In the preface to Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande,
Evans-Pritchard wrote, “If I have paid no attention to Zande
history this is not because I consider it unimportant but because
I consider it so important that I desire to record it in detail elsewhere” (1937). In 1971 he published The Azande: History and Political Institutions. It is an incredibly complex description of
Azande expansion during the 150 years before colonial subjugation, full of battles, royal intrigues, and struggles of succession. But in addition to the historical detail, Evans-Pritchard
outlined why history was important for anthropology:
Anthropological theory often rests on a basis of studies of
primitive societies for which there is little recorded history. In
the case of African kingdoms, such as those of the Azande, to
leave out the historical dimension is to deprive ourselves of
knowledge that is both ascertainable and necessary for an understanding of political organizations which have always, to a
greater or lesser extent, been transformed by European rule before anthropologists have commenced their study of them, and
which, furthermore, have been shaped by events that took
place long before Europeans appeared on the scene. That the
Azande had been expanding and . . . conquering and assimilating dozens of foreign peoples, as well as taking part in a
long series of dynastic wars among themselves, for at least 150
years before Europeans imposed their administrations is
surely a fact which cannot be left out of consideration in a
study of their institutions and culture. (1971:267)
Such common sense struck at the heart of Radcliffe-Brown’s
form of social anthropology; it also formed the basis of EvansPritchard’s later research agenda. Evans-Pritchard contended
that social history could serve as a model for social anthropology. He argued that there are three levels of anthropological inquiry of increasing abstraction, each with direct parallels in
historical methods (1950:122). First, the anthropologist attempts
to understand another society and translate it to his own. The
only difference between anthropology and history is that the anthropologist’s data are produced from direct fieldwork experience while the historian relies upon the written record; this was
merely “a technical, not a methodological, difference.” Second,
the anthropologist and historian attempt to make their subjects
“sociologically intelligible.” Evans-Pritchard writes,
But even in a single ethnographic study the anthropologist
seeks to do more than understand the thought and values of
primitive people and translate them to his own culture. He
seeks also to discover the structural order of the society, the
patterns which, once established, enable him to see it as a
whole, as a set of interrelated abstractions. Then the society is
not only culturally intelligible, as it is, at the level of consciousness and action, for one of its members or for the foreigner who has learnt its mores and participates in its life, but
also becomes sociologically intelligible. (1950:121)
And finally, “the anthropologist compares the social structures his analysis has revealed in a wide range of societies”
(Evans-Pritchard 1950:122). Thus, Evans-Pritchard was not engaged in historical particularism, but based his comparison on
social structures as documented from a historical perspective
with abundant ethnographic detail.