1991 No. 1 CONTENTS - Institute of Social and Cultural ...

The Nuer cannot be said to be stratified into classes. (p.7)
Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer 21
Indeed, the Nuer have no government, and their state might be described as an
ordered anarchy. Likewise they lack law, if we understand by this tenn
judgements delivered by an independent and impartial authority which has, also,
power to enforce its decisions. (pp. 5-6)
The lack of governmental organs among the Nuer, the absence of legal institutions,
of developed leadership and, generally, of organizoo political life is remarkable.
(p. 181)
The sentence in The Nuer that immediately precedes the second quotation above
is: 'He [the leopard-skin chief] is a sacred person without political authority' (p.
5). Just as. such statements concerning the lack of the leopard-skin chief's juridical
authority can be traced to an empirical negation of the applicability of the
Durkheimian conception of moral authority (see Free 1988: 74), statements
concerning the lack of law or of legal institutions can be traced to an empirical
rejection of Durkheim's characterization of 'segmentary', 'mechanical' societies
as giving rise to 'repressive law'.
Similarly, the statement concerning social class conjures up the first sentence
of The Communist Manifesto: 'TIle history of all hitherto existing societies is the
history of class struggle' (Marx and Engels 1967 [1848]: 79) of which it is a direct
contradiction and, moreover, Engels' footnote to that sentence (ibid.) which points
to the existence of primitive communist societies.
2. Rousseau and the Pastoral
A central theme of Rosaldo's essay in Writing Culture is that of 'the pastoral ': The
Nuer is seen as written in 'the pastoral mode'. (This is a theme to which Clifford
returns in his essay in the same volume where he claims (1986: 113) that salvage
anthropology is 'appropriately located within a long Western tradition of pastoral'.)
It would be largely fruitless to enter into a defInitional argument concerning the
appropriateness of the word 'pastoral'. A more important question than what
pastoral means is what the usage of the term does or enables one to do in this
specific argument. Nevertheless, Raymond Williams, whose The Country and the
City (1980) is cited by Clifford as an authoritative work on the pastoral, points to
'the confusion that surrounds the whole question of "pastoral" , (ibid.: 14) and says
that 'the first problem of defInition, a persistent problem of form, is the question
of pastoral, of what is known as pastoral' (ibid.: 12). However, these definitional
problems do not seem to daunt the writers of culture from writing of 'the pastoral
mode', or from continuing to extend its usage from poetry to anthropological
writing. What do they achieve by this?