Christopher Morton - The Anthropological Lens: Rethinking E. E. Evans-Pritchard

When I began research on E. E. Evans-Pritchard in 2003 as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project on the Pitt Rivers Museums South Sudan collections, I little imagined that I would write a book such as this. I owe its existence to the two colleagues who spearheaded that project, Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards, whose encouragement and support I will always be deeply grateful for. The research formed the basis of a subsequent postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, during which time some of the ideas I explore in this book were first published. A section of is based on another article published in Visual Anthropologyin 2009. All of the photographs reproduced are from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, unless otherwise stated, and I am grateful to the museum for permission to reproduce them.

After a detour to work on other topics, this book began to take shape during a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2016, and I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their essential support. I am indebted to many friends and colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere for their help, encouragement, as well as critical feedback over the years, that have shaped the work in many ways, including Perez Achieng, Ahmed Al-Shahi, Angelo Beda, Dominic Byatt, Zoe Cormack, John Evans-Pritchard, Philip Grover, Wendy James, Jok Madut Jok, Douglas Johnson, Patti Langton, Alexander Maitland for permission to reproduce the contents of letters to Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Mike OHanlon, Gilbert Oteyo, Katherine Rose, Bruce Ross-Smith, David Shankland, Andr Singer, Richard Vokes. This book is for Catherine, Blake, and Conrad.