A deeply influential book of early anthropology, Evans Pritchard elaborates on Emile Durkheim’s theory that every society
has its own internal logic and that no human society is essentially irrational and will structure itself according to its own social structure. Pritchard’s study of the practice of
witchcraft as performed by the Azande people looks at the logical form of behavior in order to solve certain social problems that their society faces in daily life. Pritchard notes that Azande are aware of the natural causes of
misfortune that they attribute witchcraft to, but that the Azande people have a clear distinction between natural and supernatural causes of misfortune in their daily life and have a complex structure of how witchcraft works within their society. Rather than necessarily being the cause of the misfortune, witchcraft is used to explain misfortunes in socially relevant terms. It tries to explain the unique forms such misfortunes take, forms that cannot be explained in a rational manner. Thus it is not the event itself, but the variety of chances that cause such an event to happen. Evans Pritchard’s study of witchcraft in this society is a study of social mechanisms which create a certain cultural system. His work defies former concepts of primitive society’s illogical structures versus the Western, and therefore more modern, more rational, cultures obviously logical structure. By looking at how this so-called ‘primitive’ culture formed a system of what was considered a backward belief in witchcraft, Evans Pritchard explains how such a cultural system works within the society and how the people of that culture are not irrational, chaotic beings but rather deeply rational and logical in their thought process. This book is important for a knowledge of the evolution of anthropology in the twentieth century. By describing the Azade people’s cultural system through social terms rather than natural, Evans Pritchard helped to carve the way for a more complex view of social and cultural anthropology.