1 The Awkward Social Science? Anthropology on Schools, Elections, and Revolution

As an anthropologist of religion and ritual I am conscious of a duty to follow custom, and it is the custom on occasions like these to begin by invoking the ancestors. Of Oxford ancestors, the two who tower over the field are A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans-Pritchard.1 A French reviewer of my first monograph was kind enough to see in it the influence of Evans-Pritchard.2 Evans-Pritchard, as many of you will be aware, gave an inaugural lecture in which he praised and endorsed the explicitly comparative and positivistic view of anthropology of his predecessor, Radcliffe-Brown. Later, he changed his mind and decided that anthropology should be seen as a kind of cultural translation and that therefore anthropology belongs properly with the humanities. In his Marett Memorial Lecture of 1950 he famously declared that “social anthropology is a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art”; consequently “it studies societies as moral systems and not as natural systems … [it] seeks patterns and not scientific laws…[and] interprets rather than explains”3 – for anthropologists at the time this must have come as a shocking and iconoclastic retreat from the conventional positio