[4] This work coincided with his appointment to the University of Cairo in 1932, where he gave a series of lectures on religion that bore Seligman's influence.

Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande is the first major anthropological contribution to the sociology of knowledge through its neutral — some would say "relativist" — stance on the "correctness" of Zande beliefs about causation.

The most notable of these issues involved the deaths of eight Azande people due to the collapse of a termite infested door frame.

Evans-Pritchard's empirical work in this vein became well known through philosophy of science and "rationality" debates of the 1960s and 1970s involving Thomas Kuhn and especially Paul Feyerabend.

Among the doctoral students he advised was the late M. N. Srinivas, the doyen among India's sociologists who coined some of the key concepts in Indian sociological discourse, including "Sanskritization", "dominant caste" and "vote bank."

Mary Douglas's classic Purity and Danger on pollutions and uncertainty — what we often denote as 'risk' — was fundamentally influenced by Evans-Pritchard's views on how accusations, blame and responsibility are deployed though culturally specific conceptions of misfortune and harm.

In 1950, he famously disavowed the commonly held view that anthropology was a natural science, arguing instead that it should be grouped among the humanities, especially history.

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was born in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, the son of an Anglican cleric.

The rubric for the lectures is that they "should provide an empirical analysis of social relations, and should be based on fieldwork or on indigenous primary materials" (see ref above).