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

Citation

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Clarendon Press.

Chapter Summary

The Nuer is an ethnography of a cattle-keeping people of the Nilotic Sudan, based on Evans-Pritchard's fieldwork, and the first of his three books on them; Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951) and Nuer Religion (1956) followed. The subtitle names its two halves: modes of livelihood, then political institutions. According to Tony Free's 1991 study of the book, Evans-Pritchard described the first two chapters as dealing with cattle and ecological relations, the third as a bridge between the two parts, and the last three as dealing with social structure. That gives six chapters.

Chapter 1: Interest in Cattle

The opening chapter shows how far cattle shape Nuer life. They are an essential food supply and the most important social asset, and the Nuer, in Evans-Pritchard's phrase, speak a "bovine idiom", defining social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Horticulture is treated as an unfortunate necessity, and the chapter ends with the place of cattle in the political structure.

Chapter 2: Oecology

The second chapter supplies the environmental setting for a people who keep cattle and carry on limited horticulture, and deals with labour in terms of the relation of food supply to the environment. It completes the account of "modes of livelihood" announced in the subtitle.

Chapter 3: Time and Space

The bridge between the two halves. Evans-Pritchard presents Nuer time-reckoning as a conceptualisation of natural changes, chosen according to their significance for human activities, and states that the Nuer have no expression equivalent to "time" in English. He also develops "oecological distance" and "structural distance", the latter defined as the distance between groups of persons in the social system, expressed in terms of values. The second idea underlies the political chapters.

Chapters 4–6: The Political, Lineage and Age-set Systems

The last three chapters take up the political system, the lineage system and the age-set system; Chapter 5 is titled "The Lineage System". The French publisher's description of the translation summarises the argument: the Nuer are a society without government or marked differences of rank, the tribal segments tend to split and merge, and cohesion is maintained through kinship, so that the lineage structure provides the framework of the political system. Evans-Pritchard describes the Nuer state of affairs as an "ordered anarchy" and denies them law in the sense of judgements delivered by an independent authority with power to enforce them; the leopard-skin chief is a sacred person without political authority.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

• Modes of livelihood: the way a people's subsistence, labour and environment are tied together, here centred on cattle.
• Bovine idiom: the Nuer habit of expressing social relationships in terms of cattle.
• Oecological time and distance: time and space reckoned from the pastoral year and from relations between communities, not from abstract measures.

Chapters 4–6

• Structural distance: the distance between groups in the social system, expressed in terms of values.
• Ordered anarchy: Evans-Pritchard's description of political life without government or law in the ordinary sense.
• Segmentary lineage system: the structure of lineages whose segments divide and combine, on which political order rests.
• Age-sets: the third structural system treated in the last part.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A landmark case. Discussions of the book describe it as a landmark of social anthropology, and Robert Bates called it a foundational work in the study of stateless societies. The French publisher presents the Nuer as a striking example of an "ordered anarchy".
• Livelihood and politics in one account. The book links cattle, ecology, time and space with lineage and political structure, so a reader sees how the two halves connect, not just one or the other.
• Argument visible in the text. Free's 1991 article quotes passages in which Evans-Pritchard states his points plainly, for example that the Nuer have no government, and that structural distance in the lineage system of the dominant clans is a function of structural distance in the tribal system.

Limitations

• Colonial setting. Renato Rosaldo criticised the book for rendering invisible the colonial power relations that made the fieldwork possible, and Douglas Johnson (1982) examined Evans-Pritchard's links with the Sudan Political Service. A modern reader should read the ethnography with that context.
• Mixed reception. Audrey Richards called it "unsatisfying in some respects" but also "a brilliant tonic" and "an irritating book". Susan McKinnon (2000) re-examines its account of patrilineality and equality.
• Partial coverage. Kinship and marriage, and religion, are the subjects of the two later Nuer books, so this volume is not a complete ethnography. Free also notes that Evans-Pritchard gave few references to other writers, so the theoretical background has to be inferred.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the economic and political anthropology course, The Nuer is an ethnographic classic on political order and livelihood, and should be read in the company of other classics. Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific is the foundational ethnography of Trobriand exchange, authority, magic and fieldwork; Mauss's The Gift analyses gift exchange. Hann and Hart's Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique and Wilk and Cliggett's Economies and Cultures are introductory textbooks that supply the background on production and exchange. Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything challenges simple stories about progress, hierarchy and the origins of the state, and gives a recent wider frame for the questions about political order that The Nuer raises.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students who have read an introduction to economic or political anthropology. Read Chapters 1 and 2 first, to understand why cattle and ecology are the starting point, and then Chapter 3, whose idea of structural distance prepares the last three chapters. In those chapters, draw a simple diagram of the segments and how they ally or divide.

Read the book critically alongside secondary work: Rosaldo's essay in Writing Culture on the pastoral mode and Free's 1991 article, which replies to him, give two views of the text. Pair it with Malinowski for two classic styles of fieldwork, and with an introductory textbook for later approaches to the same questions.