ABSTRACT
Evans-Pritchard was committed to empirical research, and from his perspective, his argument could be only as good as its evidence. His prolonged passages of ethnographic observation, many of which were cut from the text in the more popular 1976 edition of Witchcraft, testified to his notion of anthropological evidence itself. His intellectual achievement in the context of his time was considerable. In the 1920s and 1930s, the discipline of anthropology in Britain was in a process of evolution and uncertainty-it consisted of just a few pioneers, most of whom huddled round a seminar table at the London School of Economics. World War II swiftly intervened, during which time Evans-Pritchard served in the British army in the Sudan. The specifics of Witchcraft have disappeared in the subsequent century of life in the Southern Sudan, and the potency of Evans-Pritchard's argument today rests on his theoretical contribution rather than on the modern accuracy of his ethnographic findings.
