The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People is a 1940 book by the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard and is considered a foundational work of social anthropology. The Nuer is the first of three books Evans-Pritchard wrote on Nuer culture, along with Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951) and Nuer Religion (1956). Evans-Pritchard, later an Oxford professor, had already established a reputation as a leading anthropologist through his work among the Azande people, and his cultural surveys of the Nuer were undertaken at the request of the government of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, whose territory encompassed the Nuer homeland. The Nuer examines the political, kinship, and age-set systems of Nuer society and places those structures in the context of the ecological influences and structural features of Nuer culture.

This study guide uses the 1968 edition from Oxford University Press, a reprint of the original 1940 edition.

Content Warning: The Nuer comes from a context of European colonial ventures in Africa, and the book represents an outsider’s depiction of an Indigenous society. Certain observations of Nuer culture might thus be marked by Eurocentric biases and outdated anthropological perspectives. Some editions of The Nuer contain photographs depicting Indigenous people in a state of nudity, including some underage individuals.

Summary

The Nuer is divided into an introductory section and six chapters, interspersed with sketches, charts, maps, and photographs from Evans-Pritchard’s research surveys. The introductory section offers an opening description of the Nuer people and a topical overview of the remaining six chapters. The Nuer are an ethnic group who inhabit the northern area of South Sudan (which during Evans-Pritchard’s day was in the central region of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), at the confluence of several major waterways, including the White Nile, Bahr el-Ghazal, and Sobat Rivers. Evans-Pritchard offers a brief assessment of their territory and of his experiences there, making particular note of the difficulties he faced in getting accepted in Nuer society.

Chapter 1 focuses on the role of cattle in Nuer culture, as cattle husbandry is one of the foundational features of their daily life. Raising cattle is not only a source of dietary nutrition (largely in the form of milk), but it also provides the defining idiom in which many of the values of Nuer life are expressed. Cattle are the main form of wealth and the object of most of the raids and wars conducted in their territory, as well as being a medium of exchange in many circumstances, such as marriage and the mediation of disputes.

In Chapter 2, Evans-Pritchard focuses on the ecological influences that shape Nuer culture and keep it in a state of equilibrium. The environment which they call home—a flat mixture of swampland and savannah—characterized by clay soils and a maze of river channels, is better adapted to cattle husbandry than to horticulture, and thus the environment reinforces the Nuer predilection for raising cattle as their main form of livelihood. Further, the annual cycle of dry seasons and wet seasons, which in their territory rise to the level of annual floods and droughts, requires a mode of transhumance rather than migration or fixed residency. The back-and-forth movements which characterize each year add certain restraints to Nuer culture, such as restrictions on the size of herds, which in turn enable their society to maintain a relatively egalitarian footing.

In Chapter 3, Evans-Pritchard approaches abstract issues of time and space, recording both the cultural details of the Nuer’s calendrical system as well as the conceptual framework in which time itself is understood. After noting that the Nuer use a lunar calendar which is divided into two main sections that roughly correspond to the annual cycles of dry and wet, he suggests that the Nuer conceive of time not so much as a conceptual medium that can be measured, used, or wasted (as in the common Western view), but rather as the interrelationship of social events. Similarly, he argues that space in Nuer culture is conceived of not so much in measurable units of distance as it is in the social distance between various groups (tribal segments or lineages) and their corresponding overlay onto villages and territories.

Chapter 4 deals with the Nuer’s political arrangements. The Nuer are divided into tribes, some of which live to the west of the White Nile and some to the east, These tribes, which form the largest political units of Nuer life, are further subdivided into primary, secondary, and tertiary sections, all the way down to the level of individual villages. While these tribal units provide social and political identifications, they are not structurally centered around a government or administration. Their system runs without political officers like monarchs or centralized leaders, although one set of figures, called the leopard-skin chiefs, serve as impartial mediators in disputes.

After the political system, the second social structure Evans-Pritchard’s observes is the lineage system, discussed in Chapter 5. Nuer lineage is defined by agnatic relationships—that is, genealogical relations traced back through a male line of ancestors. The largest lineage group is that of the clan. A clan is not coterminous with a tribe—the former is a kinship system that does not include territorial considerations, while the latter is a political system that includes territory, and each system provides values for different circumstances in Nuer life and society. Clans are subdivided into smaller and smaller kinship groups (called maximal, major, minor, and minimal lineages).

After the political and genealogical systems (tribes and clans), a third set of social structures which offer group-identification values among the Nuer is the age-set system, which constitutes the focus of Chapter 6. This system applies only to adult men, who are inducted into cohorts of their contemporaries at their initiation into manhood. Each age-set thus comprises all Nuer men of a certain age, which are differentiated from the age-sets above and below them (similar to the Western trend of separating contemporary cohorts into generations like “Boomers,” “Gen X,” “Millennials,” and so on). Despite these different ways of providing social differentiation through tribal, clan, and age-set groups, Nuer society is fundamentally egalitarian, with no significant class stratification. All these ways of considering group identity—tribes, clans, and age-sets—work together to form a coherent, explanatory whole which gives each Nuer member a sense of place and a role in their society.