Edmund Leach by Stanley J Tambiah

Edmund Leach by Stanley J Tambiah

Stanley J. Tambiah discusses the life of Edmund Leach (1910–1989), one of Britain's foremost social and cultural anthropologists, and a man of extraordinary versatility, originality and intellectual breadth. His substantial contributions to anthropology deal with topics including kinship and social organization, hill tribes and valley peoples, tenure and peasant economy, aesthetics, British structural-functional methodology, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, biblical narratives and the myths of Classical Greece. Leach was not wedded to any settled orthodoxy: what makes his work exciting is his experimentation with new ideas, and his expansions of the horizons of the discipline. His distinctive view of the comparative method allows him to transcend the stale dichotomy between 'them primitives' and 'us moderns', finding instead a dialectic between 'us' and 'them' which opens up the possibility for illuminating common human propensities and capacities.

'… 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

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521521024
ISBN 10	0521521025
Title	Edmund Leach
Author	Stanley J Tambiah
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2002-02-14
Number of pages	538
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable