Edmund Leach

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (born November 7, 1910 in Sidmouth , England , † January 6, 1989 in Cambridge , England) was a British ethnosociologist . He represented the more eclectic version of British social anthropology .

Life

After completing his engineering degree in electrical engineering in 1933, Edmund Leach applied to Butterfield & Swire (now Swire Pacific Limited ), one of the then leading British trading companies in China. He was accepted and worked as an engineer-in-business in China between 1933 and 1936. He traveled a lot there and, as part of his work, came to Beijing , Shanghai , Tsingtao and Chongqing, among others . In 1936 he met the American psychologist and amateur anthropologist Kilton Steward at a celebration at the British Embassy in Beijing. This persuaded Leach to accompany him on a trip to the Yami on the island of Botel Tobago.

The trip to the island south of Taiwan had a lasting influence on Leach and cemented his decision to study anthropology on his return to England . In 1937 he returned to London and gave up his position at Butterfield & Swire. Via the New Zealand ethnologist Raymond Firth , he came to the anthropological seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE), which was then led by Bronislaw Malinowski .

Edmund Leach undertook field research in Iraq as part of his studies in 1938 , which he had to break off because of the tense political world situation and the security situation in Iraq. Initiated by Noel Stevenson, a participant in the anthropological seminar, he went on a research trip to the Kachin people in Northern Burma in 1939 . His nine-month research work in the Sinlum Hills between October 1939 and June 1940 was to form the basis of his dissertation, but most of his documents were lost while fleeing from the advancing Japanese troops.

Through the contacts of Noel Stevenson, Leach got into the army and fought as a liaison officer in the underground against the Japanese army , which had occupied Burma at that time. The language skills that he had acquired in the course of his research work helped him in particular. In 1954 Edmund Leach wrote a treatise on the oscillating social structures of the Kachin from the remaining research material and from the findings of his military service. This book "Political Systems of Highland Burma" is one of the classics of political anthropology today.

Leach was a professor at the University of Cambridge until 1978 . He was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and the British Academy in 1972 .

Works

Political Systems of Highland Burma

Leach investigated the kachin in the highlands of Burma. It was the first real monograph in this region.

Using peripheral , tribal , stratified societies, Leach studied the question of dynamics and concluded that local systems (even in very remote regions) are never (a) isolated from the environment, nor (b) static. Before Leach, the ethnologists ascribed a uniform culture and social organization to the Kachin. The functionalist social anthropology that prevailed in Leach's day, on the other hand, had assumed a balanced equilibrium and had assumed a single social system in which the ethnographer worked.

Leach was one of the first British social anthropologists ( ethnosociologists ) to go beyond the static structural functionalism advocated by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown . He described the social structures among the Kachin as oscillating between two opposing social models,

• a hierarchical model based on chieftain- follower relationships called the gumsa model
• and an egalitarian organizational model called gumlao .

The hierarchical model was based on the theocratic kingship of the Shan valley. But this model was internally unstable - because it was anchored in a system among the Kachin in which the patrilineages , who marry women outwardly , are superior in rank to those who accept women. The model was constantly threatened with divisions. The gumsa hierarchy had to collapse according to its internal nature, with new groups splitting off, which were organized according to the gumlao model. But then the egalitarian system was replaced by the hierarchical gumsa model.

Rethinking Anthropology (1962)

This collection of essays contained Leach's credo from the experience of the investigation with the Kachin: If you only study individual societies, you are afflicted with a disease: the so-called " Amongitis ". You have to compare internationally, you have to show differences.

literature

• Jesús Jáuregui: Cultura y Communicación. Edmund Leach in memoriam . CIESAS, Mexico City 1996, ISBN 968-496-317-3 .
• Stanley J. Tambiah: Edmund Leach. An anthropological life . CUP, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-80824-3 .
• Heather Weston (arr.): Edmund Leach. A bibliography . Royal Anthropological Institute, London 1990, ISBN 0-900632-39-9 .
• Stanley J. Tambiah: Edmund Ronald Leach, 1910-1989 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 97 , 1998, pp. 293-344 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Edmund Leach in the catalog of the German National Library