Nur people - A description of the lifestyle and political system of a group of people by the Nil River

Author: (British) Evans-Pritchard
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: In the ethnographies of the Nuer by Evans-Pritchard and the Tugen by Fortes, new patterns are vividly presented. These paradigmatic case studies for the first time provide a feasible description of how large-scale societies can operate without centralized authority. Social anthropology is precisely where it can make the most original contributions to the social sciences and political philosophy through its research on these societies without centralized political systems. The implications of the thoughts of Evans and Fortes can be seen most clearly from their analysis of segmentary lineage systems, especially in The Nuer, which is one of the most important and influential anthropological works of this period. Through field research on an African tribe without systems similar to those of the West, it poses a challenging question to the working paradigms that guided a generation of anthropologists in social and cultural studies: how is society organized in a tribe without a state or government? It is considered to have truly played a role in updating anthropological epistemological paradigms.