Evans Pritchard’s book “The Sanusi of Cyrenaica” opened the doors towards a whole new culture and history for me.
What I know as assumed mainly of tribal societies as being “backward and chaotic” is impressively demonstrated to be overstated throughout this book. Pritchard shows how the Sanusi order in Libya has evolved over approximately a century from a primarily religious fraternity into a full-fledged political organization.
I found the eight chapters of the book to be very systematically organized to prove the theory Pritchard assumes.
I saw that the positionality if I may say of Evans Pritchard in his account has had a great influence on what he wrote; being an officer in the war and spending almost two years in Libya have definitely …show more content…
In these chapters, Pritchard establishes an extremely detailed although focused narrative on the different social, geopolitical, and historical -and perhaps more- aspects of the Sanusiya and the tribes. He develops his assumption steadily by using these aspects to explain how the native characteristics of the Bedouins as well as the compelling leadership of the Sanusiya, besides many other factors have influences the order’s development.
The author’s use of supplementary maps and diagrams have definitely made the reading experience more interesting. It also empowered his discussions and explained them. Moreover, I found that referencing Italians and writers from other nationalities has inevitably supported every argument he made using them. In places they showed how not only he saw what he described, and in other places he was able to refute their arguments, proving …show more content…
It also prevailed when the Bedouins chose, when a lodge Sheikh died, his brother or son to be his successor, what Pritchard calls “hereditary succession” (p. 81) It is also manifested in how the tribes sustained and organized themselves and interacted with the outer world.
Pritchard takes this a little further when he claims on p. 84 that the Sanusiya preserved its unity and became a political order because “it was identified with the tribal system of the Bedouin”. He supports this firstly by the lack of cohesion in other orders in Libya. He says that the Sanusiya had an economic, political, administrative and religious role (only) in the life of the morally and socially secure tribes, secure because of their segmentary
What I know as assumed mainly of tribal societies as being “backward and chaotic” is impressively demonstrated to be overstated throughout this book. Pritchard shows how the Sanusi order in Libya has evolved over approximately a century from a primarily religious fraternity into a full-fledged political organization.
I found the eight chapters of the book to be very systematically organized to prove the theory Pritchard assumes.
I saw that the positionality if I may say of Evans Pritchard in his account has had a great influence on what he wrote; being an officer in the war and spending almost two years in Libya have definitely …show more content…
In these chapters, Pritchard establishes an extremely detailed although focused narrative on the different social, geopolitical, and historical -and perhaps more- aspects of the Sanusiya and the tribes. He develops his assumption steadily by using these aspects to explain how the native characteristics of the Bedouins as well as the compelling leadership of the Sanusiya, besides many other factors have influences the order’s development.
The author’s use of supplementary maps and diagrams have definitely made the reading experience more interesting. It also empowered his discussions and explained them. Moreover, I found that referencing Italians and writers from other nationalities has inevitably supported every argument he made using them. In places they showed how not only he saw what he described, and in other places he was able to refute their arguments, proving …show more content…
It also prevailed when the Bedouins chose, when a lodge Sheikh died, his brother or son to be his successor, what Pritchard calls “hereditary succession” (p. 81) It is also manifested in how the tribes sustained and organized themselves and interacted with the outer world.
Pritchard takes this a little further when he claims on p. 84 that the Sanusiya preserved its unity and became a political order because “it was identified with the tribal system of the Bedouin”. He supports this firstly by the lack of cohesion in other orders in Libya. He says that the Sanusiya had an economic, political, administrative and religious role (only) in the life of the morally and socially secure tribes, secure because of their segmentary