The Sudan Handbook

100 the sudan handbook

peoples, were the focus of an early generation of anthropological research

in Sudan. Interpretive accounts of their beliefs and practices, strikingly

resonant with those of the peoples of the ancient Middle East as repre-

sented in the Old Testament, are among those now regarded as classics

in the anthropology of religion. The writings of E. E. Evans-Pritchard led

the way, following up his early work on the logical character of Azande

thought with his study of what he boldly called ‘Nuer Religion’. Of

course, the Nuer being a largely preliterate society, indigenous Nuer

‘theology’ and ‘belief’ had to be approached through the translation

of language in use, and the observation of rituals, rather than sacred

texts. Evans-Pritchard showed how the ways in which Nuer referred to

various manifestations of kuoth or ‘Spirit’, how they offered prayers and

sacrifices and discussed relations between the human and the spiritual

revealed a whole cosmology, which at its apex justified the translation

‘God’. Myths and songs, historical memories of great prophetic leaders,

and rituals conducted at the sacred sites associated with them – in

particular the remains of Ngundeng’s Mound, the shrine built by the

prophet Ngundeng and partially destroyed by the British – continue to

reconstitute the tangible world of ‘Nuer religion’. The classic work on

Dinka society, Godfrey Lienhardt’s Divinity and Experience, focuses on the

translatability of personal experience and specifically upon the forms

that a human apprehension of the divine may take. It emphasizes the

existential reality of nhialic as an ultimate divine presence in relation

to the history of human beings, along with various lesser ‘divinities’

associated with the emergence of particular clans. In Dinka cosmology

there are also relatively autonomous ‘free’ divinities and ‘Powers’ (jok)

of the kind that can cause harm to human life, but can also be occasion-

ally placated or exorcized. Among the Dinka, maintenance of peaceful

and proper relations between human beings themselves, and between

them and Divinity, is the responsibility of local ritual specialists known

as Masters of the Fishing Spear. These are born to priestly lineages, as

distinct from the more common warrior lineages, and inherit physically

from their fathers a special capacity for spiritual insight. In the Dinka

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors lands^ of^ the^ mid-twentieth^ century,^ there^ was^ thus^ still^ a^ geographical^

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