Edmund Leach
| Sir Edmund Ronald Leach | |
|---|---|
| Born |
7 November 1910 Sidmouth, England |
| Died | 6 January 1989 (aged 78) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | social anthropology |
| Institutions |
Burma Army London School of Economics Cambridge University |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University |
| Doctoral advisor |
Bronisław Malinowski Raymond Firth |
| Doctoral students | Fredrik Barth |
| Known for | Ethnographic work in Sarawak and Burma Theories of social structure and cultural change Kinship as ideal systems Disagreement with French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss |
| Influences | Claude Lévi-Strauss |
| Notable awards | Provost of King's College (1966–1979) Chairman of Association of Social Anthropologists (1966–1970) President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971–1975) President of British Humanist Association (1970) Knighted (1973) Trustee of the British Museum (1975–1980) |
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist.
Leach was born in Sidmouth, Devon, the youngest of three children and the son of William Edmund Leach and Mildred Brierley. His father owned and was manager of a sugar plantation in northern Argentina. In 1940 Leach married Celia Joyce who was then a painter and later published poetry and two novels. They had a daughter in 1941 and a son in 1946.
Leach was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College where he graduated with a BA with honours in Engineering in 1932.
After leaving Clare University, Leach took a four-year contract in 1933 with Butterfield and Swire in China, serving in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chungking, Tsingtao, and Peking. 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. He intended to return to Engliand by way of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but increasing political turmoil in Russia convinced him otherwise. While in Peking, Leach had a chance encounter with Kilton Stewart, a psychiatrist, former-Mormon missionary, and published author who invited him on a trip to the island of Botel Tobago off the coast of Formosa. And so, on his way home Leach spent several months among the Yami of Botel Tobago, an island off the coast of Formosa. Here he took ethnographic notes and specifically focused his efforts on local boat design. This work resulted in a 1937 article in the anthropology journal Man.
He returned to England and studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics with Raymond Firth who introduced him to Bronisław Malinowski. He was an active member of Malinowski's "famous seminar". In 1938, Leach went to Iraq (Kurdistan) to study the Kurds, which resulted in Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds. However, he abandoned this trip because of the Munich Crisis. 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).
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