S/S/38. Compare and contrast 2 anthropological accounts of politics and violence among the Nuer of Sudan. What do the differences (and similarities) between these accounts tell us about how anthropologists approach war and violence?

This essay will present and analyse the approaches of Evans-Pritchards (1940) in The Nuer and Hutchinson (1996) in Nuer Dilemmas. They present two very different accounts of the Nuers political institutions and the use of violence in society, shaped both by the changing nature of Nuer society throughout the twentieth century and by their different anthropological approaches.