The Nuer A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

E-130: Oxford: Clarendon Press. Very Good in Good dust jacket. 1940. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, UK, 1940. 271 pgs. Illustrated with 29 plates, 15 illustrations, 3 maps. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (front panel is detached front the spine). Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. This pioneering book of cultural anthropology, written in the mid-World War years by one of the true pioneers of the field, provides insightful and detailed information about the life of a pre-modern society of Sudanese living along the Upper Nile, the Nuer. Evans-Pritchard spent considerable time in the field investigating the Nuer, learning their language, tweezing out their remarkably complex culture and society, and analyzing their relationship to an unforgiving ecology, their economy based on cattle raising, their structure of family and tribal descent. The chapter that explores the Nuer management of and dependence on cattle raising alone is worth the book's purchase price. Most of all, Evans-Pritchard makes the reader aware of the complexities and sophistication in a pre-modern; native culture and society, bereft of writing, most private possessions, law, and institutionalized political, economic and social leadership. E-130; 9.1 X 6.6 X 1.1 inches; 271 pages .