The Nuer

The Nuer is E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 ethnography of Nuer social and political organization in what is now South Sudan. It describes a society whose political order rests on kinship, segmentary lineage, and flexible territorial groups.

Nuer people: A Nilotic people of South Sudan and western Ethiopia with shared languages and cultural traditions. The ethnography’s subject is Nuer society, though its focus is political organization rather than a full cultural survey.
Nuer political system: The organization of Nuer political relations through territorial groups, kinship, and shifting alliances. This is the institutional system Evans-Pritchard sets out to explain.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard: A British social anthropologist known for ethnographies of the Azande and Nuer. He conducted the research and wrote The Nuer.
The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People: A 1940 ethnographic companion by E. E. Evans-Pritchard focused on Nuer livelihood, kinship, and social institutions. This companion volume gives fuller attention to social life beyond the political analysis of The Nuer.
Segmentary lineage: A kinship system in which descent groups combine or divide into larger and smaller units in response to circumstances. Evans-Pritchard used this model to explain how Nuer groups formed shifting political alliances.
Segmentary opposition: A pattern in which groups unite against outsiders while remaining divided among themselves at closer levels. The book describes Nuer political alignment as changing with the scale of conflict.
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: A condominium administered by Britain and Egypt from 1899 until Sudanese independence in 1956. The Nuer communities studied by Evans-Pritchard lived within this colonial territory.
The Nuer of the Southern Sudan: A 1956 ethnographic study by Diedrich Westermann concerning Nuer society and language. Westermann’s work offers a separate account against which Evans-Pritchard’s portrayal can be compared.
Lineage: A descent group whose members trace ancestry through a line of related forebears. Lineages provide the kinship structure from which the book’s political segments are formed.
Blood feud: A cycle of retaliatory violence between families or groups following a killing or serious injury. Feud and compensation reveal how conflict is regulated where no central authority enforces law.

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