In the intervening years, as she indicates in a prologue, the image of the Nuer as a pastoral people in harmony with their environment has been replaced, in global media awareness, with a picture of the entire Southern Sudan as a disaster zone, decimated by famine and conflict. The disaster is real: many Nuer have lost their cattle; a good proportion have been driven, along with other southerners, to the periphery of northern Sudanese towns, forming a landless sub-proletariat, disfranchised and abused; Nuer children have been bought and sold as agricultural labour for mechanized farms in the North; many young Nuer men have taken to the bush as fighters in one or other of the rebel groups that now control most of the rural area of the South.

Yet the Nuer are not a hapless group of primitives submerged by the world system. Nuer Dilemmas shows in intriguing detail how their communities have both resisted and incorporated the fractured modernity of a malformed state. It also demonstrates the special qualities that social anthropology still has to offer in representing the durable logic of culture.

Revisionist ethnography of Southern Sudan has been a long time coming. This is partly because the conditions of fieldwork have been so difficult and partly because E-P’s oeuvre, time-bound though it is, still retains a remarkable degree of authority.  And Nuer themselves have not demurred from his account of their culture and political system. Educated Nuer continue to emerge against all odds from the eroding school and university system of Sudan, and none of them has formally challenged the image that is presented in the Nuer trilogy.

The most substantial modification of E-P’s view hitherto has been the work of a historian, Douglas H. Johnson, whose Nuer Prophets (reviewed in the TLS, June 2, 1995) is an immaculately detailed history of the institution of prophecy among the Nuer and its role in the successive conflicts that have beset them—conflicts with the colonial authorities, with post-independence governments, with other ethnic groups in the South and among the Nuer themselves. Johnson’s book shifted the Nuer from the eternal present tense of classical ethnography into historical time, while also engaging in a theoretically sophisticated dialogue with indigenous concepts of history, a project that E-P, though he was unable to carry it out himself, would certainly have applauded.

Updating the ethnographic record

Hutchinson’s book, the product of a two-year sojourn in eastern and western Nuerland in the 1980s—a period of fieldwork that was supplemented by subsequent visits to Nuer communities in the diaspora and the war zone—tackles the legacy of Evans-Pritchard more directly. Respectfully but unremittingly, Hutchinson demonstrates the extent to which the Nuer trilogy is constrained by E-P’s determination to provide a systematic account of social institutions that were themselves in a state of flux, and by his tendency to identify with the male representatives of notable lineages. His account, she shows, is also limited by his minimal knowledge of the Nuer groups living to the west of the Nile, in the heart of Southern Sudan, groups that have had, until recently, significantly less interchange with the world at large.

Lineage diagram from The Nuer by E.E. Evans-Pritchard

At the time of E-P’s fieldwork in the 1930s, she points out, Nuerland had only recently been brought under colonial control. Its subjugation involved several punitive expeditions, climaxing, in 1927, with the bombardment by the Royal Air Force of the so-called pyramid of Ngungdeng, a huge earth mound built by the followers of a Nuer prophet who had been at the forefront of non-cooperation with colonial rule. These events are scarcely mentioned by E-P, yet the fraught situation prevailing as a result of this and other interventions by the authorities under whose aegis he worked was arguably the chief factor framing his research.

For Hutchinson, doing fieldwork half a century later, Nuer interpretations of such external events, and incorporation into their sense of themselves, form the principal subject of her inquiry. One of the many engaging aspects of Nuer Dilemmas is the sense Hutchinson gives of the process of field research, of the technique anthropologists call participant observation. This consists in large part of the art of conversation. There is a vivid sense of her interaction with thinking, talking, joking Nuer men and women. They are engaged in constant debate, like other people in the world, about the meaning of the new things in their lives—guns and money, state power, literacy and the changing relations between the sexes.

Hutchinson describes the elaborate joking relationships she established with village-dwelling Nuer—based on her own ambiguous status as a married woman, yet one who was puzzlingly unaccompanied by a spouse or children—and how these enabled her to break through gender stereotypes. She also describes her discussions with educated Nuer, including the Commander-in-Chief of the Southern Sudan Independence Army, a largely Nuer rebel faction that currently administers large tracts of Nuer territory. Nuer Dilemmas does not seek to impose a false coherence on the debates that rage among the Nuer about their future, but by means of the classic virtues of anthropological research—detailed linguistic analysis, subtle contextualization and intimate, telling anecdote—it provides a map of the myriad paths that cross and recross in the field of social change.

The research on which this book is based is an achievement in itself. Nuerland is a harsh place to live even in peacetime. To survive is noteworthy. To produce a book like this, an outstanding contribution to the already remarkable scholarly literature on the peoples of Southern Sudan, is a triumph. Fortunate is the outsider who has the chance to live among the Nuer. But fortunate also the Nuer, to have such outsiders live with them. ★