Stanley Tambiah has provided a comprehensive and systematic account of Edmund Leach’s (1910–89) intellectual and personal journey through social anthropology. His is a long and complex book, a summary of Leach’s major publications supplemented by interviews with his close associates and material from his personal papers. Tambiah’s task was complicated by Leach’s bold and iconoclastic stance and the originality, versatility, and breadth of his work: He wrote on kinship, politics, ethnicity, land tenure, economy, biblical texts, art, and architecture, among other topics. Tambiah’s aims are to link the personal and the intellectual and to explore continuities and changes over a career that spanned many decades. He finds the continuities to lie in a distinctive take on structuralism and functionalism, a mix of idealism and empiricism, and a pragmatic instrumental, or strategizing, perspective.

Leach combined skills as an ethnographer and an essayist; he also was an effective administrator, a distinguished lecturer, and a public intellectual who contributed to the debate on contemporary culture. The first part of his career focused on analyses of field studies conducted in nations then known as Burma and Ceylon and yielded two path-breaking ethnographies that challenged conventional thinking. The first, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Harvard University Press,1954), criticized assumptions of social equilibrium derived from Durkheim and assumptions that the boundaries of a society, culture, and language are necessarily coincident. The book and early articles also pointed to errors in Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of Kachin marriage. Leach’s second ethnography, Pul Eliya (Cambridge University Press,1961), was based on field research in dry-zone Sri Lanka. In it, he argued against the structural–functionalist and kinship theories of his contemporaries and made what was then a radical assertion, that kinship was “not a thing in itself but rather a way of thinking about rights and usages with respect to land.” (Leach 1961). Tambiah shows how this view was foreshadowed in the earlier book (pp. 208, 364). Leach also challenged his colleagues in his 1959 Malinowski Memorial Lecture (entitled “Rethinking Anthropology”) by criticizing functionalist organic analogies and poorly reasoned typologies, famously depicting the followers of Radcliffe-Brown as “anthropological butterfly collectors” (pp. 68–69). That same year he used his Sri Lankan materials to challenge Wittfogel’s hypotheses about hydraulic societies. Tambiah comments that Leach knew that his polemical stance and predilection for “combatively contesting settled orthodoxies … made him vulnerable to criticism … [and that] he deliberately took the risks entailed in such polemics” (p. 208). He also hints that this stance may have had sources in Leach’s early experiences (p. 16), although this point is not well developed.

In the second phase of his career, Leach produced essays that drew from published sources, notably biblical materials. These studies were inspired by Lévi-Straussian structuralism “supplemented by Leach’s own adoptions from information theory” (p. 236). Yet, at the same time, Leach criticized Lévi-Strauss’s universalist, reductionist assertions regarding the innate propensities of the human mind, his lack of fieldwork experience, his lack of discrimination in the use of source materials, and his growing disinclination to link myths to their local social, cultural, and material contexts. Tambiah notes the marked contrast with Leach’s own enduring empiricism and concern with ethnographic contexts. Whether in analyses of biblical materials or land ownership, he supported his arguments by “exhaustively taking note of all the relevant evidence from every context” (p. 301).

Tambiah explains Leach’s long-standing attraction to equations of relations and transformations as due to his early training in mathematics and engineering. Another continuity in his writing on culture and society was his idealism and pragmatism. As early as Political Systems, Leach defined social structure in terms of ideas strategically applied to practical situations, “a pattern structure of verbal concepts, open to diverse interpretations, rather than empirically observable and existing kin groups” (p. 94). Tambiah traces this perspective to the influence of Malinowski and Firth, to a line of theorizing that stresses how individual actors use and manipulate ideal categories and norms to further their interests and goals, rather than to the focus on social structure organized in terms of statuses, roles, moral guidelines, and jural norms associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes. By the time Leach encountered Lévi-Strauss, he was deeply enmeshed in those presuppositions of British social anthropology that made sense to him. This explains the ways in which Leach followed and faulted Lévi-Strauss and adapted structuralism to his own agenda.

A good deal of Tambiah’s book is devoted to exploring Leach’s many high-profile debates with other leading anthropologists of his generation, and an entire chapter focuses on the issue of paternity recognition in Australia and the Trobriands. Tambiah states that Leach’s comparison between “paternity ignorance” in those societies and dogmas of virgin birth in Christianity stemmed from his interest in “parallel structures of reasoning between different cultures and societies” (p. 288). The problem of cultural translation continued to occupy Leach’s thinking, as it did that of other social anthropologists of the time.

This book admirably meets its goal of providing an intellectual biography, and Tambiah adheres closely to the mandate of a biographer. It is difficult, however, not to wish for more. An appraisal of Leach’s weaknesses as well as of his strengths and of his legacy in the history of sociocultural anthropology would have been highly useful. And, although Tambiah cites many instances of Leach’s openness and generosity toward his students, one learns little about his impact on the work of those students and others who followed him. More could be said about the mutual influences between Leach and his contemporaries, particularly those colleagues who also were influenced by Lévi-Straussian structuralism. And despite Leach’s own statements, one sees echoes of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown in his work, for example, in his dismissal of Spiro’s inferences about individual psychology and in his stated goal of understanding how social systems work and why they hold together, mentioned in his controversial biographical essay in the Annual Review of Anthropology (“Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology,” 1984:1–23). Tambiah attempts to put a positive spin on this piece, casting it as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge (p. 474). One can see Leach’s attribution of his adversaries’ concern with social equilibrium and enduring social structure to their immigrant origins and lesser class backgrounds, however, more as a way of discrediting their contributions than of setting the record straight about the history of anthropology in Britain. Despite these quibbles, Tambiah’s is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.