Edmund Leach

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Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (November 7, 1910 – January 6, 1989) was a British social anthropologist. He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966-1979, was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975. He introduced Claude Lévi-Strauss into British social anthropology.

Edmund Ronald Leach was born in Sidmouth, England on November 7, 1910. He was the youngest on three children and was the son of William Edmund Leach and Mildred Brierley. His father owned and was manager of a sugar plantation in northern Argentina. Edmund was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge were he graduated with honors in Medical Sciences in 1932. After leaving Cambridge University he accepted a four-year contract in 1933 with a trading firm of Butterfield and Swire located in China. He found out after his contract expired that he did not like the business atmosphere and never again was going to sit on an office stool. On his way home he stopped and spent some time among the Yami of Botel Tobago. Here he took ethnographic notes and made drawings of the Yami. This event is when he considered becoming an anthropologist.

Back in London the anthropologist Raymond Firth introduced him to the economic lectures of Bronislaw Malinowski. Edmund went to Iraq to study the Kurds, but he abandoned this and went back to London. "He wrote: "I’ve got an enormous amount of ability at almost anything, yet so far I’ve made absolutely no use of it…I seem to be a highly organized piece of mental apparatus for which nobody else has any use" (D.N.B. 258). In 1939 he was going to study the Kachin hills of Burma, but World War II intervened. Edmund then joined the Burmese Army, were he achieved the rank of Major. In 1940 he married Celia Joyce who was a talented painter and also published two novels. They had a daughter in 1941 and a son in 1946.

After he left the Army in 1946, he became a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. In 1947 he received a Ph.D. in anthropology at the London School of Economics. In 1953, he became a Professor at Cambridge University of Social Anthropology. He was elected provost of Kings College in 1966 and retired in 1979; President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971-1975); a Fellow of the British Academy (from 1972) and was knighted in 1975.

His first major book was Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954); it challenged the theories of social structure and cultural change. His second major work was Pul Eliya, a Village in Ceylon (1961), where he directed his attention to theories of kinship as ideal systems. Edmund applied his ability of kinship to his disagreement with French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss. His book Levi-Strauss was translated into six languages and ran three editions.

For many years he suffered from cancer of the head without complaining. Edmund Leach died in Cambridge on January 6, 1989 of a tumor of the brain.

[edit] Bibliography

Political systems of highland Burma: A study of Kachin social structure (1954). Harvard University Press
Rethinking Anthropology (1961). Robert Cunningham and Sons Ltd.
Pul Eliya: a village in Ceylon (1961). Cambridge University Press.
Culture and communication (1976). Cambridge University Press.
Social Anthropology (1982). Oxford University Press.
The Essential Edmund Leach Volume 1 and Volume 2 (2001). Yale University Press.
Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (2002). Cambridge University Press.