Witchcraft Oracles and Magic Among the Azande

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (Foreword by C.G. Seligman)

Editore: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Oxford UK,, 1972

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Octavo; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine titles and decoration; 558pp., with a monochrome frontispiece, maps, 33 monochrome plates and illustrations likewise. Moderate wear; shaken; spine extremities softened; text block edges lightly toned and top edge dusted with some pen scribbles; light offset to the endpapers; previous owners' names in ink to the front endpapers; some pencilled ticks to the contents pages. Dustwrapper lightly rubbed and edgeworn; some mild chipping to the spine panel extremities and flap-turns; spine panel sunned; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Postage quoted is for a standard format octavo book. Final charges may vary depending on size and weight. At the London School of Economics, Evans-Pritchard came under the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and especially Charles Gabriel Seligman, the founding ethnographer of the Sudan. His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the London School of Economics and conduct research in Azande and Bongo land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer. This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence. After his return to Oxford, he continued his research on Nuer. It was during this period that he first met Meyer Fortes and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Evans-Pritchard began developing Radcliffe-Brown's program of structural-functionalism. As a result, his trilogy of works on the Nuer (The Nuer, Nuer Religion, and Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer) and the volume he coedited entitled African Political Systems came to be seen as classics of British social anthropology. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral - some would say 'relativist' - stance on the 'correctness' of Zande beliefs about causation. His work focused in on a known psychological effect known as psychological attribution. Evans-Pritchard recorded the tendencies of Azandes to blame or attribute witchcraft as the cause of various mis-happenings. The most notable of these issues involved the deaths of eight Azande people due to the collapse of a termite infested door frame. Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well-known through philosophy of science and 'rationality' debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn and especially Paul Feyerabend.

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• Titolo: Witchcraft Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
• Editore: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Oxford UK,
• Data di pubblicazione: 1972