11 Reasons Why Edmund Leach Was the Ultimate Anthropology Badass
1. Lost his fieldnotes, yet wrote a monograph that anthropologist love to read even after more than sixty years since its publication. 2. Became known even outside anthropology. Political Systems of Highland Burma appeared in Autumn Ball , a famous 1979 novel by Estonian writer Mati Unt. 3. Expressed an opinion that Frazer’s Golden Bough was actually a gilded twig. 4. Called Clifford Geertz a theologian disguised as a professor of anthropology (and seems to have suggested that Geertz was a major novelist also). 5. Took the label “positivist” as a compliment. 6. Spoke of his fellow colleagues as of mere butterfly collectors. 7. Revolutionized British anthropology by dragging Lévi-Strauss across the Channel. 8. Was surprised to find that so many people attended Lévi-Strauss’s 1965 Huxley Memorial Lecture, because only Leach himself (and maybe a few others in UK) understood Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. 9. Wrote that Melford Spiro’s anthropological a...