What happened to the Nuer after Evans-Pritchard left? Nuer Dilemmas tell us not through an historical narrative, but as an ethnography of debate. Sharon Hutchinson traces the struggles of South Sudanese Nuer men and women to cope with the immense social, political, economic and religious transformations wrought by more than six decades of turbulent history that spanned a quarter century of British colonial rule (1929-55) as well as two devastating civil wars (1955-72 and 1983-2005). The book foregrounds cultural values, concepts and practices that Nuer men and women perceived as changing and were in the process of collectively redefining and reevaluating during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Hutchinson reveals the core of both Nuer thinking and of current dilemmas: the continuing importance of “blood,” “cattle” and “food” in the creation of enduring social relationships, and the simultaneous appreciation that new things—"money,” “guns” and “paper”—are also capable of binding and dividing the social world. By exploring how Nuer men and women have variously experienced, understood and responded to a host of novel social and historical forces, including the discovery of massive oil deposits beneath their homeland, Hutchinson—or Nyarial—shows how three generations of Nuer men and women have been drawing creatively on implicit meanings and tensions in their culture and social lives in their efforts to make sense of our increasingly senseless world.

The 2023 Edition of Nuer Dilemmas includes a new chapter or “Epilogue” in the Nuer language in which Hutchinson describes personal security challenges she has faced from suspicious military and government security personnel as she returned to the war zone for eight periods of field research during Sudan’s long and devastating second civil war, which ultimately culminated in South Sudan’s achievement of political independence in 2011.

FIND AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE 2023 EPILOGUE HERE