The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

eflection to divination before Evans-Pritchard. Being a student of the functionalists,
Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, he had a focus on fieldwork as opposed
to the arm-chair theorizing of the evolutionists. But Evans-Pritchard still exhibited the
methodical rigor of the evolutionists.
Evans-Pritchard was educated in a post-evolutionistic environment. Although the
evolutionistic theory had dwindled in importance the difference between the scientist and the
savage was still an important question. For the evolutionists this difference was to be found
in cultural stages of evolution, for Lévy-Bruhl it was found in mentality. The core of Evans-
Pritchard’s project was to demonstrate that this difference was only apparent and
consequently that primitives were every bit as rational and intelligent as the Europeans
(Douglas 1980: 33-35). Evans-Pritchard was not satisfied with how the “arm-chair”
anthropologists treated data from other countries. Theories of primitive thought were
constructed on dubious source material, which was treated selectively: “(..)primitive thought
as pieced together in this manner by European observers is full of contradictions which do
not arise in real life because the bits of belief are evoked in different situations” (Evans-
Pritchard 1934: 29). Evans-Pritchard shifts the focus to how these beliefs are products of
everyday life, not theoretical science or abstract theology. 10
It is not that he does not think that there is any difference, indeed he does, but he finds it
not in any all pervading primitive mentality, pseudo-science or pre-logical thought. Instead
he finds it in how everyday life and its institutions establish in individuals local systems of
collective representations. This idea of collective representations is an idea he got from the
French school of Durkheim & Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl (Evans-Pritchard 1934). An illustration
is when he writes about the “web” of Zande thought: “The web is not an external structure in
which he (A Zande) is enclosed. It is the texture of his thought, and he cannot think his
thought is wrong. Nevertheless, his beliefs are not absolutely set, but are variable and
fluctuating to allow for different situations and to permit empirical observation and even
doubt” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 195). That which installs these collective representations and
makes them coherent in the Azande is institutions used in real-life situations: “Throughout I
have emphasized the coherency of Zande beliefs when they are considered together and are
interpreted in terms of situations and social relationships” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 540).
10 This interest, of course, parallels a turn in philosophy taking place at Cambridge with Ludwig Wittgenstein
and the philosophy of everyday language (Douglas 1980).
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