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.
