Abstract
Mr. E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD, who has been appointed to succeed Prof. Radcliffe-Brown, studied anthropology and late Prof. C. G. Seligman at the London School of Economics and is well known for his researches among the peoples of the Anglo-Reptian Sudan carried out during 1926–36. The results of these studies have been published in a number of papers in Sudan Notes and Records and other scientific journals, and in two notable books, “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande”(1937) and “The Nuer”(1940). The scientific value of these works lies in the penetrating analysis applied to carefully observed facts. Mr. Evans-Pritchard was for a time professor of sociology at the Egyptian University, Cairo. He left Egypt to take up the position of research lecturer in African sociology in the University of Oxford. With Dr. Fortes he edited and contributed to a book on “African Political Systems”(see Nature, August 10, 1940). In 1939, Mr. Evans-Pritchard joined the Army and served in the Abyssinian campaign and later in Syria and in Cyrenaica. In the last-named country he was in close contact with the Senussi, on whom he has written several papers. On his return from the Army he was appointed reader in anthropology in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge now loses and Oxford regains one of the most brilliant of the exponents of what may be called the.newer social anthropology, in which theories of social institutions are tested and developed by experimental observations in the field.
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Social Anthropology at Oxford: Mr. E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Nature 158, 159 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158159a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158159a0