#azande

¶ Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?

I teach Akan philosophy in Accra, and every year I set Peter Winch's essay "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964). It is a reply to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic 1937 study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Evans-Pritchard took…