Leach, Edmund 1910-1989

## Quotes

“Men do not have to cook their food they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts”

“Truth is a totality, the sum of overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity”

“The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who aren’t like us”

“Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents”

## Biography and History

Edmund Leach was a social anthropologist; he was born in Lancashire, England on 7 November 1910. He was the son of a nineteenth century bourgeois family.

Leach studied at Marlborough College; later he moved on to Cambridge to preserve his interest in mathematics; he obtained his BA with Honours in Engineering. He took a job in China at a trading center-*Butterfield and Swire*, where they had branches in Hong Kong. He did not like the office atmosphere, but it certainly facilitated his interests in the culture and history, meanwhile igniting his interests in travel. He also acquired skills in finance and business administration which would help him in his later years. During his travels, he met a Mormon missionary, who gave him a tour of the *Yami* which brought his anthropological interests into fruition.

Leach returned to England and signed up as a research student to participate in Malinowski’s seminars at the London School of Economics; it was during this period that Leach expected to travel with more ethnographic incentive. In 1939, his anthropological work in the Kachin Hills of Burma had to be postponed due to World War II. Leach joined the army, where he achieved the rank of major, but this did not stop him from making detailed ethnographic notes of Burma. From 1939-1940, Leach was doing research in Hpalang where he lost his field notes and photographs during the chaos of the Japanese invasion of Burma; he reconstructed his notes from memory and produced one of his best works. Alongside of his intense fieldwork in the Hpalang, he met his wife, Celia Joyce, a painter and a novelist.

After he left the army in 1946, he started to lecture in social anthropology at the London School of Economics. In 1947; he furthered his education by getting his PH. D in Anthropology. In 1953, he became a professor at Cambridge University and was later promoted to reader, finally in 1972 he was promoted to chair of the Anthropology Department. In 1960, Edmund Leach researched the interconnections of Chinese and Indian culture. He moved on to do research in Sri Lanka, where his engineering skills came through in his analysis of their conditions, economy, social and kinship structures, political and religious systems.

By 1961, Leach was involved in many fields within the anthropological tradition; he worked with myth, political organization, economics structural analysis, art and architecture, and religion within the biblical tradition. He travelled throughout the United States in the 1970s to different universities, giving different academic lectures. He spent a year as a Fellow of the Center for advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a term at the John’s Hopkins University in 1976 as a professor.

Leach stopped working at King’s College in 1978. His retirement did not stop him from attending intellectual and academic seminars. He spent his retirement with his wife Celia in Barrington, outside of Cambridge. Despite his ongoing activities and interests, he fell; he passed away on January 6, 1989. There was a funeral service at King’s College- a beautiful way to remember his life and his work as a social anthropologist.

## Work

* *Political systems of highland Burma: a study of Kachin social structure* (Harvard University Press, 1954)
* *Rethinking anthropology* (Robert Cunningham and Sons Ltd., 1961)
* *Pul Eliya: a village in Ceylon* (Cambridge University Press, 1961)
* *A runaway world?* (London: BBC, 1968)
* *Genesis as myth and other essays* (Jonathan Cape, 1969)
* *Lévi-Strauss* (Fontana Books, 1970)
* *Claude Lévi-Strauss* (Viking Press, 1970)
* *Culture and communication: the logic by which symbols are connected* (Cambridge University Press, 1976)
* *Social anthropology* (Oxford University Press, 1982)
* *The essential Edmund Leach* (Yale University Press, 2001, 2 vols.)

Source: Wikipedia

Leach participated extensively in Malinowski's seminars at the London School of Economics in 1937 and created an association of Malinowski enthusiasts surrounding his works and seminars. This marked the beginning of his anthropological journey.

From 1938-1939 Leach worked as Raymond Firth’s research assistant on his book now known as *Malay Fishermen.* In 1947 Leach completed his PhD on the reassessment of all of Firth’s literature due to the extensive fieldwork they conducted together. Once he completed this, he was put in charge of the Social Anthropology Undergraduate department at the LSE, however very quickly resigned in order to work on his book *Political Systems of Highland Burma* (Tambiah, 2002: 1-50).

Ten years later he began to teach at Cambridge University and published his book *Rethinking Anthropology* (1961) in which he outlines the Structural Approach which was in the midst of being conceptualized by Levi-Strauss. It is here where Leach acquired his “reputation as a ‘critical *rethinker* of anthropology’ and as one of the ‘most original minds of modern social anthropology’” (Tambiah, 2001: p.308). Thus this marks the start of his individual work. The essential and most influential of his work includes a few papers regarding his views on Lévi-Strauss and his theory of structuralism, a detailed analysis of the “irrigation-based community” of Ceylon, a synthesis of his thoughts concerning how “the family, education the sanctity of life” ought to be re-imagined (Murphy, 1970: 852) in *A Runaway World?*, an analysis of myth in association with the bible in *Genesis as Myth and Other Essays,* and a beginners guide to the concept of social anthropology.

Overall, Leach associates himself with two anthropological approaches; Levi-Strauss’s *Structuralism* and Malinowski’s *Functionalism.* He manages to combine the two into an independent approach described as the “connection between components, such that functional relations constituted an interconnected totality… [that are] ‘transformations’ of one another” (Tambiah, 2002, p.309-310).

## Influences

Although there is no denying Edmund Leach was heavily influenced by the Structuralism of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, (having been one of the first British anthropologists to be drawn toward structuralism and even publishing a popular introduction to the man himself),  Leach would soon begin to critique Lévi-Strauss, and found his interest and passion grew more towards the study of a more social anthropology, involving individual’s lives rather than universal mental structures.

Leach definitely benefited from having one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists, Polish anthropologist, sociologist and ethnographer, Bronisław Malinowski as his Doctoral Advisor. Malinowski, a proponent of Functionalism also no doubt greatly influenced Leach. Interestingly both Leach and Malinowski had foundations in studies other than anthropology, namely economics, physics, mathematics and mechanical sciences, but were wooed by Anthropology. Leach would later eulogize Malinowski as one of his two ‘supernatural beings’ or ‘deities’.

Edmund Leach also had Raymond William Firth as a teacher. Firth was a British anthropologist who had also studied under Bronislaw Malinowski and later, he and Edmund Leach became key advocates of the methodological individualist movement at Cambridge.

Leach’s most notable students include Nur Yalman and Fredrik Barth.

## Analysis

As both a structuralist and a functionalist who looked at function from a mathematical lens, Leach was able to eliminate contradictions between the two schools of thought that gave him a wider range of theoretical possibilities. He used this point of view to analyse patterns, underlying structure and function of social order by means of ritualistic and mythological variations. Leach also attempted to refine existing concepts that were taken up by scholars of British social anthropology followed by heavy inclinations towards the French structural binary theory believing it could give anthropology a credible scientific methodology.

In this important post World War II golden age, he sought to rethink anthropology; to do research in a more universal manner where culture and social limits are not traced but interconnected networks. This strongly opposes Radcliffe-Brown’s idea that societies were separate social ‘races’ as well as Malinowski’s idea that cultural systems were independently self-sufficient, thus eliminating some racism in the field of anthropology.

## Critique

As a simultaneous advocate, defender, and sometime gentle critic of Levi-Strauss's structuralism, much of the criticism intended for and directed at Levi-Strauss could also be applied to Edmund Leach. As a critic, Leach's most noted objection to Levi-Strauss's structuralism is found in his critique of Levi-Strauss's eagerness to yield too easily to and attribute too much credit to what he wilfully perceived as the universals of human society, to the neglect of real, complex and individual practices and structure. This Levi-Strauss often did second hand and without any personal observation. Edmund Leach eventually became quite critical of Levi-Strauss's generalized and reductive approach, although he never managed to remove structuralist notions from his work entirely.

Criticism initially accorded to Levi-Strauss can also be attributed to Leach. Leach, who expounded mostly on kinship relations, could be accused by Marxists as ignoring primary economic factors in society. Leach could be seen as guilty of discrediting the power of individual agency, according to existentialists just as he could be accused of (like Levi-Strauss) relying too heavily on perceived static commonalities and projections of personal understandings of concepts and ideal types.

## Sources

Anthrobase.com. Leach, Edmund- AnthroBase - Dictionary of Anthropology: A searchable database of anthropological texts. 2015. Available at: http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/pers/leach\_edmund Accessed October 13, 2015

Google Books. Pul Eliya. 2015. Available at: https://books.google.ca/books/about/Pul\_Eliya.html?id=wPRT6RKAvboC&redir\_esc=y. Accesses October 14, 2015.

Kings College Website: http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/archive-centre/archive-month/february-2013.html

Korn F. Genesis as Myth, and Other Essays. Sociology. 1971;5(2):273-274. doi:10.1177/003803857100500227.

Murphy R. : A Runaway World? . Edmund Leach. American Anthropologist. 1970;72(4):852-854. doi:10.1525/aa.1970.72.4.02a00130.

Scupin, R. (2005). Leach’s Legacy: A review of Edmund Leach: AN Anthropological Life, BY Stanley Tambiah. Anthropology Today, 21(3), 22-23

Spencer, Robert F. (1968) The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism by Edmund Leach. American Anthropologist, 70(3), 602-604

Tambiah, Stanley J. Edmund Leach: An anthropological Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2002. ISBN: 0521521025 http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/97p293.pdf

Wikipedia.com. Leach, E. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund\_Leach. Accessed October 14, 2015.