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

The introductory section relates Evans-Pritchard’s survey visits to Nuer territory and provides an initial description of the main features of Nuer culture. At the time of its writing, Nuer territory was located in the south-central region of what was then called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (and would later become part of Sudan in the late 20th century and South Sudan in the 21st). Evans-Pritchard already had some familiarity with the geography and cultural milieu of the region through his previous work with the Azande people and was requested by the Anglo-Egyptian government to conduct a survey of the Nuer. A few earlier colonial explorers had left some scant notes on the Nuer, but no full anthropological survey had ever been undertaken.

Evans-Pritchard places the Nuer as a subsection of the Nilotic culture type, sharing a branch and geographical proximity with the nearby Dinka people, Evans-Pritchard commenting: “Nuer and Dinka are too much alike physically and their languages and customs are too similar for any doubt to arise about their common origin, though the history of their divergence is unknown” (3). The Nuer (whose own name for themselves is the Nath) numbered about 200,000 at the time of Evans-Pritchard’s survey and lived in the swampland and savannah at the confluence of the Nile with several of its tributaries, including the Bahr el-Ghazal and the Sobat River.

Evans-Pritchard informs the reader that the focus of his book will be on the political institutions of the Nuer, but that those political features must be considered in the context of the ecological influences of the Nuer people’s environment: “[Nuer political institutions] cannot be understood without taking into account environment and modes of livelihood. […] It will be seen that the Nuer political system is consistent with the oecology” (4). This is an early statement of one of the book’s major themes, that of the Ecological Influence on Human Culture. The introductory section then outlines the materials of the following six chapters, with special attention given to the political structures of Nuer society (tribes and their segments), kinship structures (clans and lineages), and the age-set system.

Evans-Pritchard’s survey work began in 1930, and he was not optimistic concerning the prospects of success: “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” (9). His early attempts were largely focused on gaining an ability to converse in the Nuer language, but he found most Nuer to be uninterested in helping him. The main exception to that reaction was the Nuer youths, one of whom, Nhial, attached himself to Evans-Pritchard as a semi-permanent assistant. Despite finding some help in this manner, Evans-Pritchard portrays ethnographic work among the Nuer as almost impossible: “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” (12-13). Nonetheless, after continuing his attempts over the course of several expeditions in the 1930s, Evans-Pritchard was able to live alongside of the Nuer and observe their customs firsthand, often with the benefit of continual visits for conversation from his neighbors, who in the end treated him as an equal rather than an outsider. His ethnographic survey, then, was the product of firsthand observation and inclusion in daily life rather than the more conventional survey mode of relying on large verbal data-sets from a few trained informants.

Evans-Pritchard’s work reads like an ethnographic research journal, especially in its use of long passages of prose text and its supplemental presentations of information in the form of maps, charts, and photographs. Unlike the following chapters, the introductory section includes personal narratives that hearken back to the genre and style of colonial explorers’ travelogs. Of particular note is his inclusion of other characters, such as Nhial, who are seldom mentioned in the later chapters due to those passages’ exclusive focus on cultural features rather than personal narrative, but readers should keep in mind that the information presented in those passages largely derives from Nhial’s knowledge and others like him.