Where Have All Their Lineages Gone? Cattle and Descent Among the Nuer

Abstract

Evans‐Pritchard's The Nuer not only served as the paradigm of “segmentary lineage systems,” but it also inspired a wide range of ethnographic literature which contributed to the elaboration of “descent theory.” The Nuer ethnography was reanalyzed many times and most recently it was declared that the “segmentary lineage system” constituted a “representational model” only, quite different from the actors' “operational rules” (Holy 1979a). Despite the remarkable insight that it proved in the formation of Nuer local groups and the mechanics of Nuer politics, Holy's analysis falls short of a satisfactory reinterpretation of the Nuer polity for those interested in comparison because it restricted itself to local groups and failed to tackle the Nuer concepts of buth, thok dwiel and mar, central to Evans‐Pritchard's interpretation. By relegating lineages to the status of “representation,” Holy further obscures the course of comparative analysis since he does not provide any criterion to discover when lineages belong to the “representational” or the “operational” levels. Using a different conceptual framework, it is demonstrated that the groups which Evans‐Prit chard interpreted as lineages are not “representations” but are in fact defined around cattle. It is concluded that the Nuer simply did not have any lineages, segmentary or not.