ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropology was preoccupied with a central question: In what way was "primitive, irrational" man different from "modern, scientific" man. The field's dominant theory was one of evolutionism: the idea that cultures existed on a linear spectrum of development, from primitivism to scientific modernity. The cultures of "primitive" or "savage" peoples such as the Azande were thought to directly mirror those of modern Western Europe's forebears. The former were considered "pre-logical"-even incomprehensible-while the latter demonstrated post-Enlightenment rationality. Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote in a well-established tradition of social anthropology of religion, but pioneered, along with his one-time mentor Bronislaw Malinowski, the functionalist fieldwork project. During his education, the seminal figures in the academic scholarship of religion had been Edward Tylor and James Frazer. Frazer adhered to Tylor's cultural evolutionism, arguing that primitive magic was inevitably supplanted by religion, which in turn gave way to rationalist science.
