The poet, the missionary, and the sacred spears

Chapter 8 explores Evans-Pritchard’s Kenyan Luo fieldwork and photography, and in particular the fascinating insight it provides into the role of Walter E. Owen (1879–1945), a significant missionary figure in the region. As Evans-Pritchard notes, his survey was made possible by the local knowledge and networks already established by Owen, and the cooperation of local Luo people came about largely out of their high regard for him. The chapter argues that what is most striking about Evans-Pritchard’s record of his relatively short six-week visit to Nyanza in 1936 is his readiness to photograph Luo people as he found them, mostly in Western dress. The photographic record provides a counterpoint to his written account of the visit, Luo Tribes and Clans (1949), which pays almost no attention to colonial influences on Luo social life or political organization.

The participant-photographer

Chapter 7 examines Evans-Pritchard’s photographic record of the Nuer rite of gorot, witnessed in 1936, and raises questions about the relationship between photography and participant-observation as a core research method in early twentieth-century anthropology. The chapter explores the question of why Evans-Pritchard’s record of this ritual is characterized by a sustained visual engagement with two distinct stages of the rite, and why other aspects of the ceremony are not recorded. In order to explore this question, the chapter proposes the model of Evans-Pritchard as ‘participant-photographer’—a model that understands his involvement with the ritual as being composed of periods of photographic engagement interposed with observation and note-taking. Placing Evans-Pritchard back into the field through a careful examination of his fieldwork records of a particular event enables us to gain a new insight into not just his fieldwork methods, but his proximity, involvement, and perspective on key elements of the ritual as they unfolded.

Double alienation

The starting point for this chapter is the observation that the photographs that Evans-Pritchard took of the Azande are quite different in nature from those he took of the Nuer. This opens up a complex area of photographic investigation. Why should they be so different, given that they were taken by the same fieldworker, and at a similar time? The argument put forward is that Evans-Pritchard’s fieldwork photography is marked by differently patterned indigenous responses to the camera. The chapter argues that such differences as exist boil down to very different historical and cultural relations to outside influences within Zande and Nuer society in the early 1930s, and that this is inscribed within the archival record, played out in modes of self-presentation to Evans-Pritchard’s camera.

Visuality and textuality

Chapter 3 examines a sequence of twelve photographs that Evans-Pritchard took of his assistant Kamanga’s initiation into the Zande corporation of witch doctors. I consider them from the perspective of his core fieldwork methodology, that of writing vernacular texts, making a series of comparisons between these two fieldwork methods. I also explore the way in which the photographs allow us to understand Evans-Pritchard’s movement in the ritual space during the ceremony, and the way that his photographic engagement in the event was balanced with his own participation as the sponsor of Kamanga. The chapter also examines the way in which some of the images were published as a sequence, and the way in which Evans-Pritchard used them within the monograph to establish his argument.

Photographs are to think with

Chapter 1 sets out the main arguments and contexts of the book. It begins with a discussion of why using the photographic archive to explore the fieldwork on which Evans-Pritchard’s celebrated writings was based is so transformative. It discusses the relationship between anthropology and colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Evans-Pritchard’s equivocal positioning within this as someone directly funded by the colonial administration and yet having a critical relationship to it. It explores the way in which Evans-Pritchard sought to move anthropology away from the natural sciences and towards history and the humanities. It compares his fieldwork photography to other anthropologists of the period and challenges the assumption that anthropology in the period was not a visual endeavour.

Survivals, surveys, and struggles

Chapter 2 sketches Evans-Pritchard’s early career and intellectual influences, before setting the scene for his first piece of fieldwork among the Ingessana people in Sudan by describing the reasons why his teacher Seligman asked him to continue an ethnographic survey there, including his interest in diffusionist ideas of ancient Egyptian cultural influence, as well as Tylorian survivals. It then goes on to outline some of reasons why Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski fell out shortly after his return from fieldwork among the Azande. It then goes on to describe Evans-Pritchard’s other ethnographic surveys for Seligman among a number of cultural groups, and the way in which he used photography as part of the work.

Akobo Realism

This chapter explores Evans-Pritchard’s two and a half months’ fieldwork among the Anuak in 1935 when he believed no further opportunity to return to the Nuer might be possible, and after his planned trip to Ethiopia was aborted due to the invasion of the country by Italian forces. In Anuak country he walked 400–500 miles along the Akobo River, taking over 200 photographs and assembling a substantial artefact collection. The chapter engages with Geertz’s theme of Evans-Pritchard’s literary ‘optical idiom’ by comparing Evans-Pritchard’s photography with his anthropological writings on the Anuak. The analysis reveals a completely new understanding of the immediate contexts of colonial manipulation among the Anuak leading up to and during his visit in 1935, as rival chiefs were played off against each other by the colonial administration.

Image, archive, and monograph

Chapter 5 examines the relationship between Evans-Pritchard’s use of photographs in The Nuer, the way he draws upon such visual evidence in his texts as part of the overall argument, and whether such visual material asserts the ‘ethnographic authority’ of the anthropologist, as argued by James Clifford. The suggestion by Geertz of a link between the visualizable as a dimension of Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic writing, and the visual presentation of photographs within The Nuer, is an important interplay with which this chapter grapples. I argue for a material history approach that reveals the influence of wider contexts, such as anthropological book production in the 1940s. I also argue that a closer examination of the relative costs and restrictions in sharing or making plates for book illustration during World War II is important to understanding image selection for The Nuer, with many plates reused from journals that had carried his earlier articles.