Cairo Essays

Edmund Leach

• Evans-Pritchard by Mary Douglas
  Fontana, 140 pp, £1.50, March 1980, ISBN 0 00 634006 7

Fontana Modern Mastership has by now become so diffuse that the editorial problem may well have shifted from choosing a master who deserves the accolade to finding a biographer to bestow it. Why else should Malinowski still be left off the list but Evans-Pritchard (E-P to all who knew him but not in this book), Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946-1970, gain the crown? But if E-P be held to deserve apotheosis then Mary Douglas seems, on the face of it, a very appropriate hagiographer, for she is a noted anthropologist in her own right, was once a pupil of E-P, and, like E-P himself in his later years, is an exceptionally devoted member of the Roman Catholic Church. But, unlike E-P, Douglas lacks a sense of history, and the outcome is perverse.