Does the scientific value of Evans-Pritchard's and Malinowski's structural-functionalist ethnography stand apart from the colonial administration that made their fieldwork possible, or does that entanglement compromise how their conclusions should be read today?
Both anthropologists worked within colonial structures: Evans-Pritchard's own doctoral thesis names the "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" as the administrative unit his Azande fieldwork was conducted within, and Malinowski, in a 1938 essay, wrote that "the practical anthropologist must be the educator, at times the advocate of the natives...but he can never work against the firm principles of ordered European control," an explicit acceptance of colonial limits on his own applied work. The anthropologist Diane Lewis went further, arguing that anthropologists of this generation risked becoming tools of colonial policy regardless of their personal political sympathies. Talal Asad, himself once a student of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, later edited Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), the volume most associated with this wider re-examination. None of this is in dispute about what happened; what remains genuinely unsettled is how far it should change how their ethnographic conclusions are rea
What would resolve this A historiographical consensus, so far absent, on how to weigh a functionalist ethnography's descriptive and theoretical contributions (the coherence of Zande witchcraft-reasoning, the segmentary lineage model) against the colonial power relations within which the fieldwork producing them took place, rather than treating the two as either fully separable or as mutually invalidating.
History and philosophy of anthropology; postcolonial studiesBA Notes: Ethical Controversies in Malinowski's Applied Anthropology