Edmund Leach

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach ( born November 7, 1910 in Sidmouth, England; † January 6, 1989 in Cambridge, England ) was a British sociologist Ethno. He represented the eklektizistischere variant of the British Social Anthropology.

Life

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

The trip to the island south of Taiwan located influenced Leach lasting, tightening his decision to study anthropology on his return to England. In 1937 he returned to London and gave his position at Butterfield & Swire on. About the New Zealand anthropologist Raymond Firth he reached the anthropological seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE ), which was performed at the time of Bronislaw Malinowski.

Edmund Leach undertook in 1938 as part of his studies, a field research in Iraq, he had to stop because of the tense political world situation and the security situation in Iraq. Prompted by Noel Stevenson, a subscriber of the anthropological seminar, he undertook an expedition in 1939 to the people of Kachin to North Burma. His nine-month research work in the Sinlum Hills, between October 1939 and June 1940 should be based on his dissertation, but to escape from the advancing Japanese troops, most of his documents were lost.

About the contacts of Noel Stevenson came Leach into the army and fought in subsequent years as a liaison officer in the underground against the Japanese army, which had occupied Burma at this time. He was assisted especially the language skills that he had acquired in the course of his research. 1954 wrote Edmund Leach from the remaining research material and from the findings of his time in the military a treatise on the oscillating social structures of the Kachin. This book "Political Systems of Highland Burma " is now one of the classics of political anthropology.

Works

Political Systems of Highland Burma

Leach examined the Kachin in the highlands of Burma. It was the first real monograph of this region.

Using peripheral, tribal, stratified societies studied Leach, the question of the dynamics and concluded local systems (also in very remote areas ) are never ( a) of the Environmental foreclosed nor ( b ) static. Before Leach ethnologists wrote the Kachin a uniform culture and social organization. The functionalist social anthropology, which prevailed to Leach's time, however, a balanced equilibrium was accepted and had gone from a single social system, in the work of the ethnographer.

Leach was one of the first British social anthropologists ( ethno- sociologists ) who went on to represent Alfred Radcliffe -Brown static structural functionalism addition. He described the social structures in the Kachin oscillating as opposite between two models of society,

• A hierarchical model based on Chieftain Gefolgschafts relations and referred to as gumsa model is
• And an egalitarian organizational model, which is called gumlao.

The hierarchical model leaned on to the theocratic kingdom of the Shan valley. This model was but inwardly fragile - because it was anchored in the Kachin in a system in which the patrilineages, marry the women outside, that are superior in rank to accept women. The model is constantly threatened divisions. The gumsa hierarchy thus had to collapse, which split off new groups organized themselves after the gumlao model their inner nature. Then, however, the egalitarian system was again replaced by hierarchical gumsa model.

Rethinking Anthropology (1962 )

This collection of essays contained Leach's credo from the experience of the examination with the Kachin: If you only studied individual companies, one is afflicted with a disease: the so-called " Amongitis ". You have to compare international, one needs to show differences.