ABSTRACT
This article is essentially a tribute to the greatest living British anthropologist, Professor Evans-Pritchard of Oxford University, who in 1950 had the temerity to declare in his Marett Lecture, in face of the structural-functionalist orthodoxy of most of his colleagues that he regarded ‘social anthropology as being closer to certain kinds of history than to the natural sciences’ (Evans-Pritchard 1950: 198). This view provoked a storm of protest from the majority of British anthropologists, who held to the position formulated by the late Professor Radcliffe-Brown and his followers, including Evans-Pritchard in his earlier days, that the behaviour and interpersonal relationships observed during fieldwork by anthropologists should be ‘abstracted in the form of structural relationships between social positions and groups and these structural relationships (should) further be abstracted in the form of separate systems: economic, political, kinship, etc.’ (van Velsen 1967: 130). Comparison between such timeless and abstract structures elicited from the rich variety of cultures in different parts of the primitive world was thought to be in thorough accordance with ‘scientific method’. History, according to Radcliffe-Brown, in societies without written records or about which written documents by alien investigators were not available, could never be anything but ‘conjectural history’. Such guesses were almost worthless and much time and energy could be saved, as both Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski asserted, if stress were laid on exposing the functional interconnexions between social positions and institutions as they existed in the ‘ethnographic present’, in the here-and-now of anthropological investigation, or even, as we have seen, in a timeless milieu of structural relationships. Indigenous tales about the past were considered pseudo-history or ‘myth’, and, at least in Malinowski’s view, had the main social function of providing a charter and justification for contemporary institutions and relationships between positions and groups. Much understanding of the nature and functioning of certain kinds of social system was undoubtedly obtained by the use of this so-called ‘synchronic method’. But it led to a widespread devaluation of historical research by British anthropologists, even where an abundance of written documents was available, as in West Africa and India, for example. Since Evans-Pritchard’s Marett Lecture in 1950, and even more pronouncedly since his Simon Lecture at Manchester University in 1960, the trend has been in considerable measure reversed. A stream of historical studies by anthropologists, particularly in African tribal history, has rushed from the presses in the past few years. Professor Jan Vansina, now at Wisconsin University, has even been able to show us how the formerly despised oral tradition can be handled as reliable historical evidence, if it is critically assessed in relation to other sources of knowledge about the past; as he writes (1965: 7–8),
‘[Oral tradition] . . . has to be related to the social and political structure of the peoples who preserve it, compared with the traditions of neighboring peoples, and linked with the chronological indications of genealogies and age-set cycles, of documented contacts with literate peoples, of dated natural phenomena such as famines and eclipses, and of archaeological finds.’
