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Paul Rabinow’s essay “Midst anthropology’s problems,” published in Cultural Anthropology in 2001, is both a midpoint and a point of inflection in Rabinow’s intellectual trajectory. It offers a vant...

Erich Rothacker (1888–1965) was a key figure in early twentieth-century philosophy in Germany. In this article, I examine the development of Rothacker’s philosophy of culture from 1907 to 1945. Rot...

When confronted with the task of choosing texts for an undergraduate four-field course in a joint sociology/anthropology department, I elected to teach with Franz Boas’ 1928 text, Anthropology and modern life . Six years in, I have become enamored of the text for teaching undergraduates. This essay examines the question of how an early twentieth-century textbook applies to the questions of the twenty-first century and how Boas continues to play an active role in how anthropological work is presented to the public in sites like the Field Museum of Chicago. Considering Boas’ work on race, nationalism, eugenics, and education enables students and others to see themselves in dialogue with a long four-field tradition in anthropology, and revisiting his legacy as professional anthropologists offers us space to be joyful in our own often-troubled history.

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven.

This paper addresses one of the most controversial issues in cultural anthropology: the conceptual foundations of kinship and the apparent inevitability of ethnocentrism in kinship studies. The field of kinship studies has been in turmoil over the past few decades, repeatedly pronounced dead and then again rising from the ashes and being declared central to human affairs. As this paper argues, the conceptual confusion surrounding ‘kinship’ is to a large extent due to the lack of a clear and rigorous methodology for discovering how speakers of the world’s different languages actually navigate their kinship systems. Building on the author’s earlier work on kinship but taking the analysis much further, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such a methodology can be found in natural semantic metalanguage theory (developed by the author and colleagues), which relies on 65 universal semantic primes and on a small number of universal “semantic molecules,” including ‘mother’ and ‘father’. The paper offers a new mo...

In this paper I outline an integrated framework for the study of culture, called evolutionary cultural anthropology, that highlights culture and its interactions with biology and ecology. Applied research during Ebola outbreaks and several decades of research with hunter-gatherer children of the Congo Basin are utilized to illustrate evolutionary cultural anthropology.

This article discusses privacy and secrecy in relation to the sexual lives of adults with significant disabilities. It compares ideologies and practices of privacy in two Scandinavian countries that diverge dramatically when it comes to sexuality and disability. In Sweden, the sexual lives of adults with disabilities are hindered and blocked by the people the welfare state pays to assist them. In Denmark, those same kinds of assistants facilitate sexual lives. A reason for this difference hinges on how “privacy” is conceptualized and practiced. In Denmark, to label something as “private” configures a particular kind of ethical space of engagement. In Sweden, “private” means “secret,” “off limits,” “beyond the boundary of knowledge or engagement.” This collapse of privacy and secrecy into one another has dire consequences for people with disabilities.

Many aspects of war are deliberately kept secret, but some are so mundane that they simply are not reflected upon. In the face of the brutal mass violence of most wars today, these mundane secrets are not spectacular enough to capture media attention or the observers’ imaginations. They are, in a sense, the unmarked secrets of everyday war. In this article, I address such unmarked secrets of war. Focusing on war-torn northern Uganda, I follow two parallel threads. One is the anthropology of life histories, or my journey into anthropology in conjunction with the stories of a few Ugandan key informants. The second thread exposes the conditions that influence a researcher’s tendency to craft and edit data and experience. In acknowledging the entanglements of the two threads, I focus on storytelling and listening in situations that initially may remain unmarked—and thus silent and even secret—to the outside participant observer. In addition, rather than presenting any straightforward story of the war in north...

The foundations of modern cultural anthropology were laid in the sixteenth century, when European scholars began to shape older forms of comparative ethnology into a new theory of world history. Fo...

This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problematize a long and major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article’s ethnographic site is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develop computerized algorithms that are able to simulate the improvisation styles of past jazz masters and mix them with one another to create new styles of improvisation. The article argues that the technology that allows the scientists to simulate and mix styles is playing an increasingly important role in mediating contemporary forms of sociality over the Internet and that the anthropological tradition that has theorized culture as artistic style has to be reconfigured to account for the dynamic nature of these contemporary forms of sociality not as styles but as st...

1. A Plurality of Foucaultian Inquiries Is there a single area of intellectual inquiry in the humanities and social sciences where the work of Michel Foucault is not taken seriously? Disci- pline, biopolitics, governmentality, power/knowledge, subjectivation, ge- nealogy, archaeology, problematization—these are just a few of the many Foucaultisms that have been adopted in fields such as philosophy, sociol- ogy, cultural anthropology, political science, history, literary studies, area studies, and much else besides. Just a short list of the forms of Foucault's influence would necessarily include certain of his philosophical commit- ments, methodological strategies, discursive resources, and materials for reflection.

Published by American Schools of Oriental Research via Near Eastern Archaeology and copyright of American Schools of Oriental Research. The definitive version of this article is available at: http://0-www.jstor.org.iii.sonoma.edu/stable/10.5615/neareastarch.75.2.0068

In the 2006 Wenner-Gren symposium volume edited by Ribeiro and Escobar and titled World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power, the central question focused on the ways in which cultural anthropology was being challenged and reshaped by “transformations within systems of power.” In this essay, I will explore two propositions: first, that the question can usefully be reversed to examine how the anthropological field is itself a key transformer of those systems of power; and second, that the idea of “world anthropologies” presented in Ribeiro and Escobar can be challenged by expanding it to biological anthropology. In doing so, I suggest that the stimulating pluralization of scientific production can be combined with the (re)construction of a shared world anthropology.

While matters of security have appeared as paramount themes in a post-9/11 world, anthropology has not developed a critical comparative ethnography of security and its contemporary problematics. In this article I call for the emergence of a critical “security anthropology,” one that recognizes the significance of security discourses and practices to the global and local contexts in which cultural anthropology operates. Many issues that have historically preoccupied anthropology are today inextricably linked to security themes, and anthropology expresses a characteristic approach to topics that today must be considered within a security rubric. A focus on security is particularly important to an understanding of human rights in contemporary neoliberal society. Drawing on examples from Latin America and my own work in Bolivia, I track the decline of neoliberalism and the rise of the security paradigm as a framework for organizing contemporary social life. I suggest that security, rather than a reaction to a terrorist attack that “changed everything,” is characteristic of a neoliberalism that predates the events of 9/11, affecting the subjects of anthropological work and shaping the contexts within which that work is conducted.

In this article, we argue for the increased use of panel data in cultural anthropology. Panel data, or repeated measures from the same units of observation at different times, have proliferated across the social sciences, with the exception of anthropology. The lack of panel data in anthropology is puzzling since panel data are well-suited for analyzing continuity and change—central concerns of anthropological theory. Panel data also establish temporal order in causal analysis and potentially improve the reliability and accuracy of measurement. We review how researchers in anthropology and neighboring disciplines have dealt with the unique challenges of collecting panel data and draw lessons for minimizing the adverse consequences of measurement error, for reducing attrition, and for ensuring continuity in management, archiving, documentation, financing, and leadership. We argue that increased use of panel data has the potential to advance empirical knowledge and contribute to anthropological theory.

The history of anthropology, according to George Stocking, represents an argument between Enlightenment and Romantic impulses: on the one hand the universalism of anthropos, on the other the diversitarianism of ethnos. In its structural and relativist emphases, the latter impulse has tended to predominate in social and cultural anthropology. A case can be made for the importance of emphasizing a continuing Enlightenment heritage in social-scientific thought. Introspection provides a methodology for gaining access to universal human truths concerning individual human capacities and conditions. Through the psychically intensive study of the self one accedes to a psychically extensive appreciation of the other, of Everyone. One comes to know the psyche as a constant in human life.

Two key aspects of social and cultural anthropology are comparison and reflexivity. For a genuinely empirical anthropology, these must be mutually engaged. In exploring various kinds of comparison--from formal intercommunal analyses to comparisons between nation-states, between anthropology and its cultural objects, and between anthropological and other kinds of writing--the anthropologist's personal trajectory is critically influential on choices made and paths taken. In contemplating my earliest work in Greece, my decision to compare forms of identity in Greece and Italy, and a recent move to the geographically broader framework offered by including Thailand, I have also had to consider the role of differently situated anthropologists (e.g., local as opposed to foreign), points in career trajectory and developing linguistic competences, and shifting epistemological contexts. As a result, over time, I have found the linkage between comparison and reflexivity increasingly central to the empirical understa...

In this paper, we seek to respond to an article on qualitative research published in the Library Quarterly [1] in which Sandstrom and Sandstrom critique as antiscientific and particularistic [1] contemporary qualitative approaches to research in library and information science (LIS). Specifically, Sandstrom and Sandstrom argue that LIS researchers have misapplied ethnographic methods appropriated from cultural anthropology in ways that subvert the direction and value of current research in LIS. As members of the LIS research community we would ordinarily applaud the promotion of systematicity and rigor as being of fundamental interest and import in LIS scholarship; however, we believe that Sandstrom and Sandstrom are advancing a particular agenda that would weaken, not strengthen, ethnography and studies of culture, history, and society, whoever may carry them out, and that this will not help the LIS research community move toward agendas that link library studies to the social order. Over and above the Sandstroms' apparent epistemological investment in the notion of a single science, what concerns us in particular is the rhetorical ferocity the Sandstroms employ in making their argument. Labeling as "unscrupulous power elites and charlatans" [1, p. 176] those researchers who, in the Sandstroms' view, have abandoned the assumptions that the Sandstroms regard as the basis for the "doing" of a "scientific"

Cultural anthropology in the United States is funda mentally preoccupied with issues of power and domina tion. From past to present, text to context, formal insti tutions to daily life-everywhere we look, it seems, we see the workings of power. Yet there are domains o power we have not fully grasped. One of these is humai reproduction, an arena with both micro(individua childbearing) and macro(population-as-a-whole) dimen sions. Reproduction has suffered a variety of fates in 2oth century anthropology, all discouraging attention to its connections to power. In the field at large, childbearinj has often been naturalized, privatized, and romanti cized-and effectively removed from critical inquiry In the subfields of cultural ecology and demographic anthropology, where reproduction's importance has been recognized, it has often been operationalized, vari abilized, and scientized-and effectively depoliticized Mostly, however, fertility has been simply ignored, lef, to the demographers and not only scientized but alsc decontextualized and universalized-placed in a techno space where nothing anthropological much matters. Michel Foucault, one of the instigators of today'" power preoccupation, identified population as one o two sites of modern biopower (Foucault I978). Whilc anthropologists have devoted great energy to the othe: site-the individual body-they have paid remarkabl; little attention to population writ large. Yet in today'!

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June r995 ttl 1995 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved oo32041~5136o3·ooo3S2..oo The Primacy of the Ethical Propositions for a Militant Anthropology! by Nancy Scheper-Hughes In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti­ cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethi· cal in our dealings with the other. Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag­ ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an· thropology might take. NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.). Born in 1944, she was educated at Berkeley (Ph.D., 19761. She has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at Southern Methodist University, at the University of Cape Town, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her research interests include the application of critical theory to medicine and psychiatry, the anthropology of the body, illness, and suffering, the political economy of the emo­ tions, and violence and terror. Among her publications are Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ire­ land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979l, the edited volume Child Survival: Anthropological Per­ spectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children [Dor­ drecht: D. Reidel, 1987), and Death Without Weeping (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992l. The pres­ ent paper was submitted in final form 25 x 94. I. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Israel Anthropological Association Meetings, Tel Aviv University, on March 23, 1994, where the conference theme was Politically Committed Anthropology. On my return to South Afriea I pre­ sented the paper to my colleagues at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, on May 13, 1994, where it achieved a certain notoriety and generated a strong response, aspects of which have worked their way into this revision. In No­ vember r994 parts of this paper were read at the AAA symposium Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond Intellectual Imperialisms and Parochialisms of the Past (see Winkler 1994:AI8). I am grateful to my Israeli, South African, and North American colleagues for their contributions and criticisms. Finally, at a crucial moment in my failed attempts to make sense of the useless suffering of the multitudes of Northeast Brazilian angel-babies, T. M. S. Evens introduccd me to certain key writings of Emmanuel Levinas [1986}. Although I originally rejected these with the vehemence of the For much of this century cultural anthropology has been concerned with divergent rationalities, with explaining how and why various cultural others thought, reasoned, and lived-in-the-world as they did. Classical anthropo­ logical thinking and practice are best exemplified, per~ haps, in the ~reat witchcraft and rationality debates of decades past. Ideally, modernist cultural anthropology liberated truth from its unexamined Eurocentric and Orientalist presuppositions. But the world, the objects of our study, and consequently, the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. Exploring the cultural logic of witchcraft is one thing. Documenting, as I am now, the burning or necklacing of accused witches, politi~ cal collaborators, and other ne'er-do~wells in belea­ guered South African townships-where a daily toll of charred bodies is a standard feature of news re­ ports-is another. 3 A more womanly-hearted anthropol­ ogy might be concerned not only with how humans think but with how they behave toward each other, thus engaging directly with questions of ethics and power. In South African squatter camps as in the AIDS sana­ toria of Cuba and in the parched lands of Northeast Bra­ zil, I have stumbled on a central dilemma and challenge to cuIrural anthropology, one that has tripped up many a fieldworker before me (for example, Renata Rosaldo [r989:r-2rl in his encounters with Ilongot headhunt­ ers): In bracketing certain Western Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically with a multiplicity of alter­ native truths encoded in our reiRed notion of culture, anthropologists may be suspending the ethical (Buber 1952:147-56) in our dealings with the ((other, espe­ cially those whose vulnerable bodies and fragile lives are at stake. Moreover, what stake can anthropologists expect to have in current political debates in rapidly de­ mocratizing nations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa where newly drafted constitutions and bills of rights-and those of Brazil and South Africa are exem­ unreflexive cultural relativist, Levinas's notion of a pre-cultural moral repugnance toward unnecessary human suffering came back to haunt me with a vengeance, along with the specter of three-year­ old Mercea, who died abandoned by both her mother and her an­ thropologist during Brazilian Carnival celebrations in 1989. 2. Excellent reviews of these debates in anthropology can be found in Mohanty (1989), Hollis and Lukes (1982J, Wilson (1985), and Tambiah (1990J. 3- Here is how the death of suspected police collaborators and witchcs is described in the local white newspaper in Cape Town (my emphasis): Dozen Bodies Removed from Guguletu in Week­ end Casualties ; The charred bodies of seven people, including a 50 year old woman and her teenage daughter, were found in Tho­ koza hostel and Katlehong on Friday. . The burned and blackened bodies of two young men were found at the Mandela squatter camp in Thokoza and another body at Katlehong railway station (Cape Times, September 1993); Another 40 bodies found on the East Rand ; finally, Charred bodies of two witches found in Nyanga (Argus, January 21, 1994l. The women accused of witchcraft had been bound together with rope and were badly burnt. While white deaths counted -as, for example, in the extensive and personal coverage of the white victims of the St. James Church massacre in Cape Town in late July r994-the black victims of township violence were merely counted, recorded as body counts.

Before she died in Berkeley, California, in June 1970, Hortense Powdermaker was actively involved in a study of the Berkeley youth culture and in the preparation of a book-length manuscript on culture, women, and men. This paper touches on the final engagements of Powdermaker, in addition to other, earlier, unpublished and more personal papers. It suggests that the impetus behind Hortense Powdermaker's involvement with the sixties' youth culture was her deep empathy for young people based on her own ability to remain in dialogue with the passionate and romantic "girl" she was in the 1920s. Although Hortense Powdermaker is perhaps less well known today than she was at the time of her death, Powdermaker was a pacesetter, at the forefront of what are today current trends in cultural anthropology: popular culture, the media, and communication; power relations; anthropological feminism; critical self-reflexivity; and the relations of theory to practice and to political praxis.

In I925, the 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on the island of Ta'u, in American Samoa, to start her first fieldwork. Her ambitious project was to decide if "the disturbances which vex our adolescents [are] due to the nature of adolescence itself or to civilisation" (Mead I973 [i9281:6). She spent nine months with a study group of about 68 young Samoan girls. Recognizing the scientific control difficulties inherent in such studies and thereby reserving some rights of ceteris paribus, she concluded that Samoan youth faced nearly none of the disorientations and disruptions to life and psyche that vexed American youth in their comings of age; that this was largely to be explained by Samoans' relaxed attitudes toward adolescent sexual exploration and intercourse; that the differences between the two societies were testimony to the remarkable plasticity of human behavior; and that that plasticity was testimony to the triumph of culture over nature. Cultural anthropology, psychology, and Westem educational systems were put on notice to revise their theories and change their practices: biology was not destiny; racist theories of behavior could be abandoned; educational systems could be revised to accord with the newfound facts of this anthropological psychology; and the nature of adolescent turmoil was really the culture of adolescent turmoil set against a biological problem and therefore learned and shared behavior that could be unlearned, revised, channeled, and managed. Mead published the results of this study in i928 as Coming of Age in Samoa (see also Mead I969 [I930]). For reasons having to do less with the scientific community's satisfaction with her research than with the public flash of science in paradise,2 this book became a best seller and launched her on her career as a popular author and lecturer. In I983, Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist who has worked in another part of Samoa (the island of Savai'i, Westem Samoa) periodically since I943, published a substantive and theoretical challenge to Mead's thesis called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Although Mead had been dead for five years, her enormous popularity had kept her work in the public view. In anthropology, her Samoan research was still respected for its pioneering impact on the concept of culture and education and for its sharpening of values the field still holds today conceming culture and racism. It was also recognized as inadequate on several counts (she exaggerated the simplicity of Samoan society, for example, and her delivery of what she called "controlled comparison" science was in the best estimate weak) and had been relegated largely to discussions of disciplinary history by the time Freeman published his critique. So, contrary to Freeman (I984:I0I, I03, I05, II5), few anthropologists who knew Mead's Coming of Age were surprised when he claimed that it had "greatly underestimated the complexity of the culture, society, history, and psychology" of the Samoan people (p. 285 ).3 Whether or not it was completely wrong about Samoan adolescence was not easily established, but various critics began to draw the line when it was perceived that Freeman's criticism was itself overdrawn and, despite his disclaimers, a personal attack on Mead. Freeman found many of Mead's assertions on Samoan character, family values, and sexual behavior "preposterously false" (p. 288). He claimed that her "zealous adherence" to the procedural rule "that one should never look

The historic study of human origins has choreographed both popular and intellectual conceptions of our species and its ancestry. A commonality in many accounts is the articulation of some fashion of journey from animal to human, a metaphysical narrative of severance (see Stoczkowski 2002). In this perspective either a species is human or it is not, end of discussion. The alternative and perhaps too readily discounted position is to collapse the boundaries of the animal, note that difference is by degree and not kind, and consider beings-intheir-environments. There are, of course, credibility problems with both accounts, and all of the anthropological fields are culpable for their lack of engagement with this issue, as well as related issues. One potential way forward is discussion concerning some of the most fundamental categories we use in relation to such topics: culture, tradition, sociality, animal, and human. Through its intense scrutiny of culture in otherthan-human animals and in bringing together a diversity of opinion and studies from what was a previously scattered and esoteric literature, this volume is most welcome and deserving of attention. Indeed, if we maintain that culture is a substantial part of what defines the human—and, for that matter, that there are clear differences between humans and nonhumans— then it is imperative for us to consider the biogenetic precursors, cognitive mechanisms, and behavioral foundations underlying culture, learning, transmission, and tradition in other species, especially perhaps those most resembling ourselves. The collection is opened by the introduction, where, in addition to outlining the rationale behind the book and its structure and describing the origins of certain key terms that feature in the relevant, mainstream disciplinary outputs of biology, psychology, and primatology, the editors also provide historic contextualization to the major debates characterizing research into animal culture. In chapter 2 Frans de Waal and Kristin Bonnie, both strong advocates of animal culture, claim that certain learning is born out of the desire to conform and thus can be independent of external reinforcement. In part this relates to mirror neurons and other forms of hardwired social facilitation that certain social animals seem to exhibit in helping them “tune” into the various actions and intentions of other group members. Using chimpanzees and capuchins as cases in point, they demonstrate that as social learning is subject to group modifiers and motivators, it is much more than individual learning in social contexts. William McGrew, another long-standing supporter of the position that chimpanzees possess culture, uses chapter 3 to review the variation that has been documented for chimpanzee behavior across Africa. He also makes the point that as we have no direct access into the mind of any primate (human or otherwise), the inferential and methodological instruments of cultural anthropology can be of great assistance to the primatologist, especially if anthropological work shifts its focus from the content to the mechanism of transmission. Chapter 4, by Carel van Schaik, notes that the inferential keystones of comparative geography are pretty solid, and it works through such an approach for orangutans. The author explains that certain geographically variable patterns can be most parsimoniously explained as innovations spread by social learning, although some ecological and genetic effects are also deemed significant. Indeed for van Schaik it is the interaction between ecology, genetics, and cultural transmission that requires future attention. Andrew Whiten revisits his “method of exclusion” in chimpanzee culture research in chapter 5. He acknowledges, somewhat refreshingly, that most of the evidence available is circumstantial. The point is well made that animal traditions are analogues rather than homologues of human culture, and there is also an important discussion concerning the status of terminology. In fact, definitional concerns are, quite rightly, given primacy by many of the contributions, having been identified as central to any progression of understanding. In many respects the battery of opinion in the “culture wars” relates to rudimentary and conflicting conceptualizations. Even in this volume we have scholars working past one another, with culture defined, for example, as multidimensional learning and transmission (McGrew); as composed of multiple traditions, group-typical behavioral repertoires, and interpopulation variation (van Schaik); and as a socially learned complex with symbolism and a ratchet effect (Hill). It is disappointing that despite the aims of the editors, the contributors were not able to reach any kind of compromise relating to definition; such remains a vital project for the future. In chapter 6, Hal Whitehead presents the often overlooked evidence for cetacean culture. He makes a compelling case, while working through data on humpback and sperm whales, that novel statistical methods with similarity matrices at their core can be used to isolate forms of cultural variation. Chapter 7, by Brooke Sargeant and Janet Mann, also concerns aquatic mammals. They focus on intrapopulation variation in the foraging behavior of Shark Bay dolphins and include some tantalizing thoughts about social meaning and specific foraging behaviors. These two contributions are excellent not simply in terms of their well-presented research results but because they force us to consider explicitly the environmental context of animal culture and its correspondence to interindividual difference and synchrony. Kevin Laland, Jeremy Kendal, and Rachel Kendal, preferring a minimalist definition of culture and deploying an im

The argument of Evans-Pritchard's classic The Nuer has been subject to conflicting interpretations. We examine these interpretations and then present a reading of the work that treats it as a whole. A key conclusion is that Evans-Pritchard distinguishes among three aspects of the "systems" he describes: (1) logical possibilities immanent in all forms of action, (2) cultural or local idioms in terms of which action is formulated and expressed, and (3) conditions and patterns of action. With this framework he develops, through an examination of the way interests in cattle are translated into political practices, an analysis in which the central theoretical problem is the relationship of structure to human agency. Our reading raises questions about the utility of standard classifications of theoretical orientations in social and cultural anthropology, particularly of the category of structural-functionalism, of which The Nuer is taken to be a central text.