Penelope Stickney

Penelope Stickney

Comparative Religion 600

Classics in Comparative Religion

Professor Brian Wilson

March 31, 2000

Edmund Leach: The Artist Anthropologist

Edmund Ronald Leach (1910-1989) exhibited great intellectual enthusiasm for the cultural and intellectual worlds he traversed, and he took risks with new ideas that challenged standard practices and principles. His writings spanned over fifty years of his life and investigated the topics of kinship, ritual and myth, art, economics, and technology. He wrote easily in a characteristically human voice rather than one of professional isolationism and was passionate about his topics. Although the spirit that reveled through his pen has often provoked controversy, the depth of his writings, "his boldness...and ability to penetrate to the core of a discussion..." makes it difficult to dismiss his theories (Gudeman and Fontaine 1).

His early subjects follow a broad scope of cultural anthropology that include intensely detailed accounts of the culture and people of China, Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Guam, and Thailand, just to name a few. Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) and Pul Eliya: a Village in Ceylon (1961) are considered his two major works and follow a trend inherited from Malinowski for ethnological fieldwork. These volumes preceded the rigorous intellectual essay "The structural implications of matrilineal cross-cousin marriage," which was the Curl Prize Essay of 1951 and reprinted later in his anthology of essays, Rethinking Anthropology (1961). Leach spent most of his career writing vividly and energetically in the essay format which he readily used to argue the points of other theorists and to explicate his own ideas. He believed that anthropological studies must not become an end to themselves but rather contribute to other disciplines and to thought in general. Widely received in an era of emerging media consciousness, the essay style allowed him to quickly send to print an enthusiastic discussion of contemporary social

Stickney 2

thought that let the "reader feel poised at the frontiers of knowledge" (2). In a decade

influenced by quick and secretively emerging bits of vital information from the "underground," followed by many passionate coffee house discussions, Leach's sudden expulsion of thought was profoundly exciting.

History happened quickly in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The previous forties and fifties introduced Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of independence, that life can be ordained through free will. His words, "not only the man that we would like to be ourselves" but also "an image of man such as we think we ought to be" (qtd. in Johnson 576) [italics mine] repulsed the WWII offspring with its pseudo-lifestyle appearance and artificial materialism. Oblivious to the immigrant and farm worker's struggle for financial stability and the American Dream, this post-war generation called on Marxism as its social leader. According to the teachings of Karl Marx, "All wealth is produced by labor and should go to labor, and that, as this leaves nothing for the capitalist, who can therefore never accept the system, the worker must prepare for a class war in which capitalism will be destroyed" (Marx 472). In this anti-establishment fervor the restless youth relished, although a governing essence of Marx' theories was overlooked "that history is largely determined by economic forces" (472). Instead, reformers, disillusioned by the current standards, naively believed that a socialist society could supply the needs of the individual through the group. Those students and intellectuals seeking a reformed America were fueled by many grave factors, among them the Viet Nam conflict and the Civil Rights movement. Although Leach appears to be silent on the anthropological and sociological implications of these topics, he was invariably touched by their boorish atrocities and horrors as was the rest of the nation. And, as the social milieu took its cues from the economic and political arenas, so the permissiveness of language use in publication became a tool for Leach's energy, as we will discuss in his study on language.

In the 1960s, the national climate turned hostile to business, and in 1968, the growth

Stickney 3

of stocks ended completely. The book Silent Spring was published in 1961, and it drew

attention to the alarming pollution caused by the processes of booming modern

economics. In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at AnySpeed, presenting the American auto industry, the very heart of the industrial economy, as a death trap. In politics, after the spring of 1973, the Nixon presidency was rendered totally ineffectual by the Watergate witch-hunt, and President Carter's "human rights" policy, under which the signatories were to strive to end violations of human rights around the world, was ignored behind the Iron Curtain. "As relative American power declined, and Soviet power rose, international terrorist incidents increased steadily, from 279 in 1971 to 1,709 in 1980. The number of assassinations, in which the KGB...had always specialized, increased...from seventeen in 1971 to 1,169 in 1980" (Johnson 688). Also, angry, young radical leaders invoked unspeakable cruelties on their captives--diplomats or businessmen chosen by occupation--and viewed their victims not as tortured or murdered human beings, but as symbols of an archaic society, reflecting the Marxist doctrine of thinking in terms of classes instead of individuals. In the process, the terrorists dehumanized themselves. While dispelling and prosecuting such anarchy should have been of the government's utmost concern, by the 1970s the United Nations was itself a "corrupt and demoralized body"(689), staggered by the 1969 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where "the whole world watched" street police clash with 5,000 anti-war demonstrators. Not just the United States, but the "whole world" was in complete chaos; no one knew whom to trust, and Marx had provided an acceptable explanation. Events are not "determined... by human will, as had been traditionally supposed, but by the hidden structures of society. As Marx put it: 'the final patterns of economic relatives as seen on the surface...[are] very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but concealed essential pattern and the conception corresponding to it.' Man was imprisoned in structures: twentieth-century man in

Stickney 4

bourgeois structures" (695).

The emerging Structuralist theories coincided with the demoralizing of America, the

steady expansion of Soviet power, and the rapid expansion of higher education, especially the social-science disciplines. Between the mid-1950s and late 1960s, the average increase of expenditure on higher education was between 10 and 16 percent across the world, with America at 11 per cent average annual increase. "University enrollments rose by an annual average of over 12 per cent in this period. By a historical accident, which had nothing to do with structures, deep or otherwise, the Structuralists thus had an influence quite disproportionate to the intrinsic plausibility of their theories, and they attained their maximum impact on society during the Seventies, when millions of new graduates poured out of the universities" (696).

For Claude Levi-Strauss, as for Marx, history was not a succession of events but a discernible pattern working according to discoverable laws. In Structural Anthropology, first widely read and translated in 1963, Levi-Strauss insisted that social structures are present even when not visible to the eye or even detectable by empirical observations. Their existence is as certain as molecular structures, present though undiscoverable by all but the electron microscope. Structuralism postulates that human attributes and activities are governed by laws analogous to the ways scientific laws govern nature, and these structures determine the cast of mind, so what appear to be acts of human will are merely in concordance with the structure.

With a passionate interest in the works of Levi-Strauss and the use of structuralism as a theoretical framework for interpreting data gained through fieldwork, Edmund Leach's essays were written to a new generation of intellectuals. His direct approach and ability to make the theories appear simple made his work exciting and gave the readers a glimpse into his enthusiasm for ideas.

A student of Malinowski's in the London School of Economics, Leach was greatly

Stickney 5

influenced by Malinowski's emphasis on the importance of the use of fieldwork in

anthropology. The results of specific societal studies, Political Systems of Highland

Burma (1954) and Pul Eliya: a village in Ceylon (1961), represent his bridge into the discipline. The first, a serious theoretical account, is based on his early fieldwork in the Kachin Hills of Burma, just before the Second World War and contributes to the relationship between ritual and social structure which had been a study of Durkheim's. In his work, Leach concludes that the ritual in the society "makes explicit the social structure....The individuals who make up a society must from time to time be reminded, at least in symbol, of the underlying order that is supposed to guide their social activities." The value of Leach making a distinction between real and ideal social structures enables Leach to avoid "the type of static view of society suggested by a perception of ritual and social structures as perfectly matched" (Cunningham 88). Leach writes of these distinctions as extremes. "At one extreme we have actions which are entirely profane, entirely functional, technique pure and simple; at the other we have actions which are entirely sacred, strictly aesthetic, technically non-functional." But he concludes that ritual is an aspect of most human behavior, "one instrumental and aiming to do something and the other symbolic and expressing something about the participants such as their social status" (88).

Similarly, Pul Eliya, "is a very materialist interpretation of his very full data on kinship and caste...[building on his] concept of verbal 'categories,' which are material expressions of linguistic phenomena, that Leach developed in the earlier work" (Gudeman and La Fontaine 2). This practical yet intellectual interpretation of his data established Leach with his colleagues as the subject of controversy, as he was charged with a change in theoretical position between the works, even though they embody deep similarities, as Fuller and Perry discuss in their essay published in Anthropology Today, June 1989 (qtd. in 2). Leach believed that data was only relevant if someone could do

Stickney 6

something with it--knowledge was only vital if it could be applied to something practical—that is, if it could relate to theoretical considerations. Although he did not believe that data collected in one geographic area was necessarily universally applicable, he wrote on a more abstract level, engaging in comparison and cross-cultural generalizations and using his version of structural analysis to illuminate his readers to another level of discovery.

Disappointed with the response from his colleagues with the introduction of Political Systems and Pul Eliya, Leach challenged them to reconsider their limited point of view with his essay, Rethinking Anthropology (1961). In this essay Leach argued that "the nature descent of African societies could only be elucidated using a structuralist 'alliance' model...[that] had been developed by Levi-Strauss using a variety of different ethnographies, mostly American" (Gudeman and La Fontaine 3). Leach contested that it was his position to take the theories recorded by others and contribute to them "primarily [as] that of analyst" (Leach Rethinking v) [Italics mine]. To this end he modified Levi-Strauss' model as he applied it to the Kachin data and he redefined the Trobriand ethnology through the works of Malinowski. "In each case," he argues, "I have tried to reassess the known facts in the light of unorthodox assumptions. Such heresy seems to me to have merit for its own sake." Then he states his position that becomes the underlining score for all his life's work, "Unconventional arguments often turn out to be wrong but provided they provoke discussion they may still have lasting value" (v).

Although this essay was published upon request as the title piece in an anthology of the same name, it was first delivered in 1959 at the first Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. Here I find Leach's timing significant and brazenly humorous, as in support of Malinowski's work and the atmosphere of a memorial to the theorist he holds in such high regard, he creatively selects the opportunity to address his colleagues and challenge their intellectual approach in their study of Social

Stickney 7

Anthropology. "...[D]uring the last year or so...[m]ost of my colleagues are giving up the attempt to make comparative generalizations; instead they have begun to write impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples" ("Rethinking" 1). It is in this arena that he meticulously discusses the concepts of generalization and comparison in light of a mathematical pattern and challenges his audience to consider new theories. Initially he establishes his point this way:

Any two points can be joined by a straight line and you can represent this straight line mathematically by a simple first order algebraic equation.

Any three points can be joined by a circle and you can represent this circle by

a quadratic or second order of algebraic equation.

It would be a generalization to go straight on from here and say: any n points in a plane can be joined by a curve which can be represented by an equation of order n-I. This would be just a guess, but it would be true, and it is a kind of truth which no amount of comparison can ever reveal. (2)

In his elaborate explanation and discussion of the limited vision of comparison theory advanced by Radcliffe-Brown, Leach acknowledges that "[c]omparison and generalization are both forms of scientific activity, but different" (2). He states that he is concerned with generalization and that comparison, although useful, has its limitations. The dilemma of comparison is that it creates classifications without explaining the rationale for doing so--without basing it on rational thinking. On the other hand,

"Generalization is inductive; it consists in perceiving possible general laws in the circumstances of special cases; it is guesswork, a gamble, you may be wrong or you may be right, but if you happen to be right you have learnt something altogether new." (5)

Creating categories for comparison involves a certain amount of guessing, and

"...if you are going to start guessing, you need to know how to guess. And this

Stickney 8

is what I [mean] when I say that the form of thinking should be mathematical.

Functionalism in a mathematical sense is not concerned with the inter-

connections between parts of a whole but with the principles of operation of

partial systems." (6)

Although at the onset both theories require a certain amount of guessing, Leach qualifies his argument:

"Now I don't want to turn anthropology into a branch of mathematics but I believe we can learn a lot by starting to think about society in a mathematical way.

Considered mathematically society is not an assemblage of things but an assemblage of variables." (7)

As an aside from Leach's work, I would like to digress a moment to discuss the development of his theory based on historical significance. When Leach gave this address in 1959, he was standing in the dawn of a new era. In 1958, with grants from the National Science Foundation, the concept of "New Math" grew from the School Mathematics Study Group of 200 teachers and mathematicians who participated in the program and wrote textbooks that served as guidelines for other textbook writers. By 1960, the New Math was distributed to eighth grade students in participating schools. The concepts were duplicated, often with faded blue ink, bound in temporary notebooks passed out as "handouts" and taught by classroom teachers trained through seminars. Nevertheless, in spite of its difficult, primitive format, the response was positive. One child explained, "I have to think, and I see a reason for what I'm doing" ("Mathematics" 373).

By the mid-sixties, the New Math system was published in textbooks and all children were taught "Set Theory" as a way of solving problems in mathematics and in logic. Leach took the explanation of "overlapping and disjointed sets" ("Set" 589-590) and

Stickney 9

applied them to his essay, "Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse," which will be discussed later. The theories that Leach proposed to the members of the audience at Malinowski's memorial were only possible due to the available presence of current and applied research. Leach's fame grew on his quick reaction to current trends.

To help prove his point that mathematics can explain relationships, especially in certain kinship categories of human-sexual-partner availability, Leach placed a diagram before his audience, Figure 2 in his lecture, and asked them (after a discussion of Figure 1--both of which I have included as Appendix 1)

"to think of this as a mathematical expression and forget ...that it was originally derived from Trobriand ethnography. I want to 'generalize' this pattern. Instead of using a value term like filiation, we will use algebra. Filiation with the father = 'q', filiation with the mother = 'p'." (12)

Within this example he continues the 'p'and 'q' discussion of the variables of relationships

between fathers and mothers and their sons and daughters. And, in so doing, he writes,

"The essential requirements is that the 'p' and 'q' in relationships should be symbolized as different not only in quality but in kind. The Tikopeka...say that the substance of the child originates from the father's semen and derives nothing from the body of the mother." (13)

This discussion, upon completion, is followed by other examples of the development of the child and the recognized physical attributes it receives from its parents, which differ according to the beliefs of the individual society. He concludes this sequence of thought with, "The merit of putting a statement into an algebraic form is that one letter of the alphabet is as good or as bad as any other. Put the same statement into concept language, with words like paternity and filiation stuck in the middle of it, and God help you!' (17)

Before his elite audience, Leach defended his mathematical position by saying,

Stickney 10

"I am not trying to argue that we can use mathematics to solve anthropological problems. What I do claim is that the abstraction of mathematical statement has great virtues in itself. By translating anthropological facts into mathematical