What was Evans Pritchard's major contribution to anthropology ?

EP was very much concerned withn

- The problem of 'cultural translationation' (kuper, 1983) -The need to understand history in order to understand anthropology - Saw anthropology not as a natural science but as part of the humanities in contrast to Radcliffe Brown.. -E-P studied societies as moral systems and not as natural systems: we should not seek to discover patterns of scientific laws, we should interpret culture! -Thus challenged notions of rationality when studying witchcraft -Rooted in the idea of the 'relativity of ideas'// emphasising the wave of reflexivity that would come students e.g Talal Asad

His worked focused on

-EP recorded the tendencies of Azandes to blame or attribute witchcraft as the cause of various mis-happenings. - he called into question the evolutionary teleologies that suggested that native people were inferior to Europeans.

Evans-Pritchard's Text

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) -Is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation