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Through the reading of Sharon Hutchinson's monograph on the nuer, this article explores the misunderstandings between contemporary anthropology and the modern classics. it tries to identify invisible genealogies that go back to the British functionalists, particularly to Evans-Pritchard, and minimizes the explicit oppositions between the present and the past of anthropology . it reveals that some classical notions are detectable in non-explicit ways among those who claim to reject them and, at the same time, that contemporary concerns have their roots in modern ethnographies. The author shows that static approaches -- as the one by Evans-Pritchard on the nuer -- had a historical meaning and recalls that British social anthropology had its own theoretical and methodological answers to the transformations of African contexts under colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]