In 1930, Edward Evans-Pritchard, then a lecturer in anthropology at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, set off for the marshes of the Upper Nile in the Sudan, at that time a colony jointly administered by Egypt and Great Britain. His goal was to live among and study the Nuer, a pastoral people who spoke a Nilotic language. Greeted by the Nuer with suspicion and hostility--the colonial government had just launched a punitive expedition against them--Evans-Pritchard slowly gained their confidence.

Evans-Pritchard focused on the Nuer's religious practices. Unlike previous anthropologists who tended to focus almost exclusively on kinship relations, he examined the more complicated connections between social structure and religion. In his books The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (1940), Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer(1951), and Nuer Religion (1956), Evans-Pritchard helped pioneer the argument that religious rites and...