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Four Zande texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

E. E. Evans-Pritchard
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Extract

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 1974 , pp. 41 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1974

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References

1 Otherwise one or two spears.

2 Not to his in-laws but to himself and his kin.

3 Not necessarily ten, that is just a round number—it may be only five or six.

4 In his desire to satisfy his in-laws. They would test his spears to see if they were of good quality metal.

5 She would also help with the gardens, at any rate in the year before she comes finally to live with her husband. He would build her a granary and while still living with her parents she would come and plant in his home and look after her crops there so as to have something to start on.

6 This is the opinion of the younger men rather than of the older men with marriageable daughters. Even the younger men, or many of them, who wish to marry feel that the older method of paying bridewealth had advantages—it gave them more security in the union.

7 Even if her husband is already married they hand the wife over first to his father and mother. The father would call her ‘wife’ and joke and be familiar with her. He might even sleep with her—but this in old times and not considered quite correct.

8 Before this she had restricted her visits to his father's home.