An interview of the anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach

now you may always had a bent to anthropology but I think you became a professional anthropologist by rather slow degrees didn't you read something else it came well yes it was an accident I when I was at Cambridge I had no idea invent apologies I came up to read in mathematics and went on to read engineering which I took my degree in engineering now the way other thing is what happened in Cambridge which I suppose slanted me towards and Paulo di the great day of Cambridge Theatre of a Cambridge festival set of famous repertory which are certainly influenced me a great deal of sort of tending to interested in theatre and seeing life as theatre which ultimately gets fed into my and apology but at that time I had no idea I just when I graduated that it was bad slump and I just not now and I joined the British firm in China Butterfield and soir and after spending a year in London I went out Shanghai and was in China for three and a half years that is until the end of the night at 6:00 and I was posted in various places in Chongqing and Tsingtao and eventually in teaching and he began to be interested in anthropological matters at that time to do you know an amateur is where happen well I traveled a great deal and made a point of every time I had the chance I got to the most obscure parts of China borders to get some order the manga and forearm so I saw much more of China than I think the ordinary visitor did I mean China neither they varied country of Martha's country and it is enormous of a young man to be impressed by the extreme extraordinary situation of here is a great civilization which immense antiquity which is predicted by ball as well yet they did everything exactly the other way around I mean there's a young man one got the impression that everything was back to front them in you know the men will skirts the living royal trousers Amendola it was like that and in all sorts of ways it is in fact true the Chinese solution to basic problems is rather the reverse of the European problem and this gradually filtered into my interests I think could you give a lot of instances of the way in which they reverse the solutions does it share a pin in their subjects rituals well they're all sorts of ways in which I mean they have a very thing we have a kind of religion which is a very distinct system of the Christian system which is in the scene of a distinct religion often clearly the Chinese have no religion and yet they are their whole life is surrounded by rituals of various kind and their architecture is very closely related to cosmology to a degree which ours is not they consciously sir and this interested in a like ideal the the whole matter of Chinese architecture and the abstractions of Chinese architecture which are quite different from our than in the Temple of Heaven in peek in with marvelous symmetrical home scaleo the roof is the sky and the ground the bottom of the earth I mean it's it's sort of a everything is consciously symbolized in the earth ways but also I found that you know yeah it seems to me that European art even when we become self-consciously abstract we're still in somehow copying nature whether the bed goes right back to Greeks that somehow art is a form of imitating nature at one removed making abstractions out of nature whereas Chinese much more consciously seem to make nature fit their own ideas I mean you don't never in your make painting a picture you never copy it from nature you think about it and then you paint it but in the same night having done that you then make the nature look like look like what's your idea so the idea of a mountain the actual Chinese sacred mountains which I climb for a five and I climb three of them they had been made to look like the pictures with steps all the way up them so they didn't climb them rather than the pictures made to look like the mountain I mean the picture that I like the mountains but it's it's a sort of back to front way of thinking about it all sorts of aspects of that that the ideas come first and the fact afterwards I think in from work one of the things I got very interested in in China besides architecture well ancient Chinese Jade's I mind the same way or but I mean these are mainly grave goods which are sort of homework yogi open and they're not Jade as we now think of another whole bright green they're stone objects are there is kind which played a very important part in ancient Chinese rituals ancient I'm talking about thousand BC for example this object here this disc with bubbles on it has a very complicated cosmological significance but here is a point where it is different from our appreciation so the Chinese appreciation of this is the feel of it the actual sensory touch and the sensory touch is is what is appreciated rather than simply the shape of what it is though the shape comes into it again now here for example is a pig which is Jo dynasties how do we see that I don't know that's not quite enough there you'll notice it's already a highly abstract it's a pig you can see it's a pain but it's a very abstracted kind of pain and it's beautifully lovely to touch and then again here's a little pig which is more abstract than the two of them you see immediately carrying pressing or all to adjust the formal abstraction of these ideas now I'm cheating bit here because I acquired these tortoises after I've become an anthropologist so that it's not absolutely straightforward there but I card them in Hong Kong in nitrogen to c-section but here one is becoming very logical because clearly they are tortoises but they're not straight tortoises I mean this tortoise has a human face isn't the Eddie Devon man the Silius male and a lovely creature and the other one is quite obviously female and actually she's more like a pickaninnies I mean if you haven't actually owned a pick Annie's and there she'd been courted the pic Annie's will behave just like like that the piggies doesn't have a split tail anymore a caucus taught us how to split tail but this is linked up with the whole of Chinese civilization and their complicated word Chinese writing came out of oracle bones which used tortoise shells for making Oracle's and there's a whole blending here of animal characters and human characters and now I can see that this is really they deep that involves a whole lot of anthropological nations but certainly my interest in Chinese Jade's sort of lead me somehow along the road where I was likely to pick up and clawed for ideas so I came was provided more or less unwittingly mathematics engineering and drama in the making of you as an solace and then China gave you a view of a culture which formulates the formulas reality in a quite different way so you became more more interested in that aspect so you were on well on the way now to becoming of full scale labs fathers what happened next well I had traveled around and seen some on corners of China but right at the end when I decided to come home and I'd resigned from my firm I had some time to waste in a way and I joined up I was in Peking I joined up with a rather eccentric American and we went off to an island called bucket of a girl which is off the coast of Formosa which is within Japanese territory there's our Taiwanese tree which was a very small island with about 1,500 so called a primitive people the Yami and this will absolutely blow me over I mean I didn't there anything anthropology at all but this fantastic experience of we were the first Europeans beyond these islands and right the beginning of the century and their few European that ever been right and you know I didn't know Paula died I was an engineer I could draw I drew beautiful pictures and drawings of their boats and their houses and asked a lot of questions that I might the question that I asked for but quite not bad but they were not quite like this if I'd asked now and when it was after that I was there about two and a half months my partners were there longer well when I got back home I had all this stuff from his Island and I fell I want to find out whether it was there any interest and I hadn't have a contact with anthropology and through Raymond first and I hadn't been met that a subsequent living my closest friend and I took along to him and said look here I'd been to his Island all this stuff he has photographs and pictures and on isn't if any interest music world is in sting but of course you've asked one question another yes you better come and meet malinovski no Malinowski at that time was this famous professor Polanski economics with very charismatic figure and created enmities all round was tremendously powerful personality and if he liked you he liked to knew he didn't buy to that loud goodness knows for some reason rather he decided he liked me and for the next and it turns out I were only new Malinowski for about eighteen months but she didn't know but then he went off to America I was complete there I'm you know added dongle affirming very pop and ok man ask you decide that again me I'm honest and that was that and I it is most exciting experience of my life was this this this year and a bit working without last year attending his seminars going to his house talking to him and so on and however he went to America in 38 so then I worked with first as a research assistant for a year and that was a very valuable experience working with one who was was writing a book and I worked with first on my writing of the book learnt what anthropologists do and then in 1939 I went again this time I abandon game shed Easter and I went to Burma eating that to China you see I've gained in work right on the edge of Burma and China complicated reasons I should go there but then because the war really did break out and that kept me in Burma on a North Burma India for the next six years so you went to Burma as an anthropologist the menu then the war broke out so you had to combine it with others here Oh indeed I intended to be in Burma just for 15 months or something like that to do a say stop this type of an anthropological study of a community which part of which I did but I was actually in these five years I was a member of the Burma Army but partly because the war in Burma didn't mean very much all the Japanese Pearl Harbor of I'm partly because I was a sort of misfit from the army point of view anyway as well 8th century Chinese character I managed to fit in quite a lot of anthropology along with my military service because in the end I was a very regular kind of serve of soldier and this took me to a most extraordinary parts of Burma which I could never got to accept if the government hadn't been prepared to drop me they'll push me there something went one way or another you were very much a loner I mean we're not in a regular military formation well I am until the Japanese chased as odd I was officially a member of the 3rd Burma rifles but I was seconded to various other thing that or X list and at that point I was seconded to something called Burma levees which didn't really exist and subsequently I was seconded to something called chin levels which any existed when I had sort of over created it one way or another and then I got the unpopular with with them in the tree and was eventually a kind of civilian I was a tech I was like as we went back into bung eventually there were had to be a civilian military civilian service and I was I was attached to this I will a high up in this this particular non-military military operation but this led to me seeing a lot of Burma I mean I was theoretically a time behind the Japanese lines but there were no Japanese lines there behind so it wasn't the daring as it sounds but I did have much fun why do you memorized early in 1946 I would because I'd been seen service right through yes I got early d-mail but no lavish I was then still very uncertain whether to be an anthropologist but I got all this material and I made contact with first again has been now professor Li L Z I discussed it with him and he said well why don't you work on this material to have it firsthand and go back to the literature and see them make sense of the literature in the light of your unique experience and I did this and my PhD was in fact that I've been resumed it was seven years after to India and it is a book where CSIS which I read up city was end up being written that the kitchen was from 1800 onward and in the light of my own experience and as soon as I finished that which is in 47 I was taking on the staff of the LSE II I went the Borneo to do a special reconnaissance of ceramic two plans at research projects which were while surprisingly carried out but not by me I was in had several years teaching in LSE in 1953 I agreed to move to Cambridge where porters of Technology fficer so in the interval between actually games Cambridge and leaving the LSE I did my fieldwork in the Salaam in Sri Lanka but which I wrote a book which was published around and since then I was actually on the staff in chamber of the faculty since 1953 and now I consider I've been a serious professional anthropologist since about I suppose 1946 and I done taught long anthropology before you were say you about 37 when that when you became a serious professional anthropologist I actually finally committed yes I was born in 1910 so that I could say I was 37 when I was at was here but my boats and no personal gain probably crossing the Rubicon or anything there and all at this time you were it was still very much of the British school of anthropology and was represented by fear okay muster you see I mean I my I had in fact in Burma written a very thirsty and malinovski monograph about the kitchen which was lost to the Japanese but it was I it was a pure pure piece of functional study what would be the how would you describe the main features of functionalist and logical studies well he grew up out of malinovski studies of the island of Ko Olina in the Trobriand Islands Indonesia and he was he studied between 19149 King and first case the study of tick appear to those small Polynesian island of three square miles in size and claw hundred people and it they tended to take for granted that the community they were studying had clear-cut geographical boundaries and that also boundaries of a social kind in time and space as it were so do you studied this society as you observed it over a period of one year two years old one of occurred but sort of photographically an instantaneous holding picture of the society and you didn't worry too much about how it had come to be like that you didn't worry at all you rather tended to imagine it and always been like that and you didn't worry too much about its contacts with other parts the world you were concerned with the microsociology might say of how the institutions which you directly hit it together like the gear wheels of a watch now this is a very valuable thing because no previous kind of society ever been at this miniscule level and the kinds of discoveries that were made about the way things fit together are of the valid discoveries the weakness was that it was lacking in dynamism and it was and it tends to produce a very static picture but this didn't worry me of my engineering point of view that always thought in mathematics from always learned statics before in the dynamics and dynamics didn't seem to be very different from statics a beautiful those already to get that room but there were lots of rival views of what and Falls ought to be at that time and of course some of them grow more well yes I mean in the Red Cliff Brown was also a functionalist with a contemporary read of dosages had a very parent attic Korea and but came back to Oxford in 1936 and he was a devoted follower of immune doctrine the French sociologist their integral of a narrow view of what till Kamiya sociology was about and some extent he was interested in the comparison of societies as types he was interested well in a manner of Max Weber they were the German social good but these sort of societies as corresponding to certain ideal types which could then be set on up on a kind of taxonomy and eventually you would have a scientific sociology in which types of societies were like the types of men mammals and types of insects and so on and it was a rare botanical way of thinking about him and but here again he was concerned with how institutions fit together to make a system an articulated system or like a skeleton of a mammal but I was never directly associated with red-brown except that he was my examiner of my PhD thesis which which I am thanks and I knew him personally but I never had contact with in academic yeah will this be because of your mechanistic been to a rather posed this biological well it is simply principally because the ID will rival read grown up between Oxford anthropologists under bracket Brown and London and apologists under on the first but idea said this is true that my my model-making was much more mechanistic and abstract over a whereas rapid Brown who fancied himself rather other as a mathematician wouldn't even may leave merely mathematic it did use his models biological models to a degree which I found was rather naive but of course there was or later evans-pritchard who had been succeeded now a relative Brown of Oxford and had originally been very close directly from later deviated from this position very widely by reinstating an interest in history and in ideology as opposed to and in some ways move Allah closer to lehre straws I wanted to ask you about ladies clothes I mean it's obvious to us that pure formal training has been an English functionalist school why did lady stores have such importance for you well it's a bit of a long story but it's like this Lyra straws this background at logical background was really taken up from the American cultural anthropologist or ethnologists of the English would call them particularly low E and in 1940 dental war he was in New York and became closely associated with the famous linguist yeoman Jakob Sutton and clearly picked up a great many ideas from yochelson and wanted to apply a Crimson's ideas to the kind of comparative cultural anthropology which he'd known from the immersion he is major application of was in this book would have published in 1949 originally on the elementary structures of kinship in the first French tradition which is a comparative study of kinship systems essentially a kinship terminologies kinship terminologies fathers that brother son cousin and so on over a geographical area stretching from Australia to Siberia now the study of kinship terminologies as a kind of and pelagic efreet which goes back to latter part of 19th century it was started by Morgan the idea that a kinship terminology system the system of the use of words reflects is a correspondence to the type of society and neutrals tried to show that by comparing the kinship terminology is and the formal rules of marriage over this large geographical area he could arrive at certain fundamental principles about exchange systems as reflected in in marriage you could have types of exchange where the marriage was reciprocal to the two sides exchanged brides or you could have them asymmetrical where once I gave a bride and else I did not now this is far removed from British functional social anthropology however the central axis point sort of focal point of lilies roses massive volume was the chapter relating to the kitchens of North Burma which is based of course on wala and teacher as the graphic fact before I'd ever got there and was in many cases many details wrong I mean they're just all things wrong but this was the central chapter of the book about which the thing really hung and I was fascinated because these are the people I'd worked with throughout the war or I really knew about like children and what baffled me was that although latest Ross is ethnographic facts a simple recording of custom work in many cases quite wrong nevertheless his method had arrived at certain insights but the the underlying principles of which the sister so hard he worked which no one previous to him had sieved and Edith I'm not sure how I perceived a moment he said this of the squad of listen this was he got hit back to front a factor never notice didn't matter very much indeed understood something about the society which no one else had understood and this fascinated me how it could count be that someone could be wrong on his facts when write some hard battle see area and this runs through my later of my interest in structuralist anthropology has been this relation between the ethnographic facts and the underlying theory later of course latest rows moved right away from comparative study of kinship systems till the comparative studies of myths and here again the same principle applied that his his big book or method for volume work is a comparative study of the mythologies mainly of American Indian stretching from Patagonia to Alaska but particularly for the South American Indian where the myth is you know it's it's very secondhand its stuff which is translated into Spanish and Portuguese and men into fractions are on a very far removed from the original stuff and he is comparing mythologies as if they were separated from the societies which produced them and yet he seems to be able to say something very interesting about his mythology even though they are unrelated to the societies in which generated them and certainly my key pupils were Stephen young Jones who is and his wife who you know because their Stephen is a fellow King you know purposely I said where I sent them to the field in South America to the Amazon the upper Amazon to an area where I knew that the destruction kind of miss prevailed to find out what's it like on the ground if you actually look at this stuff in detail and whereas nearest Ross is a condor miss may occupy a couple of paragraphs perhaps the huge earns is miss you know it once 480 hours of tape on him it just goes on and on and yet their studies are in a way very functionalist in that they're concentrated studies of a single long highest community in the upper Lopez or very little nevertheless they find but in a certain sort of way the nearest rossion analysis is very penetrating and illuminating for this detailed functional analysis so that in their case they have as it were amalgamated the two traditions chi interrupted list and yet is care and if the fact that that labor zones are so often wrong about ethnographical detail and you were able to show this yourself because of your knowledge and the Hugh Jones is done seg D it makes it even more impressive that the that the insights are so often correct and made you thought that the theory which owed so much to Jakob s'en must have something in it it's out the way this is the way I'm thinking obviously that liberals like is because he's coming at it as a he's trying to apply a theory of linguistics to that's what I want to ask you how does that work well because the Assumption the key thing becomes ins linguistics which comes from the saucer were much earlier in the century but in Jakob Sion's case it is concerned with phonology how do we actually pick up a message from a flow of speech flow speeches at an objective level is a pattern of sound on on the breath imposed on the breath and this pattern when you write it down it consists of vowels and consonants and Naxals and intonation z' and and so on alternating with one another and yet we are not only capable of drafting this coded message onto the onto our breath but we are able to decode it again and turn it into a meaningful message the other person is interested first of all how do we do this we clearly it's inconceivable in Euros a vast variety of human languages that are that our mental apparatus can be so sophisticated that it can visit where decode anything if they were all different it must there must be some very fundamental principles which it operates on and the artisan has talked about distinctive features in live sourcing arguing binary opposition's there is a very small number of opposition's which which we can recognize we don't can't recognize them consciously we recognize them unconsciously we recognize unconsciously the difference between the hard son of P and the soft sound but of B and so that pit is not the same as bit but that's all it's just a single alternation the very very fine grade and the whole whole phonology according to dr. Zhiming friend it built up on a very limited number of distinguished distinctive feet distinctive features which can decode the whole system so Lewis rose but this is in mine it's not out there it is something in the mind and news rice is arguing that when customer behaviour must similarly be coded in this sort of way so that when we do react in certain customer where you're possibly not acting in some in as it were the opposite way whatever the opposite way is and that this again conveys a message which is in the mind now this is very tricky what we mean by in mind I mean the whole whole function this tradition has been very much empirical observing what people do out there recording the fact everything that the folks lived as way something which you can record on a tape recorder take a photograph of make a videotape of and so on the highly suspicious on of interpretive nations in the mind and therefore this is where my my puzzles of being what is the relationship between these objectives that's out there in the world which are as it were in a sense of in a sense really objective in the sense that you can actually record them and preserve the month on tape o'clock and and the message barry the argument that these behaviors besides doing a 6/8 thing I mean do things in the sense that you grow potatoes in them and build a house and you actually alter the state of the world but also they say something so there is a whole coding involved in the way we the food we the dresses we were the kind of houses we live in the way we arrange our houses I mean you're just going to a house and mind all the rooms are the same I mean the living room and pretty em of a bedroom and these have all very different values and you can there's a sort of coding patterns built into that and the way room buildings are arranged on the on the ground and then the big stars are not are not like human has a bit of a trick if we want to be contemptuous of the human being we say you know in a pigsty and so on yes and there's so much in the ordinary material things we do in which the functionalist have paid so much which is in fact concerned with giving messages rather than with just solving economic problems and this is this big change I think that that nod is and then no one can entirely ignore and in very much in in the malinovski expedition it was how does the behaviors with customer behaviors how do they serve the needs of the individual and what was mentors how do they keep them alive I mean the basic need for the human being is to is to keep warm and eat food procreate his species and not die and you then showed that the whole of your cultural arrangements of the Trobriand islands just did this well in a way it's fairly obvious because it if they didn't do that there were many true being Islanders to talk about but but having shown this and you showed a number of interesting things which previously people hadn't noticed of house housing is dovetail into jente what they tended to be overlooked was all these behaviors are also saying things communicating messages and it is the nature of the message how the coding how the messages are coded which underlies how the sort of structuralist element has not worked into the system and I think most practicing and polders now there has been a tremendous merging of these two schools in that most field anthropologists whether they're American or French or English now do very much the same sort of singing and what they do is obviously derived from that logic it has more gadgets it has television cameras and click recorders and also policy but no that's what they're doing is what Malinowski would have sent his field workers all to do but now they go into the field assuming that part of their job is to try and understand the symbolic coding of what is built into the behavior as well as just the materialist economic coding and the symbolic coding is assumed to be in some way coded in a manner which is some in some way related to linguistics I mean decisions of how the argument started so we've got I mean I can put it this way we have it a level at which people are concerned with the very intricate problems of how things actually are on the ground and then you've got the second level where people are persuaded also that the systematic arrangements carry a message now having out to that level your with your kind of thing and also in a measurable levy stresses kind of thing but there's a very difference between still between what what what interests you or what you're trying to do and what he's trying to do is Ann's 10 could you tell us what that distance is you're not wholeheartedly a designer well I this is because or his episode of good he seems to think that and here I'm not sure that he would actually agree you than I say but what do you want he seems to be thing he talks about the human mind and he seems to be looking for features of social systems which arise direct the fact that it is human beings who who participate them and any sort of human beings would do equally well and it must be so when he is able to fit together take the whole mythology of the Americas and actually says in mother this myth which was recorded in the Amazon only becomes comprehensible when it is put side-by-side with this other myth which was recorded in Alaska or or somewhere up there and now this must be that there is something Universal about the mental operations of the of the human beings who created these two stories there couldn't be any other and he's able to make this comparison quieting taking no notice of the fact one myths were generated in the tropics in the Amazon and the other in the semi article now I'm very very skeptical about this of seeing I feel that that there are certain very basic principles about how these coding systems operate but they're they're so basic that they're they don't get you afraid I mean they're that there's basic is the way to computers work I mean that flip-flop mechanism of computers and continuity discontinuity at that level yes there are universals about how we seemed how we operate but I would be very very cagey about so just jumping about round the map and saying oh well you know that's reminds me of that I suppose your differences from latest rows attributable not only two very different formation but of the fact that his base was linguistics and yours was engineering and that makes very different I think sir but also mathematics to say mathematicians assume that they're abstractions applied at the universe at large regardless of whether human being though there at all I'm not sure that I'm entirely confident of this but nevertheless Lyra Strasse is concerned because he came into anthropology basically through linguistics is concerned with abstraction as a phenomenon of the human mind whereas I'm looking all the time for models which are then really imply that the model maker must be human I know that the model maker is and this I think is worth thinking about society as a machine it really comes into it there's an ism and our traditional curse that anthropologists study primitive societies and in every other people think that they do this and that's how our primitives are they a simple society there's also an equivalent of simple societies with over as well a society because they know you make complex well I think is actually the justification were and Poli exactly reverse of this I think that from a machine engineer's point of view it is very plain that in the evolution of mechanism mechanism did become more more complicated until about the middle of the 18th century the clock makers of the middle Beijing extremely ingenious and extraordinary Lamberg variations of machinery and then because of the pressures of industrialization when right the opposite way became simpler and simpler and simpler and now you the only way you could hope to survive as an engineer has to produce a machine which is made of absolutely standardized parts which will all fit together and be used in umpteen different machine and of course the ultimate of this is is a computer over here which uses a principle which has been the human being since the daughter does plus minus plus minus also alternation and everything is there are no moving parts in in modern machines I mean that the whole thing is work down to that level of abstraction do you think there's Riley exact analogy between that progression that you described to our simplicity and the relationships between primitive and so-called complex society well what I think about so-called large society large industrial societies are built on a sort of hierarchical principle nested principle so the very large organizations are structured in the same way of the base small organization so the parish council Israeli does the same as the as the cabinet in Whitehall and autonomy the the theory of organization is is very stereotyped and this can exist at various different levels and our modern societies reproduce the same structures over and over again other words we wouldn't be able to understand them it we can tell me because they're very simple and repetitive that we can understand them now they're interesting the reason for being an anthropologist social anthropology this is not that in studying exotic societies you're studying a simple society on the contrary the point is that the the exotic societies have not been pressurized all the become exactly the same they're enormous ly varied so you can only discover what be the possibilities of variation in human behavior are by going to these exotic places because all modern society in modern industrial society exactly the same I mean you go to Tahiti you land on the airport you might as well been Heathrow in a small scale I mean that there's nothing exotic about the about the about the airfield of tiny kids just like what I mean like my god how hideous that's all happening I mean the point is it was you will go to some exotic place simply because to a part of the world where there Canha strain to be standardized and this is really what I find fascinating about employ doing but don't think that you think that I'm just a disguise structuralist I'm interested in a structuralism but my working salon which I have mentioned was very much a study in the functionalist tradition I was trying on an argument about how whether kinship not at all in terms of kinship terminology of the organization of kinship was rarely a thing in itself were just an aspect of a property relation by annoyed so my colleague by saying that you can't study kinship at all I mean usually you're studying property relations in a community which is a very basic thing and perhaps people are talking about these property relations win the language of kinship but that's a very different thing but this is far removed from structuralist analyses but at some of Europe some of our recent work is head has been more akin to a superficial chariot nor kin to the sort of thing that later so well yes I mean I'm what I do now I mean you know the I can no longer do fieldwork you Niall an age where there's not practical to go to exotic places so I work with as you do with literary materials and artistic materials I'm particularly interested in the way patterns are arranged on the ground either in terms of the way buildings are arranged or in the way art objects make their appeal or leaning slightly in your direction the even literary exercises perhaps convey messages I'm not I mean I'm not a literary is touching us but I'm in my treatment of a biblical miss perhaps borders at times on the truth structuralist are - you did right somewhere as I read recently that on the whole your your contemporaries in English British social anthropology were opposed to the dancing do this absolu sets so you've already said that today that to some extent they're their enterprises in the field have been qualified by the sort of thing that we've been talking about they're not doing the same kind of thing they did in Mellon Oscars debt but they are nevertheless on a holding time to take an antagonistic position cause you yes I think they are you know the subject moves on and what present-day field anthropologists are undoing is influenced by all sorts of things besides those I've been talking about it's very influenced by neo Marxism a great stress on not a new Marxist theory it is very influenced by my disdain for feminism I mean the great argument that the earlier generation of social anthropologists ignored the position of women and misrepresented the position of women gave an entirely male orientated do well this is rather true but I mean it it's something we've been saying in criticism latest Ross from longtime his Armani his theory of kinship was an exchange of women between groups of men which really could equally actually change of men between groups the with it but but there are all sorts of ways in which the kind of thing I've been talking about in our consider God old-fashioned we're moving on to more fundamental matters I don't know I think that the I can never move on to something else I mean I my own view is this blend of functionalism and straddling the bridge between functions and instruction you see you don't have any insight into what the next thing that's going to have the next important thing is going to happen you develop an assertion and prodigy no because I mean clearly it's we're coming again and become more wonderful to study exotic societies that he's gotten Society or defeat disappearing so whatever it is and unfold is are going to do really again we'd have to find ways of applying their methods of study to more sophisticated social systems you

Channel: Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya

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Keywords: Leach, Edmund, anthropology, Kachin, Burma, Sri, Lanka, Cambridge, King's, College

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Length: 53min 3sec (3183 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2010