Edmund Leach

• Political systems of Highland Burma

• Pul Eliya
 Biography…..
• Engineer by initial education.
• Contractor
• Yami of Botel Tobago, an island off the coast of
Formosa
• In 1939 he was going to study the Kachin Hills of
Burma, but World War II intervened
• Leach joined the Burma Army
• After he left the Army in 1946, he became a lecturer
in social anthropology at the London School of
Economics
• In 1954, he published Political Systems of
Highland Burma. It challenged the theories of
social structure and cultural change.
• In 1961, he published Pul Eliya, a Village in
Ceylon. It was about theories of kinship as
ideal systems
 FW
• Botel Tobago (an island off Taiwan), Kurdistan
(the part which is now northern Iraq), Burma
(Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
• Initial interest in Kinship studies. Later.. To
structuralism and analyzed Levi’Strauss works.
• His Essay on structuralism gave an analysis of
works of thinkers like.. Durkheim, Malinowski,
Brown and Levi’ Strauss
 LANGUAGE
• Capability of human children speaking is
NATURE.
• Learning different languages that unintelligible
is CULTURAL
• All other ‘CODES’ are types of Language or
communication.
• Leach used MUSIC to explain structure
 Study of L in AGY
• Before 1950
• After 1950
• Food, Dress pattern, Houses are a form of
communication….
• He linked food restrictions with sexual restrictions
• Food and sex metaphors
• Sex behavior, food behavior, speech behavior
• He presents comparison of John the Baptist and
Jesus of Nazareth.– presented the NATURE
CULTURE comparisons
• This was in the context of myths..