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Intellectual biography of Edmund Leach, a leading social anthropologist of his generation, with illustrations.
List of 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.
About the author
Stanley J. Tambiah is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1954. He joined the faculty at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for ten years, and was a Fellow of King's College. He went to the University of Chicago in 1973, and moved to Harvard Univesity in 1976. He began field work in Sri Lanka (1956-59), the island of his birth, and and later worked in Thailand. He is the author of eight books.
Summary
Tambiah discusses the life of Edmund Leach (1910–1989), one of Britain's foremost social and cultural anthropologists. Leach's work includes kinship and social organization; tenure and peasant economy; and biblical narratives and the myths of Classical Greece. Tambiah's biography covers Leach's work, closing with a personal portrait.
