Edmund Leach
An Anthropological Life

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.

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'… a more important contribution of Tambiah's is to have clarified Leach's understanding of structuralism and functionalism and to explore how he reconciled them in quite innovative ways. … he offers an interpretation of Leach's work from the point of view of a distinguished contemporary …'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

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Product details

• Date Published: February 2002
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9780521521024
• length: 538 pages

• dimensions: 228 x 152 x 33 mm
• weight: 0.84kg
• contains: 7 b/w illus.
• availability: Available