Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA was a British social anthropologist and academic.
18 Facts About Edmund Leach
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Edmund Leach served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979.
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Edmund Leach was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975.
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Leach was born in Sidmouth, Devon, the youngest of three children and the son of William Edmund Leach and Mildred Brierley.
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Edmund Leach's father owned and was manager of a sugar plantation in northern Argentina.
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In 1940 Leach married Celia Joyce who was then a painter and later published poetry and two novels.
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Edmund Leach was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA with honours in Engineering in 1932.
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Edmund Leach found out after his contract expired that he did not like the business atmosphere and never again was going to sit on an office stool.
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Edmund Leach intended to return to England by way of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but increasing political turmoil in Russia convinced him otherwise.
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Edmund Leach was an active member of Malinowski's "famous seminar".
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In 1938, Edmund Leach went to Iraq to study the Kurds, which resulted in Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds.
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Edmund Leach then joined the Burma Army, from the fall of 1939 to summer 1945, where he achieved the rank of Major.
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In 1951, Edmund Leach won the Curl Essay Prize for his essay The Structural Implications of Matrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage, which drew on his extensive data on the Kachin to make important theoretical points as it related to kinship theory.
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Edmund Leach was elected provost of King's College, Cambridge in 1966 and retired in 1979; President of the Royal Anthropological Institute ; a Fellow of the British Academy and was knighted in 1975.
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Edmund Leach spanned the gap between British structural-functionalism, and French structuralism.
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Edmund Leach's turn of phrase produced memorable quotes, such as this on Levi-Strauss:.
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For example, in Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, he relies on Edmund Leach in describing Levi-Strauss's analysis of cooking in relation to human culture.
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Edmund Leach applied his analysis of kinship to his disagreement with Levi-Strauss in Pul Eliya, introducing Levi-Strauss's work into British social anthropology in doing so.