Analytic Table of Contents for Tambiah’s Biography of Edmund Leach – Anthropology Yesterday

Tambiah’s biography of Edmund Leach is large, and the table of contents is not very detailed. But in fact the book is broken up into titled subsections, which I’ve collated here into a perhaps-useful analytics table of contents. I typed it up quickly so there may be some errors, including auto-correct-induced ones.

1 Edmund Leach (1910-1989): achievements

2 Childhood and Youth

• Web of Kinship
• From Public School to COming of Age in Cambridge
• Gloomy Forebodings at Cambridge
• The Gathering of Stormclouds
• The Chinese Interlude

3 Apprenticeship and the Second World War

• Malinowski’s Seminar
• Leach’s Encoutner with Malinowski

4 The anthropologist at work: teacher and theorist

• The Career Start at LSE
• Early Cambridge Years: Forging a Perspective
• The Cambridge Don as Teacher
• Theoretical Positioning
  • The rejection of psychoanalytic interpretations and the commitment to structuralism

5 “The Political Systems of Highland Burma”

• The Dispute Between Leach and Lévi-Strauss
  • Lévi-Strauss’s revisions and counter-attacks
    • Kachin and Ha Kachin
    • On the Instability of the Kachin System
    • The relation ebtween gumsa and gumlao
  • Leach’s closing rejoinder
    • Kachin hypogamy
    • Gumsa and Gumlao: stability-instability

“The Frontiers of Burma”

• The Categories: “Hill People and Valley People”
• The Impacy of India and China
• The Chinese and Indian Political Models and Structures
• Political Interdependence of Hills and Valleys
• Commentary
  • European and Indigenous conceptions of polity
  • Critique of the search for language origins and diffusion

7 “Pul Eliya”: The Challenge to Descent Group Theory

• Introduction: The Issues Poised
• The Topography of the Tank Village
  • Summary: ideal and actual transmission of land
• The kinship system and land tenure
  • The variga count
  • Variga endogamy and the distribution of marriage
  • The nature of marriage
  • Descent, filiation, affinity
  • Compound groups
  • Paula
  • Kinship Terminology
  • Property Transmission
• Patterns of Labor Coooperation in Two Different COntexts
  • Labor teams is harvesting and threshing rice
  • Shifting cultivation
• The dialectic between “statistical” and “normative” orders
• Summation
• The Fortestian Reply: Avoidance and Uncertainty

8 “Hydraulic Society in Ceylon”: contesting Wittfogel’s thesis and Sri Lankan mytho-history

9 The Engagement with Structuralism

• The comparatives stance: us and them and the translation of cultures
• Leach on “virgin birth”
• Spiro’s Counter-Formulations
  • The argument from the Christian evidence
• The correspondence on the submission of Leach and Spiro
• Coda

11 The Structural Analysis of Biblical narratives

12 Anthropology of Art and Architecture

• “Melchisedech and the Emperor”
• “Michaelabngelo’s Genius”
• “The Gatekeepers of Heaven”

13 Individuals, Social Persons, and Masquerade

• Ritual Action and the Presentation of Self
• Gifts and Debts as Negotiated Transactions

14 Leach and Lévi-Strauss: Similarities and Differences

• The battleground of kinship
• Attrraction and Affinities
• Transformational Transcriptions
• Philosophical Divergences

15 “A Runaway World?”

• Discussion on the BBC by Medawar, Macintyre, and Leach
• The reaction of the public at large
• A bouquet from an establishment friend
• Postscript

16 British Anthropology and Colonialism: challenge and response

• The Expansive Phase of British Structural Functionalism
• The Critique of Anthropology in the Late Colonial Era
• Personal Accounts of Field Research in British Colonies: Meeting and Muting the Charges of Radical Critics
• The impact of the war on Leach’s Work in the Kachin Hills
• The ethnographic contributions of colonial administrators

17 Retrospective Assessment and Rethinking Anthropology

• A polemical parting shot
• Rethinking Ethnographic Writing

18 The Work of Sustaining Institutions: Provost of King’s College (1966-1979)

• Fellow and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Returement, Retrospection, and Final Illness

• The Impact of Social Class and Nationality on British Anthropology
• Illness