which promotes the strongest ties of interrelationship in Nuer society, is intentionally expanded to strengthen the political system. Thus, community relations—such as the political circumstance of living together in a village—can be transmuted into kinship relations by adding cognatic values to the normal agnatic system of reckoning (i.e., a family can be considered included in the village’s main kinship lineage by extending it beyond the normal practice of tracing male descent, thus bringing into view ties from the female line as well), by adoption, or by creating fictive stories about interrelationships that existed in the mythological past.

“Through the recognition of agnatic relationship between exogamous clans and of cognatic and mythological ties between clans not considered to be agnates, all the Nuer tribes are by assimilation of political to kinship values conceptualized as a single political system.”

This complicated sentence, which at first glance appears filled with dense anthropological jargon, is in fact one of the most straightforward summaries of Evans-Pritchard’s argument regarding the overlapping and mutually reinforcing nature of kinship systems and political systems in Nuer society. As shown in the previous quote as well, Nuer society allows for an interweaving of political and kinship values by a variety of methods, including expanding the normal agnatic lineage system to include adoption, cognatic ties, and mythologized backstories of interrelationships. In this way, groups which are politically aligned can consider themselves aligned in kinship structures as well, even if not falling within the traditional boundaries of a single agnatic lineage.