ABSTRACT
Evans-Pritchard's studies ranged from religion to magic, kinship, social organization, and politics, united by a fascination with the rapidly changing peoples of Africa in the colonial-era twentieth century. The social anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that Evans-Pritchard was broadly preoccupied with the construction of a sociology of knowledge. The anthropologist J. A. Barnes notes that, despite his disagreements with the pioneer of functionalism Bronislaw Malinowski and the advocate of structural-functionalism Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, disparate passages in Evans-Pritchard's work have been used to support various types of functionalism and structural-functionalism. Witchcraft's significance in the context of his work is that it captures a particular ahistorical style in anthropology pre-World War II. Barnes argues, "the sparse style in which The Nuer is written makes it easy for the busy or lazy reader to fall into the trap of treating the Nuer as if they lived in some timeless anthropological never-never land rather than in the Sudan of the early twentieth century".
