L is for Leach

Many years ago, my first year of undergraduate studies came to an unexpected end.  I was disenchanted with geology.  It was an unexpected change.  Geology had been the centre of my life for four years, and I expected it to be my future.  I suspect the geology faculty were disenchanted with me, too:  too smart for my own good, I knew far more than most (geology was only taught in few schools, so those who studied it at the university came knowing almost nothing).  Within a year, the excitement from researching the growth patterns of graptolites, a study that netted me a scholarship for the three years of my first degree, had slowly dissipated.  Full of questions and concerns, I met with the college’s Senior Tutor to discuss what to do next.

John Broadbent was English Literature specialist.  He was also a kind, thoughtful and discerning man, who had seen me several times as I navigated the complexities of arriving at Cambridge, married, with my daughter born just a few weeks before my first year examinations.  He and his wife were friends.  It was a revealing conversation, and we agreed I needed to consider changing my area of study.  A little later I bought a book: it had been recommended as a good introduction for me read, to see if its topic, social anthropology, was more what I might like.

Other Cultures had been published earlier in the year.  Written by John Beattie, an anthropologist at Oxford, I found it compelling.  The first half introduced what social anthropologists did, and the ways in which they made sense of another – in those days we might have said primitive  – society.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, it offered an overview of the dominant ‘structural-functional’ approach, based on the view the various parts of a society worked together to create a functioning whole, society as a kind of ‘soft clock’ if you like.  The second half of the book then went on to provide an introduction to the major topics of study: kinship, marriage, politics, law and economics, and finally religion and magic.  It also explored issues in social change.  My new degree course was set, social anthropology, and my tutor would be Edmund Leach.

It was at the beginning of my second year when I first understood and appreciated the Cambridge tutorial system.  In my first year, tutors had been coaches, keeping me on track, checking work, indistinguishable from secondary school teachers.  Edmund Leach provided a very different experience, one that shaped my approach to teaching from then on.  There were two of us, the other a Winchester boy, his uncle the head of an Oxford College, although, as it happened, we had little to do with each other.  Learning was an individual thing.  After discussions in Leach’s college rooms, we worked on what had been introduced, completing a (weekly) essay.

A typical week?  I had resolved to type from the day I arrived at Cambridge, and so my typed essay would be returned to me.  Alongside various points of the essay would be letters: A, B, C, and so on.  Attached to the essay would be a typed comment on each point.  Sometimes I would also receive a 2-3 page mimeo document, an elaboration of the some of the issues the essay topic covered.  Together the response was often twice the essay length.  Seldom discussing the essays, we moved to a new topic, which we were expected to go away and study:  no essay question, it was for us to decide what we would address within the broad theme we’d covered.  Self-directed learning, with a handful (and sometimes more) of books and articles we might consider.  I loved it.  Every week, I was back reading, thinking, typing.  The more I did, the more I wanted to do.

Not every tutorial was the same.  Sometimes Edmund would toss out a comment about a famous study.  “I wonder if there is more to the Kula Ring than Malinowski described.”  You might write on what Malinowski said, or you could choose to see if you could see another perspective.  He must have sensed my contrarian nature, because I was always looking to challenge the wisdom on offer:  sometimes I got a little way along a different path!  Occasionally, we would go into his rooms and see a decanter of sherry and three glasses.  There would be little or no social anthropology that week, as Edmund mulled over the challenges of the current political scene, issues in the UK, or some other topic on his mind.  At the end of the hour, he might throw out something for us to look at, or forget.  I’d make up my own topic if the latter was the case.

Looking back, now I realise he was working on two very different issues.  One was his interest in symbolism, the dialectics of religion, and the structural study of myths.  Claude Levi-Strauss, the French social anthropologist, had led a challenge to the structural functional approach with his approach, confusingly called structural anthropology (structuralism), and this had caught Leach’s interest.  At the same time, he was beginning to explore a series of issues he would later present on radio in 1967, on the topic of ‘A Runaway World’.  The first area was academic, technical, and intriguing; the latter was to prove an eye-opening journey into the mind of an iconoclast.

Edmund Leach first studied Engineering as an undergraduate, then worked for a four years in Hong Kong and China for what is now the Swire Group.  Changing direction, he studied with Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics, two of the ‘greats’. After some months among a small tribe on an island off the coast of Formosa, he wrote his first paper in social anthropology. War broke out, and instead of having his planned time in Burma to study the groups in the Kachin Hills he joined the Burma Army, serving from late 1939 to the summer of 1945.  A leader of guerilla forces, often in appalling conditions, and even commander of the Kachin irregular forces for a while, he ended as a Major.  All the while, he continued to research, gaining a detailed understanding of the peoples of Northern Burma.

He returned to the UK a changed man.  Physically, those war years had been debilitating, and left their aftermath.  At the same time, he had developed a view of anthropology that moved him well away from the established structural-functionalist approach that was dominating the field.  In 1954 he published Political Systems of Highland Burma, drawing on his PhD thesis, looking at cultural change in Burmese hill tribes.  He challenged the established theories of social structure and cultural change, and the role of politics in other cultures.  His book focussed on the relationships between the Kachin and Shan groups in the hill regions, each with its own form of  organisation:  his research revealed the differences were as much symbolic and expressive as they were real: some ‘Shans’ might leave their richer colleagues, migrate up the hillsides and become ‘Kachins’, and vice versa. The iconoclast was re-evaluating some sacred concepts.

His second book came out in 1961.  Pul Eliya was a study of a village in Ceylon.  Here he was interested in the management of water in a hydraulic society, and explored how kinship can be seen as an idealised system, a way to manage relationships, rather than determine them.  It was at this time his interested in Levi-Strauss grew, attracted by his approach even if he disagreed with the rather cerebral and idealistic nature of his theories.  Despite his concerns, he became a key figure in bringing Lévi-Strauss to the English-speaking anthropological world.  It has since been argued that Pul Eliya was a bridge between the structural-functional and structuralism schools.

Now at Cambridge, 1961 was to be an important year.  He had spent the previous year at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Studies in Palo Alto, California.  The result was a paper on Rethinking Anthropology, which became the first essay in a collection of the same name.  In large part, these papers were about kinship, a critical area in tensions between the different schools in social anthropology.  By now Edmund Leach was an outstanding and somewhat pugnacious figure in the field, while at the same time he demonstrated an impressive ability to respect the work of his colleagues, coupled with a mischievous sense of fun.

In Cambridge, as a student, I had only a passing understanding of all that was happening.  I devoured books like Rethinking Anthropology and his earlier two classic ethnological studies.  I was equally absorbed by Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology, which had appeared in English in 1963.  It was a field in ferment, and it’s hard to describe the sense of excitement.  You could take any primary data – a missionary’s account of wedding rituals in Thailand, a section of The Bible, or a collection of German children’s fairy tales – and analyse and interpret to your heart’s content!  I didn’t really understand all the complexities, but it was intellectually absorbing.

Edmund Leach was a major figure in social anthropology, and much of what he wrote was for an academic audience.  He was a leading critic of that comfortable structural-functional school, challenging academic colleagues in the leading schools in Cambridge and Oxford.  However, rather than focus on his technical contributions to social anthropology, now well in the past, it is his wider views that might seem most relevant to a modern reader.   In 1967, he was to be the Reith Lecturer for the year, offering his views on change and its consequences.  The Reith Lectures are one of those very British traditions, broadcast annually by the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) since 1948.  Intended as a contribution to its public service role, they were named after Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation’s inaugural director-general. Each year the BBC invited a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures intended to “advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest”. [i]

No longer a field researcher, the opportunity was ideal.  Edmund Leach was an intellectual, and an unembarrassedly controversial speaker.  Elected Provost of King’s the year before, he had a respect for symbols and tradition, yet critical of the fads and foibles of pretentious behaviour.  The Reith Lectures gave him a platform to examine broad social issues, focussing on man’s ability (and inability) to cope with his creations.  The delivery was provocative and contentious, and when they were published, he included a preface that attacked those who had criticised his as views as the lectures were being broadcast.  Great stuff, and great entertainment! [ii]

Like half of the university (at least), I was glued to the radio as each lecture was broadcast.  It was like listening to a man on fire.  His theme was simple: technological  change and population increases were creating a need for major change, a ‘rethinking’.  He addressed man’s relation to nature, to machines, and then the anthropologist’s familiar territory of social relations, morals, and education.  His thesis was simple:  we had to abandon an illusory and dangerous attachment to apparent objectivity, and recognise what made us human was our inter-connectedness.

Sadly, not all the lectures are still available for downloading from the BBC, making it hard to appreciate the rapid fire, hard-hitting and information-packed presentations.  Only Lectures 3 and 5 remain. [iii]  However, the resulting book had one additional virtue, as the dust-jacket included a series of “Quotations from Provost Leach”, taken from the from the lectures which were packed full of memorable remarks.  A review included these (citing the page references):

• So what we have to consider is not “why are the young so disorderly?’ but “why do the old imagine that the young are so disorderly?’ [p. 37].
• Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents [p, 44].
• Privacy is the source of fear and violence [p. 461.
• So long as we allow our perception to be guided by morality we shall see evil where there is none, or shining virtue even when evil is staring us in the face, but what we find impossible is to see the facts as they really are [pp. 54-55].
• In our runaway world, no one much over the age of forty-five is really fit to teach anybody anything [p. 74].
• Young people need to be shown that they are already in a position of supremacy; their problem is not to conquer the environment, but to look after it [p. 87].
• As you speak, you generate consciousness; what you create is yourself. That is a god-like activity [p. 88]. [iv]

Looking over what he said 50 years ago, his comments appear as relevant now as they were back then.  We still experience difficulty in accepting the young are our future.  Today’s fake news is compounding our inability to discern what is good and true, and what is wrong and evil.  The older generation clings on to the view that it knows all the answers.  For sure, we are living in a runaway world.  The only difference: it’s running away faster than ever.

Edmund Leach was more than merely a teacher.  Yes, he offered a compelling example of how to help people learn, an approach that I have followed ever since.  He saved me from being a memory machine, helping me learn how to read and think, skills that years of schooling had barely addressed. He introduced me to the intellectual satisfaction that comes from dissecting and analysing data on behaviour, myths and stories.  He was a kind and thoughtful man, and, as I was struggling to cope with life as well as study, he helped me in many other ways.  I didn’t continue with social anthropology after Cambridge, but my anthropologist’s sensitivities remained.  Working in various types of organisation, I stayed alert to the importance of rituals and beliefs, to alliances and networks.  Yet if I was to summarise what Edmund Leach offered, above and beyond all those things, it was ‘rethinking’.  I learnt the value of viewing nothing as fixed, and that the ability to stand back, to re-think, was critical.  The ideas I develop, the views I explore with friends and colleagues, these are all the more useful when I stop and ask, ‘Is that really the way things are?  Could we look at this differently?  What about applying an approach from this other field of thought?  Can we rethink this?’

I owe a huge debt to Edmund Leach:  the way I attempt to repay that debt is to see if I can pass on what I learnt to others in the best way I can.

[i] http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/the-reith-lectures/about/

[ii] Published by BBC Books in 1968.  On his self-perception, see S J Tambiah, Edmund Leach, Cambridge 2002

[iii] Lecture 3, Ourselves and Others, offers a good introduction: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00hbbsf

[iv] R F Murphy, A Runaway World, Book Reviews, American Anthropologist, Vol. 72, 1970, pp. 852-854