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

The second book ,The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People  was written in 1940 by Evans Pritchard.The Nuer are semi-nomadic cattle herdsmen living in marsh and savannah country in the southern Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.They form a congeries of tribes and since they have no chiefs and no legal institutions  the task which seemed to be of importance was to discover the principle of their tribal or political integration.

Nuer had a very simple material culture and were dependent on their environment and it became clear that the pursuit of a pastoral life in difficult conditions made a fairly wide political order necessary if they were to maintain their way of life.This political order is provided by the tribal structure.A study of the different local communities within a Nuer tribe revealed the fact  that each is identified politically with a lineage and that all these lineages are branches of a single clan.Each of the territorial divisions of tribe is thus coordinated with a corresponding branch of this dominant clan so that relations between the parts of a tribe both their separateness and their unity are conceptualized and expressed within a framework of values of descent.

Durkheim and Social Anthropology as discussed by Evans Pritchard

The writings of Emile Durkheim  had a greater and more direct influence on social anthropology.He is the central figure in the history of its development both on account of his general sociological theories and his application with remarkable insight to the study of primitive societies.According to Durkheim social facts cannot be explained in terms of individual psychology if only because they exist outside and apart from individual minds.A language is there before an individual is born into the society which speaks it and it will be there after he is dead.He merely learns to speak it as his ancestors did and as his descendants will.It is a social fact which can be understood in its relation to other facts of the same order, as part of a social system and in terms of its functions in the maintenance of that system.