ABSTRACT
Manchester University does not require its professors to give inaugural lectures, and though I have to introduce a new subject to the University, I have not the opportunity within its walls to state officially and publicly how social anthropology approaches its problems. When your Society honoured me with a request for a lecture, I felt it was an occasion which should serve as an inaugural lecture. I was therefore pleased when your Committee selected, from the list of lectures I offered it, a subject which would allow me to present, partly through my own field research, some reflections on a classic study by my colleague, Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard of Oxford—his study of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Tonight I concentrate on one aspect of that study—the form which scepticism takes in primitive society.
From Memoirs of the Manchester Literary Society, 1949–50, 91(5): 73–98. Copyright © 1949 by Max Gluckman. Reprinted by permission of the author. Max Gluckman is Professor of Social Anthropology, Manchester University.
