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Edmund Leach
An Anthropological Life

Author: Stanley J. Tambiah, Harvard University, Massachusetts

Date Published: March 2002
availability: Available
format: Paperback
isbn: 9780521521024

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About the Authors

Edmund Leach is widely regarded as the outstanding figure in Cambridge archaeology in the second half of the twentieth century, and as one of the leading social anthropologists of his generation. Stanley Tambiah's intellectual biography covers his professional career and reviews his writings. The work is organized chronologically--providing an introductory assessment as well as a closing portrait. Two brief chapters discuss Leach's early years, but the bulk of the book deals with his anthropological projects.
- The first comprehensive biography
- Conveys the extraordinary range of issues discussed by Leach
- Highlights the special view of the comparative method transcending the 'primitive' vs 'modern'
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Reviews & endorsements
'… 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: March 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
Table 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.
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Author
Stanley J. Tambiah, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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.