Full Description
Stanley J. Tambiah discusses the life of Edmund Leach (1910-1989), one of Britain's foremost social and cultural anthropologists, and a man of extraordinary versatility, originality and intellectual breadth. His substantial contributions to anthropology deal with topics including kinship and social organization, hill tribes and valley peoples, tenure and peasant economy, aesthetics, British structural-functional methodology, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, biblical narratives and the myths of Classical Greece. Leach was not wedded to any settled orthodoxy: what makes his work exciting is his experimentation with new ideas, and his expansions of the horizons of the discipline. His distinctive view of the comparative method allows him to transcend the stale dichotomy between 'them primitives' and 'us moderns', finding instead a dialectic between 'us' and 'them' which opens up the possibility for illuminating common human propensities and capacities.
Contents
1. Edmund Leach (1910-1989): Achievements; 2. Childhood and youth; 3. Apprenticeship and the Second World War; 4. The anthropologist at work: teacher and theorist; 5. The Political Systems of Highland Burma; 6. The Frontiers of Burma; 7. Pul Eliya: the challenge to the descent group theory; 8. Hydraulic Society in Ceylon: contesting Wittfogel's thesis and Sri Lankan mytho-history; 9. The engagement with structuralism; 10. The comparativist stance: us and them; 11. The Structural Analysis of Biblical Narratives (with illustrations); 12. Anthropology of art and architecture (with illustrations); 13. Individuals, social persons and masquerade; 14. Leach and Levi Strauss: similarities and differences; 15. A Runaway World?; 16. British anthropology and colonialism: challenge and response; 17. Retrospective assessment and rethinking anthropology; 18. The work of sustaining institutions; 19. Retirement, retrospection and final illness; Bibliography.
