ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a conflate two different dimensions of anthropological inquiry—the properties of the ethnographic text and the eventlike qualities of expressive performance—by addressing the form that events take in major anthropological texts. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer and Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques both claim to address the underlying form that structures events—The Nuer in the political model of segmentation, Tristes Tropiques, more indirectly, through the suggestive analogy between the experience of travel and the rite of passage. The chapter suggests that their own textual form structures one's perception of how those events actually work. It examines a larger set of segmentary practices, and their formal structures are means of enacting or actualizing the sense of cultural relativity that, ostensibly. Evans-Pritchard's study of Nuer sociology acknowledges the political aspects of Nuer life in the absence of bureaucratic government.
