Content area
Full text
Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. SHARON HUTCHINSON. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (A Centennial Book), 1996; 408 pp.
Nuer Dilemmas is one of the most significant ethnographies to appear in recent years. Anthropologists have waited a long time for a study of the Nuer that builds upon and goes beyond Evans-Pritchard's classic monographs, and Hutchinson does not disappoint. As she notes,
with the possible exception of the "Trobriand Islanders," made famous by Malinowski, "the Nuer" have been more widely cited, discussed, analyzed, and theorized (p. 21)
than any other society in the anthropological literature. Evans-Pritchard's studies continue to be assigned in both undergraduate and graduate anthropology courses, if only because so many disciplinary debates in the social sciences were influenced by them. But given that Evans-Pritchard's works were synchronic and functionalist-the practice of the day-and were intended to illustrate fundamental principles of social coherence and social reproduction, students of anthropology have had virtually no sense of the Nuer as historical actors. Hutchinson has changed all that, not by debunking EvansPritchard, but by engaging his work in a fruitful intellectual conversation and by focusing on how the Nuer live within powerful, rapidly changing historical, global, and regional contexts. This is a historical ethnography through and through, acutely sensitive to the ongoing value of Evans-Pritchard's work, but wholly committed to the need for a contemporary treatment of Nuer society free of the constraints and flaws of structural-functionalism.
The Nuer that Hutchinson describes are anything but isolated from the historical turmoil of Sudan. Nor were the Nuer that Evans-Pritchard studied, but he had no theoretical reason to integrate a study of Nuer...