Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (review)

Stanley Tambiah's book about Sir Edmund Leach (1919-1989) is not a biography in the conventional sense. Rather, Tambiah mentions in passing both biographical events and his personal relationship to Leach and his wife Celia, but implicitly argues that "an anthropological life" is a professional and intellectual matter. The character of the man emerges through discussion of his writings and professional engagements, e.g., as Provost of King's College, Cambridge. Leach's representations are "filtered, selected, arranged, and mediated" by Tambiah's "activity as narrator, commentator and friend" in an attempt to place himself "in dialogue" with the work (p. xiv). Tambiah reviews Leach's major writings, only parts of which are likely to be familiar to any single scholar given the range of interests over his career (from political organization to social structure and subsistence economy to "mytho-history," art and architecture, and Biblical studies to structuralism, cybernetics and the social construction of the self to the emancipatory role of anthropology).

Tambiah also summarizes critical reaction to Leach's work, allowing an evaluation and contemporary contextualization that would be impossible based solely on Leach's own highly persuasive and elegantly written texts. In the course of situating Leach's work, Tambiah also provides an overview of British social anthropology during Leach's career. Consistency among the content areas into which he delved came in his passion for ideas, his gift for felicitous words, his determination to make anthropology (in which I suspect he included most of what North Americans label as sociology) speak to a larger public, and his wide-ranging intellect.

Leach is perhaps best known for Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954). Like Malinowski's unforeseen internship in the Trobriand Islands during World War I, Leach's military service in Burma during World War II inadvertently facilitated his breaking loose from the anthropological model of intensive fieldwork in a single community, with limited generalization to larger social units. During the war, Leach travelled widely throughout Kachin country, obtaining a unique overview of the range of intracultural variation, particularly in relation to the Shan valley peoples. Furthermore, his notes were lost twice and the resulting ethnography was written from memory and subsequent archival research. Leach was thus forced to write a more sociological, historical and theoretical book than he doubtless envisioned at the start of his research. Leach identified two contrasting ideal types of political organization (gumlao/gumsa) which alternated historically between egalitarian and hierarchical modes (rather like the swing of a pendulum). This approach, combined with more traditional participant-observation fieldwork in a single community, demonstrated that anthropologists could move beyond ethnography.

Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (1961) provided a meticulous cataloguing of land tenure holdings in relation to kinship systems. Leach approached the ideal system on which individual and kin group strategies were based through interpretation of exhaustive statistical information on particular local arrangements. He helped move social theory from descent group to alliance theory. The socio-religious feudal structure of the Kandyan kingdom and its hierarchy of castes emerged from the social order implicit in these quantitative patterns. This is the most empirical and detailed of Leach's major works but does not entirely omit his characteristic concern with how members of the culture construct their thought-worlds (clarified through case studies).

Leach was perhaps the most important British interpreter of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Leach's version of structuralism critiqued the French anthropologist's analysis of Burmese kinship data. More importantly, however, Leach insisted on an empirical basis for structuralist generalizations, rejecting Levi-Strauss's emphasis on universal properties of the human mind and insisting that similarities of pattern across cultures be understood in ethnographic context as well as through species biology. Leach extended the structuralist method to analysis of Western civilization: his Biblical criticism treated Judeo-Christian texts with the same method as "primitive" myths; he explicated the "mytho-logic" of art and architecture in his own society; his cultural models spanned time...