The Nuer Are Dinka: An Essay on Origins and Environmental Determinism

This short article will use an example from the Nilotic Sudan to outline a process of socio-cultural change and development. Although the argument is restricted to the historical relationship of the Nuer and Dinka, there seems little reason to doubt that the process of fission and subsequent cultural differentiation outlined here could be used to account for the origin of many specific cultures, if not indeed of all cultures. I am using a particular example, for which literature is readily available, to illustrate what may be a very general and widespread kind of social evolution, a sequence of events the logic of which would account for the emergence of sociocultural entities as such. As a processual account, the present article will focus more closely upon the logic of Nuer-Dinka social history than upon the empirical features of that history; the object of the article is to show causation in what happened rather than to present an impeccably factual account. I am more interested in the relations between facts, than in the facts themselves. This article will neither disregard facts, however, nor treat them lightly, but logical relations are the key to its success or failure as an explanation of how things came to be the way they are in the ethnographic present of the Nilotic Sudan. The purpose here is to set up a scheme which will generate these present facts. As a final introductory note, it should be clear that I do not make use of 'the environment' in any explanatory sense. It makes little sense to posit that the locus of social change lies outside the system one is studying. Anthropological insistence on doing so produces the 'receding causation' so common in its literature; i.e. social systems are dependent variables in a larger system which includes climate, technology, available resources, etc. (cf. Harris I969). When historical accident is added to the above list, the questions of a truly social science are begged out of existence. In social science as in other science, the present is often the key to the past. Thus, the present-day distribution of social systems over the environment can give information as to the process by which that distribution came about. EvansPritchard's map (I940:5), reproduced on p. 6, could be interpreted as suggesting that the Nuer are an intrusive group, and that they have displaced Dinka. There are now two groups of Dinka, separated by I5o-200 miles of Nuer. There are also enclaves of Dinka within Nuer territory, and large numbers of Dinka living with Nuer as Nuer. This suggests a history of one-sided encroachment, by the Nuer. In support of this, Evans-Pritchard (I940:7, 20, 50, 69, 93, I3I-2, I50, I93) states that Nuer are able to use Dinka cattle as an emergency resource, and that Nuer raids against Dinka are regular and remunerative. The pattern is one in which the Nuer dominate and expand, and Dinka are expropriated and disappear.