Further in those Bantu societies where I have myself studied social structure, whether in Central or in South Africa, nothing is more remarkable than the lack of permanence of particular lineages or "segments"; the infinite variety there is in their composition, their liability to change owing to historic factors, the strength of individual personalities and similar determinants. . . . Nor have I ever worked in an Africa [sic] society in which status within a particular group, an age-set or a territories [sic] section, was equal. The very existence of so many principles of ranking makes for varied status of the individuals within the segment concerned. This would be revealed in a careful descriptive account of some particular ceremony or activity undertaken by one of the segments studied, but is concealed by the diagrams of this book. I therefore cannot see the distinction between domestic and political systems of segments sharply defined as Dr. Evans-Pritchard has described it. The two systems seem to me to grow one out of the other, and in the dynamics of a social situation constantly to overlap. Abstractions are obviously necessary if sociology is to develop as a science, but I think those of this book have been made too soon, at too low a level, and by too summary an exclusion of matter that did not "fit." Nevertheless, I consider the work more stimulating than many a carefully written and detailed monograph and it well repays the effort of reading and re-reading what is in some sections very difficult abstract matter. However unsatisfying in some respects, it is a brilliant, [sic] tonic, and in the best sense of the word, an irritating book. No anthropologist can afford to miss it.-Audrey I. Richards, "A Problem of Anthropological Approach" No one has said it more succinctly than Audrey Richards (1941): The Nuer is an unsatisfying, brilliant, and utterly irritating book. Others would later echo her ambivalence. Repeatedly, The Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940a) would be called a "classic," an "exemplary model" of ethnographic writing, and, in the same breath, a hopelessly flawed, contradictory, confusing, and perversely paradoxical work. Perhaps no ethnography has been simultaneously so acclaimed and so thoroughly critiqued. The commentary on Edward Evans-Pritchard's Nuer ethnographies has taken two general forms: in one, the critique of his ethnographic and rhetorical strategies has been the focus; in the other, the relation between the empirical "data" and his analytic models has been the central concern.Cultural Anthropology 15(1).35-83.
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGYEvans-Pritchard's texts were a prime target of the critique of ethnographic authority that unfolded in the 1980s. His writing was taken as an exemplar oi a specific form of rhetorical allure and visual clarity that gave his particular version of ethnographic authority such compelling force (Clifford 1988). Commentators note, among other things, "his drastic clarity" (Geertz 1988:68); "his enormous capacity to construct visualizable representations of cu...
