ABSTRACT
Edward Evans-Pritchard's main aims in Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande were both descriptive and analytical. First, the text was an attempt to use ethnographic findings, where others had not, to methodically describe a system of thought and belief that seemed alien to most Europeans of his day. Second, Evans-Pritchard wanted to challenge the prevailing view-in academia and elsewhere-that there was a fundamental divide between "primitive" people and "civilized" people. Evans-Pritchard lived among the Azande in Southern Sudan on and off between 1926 and 1930, staying in a settlement with a Zande servant named Kamanga. His analysis of micro-social context creates space both for human beings and social laws. Meyer Fortes, his friend and colleague at the London School of Economics, describes how with Evans-Pritchard "the sense that in the field one would be dealing with living people, with named, idiosyncratic individuals and not with abstract customs or patterns of social organization, came through more immediately than with Malinowski".
