Sources, with Particular Reference to the Southern Sudan. (original) (raw)

TUDES ET ESSAIS EVAN S-PRI TCHA RD Sources with Particular Reference to the Southern Sudan* Having taken my degree at Oxford in modern history after having specialized in the same subject at school have since began to read anthropological literature been astonished at the very uncritical use of sources displayed in it There is little often no attempt made such as any good historian would attempt to make at critical assessment of the sources from which his information is derived and on which his conclusions are based This paper is devoted to some observations on this topic One is really horrined at the way in which Frazer in The Golden Bough quotes authorities on page after page through volume after volume without telling us anything about them or why he accepts their testimony It is often very difficult to track down Herbert authorities in his many volumes of Descriptive Sociology e.g African Races 2nd ed. 1930 Tylor does not even give the sources for his famous essay On Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent 1889 Nor did Hubert and Mauss for their essay Esquisse une théorie générale de la magie 1904 ever publish their sources Hobhouse Wheeler and Ginsberg in their The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples 1915 were quite unable to control their many sources and good bad and indifferent were cited as though they were all evidence of the same value it may be said that Murdock Social Structure 1949 is more recent and even more disastrous example It is the same with all other writers in the earlier days of social anthropology e.g in this country England)

It is based on lecture given at the Frobenius Institut at Frankfurt in 1968