ABSTRACT
Edward Evans-Pritchard was heavily influenced by the philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who in turn drew upon the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim. Evans-Pritchard acknowledged his debts to French scholarship. The British social anthropologist Mary Douglas adds that in his research agenda he drew extensively upon interdisciplinary contributions to the contemporary understanding of knowledge. Evans-Pritchard also acknowledged work by the philosopher Eugenio Rignano on experience and selective attention. He acknowledged some of the work that influenced him, in Witchcraft itself he does not mention contemporary debates or theorists of any kind. Bronislaw Malinowski's functionalist analysis of magic was also an important precedent for Witchcraft. He observed that in the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea, magical rites accompanied dangerous open-sea fishing, while lagoon fishing went unremarked. In the early 1930s, Evans-Pritchard did address his forebears directly outside Witchcraft, critiquing first Tylor and Frazer, and then Levy-Bruhl-but he did not mention Malinowski.
