Leach, 1984-On-Radcliff-brown-Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology

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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984. 13:1-23Copyright? 1984 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

GLIMPSESOF THEUNMENTIONABLEIN THEHISTORYOF BRITISHSOCIALANTHROPOLOGYEdmundR. LeachKing's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST, England

"Leach s one of the few Britishanthropologists f theprewarvintagewith a 'conventional'upper-middle-classbackground."Kuper (15, p. 155)

It has become an established eatureof the AnnualReviewofAnthropology hattheopeningessay shouldbe writtenby a retired eniorpractitioner n thethemeof "Anthropologyn my time."I havebeenpersonallyacquaintedwithmost ofthe previous authors of these autobiographicalessays, and two of them,RaymondFirth and Meyer Fortes, were my teachersand closest associatesthroughoutmy academic career.This poses obvious difficulties. Fortes was my senior by only four years,Firthby nine; so if I were to stick to the standardpatternby recordingmyrecollection of the barefacts, therewouldbe an intolerable evel of repetition.Besides that,Firthand Fortesboth started heirautobiographical eflectionswith a reference o thecharismaof BronislawMalinowski.Firthreported,"It salmost exactly 50 years since I decided to become a professional socialanthropologist.With Ashley Montague, Evans-Pritchard, nd a few othersIhelped in October 1924 to form Malinowski's first seminarsat the LondonSchool of Economics"(8, p. 2). Fortesstated:"It was a chancemeetingwithMalinowskiin 1931 in the home of J. C. Flugel, the eminentpsychoanalyst,that eventually brought me into anthropology"(12, p. 3). It would be aperfectly legitimate autobiographical immick if I were to follow exactly thesame line. Like Firth(an economist) and Fortes (an experimentalpsycholo-gist), my initial traininghad nothingto do with anthropology.At Cambridge

0084-6570/84/1015-0001$02.00


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2 LEACHI had read mathematicsand engineering. My first personal encounterwithMalinowskiwas in 1937and,on the face of it, theconsequencesof theresultingconversion experiencewerejust as dire as they were for Firthand Fortes. Soagain therewould be repetition.But in my case that wasn't really how it happened.There was no point atwhich I decided to become a professionalsocial anthropologist,nor could itreally be said that my meetingwith Malinowski"broughtme into anthropolo-gy." It did and it didn't. Evenin 1946, whenI was demobilizedfrom the army,althoughI had alreadyhad links with professionalanthropologists or nearlyten years and hadalreadyhad extensive and variedexperienceof anthropolo-gical field research,I was still verymuch of two minds as to whether o pursuethe subject any further.A valid biographyof my anthropological ersona would have to startmuchfurtherback. I had already encountered Malinowski in print while still anundergraduate. hiswas a resultof readingRussell(3 1), which led me, by wayof Calverton& Schmalhausen(2, 3), to "Parenthood:The Basis of SocialStructure"26), which Malinowskihad then describedas: "thefirst full state-mentof my theoryof kinship,the result of over 20 years' work on a subjecttowhich I have devoted most of my attention."But that too was not a critical beginning. No doubt my undergraduateexperience at Cambridgehad a formative influence on what I subsequentlybecame, but this was trivial comparedwith influences stemming from myfamily and social class background,which are much harder o spell out.One very relevantfact is thatthroughoutmy life I have almostconsciouslyendeavored o follow in the footstepsof my greatuncle, Sir Henry Howorth,K.C.I.E., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A., authorof a famousfive-volumeHistory oftheMongols, sometimePresidentof the RoyalArchaeologicalInstitute,Trus-tee of the BritishMuseum, Memberof Councilof the AnthropologicalInsti-tute, Member of Parliament,art collector, etc, etc. But few readers of thisjournalarelikely everto haveheardof my uncleHenry,and it wouldbe absurdto extend theautobiographical lementsin thisessay to include featuresof thatsort.All the same, thatkindof pointneeds to be made. As should be apparent oanyone who pays close attention to the details of David Lipset's highlyperceptive biographyof Gregory Bateson (23), differences of social classplayed a critical role in whathappened n Britishanthropologyduringthe first40 yearsof this century, yet the two mostrecentmonograph-scalehistories ofBritish twentieth century anthropology, by Langham (16) and Kuper (15),distinguish heprotagonistsonly according o thequalitiesof theirresearchandpublications, their theoreticalattitudes, and their direct academic influenceupon one another. We are thus providedwith only the barest minimum ofinformationabout the geographical, ethnic, family, and class backgroundof


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BRITISHSOCIALANTHROPOLOGY 3the individuals concerned. Nor is the readergiven any feel of the majorintellectual innovationsof the periodas they were generatedby such contem-porarytitans as BertrandRussell and SigmundFreud.

Suchdeficiencies are serious. Mostof theargument boutwhathappened nBritish social anthropologybetween 1900 and 1936 is concernedwith eventsthattook place in metropolitanEnglandwithinthetriangleOxford-Cambridge-London, a region onlyaboutone third hesize of the stateof Massachusetts.Onsuch a minuscule stage the relationof the actors to their social surroundingdeserves close attention. Once we consider such matters, it is immediatelyapparent hatvery few of the leadingcharacterswere bornin the BritishIslesandfewer stillbelongedto thatexclusive"upper nduppermiddle" ocial classwhose memberswere then alone in feeling themselves fully at home in thevacuous conservatismof Oxford and Cambridgeuniversities. This circum-stance had discernibleconsequencesfor how mattersdeveloped over time.Being, relativelyspeaking,an insider,I was at firstgreatlytempted o trytoput the recordstraighton this particularssue and to bring my commentarydown to the presentday. But I have come to see that t is simplynotpractical.Britishacademicsare still far too sensitiveabout such matters.It wouldcausetoo much offense. So thefirstpointtobe notedabout hisessay is that t is veryincomplete. I do not refer to any living British social anthropologistwho isyoungerthan I. Nor am I at all frankabout ust whereI fit intothe social scenewhich I amdiscussing, thoughsome of my prejudiceswill be obviousenough.Yet the point thatI ammaking s far fromtrivial.I amsayingthatthesociologyof the environmentof social anthropologistshas a bearingon the historyofsocial anthropology.At world level, academicanthropologyhas developed as a consequence ofthe interactionof prominent ndividualscholars and the cross-fertilizationoftheir leading ideas. But these "prominent ndividualscholars"were ordinaryhumanbeings who hadprivateas well as publiclife histories.Whatever heydid or said as anthropologistswas simplya "structural/metaphoricransforma-tion"of what they did and said in quitenonanthropologicalontexts.There s acontinuity in such mattersand the particular tyle of an individualscholar'santhropology is meshed in with other aspects of his/her personality. Suchcontinuities aredifficultto demonstratedirectly,but they sometimesshow upin unpredictable onsistencies in behavior.That is what this essay is about.My purpose s autobiographicalafterafashion),butI am, quite emphatical-ly, not attemptinga surveyof "socialanthropology n my time."I ignoremyjuniors and even as regards my seniors and immediatecontemporaries amhighly selective. I pay detailedattentiononly to those who have notonly beenmy close associatesbut whose influenceon my thinkingI can clearly recog-nize. The arenaof British social anthropology s a small world, but it is notquite as small as all that


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4 LEACHAs a case inpointit will be notedthatI ignorethe work andtouch only brieflyon the personof A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.Thereare two reasonsforthis neglect.First,I did not have anyclose personalcontactswith R-B until the very end of

his life; second, a greatdeal thatis highly misleadinghas alreadybeen writtenabouthim. His case fitsverywell with thegeneral hesispresented nthisessay,butinorder o show thatthis is thecase, Iwould have toengagein a preliminaryexercise of deconstructionwhich would here be inappropriate.Before we come to the matterof the continuitiesbetween public lives andprivate ives, let me fill in some of thebackground ncludingbits of my own. Asto theissue of social class, I cangive some indicationof whatI mighthave beenwritingabout my contemporariesby referring o the dead ratherthan to theliving. In this contextI shall use the emotive term"aristocracy"ntwo differentsenses.First here s whatAnnan(1) calls "the ntellectualaristocracy,"hemembersof a small group of closely intermarried amilies who came to dominate theaffairsof OxfordandCambridge especially Cambridge)romabout hemiddleof the nineteenthcentury. Members of these families are still prominentinBritish academia.A Huxley, who lives in Cambridge, s the currentpresidentof the Royal Society, and he is unlikely to be the last. The presidentof theBritishAcademyis a Chadwick;he is a formerVice Chancellorof theUniversi-ty of Cambridgeand Emeritus Regius Professor of Modem History. Hisbrother,who is Regius Professorof Divinity at Cambridge,was formerlytheDean (Head)of ChristChurch,Oxford.They areboth scholars of the utmostdistinction.This intellectual aristocracywas never a partof the titled aristocracy n aformalsense. You do not find it spelledout in such referencebooks as Burke'sPeerage orBurke'sLandedGentry.Inoriginit is mostly "uppermiddleclass";its originalaffluence derivedfrom the IndustrialRevolution of the late eigh-teenthcentury;it tended to be evangelical in religious attitude.I shall also use the term "aristocracy"o denote the sort of people whosenames do appear nBurke'sPeerage. As faras the Universities of Oxford andCambridgeareconcerned,the two kinds of aristocracyare notwholly distinct.And indeed, at the beginning of this century, the interests of the intellectualaristocratswho ruledthe universitiesand of the titledaristocratswho ruledtheEmpirewere almost identical.Although it has been asserted several times by Fortes (11), Quiggin (29),Langham 16), andothers thatCambridgeacademicanthropologywas trium-phantlyestablishedbetween 1898 and 1925 as the resultof close collaborationbetween A. C. Haddonand W. H. R. Rivers, the facts, as I see them, areexactlytheopposite. The mostremarkable eatureof Cambridgeanthropologyduringthis periodwas thatHaddonand Rivers failed to establishanything atall.


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BRITISH OCIALANTHROPOLOGY 5They certainlytriedhardenough. Afteryearsof campaigning, Haddonwasappointedin October 1900 to a nontenured ectureshipin ethnology on theprincely stipendof ?50 per annum;nine years later(when he had seeminglythreatened o resign)this lectureshipwas converted nto a personalreadershipat ?200 per annum. It was the only salaried "anthropological" ost in theuniversity.In 1925, when Haddon first submittedhis resignation,it was stillthe only suchpost even thoughthe universityas a whole hadmeanwhilebeenexpanding rapidlyin all directions.There were complex reasons for this failurebut one factorwas social class.Haddon's voluminous correspondence(of which much survives) shows hislimitationsas a universitypolitician, but it seems to me obvious that his most

serious handicapwas thathe was "nota gentleman"and thathe was sycophan-tic toward those who were.LikewiseRivers, thoughhimself apowerfulandevidentlyattractiveperson-ality, was not even a graduateof either Oxford or Cambridge (he had anexternalmedicaldegreefromtheUniversityof London);worsestill, he was theson of a speech therapistand the nephew of the notoriouslyungentlemanlyJamesHunt,for whom theDarwin/Huxley ontingentwouldhave had nouse atall. Rivers' own stammerwas a constantreminderof these social deficiencies.He also had homosexualleanings, but in the Cambridgeof that time that wasnot a handicap.AlthoughRivers was brought o Cambridge o teachpsychology (underthestrange itle of the "physiologyof the sense organs") n 1893, his positionas auniversity ecturerwas not confirmeduntil 1897, andeven then a commentatorin the university senate said thatthe appointmentwas "aridiculoussuperflui-ty."Haddon'sappointmento hisreadershipprovokeda similaroutburst;t wasdeclared to be "the most reckless and culpable waste of money that couldpossibly be imagined."Rivers was not elected into a fellowship in St John'sCollege until 1902, despite the fact that at this period nearly all universityteachers were Fellows of colleges. In this respectHaddonfared ratherbetter.He had been a member of Christ'sCollege as an undergraduate, nd he wasmade a Fellow as soon as he was appointed o his university lectureship.EventuallyRivers came to be greatly respected n his college, andhe was awell-known man of affairsin the public arena n Londonwhere he dabbled nleft-wing politics. He was recognizedas a distinguished cientist, but he neverhad a significantinfluence on developments n CambridgeUniversity.Duringthe Rivers era "psychology"faredlittle better than "ethnology."

No doubt the "aristocrats"were polite enough in public; indeed, HoraceDarwin(the engineerson of Charles)collaboratedwith Rivers in research ntovisual illusions. But somehow, when it came to university politics, nothingeverhappened.And in Oxfordalso, despitethe honorsaccorded o Tylorin hisold age, anthropologyremaineda nonsubject. Tylor was not a gentleman.


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6 LEACHBut at the London School of Economics, an upstart nstitutioncreated as aplatformfor radicalFabianideas, EdwardWestermarckbeganto teach a richcombinationof theoreticalsociology andfieldwork-based ocial anthropology

as earlyas 1904. After thatall thesignificantdevelopments n social anthropol-ogy which occurredin Britainduring the first quarterof this century werefocused aroundthe L.S.E. And, by feedback, the greaterthe successes ofL.S.E. anthropology or, for thatmatter,UniversityCollege (London) anthro-pology as sponsoredby Elliot Smithand W. J. Perry] he less likely it becamethatthe conservativeEstablishmentn OxfordandCambridgewould touchthesubjectwith the end of a barge pole.Cambridge anthropologysurvived between 1900 and 1925 only becauseHaddon'sextremelymarginalpostwas attached o theMuseumof ArchaeologyandEthnology,which was createdandpatronizedby a groupof very wealthy,very "uppercrust"amateurcollectors of ethnographiccuriosities led by theredoubtable raveler,Baron Anatole von Hiigel.What I have said here is not intended o belittlethe historical mportanceofRivers' contributionso bothanthropology ndpsychology. My pointis simplythat any history of British developments in these fields needs to take intoaccount not only the overwhelming dominance and academic prestige ofOxfordandCambridgebut also the conservatismandsocial arroganceof thosewho were effectively in controlof these two greatinstitutionsduringthe earlypartof this century.Haddonand Rivers were fightingto gain recognition in amost hostile environmentand they were losing the battle.Unless this background s taken into consideration,the self-advertisementthat s scattered hrough heprivatepapersof theprincipalprotagonists s likelyto be quite radicallymisconstrued. In the case of social anthropology his isexactly what has happened.I could cite a long list of highly cogent examples, but one will suffice.Langham 16) purports o demonstrate hat there was a "CambridgeSchool ofSocial Anthropology" reatedby Rivers and Haddonwhich, particularlyn theperiod 1920-1926, madeaseriesof majorcontributions o thegeneral heoryofkinship. One member of this supposed school was T. T. Barnard,whoseacademicprowess was vouched forby Haddonandwho held office as Profes-sor of SocialAnthropology n CapeTown from 1926 to 1934. He died in 1983.Besides numerouscross-references, Langhamdevotes a special four-pagesection of his book (pp. 208-12) to Barnard'swork. Thecontentof thesepagesderives almostexclusively fromBarnard'spersonalreminiscences. And whynot?Surelytherecollectionsof a formerholderof theCapeTownChaircan betreatedas a contribution o the historyof social anthropology?Langhamdoesnottell us anythingaboutBarnard'sbackground,which he perhapsconsideredto be irrelevant.But even by Cambridge standards,the level of Barnard'saristocracywas remarkable.


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BRITISH OCIALANTHROPOLOGY 7Throughhis fatherhe was a directdescendantof thegreateighteenthcenturyPrime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford;his motherwas aLambton rom County Durham,"one of the oldest families in Britain,"with a

lineage stretchingback into the shadowsof the eleventhcentury.Hiswife was aByng, a descendant of Torringtonsand Straffords.Barnardhimself, besidesbeing an officer in the Coldstream Guards in both world wars, had beeneducated at Eton, ChristChurch(Oxford), andKing's College (Cambridge).None of this can mean much to those who do notknow thesystem. Let it sufficeto say that where titled aristocracyrates as an asset ratherthan a liability,Barnard'squalificationswould be hard to beatFrom all accountsBarnardwas a verynice man and anenthusiasticamateurbotanist, but he did not know any anthropology.He only publishedtwo veryminor, very derivativepapers nthecourseof his wholeanthropological areer.When he got the job in CapeTownhe hadn'tpublishedanythingat all. But hehad disqualified himself from becoming A.D.C. to the governor of SouthAustraliaby getting married,so he was madeprofessor n CapeTowninsteadHow could this happen?Its seems simple enough to me. Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of SouthAfrica, was an HonoraryFellow of Christ'sCollege where Haddonheld hisfellowship. Smutshad establishedRadcliffe-Brown then plainMr. Brown)asProfessor of Social Anthropology n CapeTownin 1920 on Haddon'sadvice.He would haveconsultedHaddonagainwhen Radcliffe-Brown eft forSydney.Isaac Schapera,who later succeededBarnardn thechair,was thena graduatestudentjust about to leave for London to take a PhD under Malinowski.Schapera ent Barnardhis notes on Radcliffe-Brown's ectures, and Barnardused these as the basis of his own lectures for the next eight years.It may be arguedthatgossip of this sort, however well it may be attested,contributesnothingat all to ourunderstanding f whathappened n Cambridgeanthropologyin the 1920s. But I do not agree. The astonishing rapidityofBarnard'spromotion (on the basis of ultrahigh social class status but almostzeroknowledge) as comparedwith thenonrecognition ccorded o the work ofRivers and Haddonspeaks volumes about "the Cambridgesystem." It alsoserves to negate the whole of Langham's argumentabout the intellectualdistinction of his posse of Cambridgegraduatestudents.I do notwant to be misunderstood.Thisis inpartanautobiographical ssay. Iam not myself an aristocratof eithervariety.I am not tryingto arguethatmytitular distinction is no more than a reflection of social class background.RatherI am saying thatthehistoryof Britishsocial anthropologyas viewed byparticipantobservers is quite differentfrom the same history as viewed bynonparticipant bservers, and further,thateven among participantobserversthereare severaldifferentcategories.The"insiders" ndthe "outsiders" artici-pate in quite differentways.


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8 LEACHAfter 1920 things began to change but only very slowly. From 1924 onalmostall the OxfordandCambridge raduateswho, forone reasonoranother,foundthemselvesinterestedn"socialanthropology,"migrated o London o sit

at the feet of Bronislaw Malinowski.They included EdwardEvans-Pritchard,Camilla Wedgwood, Audrey Richards,Monica Hunter(later Wilson), andGregoryBateson.I findit significant hatthreeof theseindividuals,Wedgwood, Richards,andBateson, belonged to the "intellectualaristocracy" nd that two of them werewomen. Theirmigrationreflected not simplythe attractionof Malinowski buttheir cumulativeaversion to the stifling Cambridge ocial atmosphere.Lipset(23, p. 132) cites contemporary vidence forBateson'scase; otherevidence iscircumstantial. t is on recordthatWedgwoodwas considered o be one of theliveliest members of Malinowski's seminar. At Cambridgeshe had been adisciple of Rivers and had become fascinated in the kin term systems ofMelanesia. AftergraduationHaddongave her workappropriateo herfemalestatus;she was employed in measuringskulls andwritinglabels for museumartifacts In London she was treatedas a humanbeing.At this period Cambridgehad an official policy of completesexual segrega-tion. Therewere two women's colleges and the women undergraduatesookthe samecoursesas themen, but theirnames werealwayslistedseparatelyandthedegreeswhichtheyobtainedwere notformallyrecognized.Some membersof the teaching staff refusedto lecture if women were present.But this system was understrain.In 1925J. B. S. Haldane,anultraaristocratin bothmy senses, was dismissedfromhisuniversityreadershiporcommittingadulterywith his future wife (4, pp. 73-77). After much publicized legalproceedingshe was reinstated.The casehadthelong-termconsequencethatthesix guardiansof theuniversity'smorality theSex Viri)now number even (theSeptem Viri) and have neversubsequentlybeen required o adjudicatea caseBut at the time, Haldane's supporterswere in the minority.All this bears on my problem for, in this regard,as in others, Cambridgeanthropology, such as it was, had been consistently conformist. Although"fertility" s one of the central themes of Frazer'sThe GoldenBough (14),humansexual intercourses mentionedonly as amagicalprocedure orimprov-ing the crops But Malinowski had publishedSex and Repression in SavageSocietyin 1927(24), to be followedby TheSexualLife of Savagesin 1929(25).Both books were promptlyclassified by the Cambridgeuniversity librarianunder "ARC," which meant that they could not be read without a specialauthorization rom a senior college official This furtherencouraged collegetutorsin their common belief thatanthropologywas not a proper subject forundergraduateso study at all.I was an undergraduate t Cambridge rom 1929-32. The majorityof mycontemporaries,not only in my own college (Clare)but in othercolleges also,


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BRITISH OCIALANTHROPOLOGY 9had been selected from a very limitedrangeof privateschools on the basis ofpersonalrecommendationatherhananyobvious merit.Theircommonqualitywas that they were undistinguishedand indistinguishable, hough the moreintellectual among us were almost all of a radical, near communist,politicalpersuasion.We were alreadycomingto hatethe social rigiditiesof the systeminwhichwe had beenreared, heinjusticesof which were visible on every side.By comparisonwith the presentgenerationof Cambridgeundergraduates,wewere very politicized. We had no use for compromise.The fact thatin 1929-1932 Hitlerwas just comingintopoweraddedanotherdimension. We thought hat we couldrecognizethe encroachment f a "fascistmentality" n every aspect of Britishlife, as evidenced, for example, by thereaction of the ruling class (to which we ourselvesbelonged) to the GeneralStrike of 1926. Some became activistleadersof thepoliticalleft. A few yearslater many of my contemporaries oined the InternationalBrigade in theSpanishCivil War. At least one communist cion of theCambridgentellectualaristocracydied in thatvaindefenseof socialistdemocracyas we believed it tobe. Recent revelations about the Russian recruitmentof spies from amongupperclass Cambridgeundergraduatesn the 1930s s partof thatsamestory.J.B. S. Haldane(see above), who by then was anavowedMarxist,was a kind ofculture hero.

Official attitudesnotwithstanding,he sexes were noteffectivelysegregated,butthe goal of sexual liberationandthepermissivesocietywas anoveltyand inhigh fashion. Commentarieson the work of Freud, Jung, Adler, and otherrenegade psychoanalysts were to be found on the bookshelf of every under-graduatewho saw himself as a member of the intelligentsia.A clandestinestudy of Malinowski's writingscould be a partof thatpatternalong with theliberationistpropagandaof BertrandRussell.Only a minority ook their academicstudiesseriously,but thosewho did sodid not bother to investigate "soft options" such as ethnology and socialanthropology. I doubt if I even knew that such subjectswere available forstudy. I myself readmathematics ndengineering,ungentlemanlybuttough. Iendedup with a First Class Honoursdegree. I neversubsequentlypracticedasanengineer,butmy engineeringbackground as influencedallmy anthropolo-gy. I tend to think of social systems as machinesfor the orderingof socialrelations or as buildingsthat arelikely to collapseif the stressesandstrainsoftheroof structure re notproperly nbalance.WhenI wasengaged nfieldworkI saw my problemas tryingto understand justhow thesystemworks"or"whyit held together."In my own mind these were notjust metaphorsbutproblemsof mechanicalinsight;nor was it just make-believe.To this day, in quite practicalmatters,Iremain an unusually competentamateurmechanic and retain an interest inarchitecturewhich is muchmoreconcernedwith structural eaturesof design


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10 LEACHthan with aesthetics. The contemporaryfashion by which the mysterious"cognitive"relationshipbetween mind and body is modeled as a complexpattern of computer programs all running in parallel may turn out to benonsense, but it is verycongenialto my way of thinking.I hadlearned o workwith binaryarithmeticbefore I hadever heard of computingor of Saussureanlinguistics. I recall thatwhen, in 1961, I firstencountered akobson'ssystem ofphonologicaldistinctivefeaturesmy innerreactionwas:"Ah I have beenherebefore "My engineeringbackgroundalso effected the way I reacted to Marxism.Marx had used an architecturalmetaphor or the structure f society. He wroteof Basis and Uberbauwhere his Englishtranslatorshave "infrastructure"nd"superstructure." ut Marx was not an engineer. His metaphorsdisguise thefact that even with perfect foundations Basis), the long-termstabilityof the"superstructure"f a building may be highly precarious.My concernwith design stabilitydoes not meanthatI am unmovedby theaesthetics of greatarchitecture,but it adds a dimension which less numerateobserversprobablymiss. My privateuse of the conceptof "structure"n socialanthropology s thus differentboth from the usage developed by Radcliffe-Brownand Fortes(whereit simplyrefers to the skeletalframeworkof societywithoutanyconsiderationof designfeatures)andfromLevi-Strauss's ransfor-mationalusage, which borrowsfrom Jakobson'sphonology, though my en-gineer's viewpoint is much closer to the latter than to the former.But in becoming a rude mechanicalI did not cease to be a snob. GeorgeHomans(himself an American aristocratby birth;his motherwas an Adams)once explainedthe peculiaritiesof the Boston Unitariansby saying thatwhileall sects of Calvinist origin assume that God has ordained a predestineddistinctionbetweenthe Elect andtheDamned,the Unitarians re so certain hatthey themselvesbelong to the Elect thatthey neverbotheraboutthe Damned.And that has been, very broadly, the position of the academicinhabitantsofOxford andCambridgeUniversitiesthroughoutmy lifetime. We know we arethe Elect. What happenselsewhere is of no importancewhatsoever.Today there are 46 universitiesin Great Britain and NorthernIreland. Ofthese, the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburghwere all establishedbefore 1600;UniversityCollege (London), King's College(London),and Durhamare all "pre-1840" oundations.Yet theuniquestandingaccorded to "Oxbridge"persists. It goes farbeyond self-esteem; the preemi-nence is takenfor granted.

The staff and studentsof "lesser" nstitutionsaresimultaneouslyboth con-temptuousand envious of the "the two senior universities."The contemptappearsrepeatedlyas a form of words;the envy is shown by deeds. Althoughthe social class compositionof the "Oxbridge"ntake s now entirelydifferentfrom what it was formerly,a huge proportionof the starperformersamongall


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BRITISH SOCIALANTHROPOLOGY 11young people applyingforuniversityentrywill stillputan "Oxbridge"ollegeas their first choice among the alternativeson offer. And the same attitudeprevails among academicstaff.

In 1900 Haddonresignedfroma full professorship in zoology) in Dublin inorder o take uphis ill-paid,nontenuredectureshipn ethnology nCambridge;50 years laterI, too, gave up a readershipn London Universityin favorof alectureship n Cambridge,a changeinvolvinga substantialdrop n salary.Thepatternpersists. Every post advertisedeitherby CambridgeUniversityorby aCambridgecollege is likely to attractapplicantswho are already n positionswhich are betterpaidand notionallysuperiorn status o thatwhich is on offer.The behavior of Malinowski's L.S.E. coterie must be seen against thisbackground.In the 1920s and 1930s the L.S.E. was a very low statusinstitu-tion. Up to a point it was proudof its radicalunorthodoxy,but as a partof itsefforts to achieve respectability which were ultimatelyvery successful), thepolitics of the place were steadilymoving to the right. Most of the genuinelyBritish staff, for all their posturing,would have dearly liked to be able totransferto Oxbridge, but the "British"connectionof most of Malinowski'spupils was tenuous.With varyingdegreesof enthusiasmand varying degreesof success, Mali-nowski, Firth,Schapera,Fortes, Nadel, and the other"foreigners"who weremainly responsiblefor the high prestigethatwas attributedo "British" ocialanthropologyin the 1950s and 1960s (at least in the assessments made byanthropologists rom other partsof the world) eventually assimilatedthem-selves into the life style and culturalconventionsof Oxbridgeacademics,butthey remained"outsiders"with a highly ambivalentattitude oward he valuesof theiradoptedacademicmilieu. This ambivalence s both reflectedin and areflection of their approach o the study of anthropology.Meyer Fortes can serve as an example. He never for a moment sought torepudiatehis basic social identityas the son of animpoverishedSouth AfricanJew of Russiandescent, yet in reaction o the social class hierarchyof BritishJewry, he frequentlymade the improbableclaim that his family were ofSephardimorigin.This is quiteconsistentwith thefactthat,exceptfor aperiodduringWorldWarIIwhen he returnedo WestAfrica,he was associatedwiththe facultyof eitherOxfordor Cambridge rom late 1939 untilhis retirement.Forthe last 31 yearsof his life he lived in Cambridgeas a ProfessorialFellow(laterHonoraryFellow) of King's College, an institution oundedin 1442.When he arrived romOxford n 1951, King's College was still a bastion ofBritish upper-class values of the most archaickind. Every detail stood inglaringcontrast o the mixtureof valuesto which Forteshadbeen acculturatedin his SouthAfrican homeland.Yet rightfrom the starthe was delighted. Hegave the impression hat he "venerated"King's andCambridge.The factthat,as of right,he now hadaCollegeFellowshipmeant hat hatatlonglasthe had a


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12 LEACHdefinable status in what he most admired,an inflexible andenduring"socialstructure."But if "veneration"s the rightword, it was the venerationof an outsider.Inrelation to the College, he was, as he hadbeen duringhis fieldwork in WestAfrica, an acute "participant bserver."But fieldworkinganthropologistsdonot ordinarily eek to intervene nthe affairs nwhich they participate; nd so itwas with Fortes n King's. He wasmuch ikedandrespectedby his colleagues,but he never played an active executive role in College affairs. Indeed, to aquite disconcerting extent, he never seemed to understandhow the systemreally worked or just why such an archaicconstruction houldhave failed tocollapse long ago. He was not an engineer

For the last22 of those 31 yearsI was also a Fellowof King's College andfor12of themI was, as Provost,headof the institution.At firstI too wasviewedbythe Old Guardas an outsider; hadnot beenatKing'sasanundergraduateut atClareCollege, which is immediatelynext door However,aftera while, I wasallowed to come over the wall.It has been arguedwith some justice that the changes that took place inKing's College during my provostshipwere more drastic than any that hadoccurredduringthe whole of the previous530 years of its history, the mostnotablebeingthat heCollege beganto admitwomen. Thosechangeswereonlymarginallyof my making,butcertainly was muchmorethan ust aparticipantobserver;I was actively involved in what was going on. I could be activelyinvolved in this way because, unlikeFortes,I was (moreor less) an "insider"not an"outsider,"andbecause, mostcertainly,I didnot in any way "venerate"the archaicrigidities which I and my coconspiratorswere seeking to under-mine.I believe that the differences to which I have here drawn attention arereflected in the respective styles of social anthropologyadopted by Firth,Fortes, and myself and other prominent"British"social anthropologistsaswell.First of all there is the very generalpointthatthe British-bornweretryingtoget awayfroma homelandwhichtheyfoundarchaic,whereasthe"foreigners"were looking for a new, idealized homeland hat would offer a kindof stablerespectabilitywhich their own originalhomeland acked. Schapera,Hunter,Fortes, and Gluckmanwere all from SouthAfrica. Is it too fanciful to suggestthattheprominence hatseveralof these authorswere laterto give to the notionof homeostaticsocial equilibriumand to the belief that social structures ersisteven whenthere are drasticchangesin culturalappearances erivedfrom theirpersonalneed for a stable homeland?But let me be more specific and more personal.Firthwas a New Zealander.The New Zealandof his youthwas certainlynota "socialist"society, nor was it in any way "unstable." t had the merits of a


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BRITISHSOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 13quiet provincialism.Thevalues wereegalitarian,do-it-yourself,rational;butitwas out of the swim. WhenFirthfirst came to Englandatthe age of 23 he wasclearly fascinatedby the aesthetic resources of the metropolisand of Europegenerally,but the irrational nobberiesof the English upper-middle lass musthave seemed both alien and bizarre.Yet for New Zealandersof thattime GreatBritainwas still"home";ahomelandof tradition; osy, perhapsoutof date,butstill worthpreservingin a fossilized state.Today, at the age of 82, Firth is the unchallenged "senior elder" amongBritish social anthropologists.Over the years his influence upon how thesubjecthas developedhas been immense, but it owes nothing whateverto any"Oxbridge" onnection.

Firthhas never involved himself in British nationalpolitics, but his generalstancehas been consistentlythat of a moderateconservative.As in his anthro-pology, he displays a formal interest n the way society changesover time buttendsneverthelessto view suchchangesas superficial. Certainlyhe has nevershown any enthusiasmfor change for its own sake.In academicargumenthe has been consistently skepticalaboutall forms ofreductionistgeneralization.He has never allowed himself to use ethnographicdetail simply to exemplify a propositionwhich he has arrivedat by a priorireasoning; the argument grows out of the evidence which is presented inmassive detail. The enthusiasm or "theory"solatedfromempiricalevidencewhich is oftendisplayedby Oxbridgeacademicsandby their Parisiancounter-partsarousesFirth'sundisguised contempt.Here at least he shows himself atruefollowerof Malinowski.Firthactually ived in Cambridgeduringmuch ofWorldWarII(whenthe L.S.E. hadbeenevacuated o Cambridge),buthe kepthis distance.This is all of a piece with his private passion for Romanesque art andarchitecture,a style in which extremeintricacyof decorativedetail is fitted tostructuresof almost brutalsolidity and which stands in sharpcontrastto themathematicalelegance of the gothic architectureof latercenturies.On the other hand, despite Firth's avoidance of the abstract rhetoric ofnational politics, he has been a lifelong do-it-yourself politician of quiteanotherkind. He has consistently displayeda deep commitmentto the pres-ervationand developmentof the academicdiscipline of social anthropology,andhis achievements n thatareahave beenveryremarkable.From he 1940s tothe 1960she had a wide varietyof personal,butquite informal,ties withseniorcivil servants n key positions. He used these contacts with outstandingskill.

At the beginningof the century,Haddonhad had similarobjectives, buthewasted his energies organizing utile official delegationsfromtheUniversityofCambridge o Ministers n Whitehall(which producedno results at all exceptsome platitudinousremarks rom PrimeMinisterAsquithaboutthe potentialvalue of anthropology or the future of the Empire). By contrast,Firthwent


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14 LEACHbehind the scenes and talked with the people who really mattered. He gotresults. Consideringthe tiny scale of the whole enterprise n Britain of the1950s, the central undingof social anthropologicalesearchwas quite dispro-portionatelygenerous.It was aphasewhichonlyenduredwhileFirthwas at thehelm at theL.S.E. All of which, it seemsto me, belongsto the same patternasFirth's contributions o the subject matterof social anthropology tself.Firth's published output has been very large. It is widely dispersed andcovers many fields, butby farthemajorparthas been devoted to meticulouslydetailedaccounts of the ethnography f whatFirthhimself calls "traditional"Tikopiasociety, thoughthe observations hus recordedwere made at variousdates between 1928 and1973 and someof theminplacesother hanonTikopiaitself (9, p. 219). This use of the word "traditional" eflects an underlyingpresumption, shared by nearly all anthropologistsof his own and earliergenerations,that until the coming of the white man, primitivesociety every-where had been in a state of Arcadianstabilityif not of Arcadianbliss.It has always seemed to me that Firth has rathersimilar feelings aboutEngland. "Traditional"Englandwas what he first observed when he arrivedfrom New Zealand n 1924. Inobjective erms twasasocietyundergoing apiddisintegration,but Firthseems to haveperceivedthistotal mess as an intricatevariety of cultural detail grounded n foundationsof great stability. He stillgives the impression of believing that the changes that have taken placesubsequentlyare only on the surface.Even more striking is the way that Firth's performanceas an academicpoliticianfits in with his anthropological ommitment o theconceptof "socialorganization."This expression was the title of a well-known posthumoustextbook (30) by Rivers (heavilyeditedby Perry),whichfirstappearednprintin 1924, the year in which Firth "decidedto become an anthropologist" seeabove), but in Firth's private academic language it acquiredquite a newmeaning.The expression recurs throughouthis writings, though the personalizedversion only emerges in Firth's 1949 paper (7) which formedpartof a Fest-schriftoffered to Radcliffe-Brownon his retirement romthe Chairof SocialAnthropologyat Oxford, of which he hadbeen the first holder.At thisstageinthedevelopmentof Britishsocialanthropology, he "structur-al-functionalism"of Radcliffe-Brownhad been given a great boost by theformalsimplicitywithwhich thebasictheoryof segmentaryineagestructures(which was barely distinguishable rom Durkheim'sconcept of mechanicalsolidarity)had been exemplifiedby Evans-Pritchard6), by Fortes& Evans-Pritchard13), andFortes(10). Firth'spaper s athinly disguisedattackon this"Oxford"position. He is saying that real life behavior is not determinedbyformal structuralarrangementsand segmentaryoppositions. Real life is amatter of ad hoc improvisation,of getting things fixed up by your friendsregardlessof what the formalrules may say.


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BRITISH OCIALANTHROPOLOGY 15In Firth's usage the "social structure"in this Oxford sense) provides nomore than the formalstage uponwhich social action takesplace. If we are tounderstandwhatactuallyhappens,we musttake accountof the "socialorgan-

ization," that is to say, the way in which individualsplay the game of localpolitics in order to maximize their individualprivatesatisfactions.If my own approach o social phenomenahas been that of an engineer, aconcernwithhow themachineryworks,Firth'sstylehas beenconsistentlythatof a laissez-faire economist: each individual,in competitionwith every otherindividual, is presumed to be acting so as to maximize his/her personalsatisfactions,subjectonlytotheformalconstraintsmposedby locally acceptedcultural conventions.It may be that personal rivalries were in the background,but I find itsignificantthat this oppositionbetweenEvans-Pritchard ndFortes on the onehand andFirth on the other should first have become explicit as an antithesisbetween an Oxford and an L.S.E. approach o mattersanthropological.Later,when Evans-PritchardrokeawayfromRadcliffe-Brown's"structur-al-functionalism"n favorof an idealiststylederived romMaussandHertzandVan Gennep (whichwas notreally veryfar removedfromthe structuralism fLevi-Strauss),the rift in the Oxford-London xis became even moremarked.But by this time it was a triangle, Oxford-London-Cambridge,ather han a

bipolar opposition. But that mustbe a storyfor some other occasion. For themoment let me stick to the contrastbetween Firth and Fortes.Firth was the senior by five years, but they were both introduced o theEnglish academic scene as outsiders throughthe medium of Malinowski'sL.S.E. seminar. In both cases this introductionwas priorto theirrespectiveengagement in field research in Tikopia (Firth)and Taleland(Fortes). Thesocial adjustment hat then ensuedwas in itself a kind of "dryrun"of a fieldresearchexperience.If that is a fair statement,then it is clear that the two men reactedto theirinitiation n verydifferentways. Firth ell in love withtheL.S.E.; he joined thestaff at the firstavailableopportunity in 1932) andremained herefor the restof his career. He was quite unimpressedby the pretensionsof the Oxbridgesetup. Fortes, thoughbrieflyon the L. S.E. staff afterhis return romthefield,moved on to Oxford at the firstopportunity,even thoughprospectsof secureemploymentwere very bleak. Even at that date(1939) he seems to have beenattractednot only by the formalityof Radcliffe-Brown'shighly abstractcon-cept of social structurebut by the archaicrigidity of the Oxford academic

environment,thoughone ironical consequenceof this rigiditywas thatForteswas never offered a College Fellowship.The "social structure/social rganization"debate reflects this difference inbasic attitudesas does the contrast n style between Firth'swritingsabout theTikopiaandFortes's writingsabout he Tallensi. Neitherauthorhad thegift ofliteraryelegance, but whereasthe readerof Firth finds himself in a trackless


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16 LEACHjungle of ethnographywhich abounds n botanicalraritiesof the most exotickind, the ethnographicterraininhabited by Fortes's Tallensi appears as aproductof well-ordered andscapegardening rom whichmost of the botanicalexotica have been excluded.From Firth we learn a vast amount about the details of the "traditional"Tikopia way of living, but somehow the orderingof Tikopia society remainsobscure. FromForteswe learnagreatdeal about heformalorderingof Tallensisociety, but only in bits and pieces do we get animpressionof what"tradition-al" Tallensi life was really like.In terms of my engineeringmetaphor,Fortesdescribes he social machineryand its componentpartsbut is unconvincingwhen he tries to explainhow thesystem works. Firthgives us an instructionmanualfor operating he machin-ery, but he does not tell us whatthebits andpieces would look like if we took itapart.Or to pursuemy art and architecturemodel:it is wholly appropriatehatFirth shouldbe entrancedby the highlydecorated olidityof the RomanesqueCathedral at Conques and that Fortes should have been overawed by thesymmetrical Gothic fragilitiesof King's College Chapel. At both levels mypersonaltaste has repeatedly ed me into conflict with both my teachers.Therecanbe no pointinpursuinganyfurther hiscomparisonby nuance, butwhat I am getting at is that if we consider the membershipof Malinowski'sL.S.E. seminar and the leadersof British academic social anthropologywhoemerged from it, then in various ways the individualsconcerned, notablyMalinowskihimself, Firth,Evans-Pritchard, chapera,Richards,Fortes, andNadel, presentus with aninteresting pectrum f personalcharacteristicswhichare reflected in their respective contributions o anthropology.One of thecomponentvariables in this spectrumwas "Englishness."At one extremestandsEvans-Pritchard, very English Englishmandespitehis Welsh name, educatedattheultraprestigiousWinchesterCollege (founded1387) andExeterCollege, Oxford, where he readhistory.At the otherextremestandsNadel, Britishonly by naturalization, emainingalwaysat hearta verytypical Viennese Jewish intellectualwhose wide-rangingnterests n musicolo-gy, psychology, and philosophy were prior to those in anthropology. Inbetween we have Richards, true English but handicappedby the prevailingprejudice against women academics; Firth, near English but a "colonial";Fortes and Schapera, both South AfricanJews; and Malinowski himself, apermanentCentralEuropeanwho was very muchawarefromthe start hathispotential audience was much wider than the inward-lookingparochialcom-munityof Britishacademia. He liked to claim that he was a Polisharistocrat.Evans-Pritchardwas a "true scholar" in a typical British sense, neverseemingto be altogether erious, makinga pointof carryinghis veryconsider-able learning lightly. Nadel was equally a "truescholar"but typical in theGermanic sense. He was at all times deadly serious.


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18 LEACHencountered he work of RomanJakobson.ButJakobson'ssubsequent ascina-tion with Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics(34) and my own fascination withJakobson's phonology representa convergence of ideas. I never had themakingsof a truemathematician,but I was mathematically iterate.I learnedabout "transformational"heory (in the form of advanced algebra and thenineteenth enturydevelopmentsof projectivegeometry)severalyearsbefore IenteredCambridgeas anundergraduate.f some of my anthropologicalwork is"structuralist"n style, it is for that reason.Moreover, when I switched from pure mathematicsto engineering as anundergraduate, developeda biasagainstabstractheoryas anend in itself. It isquite true that lateron, as an anthropologist,I was often exasperatedby theobsessive empiricismof Firth and Fortes and several of Malinowski's otherpupils, butI nevercame close to sharingLevi-Strauss'sview thattheoryis theonly thingthatmatters,and that f theethnographydoes not fit, it cansimplybediscarded.It was preciselyon thatissue thatmy own relationship o Frenchstructural-ism became defined. I first became interested in the work of Levi-Straussbecause the Kachinsof North Burmaprovidedhis typeexampleof a "general-izedexchange"marriage ystem (21, Chap. 15, 16). I was intriguedby the factthat while his theory, in an odd sort of way, fitted some of the facts on theground(with which I was intimately amiliarandLevi-Strausswas not), therewas a very wide discrepancybetween the details of the ethnographyandwhatLevi-Strausshadsupposed o be the case. Afterward was shocked to discoverthathe himself was in no way putoutbythesediscrepancies;he blandlyassuredhis readers hatmyethnographymustbe wrong From hen on Iknewthatwhenit came to the crunchI was just as much an empiricistas any of my Britishcolleagues.Mybook Political SystemsofHighlandBurma 18) waspublished n 1954. Itwas certainlymy most influentialwork, thoughmuch that it containshas beenseriously garbledby my critics. I had moved fromthe L.S.E. to Cambridge nthe autumnof 1953, thoughthe bookhad been writtensome while before that.Its "idealist"standpointprovokedhostile comment in both localities. Firth'sanxieties about the directionin which I might be headingare apparent n his"Foreword."The notion that the persistingelement in social relationships s apatternedstructureof verbalconcepts (which are open to very diverse inter-pretations) ather han a patterned tructure f empiricallyobservable"groups"knittogetherby mysterious"ether" alled"kinship"was as repugnanto Fortesin 1980 as it had been in 1954.My next fieldwork monograph,Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (20), didnothing to improve matters on the home front, for while it conformed tostructural-functionalistogma in providinga greatdeal of formallyorganized


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BRITISH OCIALANTHROPOLOGY 19ethnographic etail, itarguedquiteexplicitlythatkinship s not athingin itself.I argued hat,in the case of mySri Lankanpeasants,thematerial hatFortesandhis pupilswerewont to discussunder heheadingof kinshipwas simplya wayof talkingaboutrights in land and water.This book appeared n 1961, which was for me a kindof watershed.In thesameyearI broughtout abook of essays, RethinkingAnthropology 19), whichshowed much moreclearly thananythingI hadproducedpreviouslyjust howfar I had distancedmyself from my teachers.They hadbeen interested n theparticularity f otherculturesandothersocieties, both of whichwerethoughtofas existing in the plural.Malinowskiand Firthhadbothtaughtand writtenas if it mightbe possibletodescribe a culturalsystem as a uniqueself-sufficient, functioningwhole. Suchadescriptionwouldspecify the TrobriandersrtheTikopiaasdifferent rom allotherpeople. Likewise, Fortes hadfollowed Radcliffe-Brown n holding thatwhole societies aredistinguishableas species typesandclassifiable as such in akind of Linnaeantaxonomy. In the lead essay of RethinkingAnthropology,which had been deliveredin lecture form in December 1959, I denouncedallsuchapproaches o the dataof anthropology s "butterfly ollecting"andurgedthatwhatanthropologistsoughtto be doing was searchingfor generalizationsfor which culturalboundarieswere quite irrelevant.In thatsame essay, to themystificationof most of my audience,I referred o thepotentialsignificanceofbinaryarithmeticandcomputermachine code as devices for modeling socio-logical process (19, pp. 6-7). Anotherkey point, aboutwhichI was also quiteexplicit, was thatmy use of "function"derivedfrommathematicsand not frombiology or psychology, as was the case withthe followersof Radcliffe-Brownand Malinowski. Consequently,from my point of view, therewas no incon-sistency between "functionalism" nd "structuralism"in its then novel con-tinentalsense).

I spent theacademicyear 1960/61at thePaloAlto "ThinkTank"where I metRomanJakobsonand thusbeganto understandwhatI had beenplaying ateversince I ceased to be anengineer.Jakobsonwas concernedatthat time with thesearch for linguistic universals. Our problemswere of essentially the samekind. I beganto see thatmy deepestconcernswere with what is now discussedundersuchgrandiose abels as semiotics andcognitivescience. Everything hathas happened n the subsequent22 years has reinforcedmy belief thatthoseinsights were ones that I could stick with.All this ties in with my laterobsession withVico. Vico, in his own way andin his own time, was likewise interested in structuralist ransformationsasgeneralizedproductsof human hinking.His key perception nhis NewScience(33) was thatonly the makerof an object fully understands ts nature;e.g. acarpenterunderstandswhy the chairhe has made does notcollapse. Buthuman


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20 LEACHsociety was made by man, so manshouldbe able to understand ociety, in anengineering ense, e.g. why it holdstogetheranddoes notcollapse. Behind thisthereis the furtherperceptionthat all the artifacts(includinghumansociety)which man thus "makes"must necessarily be projective transformationsofwhatthe humanbrainalready"knows."This implies, to use computertermi-nology, thatsocial productsaregeneratedby "softwareprograms,"operatingthroughbut limitedby the computer-likemachineryof the humanbrain.The"software" omes fromour culturalenvironment;he"hardware" erivesfromour genetic inheritance.Many social anthropologists hink that model making of this kind is justverbal eyewash. I find it valuable, and it has dominatedmy thinkingnow fornearlyaquarter f acentury.Ireject henotionthatIhaveswungback andforthbetweenbeinga functionalistandbeingastructuralist;havequite consistentlybeenboth atonce. But bothmyfunctionalismandmy structuralism erive frommy groundingin mathematicsand engineering. Furthermore, have an en-gineer's interest ndesign, in how localregionsof complexunbounded ystems"work."Indeed, I have consistentlymaintained hatthe social systems withwhich anthropologistshave to deal arenot, in any empiricalsense, boundedatall. To discuss the pluralityof cultures is for me nonsense.But what about my social, as distinct from my educational, background?Here, as I said at the beginning, I decline to be frank, but the relevance isobvious. Here is an example.Kuper (15, Chap. 6) pairsme with Max Gluckman.We were more or lesscontemporaries. Although Gluckman was a year my junior, he had readanthropologyas an undergraduate t Witwatersrand, o his grounding n thesubjectwas earlierand muchmorethorough hanmy own, but he had missedout on other things. As was the case with Fortes, Gluckman'sfamily back-groundwas Russian-Jewish-SouthAfricanand, like Fortes,he endedup withan irrationaldevotionto stablesystemsin generaland to Oxfordin particular.FortesandGluckmanwereclose personal riendsover manyyears. GluckmanandI firstmetvery brieflyat one of Radcliffe-Brown'sOxford seminars n thewinterof 1938/39. I took an instantand astingdislike to the whole setupandtoGluckmanin particular.If anyone had askedme thenor laterwhatI thoughtof Gluckman,I wouldprobablyhave saidthatI consideredhimto be anuncivilizedandfundamentallyuneducatedegocentric whose attemptsat theoreticalgeneralizationwere ofquite puerile incompetence. My views of Radcliffe-Brownwere not all thatdifferent, though perhapsI would have qualifiedthe uneducated.Since Brown was at Trinity College, Cambridge,in several distinguishedcapacities, from 1901-1910, it might perhapsbe thoughtthat, in terms of thegeneral argumentof this essay, I should have found in him some mental


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BRITISHSOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 21affinity. In fact, I was constantlyoffendedby the characteristicwhich Stanner(32), inahighlylaudatory ssessment,mentionsas: "he(Radcliffe-Brown)wassomewhatgiven to instructingother scholars n their own subjects."Ourveryfirst meeting was markedby just such a contretempsn which R-B gave me alecture about a branchof mathematics n which I happened o be expertandabout which he clearly knew nothingwhatsoever.In the latterpartof his life, Radcliffe-Brown ried to give the impression othe more gullible members of the non-Englishaudiences that he was usuallyaddressing hat he was, by lineage andupbringing,anEnglish countrygentle-man. The fact thatin 1926, on movingfromCapeTownto Sydney, he shouldhave taken the trouble to change his name from Brown to Radcliffe-Browngives an indicationof thevalue thathe attached o such matters. nactual acthewas not borninto theEnglishsocial class which reactsfavorably o hyphenatednames. His education startedat the Royal CommercialTravellers School atPinner in Middlesex.Sucharroganceandprejudiceon my partreflects no crediton mebut, if I amhonest, I have to admit that I feel today as I felt then. But in the case ofGluckmanit was a radical difference of social backgroundratherthan anyfundamentaldisagreements oncerning ocial theory hat ay at the roots of ourmutual antipathy. Marx, Durkheim,and Freud were palpableinfluences onGluckman'sthinking(see 5); even a casualglanceatmy library helves wouldsuggest that they must have been powerful influences on my own.So where does that ead us? Onepersistent raditionn Britishsocial anthro-pology is indicatedby the frequencywith which thepractitioners efer to theirdiscipline as a "science."They meanmanydifferentthings by this word, butfew of them mean what Vico meant.One common model is that of Radcliffe-Brown,who thought of socialanthropologyas somehow analogousto a very primitivekind of nineteenthcenturytaxonomiczoology. Brown took over this ideafromHaddon,who hadstarted out as a zoologist. In this model it is supposedthat the "facts"withwhich social anthropologistshave to deal are somehow "outthere"and thatthey can be discussed and analyzed as objects and species types withoutreference to the prejudices of the observer or to the fact that the process of"participant bservation"which has somehow become thehallmarkof profes-sional (as distinctfromamateur) ocial anthropologymustnecessarilydistortwhatever it is that is being observed. The majorityof contemporary ocialanthropologistswill not, if pressed,seek to defendsuch anattitude,yet it seemsto underlie all varieties of social anthropological mpiricism.At theoppositeextremearethose who believe thatthephenomenadiscussedby social anthropologists xemplify"science" n thewaythatNewton's laws ofmotionexemplify science. There are mathematical rinciples hat will explain


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22 LEACHeverything;the ideal ethnographicmonographwould be one which consistsalmost entirely of mathematicalequationsand graphicalrepresentationsofsocial vectors. There are not many authors who have as yet managed topersuade heirpublishers o putout monographsn this form, but one suspectsthat the numberwho wouldlike to do so is considerable.Inthiscase, as in thezoological model, there is an underlyingassumption that the ethnographic"facts"recordedby anthropologicalobservers n the field have some kind ofobjective reality.The implicationof my present essay is quite the reverse;the data whichderive from fieldwork are subjective not objective. I am saying that everyanthropological bserver,no matterhow well he/shehas beentrained,will seesomethingthatno othersuch observercanrecognize,namelya kind of harmon-ic projectionof the observer'sown personality.And when these observationsare "writtenup"in monographor any otherform, the observer'spersonalitywill again distortany purported"objectivity."So what should be done? Nothing. Anthropological exts are interestingin themselves and not because they tell us something about the externalworld. When we read anthropological exts we can read them in two quitedifferentways. In the firstcase textis textjust as the Bible is text. Itmaybe in-terestingin itself; structuredn discoverableways; full of hidden"meanings"both intended and unintended. But we cannot assume that what is dis-cussed in the text corresponds o any kindof "reality." n the second case wecan read a text with the set purposeof discoveringprojectionsof the author'spersonality, of finding a recordof how he or she reacted to what was goingon.Some might say that neitherof these approaches o the publishedevidencehas anything o do withsocial anthropology. am notso sure of that;but of onething I am quite certain. Unless we pay muchcloser attention han has beencustomary o thepersonalbackground f the authorsof anthropologicalworks,we shall missout on mostof whatthesetexts arecapableof tellingus aboutthehistory of anthropology.At the back of the "sense"of social anthropology, here is also the "non-sense"of social anthropology.Thehuge gapsin my story give some indicationof how difficult it is to investigatethis "non-sense"even when it is partofone's personal experience, as, in one way or another, must always be thecase.As a finalcodafor the curious. .. Whilemy tastein architecturewouldputRomanesqueaheadof Gothic,I tend toprefer heBaroque tyleto either. Froman engineeringpointof view, it tacklesmuchmorecomplicatedproblemsandsolves them in a wider varietyof differentways.


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BRITISHSOCIALANTHROPOLOGY 23LiteratureCited

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Leach, 1984-On-Radcliff-brown-Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology

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