E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Theorists
Standing
Concerns Defining Contribution
Currently States Pioneered structural-functionalist ethnography through two major fieldworks: among the Azande (1926-1930), where he showed that witchcraft, oracle and magic beliefs form an internally coherent system of reasoning about causation rather than mere irrationality, work that later influenced philosophy-of-science debates about the rationality of other belief systems; and among the Nuer (from 1930), where he developed segmentary lineage theory to explain how a society with no centralized government or courts nonetheless maintains political order through a nested structure of lineage groups that unite against outsiders and split among themselves at a finer scale. Both fieldworks were conducted in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan under colonial administration, and later scholarship has debated how far his structural-functionalist, largely ahistorical framing of Zande and Nuer society understated the colonial power relations within which the fieldwork itself took place.
The scientific content of Evans-Pritchard's ethnography, the coherence of Zande witchcraft-reasoning and the segmentary lineage model, is not itself in dispute among anthropologists. What is debated is the methodological and ethical question of whether his ahistorical, structural-functionalist framing, describing Zande and Nuer society as self-contained systems, understated the colonial administration that enabled and shaped the fieldwork; this critique is most associated with the wider re-examination of British functionalist anthropology's relationship to colonial rule represented in Talal Asad's edited volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) and, for his own teacher Malinowski specifically, by Diane Lewis's argument that anthropologists risked becoming tools of colonial policy regardless of their personal politics.
Source Wikipedia: E. E. Evans-Pritchard