Edmund Leach

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.

'… 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

• 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.