Edmund Leach: A Synthesis

Edmund Leach (1910-1988), though a British social anthropologist, embraced French structuralism. He resynthesized Levi-Strauss, attempting in part to increase Levi-Strauss's accessibility as a theorist. Though a student of Malinowski, he fused concepts from structural-functionalism with the approach of Levi-Strauss in his analysis of kinship, social structure, and conflict in Burma (HAT). His work functioned as a bridge or filter through which other anthropologists could apply structural analysis to their own theories. Leach comes much later than those theorists with whom he is grouped in this text, but he is featured with his earlier compatriots because of his work's ability to synthesize the theories of those earlier anthropologists into cohesive thought.

Leach asserts that structuralism is a way of looking at things, not just a theory or method (HAT). He argues that Frazer, Radcliffe-Brown, Mausss, and Levi-Strauss were concerned with "things said", while Malinowski and his followers were concerned with "things done," all with the goal of explaining customary behaviors. Leach rearticulates Levi-Strauss's attempt to combine the two viewpoints of culture, Malinowski's culture as trying to fulfill individual biological needs and Radcliffe-Brown saw cultures as meeting the mechanical needs of the social system. Leach's main point says that the "codes," non-verbal cues that serve as another form of communication outside of spoken language, used are actually languages unto themselves, making structural linguistic analyses useful for social anthropologists who study these codes as behaviors.

Leach's goal was to find cultural universals about how social order functioned based on these coded behaviors. He goes on to discuss how people communicate using all of their senses, and their mind integrates all of the information received into one actual experience while simultaneously people also transmit  knowledge as well. In order to ground his theorizing, he employs a musical metaphor. The conductor of an orchestra possesses a score that he reads from left to right, continuously to grasp the melody, while reading the vertical harmonies built into the score as well. The meaning conveyed from the music as a whole comes from those two associations (contiguity = melody; metaphor = harmony).

Leach's point, when applied to a delightfully concrete example, becomes one where food, sex, and other cultural norms, are coherent sub-systems within the human brain governed by sets of rules. However, they are all contained within the human brain, giving a "structural coherence" to these products of the human brain. Using this idea of coherence, Leach breaks out Levi-Strauss's most notable binary oppositions, showing them to be variations on larger themes, such as Nature versus culture (Readings, p. 165). Leach's work in Burma helps illustrate what "variations on a larger theme" looks like when applied to kinship and social structure.  Matrilineal descent in the Garo of Assam and patrilineal descent in the Kachins of north Burma became two sides of the same coin paralleled between the Kachins' marriage with  the mother's brother's daughter and the Garos' marriage with the mother-in-law. In essence, Leach argued that structural linguistic analysis and Levi-Strauss's language of myth provided insight into the social structures of the Burmese.

Finally, Leach takes all of his teachings and applies them to two familiar figures from Biblical narratives, which is a strength of his work. He knew that in order to make a lasting impression, he needed to make a complicated theory more accessible. After putting his ideas into greater layman's terms, he then employed numerous familiar analogies from music to sex to Jesus in order to drive home key points. Another strength came through his work in Burma, where unlike his structural functionalism predecessors, he acknowledged society to be a state of flux that oscillated in Burma between egalitarian and highly ranked social structuring. Discrepancies can arise and limitations to Leach's work can be found when a culture exhibits a pattern that doesn't fit, defying a previously established cultural universal. Today, we use Leach to understand Levi-Strauss's work in mythology, which allows us to juxtapose seemingly unrelated stories like the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars and find the underlying commonality