The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People

The Nuer conception of time is determined by social functions tied to the annual movements from village to camp. While this roughly coincides with the wet and dry seasons, the temporal values of the annual calendar are more closely related to social features than environmental ones. The year is broadly divided into two seasons, tot and mai, which track the periods from the peak to the trough of annual rainfall, and each has a further marginal season attached to it (jiom with mai and rwil with tot). The Nuer also conceive of their year as being divided into two periods of cieng and wec, which correspond to village life and camp life, but which are not exact corollaries for tot and mai. The year is further subdivided into 12 lunar months, but while the names of these months are broadly agreed upon, most Nuer refer to the lunar periods with reference to the activities which take place within them (such as the time of early camps, weeding, harvesting, etc.), rather than by using the months’ proper names. Similarly, past years are not recounted by numbers or names, but rather by significant social events, the accession of a particular age-set, or references to the location of a camp in a particular year.

Evans-Pritchard expresses appreciation for the way Nuer culture appears to relate to time: “I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves […]. Nuer are fortunate” (103). This concept, of time being ordered according to events that correlate with structural relationships in Nuer society, is referred to as “structural time,” which is itself a reflection of “structural distance” in Nuer culture. Structural distance—“the distance between groups of persons in a social system” (110)—touches not only on social structures like age-sets, but on the use of physical space in Nuer society.

The most basic unit of space in the Nuer system is the village and its outlying fields. A village can range from 50 people to several hundred, and may include a cluster of several hamlets, which are circles of huts around a cattle byre. By comparison, camps range from just a few households at the beginning of the season to several thousand at its peak, especially in areas with plentiful water. At the other end of the range of physical distance from villages is the tribal territory, which can span very wide areas along the rivers and their floodplains. While Nuer feel stronger attachments to their village than to their tribe, they will join in united action if the tribal lands are threatened in any way.

Evans-Pritchard’s attention to the Nuer’s sense of identity based on opposition, underscores his thematic focus on relativity in social groupings. Even at the scale of Nuer identity itself, the conception of their own ethnic and cultural uniqueness is shaped in regard to their sense of distinction from neighboring groups, like the Dinka. The Dinka are nearest to the Nuer in terms of culture and language, and are the Nuer’s most common adversary in raiding and war. Dinka are classified as Jaang, people groups in close cultural proximity to the Nuer, as opposed to the Bar (cattleless groups who live nearby) or the Jur, those groups who live far away from Nuerland.

The idea of identity and opposition lies at the root of Nuer self-designations, and Evans-Pritchard notes that at most levels of Nuer group identity (particularly the broader, less local ones), identity is primarily a matter of being part of a group that is in opposition to another group. For example, tribal identity is most clearly expressed in circumstances when the whole tribe is threatened by another tribe. Group associations are thus relative to the circumstances in view; a person will self-identify as a member of a tribe in certain circumstances, but in others—such as when a smaller segment of their tribe is in opposition to their own segment—they will not identify with their tribe, but with their segment.

Chapter 3 concludes the first of Evans-Pritchard’s two-part focus on describing the modes of livelihood of the Nuer people. While most of the material in Chapters 1-3 is descriptive in nature, Evans-Pritchard also frequently takes the opportunity to draw connections from his observations to various principles of sociological theory.