Abstract
TO understand Dr. Evans-Pritchard's admirable account of the Nuer, a pastoral group inhabiting the swampy lowlands south of the junction of the Nile with the Sobat and Bahr el Ghazal, one must learn to think in terms of ox or cow (the ambiguity of these words in the English language showing how far we have degenerated in this respect). For it is explained that “their social idiom is a bovine idiom”. Thus their difficult cattle terminology ofcolour, age and sex—the colour scheme is given us in a dozen striking diagrams—affords the chief clue to their marriage arrangements, ritual and law. Even kinship, that basic fact in the sociology of any primitive community, is customarily defined by reference to payments of cows in the form of dowries and other wedding-presents; so that “movements of cattle from kraal to kraal are equivalent to lines on a genealogical chart”.
The Nuer
A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. By Dr. E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Pp. xii + 271 + 30 plates. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1940.) 17s. 6d. net.
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MARETT, R. The Nuer. Nature 146, 568–569 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146568a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146568a0
