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FurtherANNUAL
REVIEWS
Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984. 13:1-23
Copyright © 1984 by Annual Reviews 1nc. All rights reserved
GLIMPSES OF THE
UNMENTIONABLE IN THE
HISTORY OF BRITISH SOCIAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Edmund R. Leach
King's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST, England
"Leach is one of the few British anthropologists of the prewar vintage with a 'conventional'
upper-middle-class background."
Kuper (15, p. 155)
It has become an established feature of theAnnualReview ofAnthropology that
the opening essay should be written by a retired senior practitioner on the theme
of "Anthropology in my time." I have been personally acquainted with most of
the previous authors of these autobiographical essays, and two of them,
Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes, were my teachers and closest associates
throughout my academic career.
This poses obvious difficulties. Fortes was my senior by only four years,
Firth by nine; so if I were to stick to the standard pattern by recording my
recollection of the bare facts, there would be an intolerable level of repetition.
Besides that, Firth and Fortes both started their autobiographical reflections
with a reference to the charisma of Bronislaw Malinowski. Firth reported, "It is
almost exactly 50 years since I decided to become a professional social
anthropologist. With Ashley Montague, Evans-Pritchard, and a few others I
helped in October 1924 to form Malinowski's first seminars at the London
School of Economics" (8, p. 2). Fortes stated: "It was a chance meeting with
Malinowski in 193 1 in the home of J. C. Flugel, the eminent psychoanalyst,
that eventually brought me into anthropology" (12, p. 3). It would be a
perfectly legitimate autobiographical gimmick if I were to follow exactly the
same line. Like Firth (an economist) and Fortes (an experimental psychologist),
my initial training had nothing to do with anthropology. At Cambridge
0084-6570/84/ 1015-0001$02.00
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2 LEACH
I had read mathematics and engineering. My first personal encounter with
Malinowski was in 1937 and, on the face of it, the consequences of the resulting
conversion experience were just as dire as they were for Firth and Fortes. So
again there would be repetition.
But in my case that wasn't really how it happened. There was no point at
which I decided to become a professional social anthropologist, nor could it
really be said that my meeting with Malinowski "brought me into anthropology."
It did and it didn't. Even in 1946, when I was demobilized from the army,
although I had already had links with professional anthropologists for nearly
ten years and had already had extensive and varied experience of anthropological
field research, I was still very much of two minds as to whether to pursue
the subject any further.
A valid biography of my anthropological persona would have to start much
further back. I had already encountered Malinowski in print while still an
undergraduate. This was a result of reading Russell (31), which led me, by way
of Calverton & Schmalhausen (2, 3), to "Parenthood: The Basis of Social
Structure" (26), which Malinowski had then described as: "the first full statement
of my theory of kinship, the result of over 20 years' work on a subject to
which I have devoted most of my attention."
But that too was not a critical beginning. No doubt my undergraduate
experience at Cambridge had a formative influence on what I subsequently
became, but this was trivial compared with influences stemming from my
family and social class background, which are much harder to spell out.
One very relevant fact is that throughout my life I have almost consciously
endeavored to follow in the footsteps of my great uncle, Sir Henry Howorth,
K.C.I.E., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.S.A., author of a famous five-volume History of
the Mongols, sometime President of the Royal Archaeological Institute, Trustee
of the British Museum, Member of Council of the Anthropological Institute,
Member of Parliament, art collector, etc, etc. But few readers of this
journal are likely ever to have heard of my uncle Henry, and it would be absurd
to extend the autobiographical elements in this essay to include features of that
sort.
All the same, that kind of point needs to be made. As should be apparent to
anyone who pays close attention to the details of David Lipset's highly
perceptive biography of Gregory Bateson (23), differences of social class
played a critical role in what happened in British anthropology during the first
40 years of this century, yet the two most recent monograph-scale histories of
British twentieth century anthropology, by Langham (16) and Kuper (15),
distinguish the protagonists only according to the qualities of their research and
publications, their theoretical attitudes, and their direct academic influence
upon one another. We are thus provided with only the barest minimum of
information about the geographical, ethnic, family, and class background of
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3
the individuals concerned. Nor is the reader given any feel of the major
intellectual innovations of the period as they were generated by such contemporary
titans as Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud.
Such deficiencies are serious. Most of the argument about what happened in
British social anthropology between 1900 and 1936 is concerned with events
that took place in metropolitan England within the triangle Oxford-CambridgeLondon,
a region only about one third the size of the state of Massachusetts. On
such a minuscule stage the relation of the actors to their social surrounding
deserves close attention. Once we consider such matters, it is immediately
apparent that very few of the leading characters were born in the British Isles
and fewer still belonged to that exclusive "upper and upper middle" social class
whose members were then alone in feeling themselves fully at home in the
vacuous conservatism of Oxford and Cambridge universities. This circumstance
had discernible consequences for how matters developed over time.
Being, relatively speaking, an insider, I was at first greatly tempted to try to
put the record straight on this particular issue and to bring my commentary
down to the present day. But I have come to see that it is simply not practical.
British academics are still far too sensitive about such matters. It would cause
too much offense. So the first point to be noted about this essay is that it is very
incomplete. I do not refer to any living British social anthropologist who is
younger than I. Nor am I at all frank about just where I fit into the social scene
which I am discussing, though some of my prejudices will be obvious enough.
Yet the point that I am making is far from trivial. I am saying that the sociology
of the environment of social anthropologists has a bearing on the history of
social anthropology.
At world level, academic anthropology has developed as a consequence of
the interaction of prominent individual scholars and the cross-fertilization of
their leading ideas. But these "prominent individual scholars" were ordinary
human beings who had private as well as public life histories. Whatever they
did or said as anthropologists was simply a "structural/metaphoric transformation"
of what they did and said in quite nonanthropological contexts. There is a
continuity in such matters and the particular style of an individual scholar's
anthropology is meshed in with other aspects of his/her personality. Such
continuities are difficult to demonstrate directly, but they sometimes show up
in unpredictable consistencies in behavior. That is what this essay is about.
My purpose is autobiographical (after a fashion), but I am, quite emphatically,
not attempting a survey of "social anthropology in my time." I ignore my
juniors and even as regards my seniors and immediate contemporaries I am
highly selective. I pay detailed attention only to those who have not only been
my close associates but whose influence on my thinking I can clearly recognize.
The arena of British social anthropology is a small world, but it is not
quite as small as all that!
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4 LEACH
As a case in point it will be noted that I ignore the work and touch only briefly
on the person of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. There are two reasons for this neglect.
First, I did not have any close personal contacts with R-B until the very end of
his life; second, a great deal that is highly misleading has already been written
about him. His case fits very well with the general thesis presented in this essay,
but in order to show that this is the case, I would have to engage in a preliminary
exercise of deconstruction which would here be inappropriate.
Before we come to the matter of the continuities between public lives and
private lives, let me fill in some of thebackgroundincluding bits of my own. As
to the issue of social class, I can givesomeindication of what I might have been
writing about my contemporaries by referring to the dead rather than to the
living. In this context I shall use the emotive term "aristocracy" in two different
senses.
First there is what Annan (1) calls "the intellectual aristocracy," the members
of a small group of closely intermarried families who came to dominate the
affairs of Oxford and Cambridge(especiallyCambridge) from about the middle
of the nineteenth century. Members of these families are still prominent in
British academia. A Huxley, who lives in Cambridge, is the current president
of the Royal Society, and he is unlikely to be the last. The president of the
British Academy is a Chadwick; he is a former Vice Chancellor of the University
of Cambridge and Emeritus Regius Professor of Modem History. His
brother, who is Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, was formerly the
Dean (Head) of Christ Church, Oxford. They are both scholars of the utmost
distinction.
This intellectual aristocracy was never a part of the titled aristocracy in a
formal sense. You do not find it spelled out in such reference books as Burke's
Peerage or Burke's Landed Gentry. In origin it is mostly "upper middle class";
its original affluence derived from the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth
century; it tended to be evangelical in religious attitude.
I shall also use the term "aristocracy" to denote the sort of people whose
names do appear in Burke's Peerage. As far as the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge are concerned, the two kinds of aristocracy are not wholly distinct.
And indeed, at the beginning of this century, the interests of the intellectual
aristocrats who ruled the universities and of the titled aristocrats who ruled the
Empire were almost identical.
Although it has been asserted several times by Fortes (11), Quiggin (29),
Langham (16), and others that Cambridge academic anthropology was triumphantly
established between 1898 and 1925 as the result of close collaboration
between A. C. Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers, the facts, as I see them, are
exactly the opposite. The most remarkable feature of Cambridge anthropology
during this period was that Haddon and Rivers failed to establish anything at
all.
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 5
They certainly tried hard enough. After years of campaigning, Haddon was
appointed in October 1900 to a nontenured lectureship in ethnology on the
princely stipend of £50 per annum; nine years later (when he had seemingly
threatened to resign) this lectureship was converted into a personal readership
at £200 per annum. It was the only salaried "anthropological" post in the
university. In 1925, when Haddon first submitted his resignation, it was still
the only such post even though the university as a whole nad meanwhile been
expanding rapidly in all directions.
There were complex reasons for this failure but one factor was social class.
Haddon's voluminous correspondence (of which much survives) shows his
limitations as a university politician, but it seems to me obvious that his most
serious handicap was that he was "not a gentleman" and that he was sycophantic
toward those who were.
Likewise Rivers, though himself a powerful and evidently attractive personality,
was not even a graduate of either Oxford or Cambridge (he had an
external medical degree from the University ofLondon); worse still, he was the
son of a speech therapist and the nephew of the notoriously ungentlemanly
lames Hunt, for whom the Darwin/Huxley contingent would have had no use at
all. Rivers' own stammer was a constant reminder of these social deficiencies.
He also had homosexual leanings, but in the Cambridge of that time that was
not a handicap.
Although Rivers was brought to Cambridge to teach psychology (under the
strange title of the "physiology of the sense organs") in 1893, his position as a
university lecturer was not confirmed until 1897, and even then a commentator
in the university senate said that the appointment was "a ridiculous superfluity."
Haddon's appointment to his readership provoked a similar outburst; it was
declared to be "the most reckless and culpable waste of money that could
possibly be imagined." Rivers was not elected into a fellowship in St lohn's
College until 1902, despite the fact that at this period nearly all university
teachers were Fellows of colleges. In this respect Haddon fared rather better.
He had been a member of Christ's College as an undergraduate, and he was
made a Fellow as soon as he was appointed to his university lectureship.
Eventually Rivers came to be greatly respected in his college, and he was a
well-known man of affairs in the public arena in London where he dabbled in
left-wing politics. He was recognized as a distinguished scientist, but he never
had a significant influence on developments in Cambridge University. During
the Rivers era "psychology" fared little better than "ethnology."
No doubt the "aristocrats" were polite enough in public; indeed, Horace
Darwin (the engineer son of Charles) collaborated with Rivers in research into
visual illusions. But somehow, when it came to university politics, nothing
ever happened. And in Oxford also, despite the honors accorded to Tylor in his
old age, anthropology remained a nonsubject. Tylor was not a gentleman.
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6 LEACH
But at the London School of Economics, an upstart institution created as a
platform for radical Fabian ideas, Edward Westermarck began to teach a rich
combination of theoretical sociology and fieldwork-based social anthropology
as early as 1904. After that all the significant developments in social anthropology
which occurred in Britain during the first quarter of this century were
focused around the L.S.E. And, by feedback, the greater the successes of
L.S.E. anthropology [or, for that matter, University College (London) anthropology
as sponsored by Elliot Smith and W. J. Perry] the less likely it became
that the conservative Establishment in Oxford and Cambridge would touch the
subject with the end of a barge pole.
Cambridge anthropology survived between 1900 and 1925 only because
Haddon's extremely marginal post was attached to theMuseum of Archaeology
and Ethnology, which was created and patronized by a group of very wealthy,
very "upper crust" amateur collectors of ethnographic curiosities led by the
redoubtable traveler, Baron Anatole von Hugel.
What I have said here is not intended to belittle the historical importance of
Rivers' contributions to both anthropology and psychology. My point is simply
that any history of British developments in these fields needs to take into
account not only the overwhelming dominance and academic prestige of
Oxford and Cambridge but also the conservatism and social arrogance of those
who were effectively in control of these two great institutions during the early
part of this century. Haddon and Rivers were fighting to gain recognition in a
most hostile environment and they were losing the battle.
Unless this background is taken into consideration, the self-advertisement
that is scattered through the private papers of the principal protagonists is likely
to be quite radically misconstrued. In the case of social anthropology this is
exactly what has happened.
I could cite a long list· of highly cogent examples, but one will suffice.
Langham (16) purports to demonstrate that there was a "Cambridge School of
Social Anthropology" created by Rivers and Haddon which, particularly in the
period 1920-1926, made a series of major contributions tothe generaltheoryof
kinship. One member of this supposed school was T. T. Barnard, whose
academic prowess was vouched for by Haddon and who held office as Professor
of Social Anthropology in Cape Town from 1926 to 1934. He died in 1983.
Besides numerous cross-references, Langham devotes a special four-page
section of his book (pp. 208-12) to Barnard's work. The content of these pages
derives almost exclusively from Barnard's personal reminiscences. And why
not? Surely the recollections of a former holder of the Cape Town Chair can be
treated as a contribution to the history of social anthropology? Langham does
not tell us anything about Barnard's background, which he perhaps considered
to be irrelevant. But even by Cambridge standards, the level of Barnard's
aristocracy was remarkable.
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 7
Through his father he was a direct descendant of the great eighteenth century
Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford; his mother was a
Lambton from County Durham, "one of the oldest families in Britain," with a
lineage stretching back into the shadows of the eleventh century. His wife was a
Byng, a descendant of Torringtons and Straffords. Barnard himself, besides
being an officer in the Coldstream Guards in both world wars, had been
educated at Eton, Christ Church (Oxford), and King's College (Cambridge).
None of this can mean much to those who do not know the system. Let it suffice
to say that where titled aristocracy rates as an asset rather than a liability,
Barnard's qualifications would be hard to beat!
From all accounts Barnard was a very nice man and an enthusiastic amateur
botanist, but he did not know any anthropology. He only published two very
minor, very derivative papers in thecourseof his wholeanthropologicalcareer.
When he got the job in Cape Town he hadn't published anything at all. But he
had disqualified himself from becoming A.D.C. to the governor of South
Australia by getting married, so he was made professor in Cape Town instead!
How could this happen?
Its seems simple enough to me. Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South
Africa, was an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College where Haddon held his
fellowship. Smuts had established Radcliffe-Brown (then plain Mr. Brown) as
Professor of Social Anthropology in Cape Town in 1920 on Haddon's advice.
He would have consultedHaddon again whenRadcliffe-Brownleft for Sydney.
Isaac Schapera, who later succeeded Barnard in the chair, was then a graduate
student just about to leave for London to take a PhD under Malinowski.
Schapera lent Barnard his notes on Radcliffe-Brown's lectures, and Barnard
used these as the basis of his own lectures for the next eight years.
It may be argued that gossip of this sort, however well it may be attested,
contributes nothing at all to our understanding of what happened in Cambridge
anthropology in the 1920s. But I do not agree. The astonishing rapidity of
Barnard's promotion (on the basis of ultra high social class status but almost
zero knowledge) as compared with the nonrecognition accorded to the work of
Rivers and Haddon speaks volumes about "the Cambridge system." It also
serves to negate the whole of Langham's argument about the intellectual
distinction of his posse of Cambridge graduate students.
I do not want to be misunderstood. This is in part an autobiographicalessay. I
am not myself an aristocrat of either variety. I am not trying to argue that my
titular distinction is no more than a reflection of social class background.
Rather I am saying that the history of British social anthropology as viewed by
participant observers is quite different from the same history as viewed by
nonparticipant observers, and further, that even among participant observers
there are several different categories. The "insiders" and the "outsiders" participate
in quite different ways.
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8 LEACH
After 1920 things began to change but only very slowly. From 1924 on
almost all the Oxford and Cambridge graduates who, for one reason or another,
found themselves interested in "social anthropology," migrated to London to sit
at the feet of Bronislaw Malinowski. They included Edward Evans-Pritchard,
Camilla Wedgwood, Audrey Richards, Monica Hunter (later Wilson), and
Gregory Bateson.
I find it significant that three of these individuals, Wedgwood, Richards, and
Bateson, belonged to the "intellectual aristocracy" and that two of them were
women. Their migration reflected not simply the attraction of Malinowski but
their cumulative aversion to the stifling Cambridge social atmosphere. Lipset
(23, p. 132) cites contemporary evidence for Bateson's case; other evidence is
circumstantial. It is 011 record that Wedgwood was considered to be one of the
liveliest members of Malinowski's seminar. At Cambridge she had been a
disciple of Rivers and had become fascinated in the kin term systems of
Melanesia. After graduation Haddon gave her work appropriate to her female
status; she was employed in measuring skulls and writing labels for museum
artifacts! In London she was treated as a human being.
At this period Cambridge had an official policy of complete sexual segregation.
There were two women's colleges and the women undergraduates took
the same courses as the men, but their names were always listed separately and
the degrees which they obtained were not formallyrecognized. Some members
of the teaching staff refused to lecture if women were present.
But this system was under strain. In 1925 J. B. S. Haldane, an ultra aristocrat
in both my senses, was dismissed from his university readership for committing
adultery with his future wife (4, pp. 73-77). After much publicized legal
proceedings he was reinstated. The case had the long-term consequence that the
six guardians of the university'smorality (the Sex Viri) now number seven (the
Septem Viri) and have never subsequently been required to adjudicate a case!
But at the time, Haldane's supporters were in the minority.
All this bears on my problem for, in this regard, as in others, Cambridge
anthropology, such as it was, had been consistently conformist. Although
"fertility" is one of the central themes of Frazer's The Golden Bough (14),
human sexual intercourseismentionedonly as a magical procedurefor improving
the crops! But Malinowski had published Sex and Repression in Savage
Society in 1927 (24), to be followed by The SexualLife ofSavages in 1929 (25).
Both books were promptly classified by the Cambridge university librarian
under "ARC," which meant that they could not be read without a special
authorization from a senior college official! This further encouraged college
tutors in their common belief that anthropology was not a proper subject for
undergraduates to study at all.
I was an undergraduate at Cambridge from 1929-32. The majority of my
contemporaries, not only in my own college (Clare) but in other colleges also,
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 9
had been selected from a very limited range of private schools on the basis of
personal recommendation rather than any obvious merit. Their common quality
was that they were undistinguished and indistinguishable, though the more
intellectual among us were almost all of a radical, near communist, political
persuasion. We were already coming to hate the social rigidities of the system
in which we had been reared, the injustices of which were visible on every side.
By comparison with the present generation of Cambridge undergraduates, we
were very politicized. We had no use for compromise.
The fact that in 1929-1932 Hitler was just coming into power added another
dimension. We thought that we could recognize the encroachment of a "fascist
mentality" in every aspect of British life, as evidenced, for example, by the
reaction of the ruling class (to which we ourselves belonged) to the General
Strike of 1926. Some became activist leaders of the political left. A few years
later many of my contemporaries joined the International Brigade in the
Spanish Civil War. At least one communist scion of the Cambridge intellectual
aristocracy died in that vain defense ofsocialist democracy as we believed it to
be. Recent revelations about the Russian recruitment of spies from among
upper class Cambridgeundergraduates in the 1930s is part of that same story. J.
B. S. Haldane (see above), who by then was an avowed Marxist, was a kind of
culture hero.
Official attitudesnotwithstanding, the sexes were not effectivelysegregated,
but the goal of sexual liberation and the permissivesociety was a novelty and in
high fashion. Commentaries on the work of Freud, lung, Adler, and other
renegade psychoanalysts were to be found on the bookshelf of every undergraduate
who saw himself as a member of the intelligentsia. A clandestine
study of Malinowski's writings could be a part of that pattern along with the
liberationist propaganda of Bertrand Russell.
Only a minority took their academic studies seriously, but those who did so
did not bother to investigate "soft options" such as ethnology and social
anthropology. I doubt if I even knew that such subjects were available for
study. I myself read mathematics and engineering, ungentlemanly but tough. I
ended up with a First Class Honours degree. I never subsequently practiced as
an engineer, but my engineering background has influenced all my anthropology.
I tend to think of social systems as machines for the ordering of social
relations or as buildings that are likely to collapse if the stresses and strains of
the roof structure are not properly in balance. When I was engaged in fieldwork
I saw my problem as trying to understand "just how the system works" or "why
it held together."
In my own mind these were not just metaphors but problems ofmechanical
insight; nor was it just make-believe. To this day, in quite practical matters, I
remain an unusually competent amateur mechanic and retain an interest in
architecture which is much more concerned with structural features of design
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10 LEACH
than with aesthetics. The contemporary fashion by which the mysterious
"cognitive" relationship between mind and body is modeled as a complex
pattern of computer programs all running in parallel may tum out to be
nonsense, but it is very congenial to my way of thinking. I had learned to work
with binary arithmetic before I had ever heard of computing or of Saussurean
linguistics. I recall that when, in 1961, I first encounteredJakobson's system of
phonological distinctive features my inner reaction was: "Ah! I have been here
before!"
My engineering backg�ound also effected the way I reacted to Marxism.
Marx had used an architectural metaphor for the structure of society. He wrote
of Basis and Uberbau where his English translators have "infrastructure" and
"superstructure." But Marx was not an engineer. His metaphors disguise the
fact that even with perfect foundations (Basis), the long-term stability of the
"superstructure" of a building may be highly precarious.
My concern with design stability does not mean that I am unmoved by the
aesthetics of great architecture, but it adds a dimension which less numerate
observers probably miss. My private use of the concept of "structure" in social
anthropology is thus different both from the usage developed by RadcliffeBrown
and Fortes (where it simply refers to the skeletal framework of society
without any consideration of design features) and from Uvi-Strauss's transformational
usage, which borrows from lakobson's phonology, though my engineer's
viewpoint is much closer to the latter than to the former.
But in becoming a rude mechanical I did not cease to be a snob. George
Homans (himself an American aristocrat by birth; his mother was an Adams)
once explained the peculiarities of the Boston Unitarians by saying that while
all sects of Calvinist origin assume that God has ordained a predestined
distinction between the Elect and the Damned, the Unitarians are so certain that
they themselves belong to the Elect that they never bother about the Damned.
And that has been, very broadly, the position of the academic inhabitants of
Oxford and Cambridge Universities throughout my lifetime. We know we are
the Elect. What happens elsewhere is of no importance whatsoever.
Today there are 46 universities in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Of
these, the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh
were all established before 1600; University College (London), King's College
(London), and Durham are all "pre-1840" foundations. Yet the unique standing
accorded to "Oxbridge" persists. It goes far beyond self-esteem; the preeminence
is taken for granted.
The staff and students of "lesser" institutions are simultaneously both contemptuous
and envious of the "the two senior universities." The contempt
appears repeatedly as a form of words; the envy is shown by deeds. Although
the social class composition of the "Oxbridge" intake is now entirely different
from what it was formerly, a huge proportion of the star performers among all
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 11
young people applying for university entry will still put an "Oxbridge" college
as their first choice among the alternatives on offer. And the same attitude
prevails among academic staff.
In 1900 Haddon resigned from a full professorship (in zoology) in Dublin in
order to take up his ill-paid, nontenured lectureship in ethnology in Cambridge;
50 years later I, too, gave up a readership in London University in favor of a
lectureship in Cambridge, a change involving a substantial drop in salary. The
pattern persists. Every post advertised either by Cambridge University or by a
Cambridge college is likely to attract applicants who are already in positions
which are better paid and notionally superior in status to that which is on offer.
The behavior of Malinowski's L.S.E. coterie must be seen against this
background. In the 1920s and 1930s the L.S.E. was a very low status institution.
Up to a point it was proud of its radical unorthodoxy, but as a part of its
efforts to achieve respectability (which were ultimately very successful), the
politics of the place were steadily moving to the right. Most of the genuinely
British staff, for all their posturing, would have dearly liked to be able to
transfer to Oxbridge, but the "British" connection of most of Malinowski's
pupils was tenuous.
With varying degrees of enthusiasm and varying degrees of success, Malinowski,
Firth, Schapera, Fortes, Nadel, and the other "foreigners" who were
mainly responsible for the high prestige that was attributed to "British" social
anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s (at least in the assessments made by
anthropologists from other parts of the world) eventually assimilated themselves
into the life style and cultural conventions of Oxbridge academics, but
they remained "outsiders" with a highly ambivalent attitude toward the values
of their adopted academic milieu. This ambivalence is both reflected in and a
reflection of their approach to the study of anthropology.
Meyer Fortes can serve as an example. He never for a moment sought to
repudiate his basic social identity as the son ofan impoverished South African
Jew of Russian descent, yet in reaction to the social class hierarchy of British
Jewry, he frequently made the improbable claim that his family were of
Sephardim origin. This is quite consistent with the fact that, except for a period
during World War II when he returned to West Africa, he was associated with
the faculty of either Oxford or Cambridge from late 1939 until his retirement.
For the last 31 years of his life he lived in Cambridge as a Professorial Fellow
(later Honorary Fellow) of King's College, an institution founded in 1442.
When he arrived from Oxford in 1951, King's College was still a bastion of
British upper-class values of the most archaic kind. Every detail stood in
glaring contrast to the mixture ofvalues to which Fortes had been acculturated
in his South African homeland. Yet right from the start he was delighted. He
gave the impression that he "venerated" King's and Cambridge. The fact that,
as ofright, he now had a College Fellowship meant that that at long last he had a
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definable status in what he most admired, an inflexible and enduring "social
structure."
But if "veneration" is the right word, it was the veneration of an outsider. In
relation to the College, he was, as he had been during his fieldwork in West
Africa, an acute "patticipant observer." But fieldworking anthropologists do
not ordinarily seek to intervene in the affairs in which they participate; and so it
was with Fortes in King's. He was much liked and respected by his colleagues,
but he never played an active executive role in College affairs. Indeed, to a
quite disconcerting extent, he never seemed to understand how the system
really worked or just why such an archaic construction should have failed to
collapse long ago. He was not an engineer!
For the last 22 ofthose 31 years I was also a Fellow ofKing's College and for
12 ofthem I was, as Provost, head ofthe institution. At first I too was viewed by
the Old Guard as an outsider; I had not been at King's as an undergraduate but at
Clare College, which is immediately next door! However, after a while, I was
allowed to come over the wall.
It has been argued with some justice that the changes that took place in
King's College during my provostship were more drastic than any that had
occurred during the whole of the previous 530 years of its history, the most
notable being that the College began to admit women. Those changes were only
marginally of my making, but certainly I was much more thanjust a participant
observer; I was actively involved in what was going on. I could be actively
involved in this way because, unlike Fortes, I was (more or less) an "insider"
not an "outsider," and because, most certainly, I did not in any way "venerate"
the archaic rigidities which I and my coconspirators were seeking to under­
mine.
I believe that the differences to which I have here drawn attention are
reflected in the respective styles of social anthropology adopted by Firth,
Fortes, and myself and other prominent "British" social anthropologists as
well.
First of all there is the very generalpoint that the British-born were trying to
get away from a homeland whichthey found archaic, whereas the "foreigners"
were looking for a new, idealized homeland that would offer a kind of stable
respectability which their own original homeland lacked. Schapera, Hunter,
Fortes, and Gluckman were all from South Africa. Is it too fanciful to suggest
that the prominence that several ofthese authors were later to give to the notion
of homeostatic social equilibrium and to the beliefthat social structures persist
even when there are drastic changes in cultural appearances derived from their
personal need for a stable homeland?
But let me be more specific and more personal.
Firth was a New Zealander. The New Zealand ofhis youth was certainly not
a "socialist" society, nor was it in any way "unstable." It had the merits of a
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quiet provincialism. The values were egalitarian, do-it-yourself, rational; but it
was out of the swim. When Firth first came to England at the age of 23 he was
clearly fascinated by the aesthetic resources of the metropolis and of Europe
generally, but the irrational snobberies of the English upper-middle class must
have seemed both alien and bizarre. Yet for New Zealanders ofthat time Great
Britain was still "home"; a homeland oftradition; cosy, perhaps out ofdate, but
still worth preserving in a fossilized state.
Today, at the age of 82, Firth is the unchallenged "senior elder" among
British social anthropologists. Over the years his influence upon how the
subject has developed has been immense, but it owes nothing whatever to any
"Oxbridge" connection.
Firth has never involved himselfin British national politics, but his general
stance has been consistently that of a moderate conservative. As in his anthropology,
he displays a formal interest in the way society changes over time but
tends nevertheless to view such changes as superficial. Certainly he has never
shown any enthusiasm for change for its own sake.
In academic argument he has been consistently skeptical about all forms of
reductionist generalization. He has never allowed himself to use ethnographic
detail simply to exemplify a proposition which he has arrived at by a priori
reasoning; the argument grows out of the evidence which is presented in
massive detail. The enthusiasm for "theory" isolated from empirical evidence
which is often displayed by Oxbridge academics and by their Parisian counterparts
arouses Firth's undisguised contempt. Here at least he shows himself a
true follower ofMalinowski. Firth actually lived in Cambridge during much of
World War II (when the L.S.E. had been evacuated to Cambridge), but he kept
his distance.
This is all of a piece with his private passion for Romanesque art and
architecture, a style in which extreme intricacy of decorative detail is fitted to
structures of almost brutal solidity and which stands in sharp contrast to the
mathematical elegance of the gothic architecture of later centuries.
On the other hand, despite Firth's avoidance of the abstract rhetoric of
national politics, he has been a lifelong do-it-yourself politician of quite
another kind. He has consistently displayed a deep commitment to the preservation
and development of the academic discipline of social anthropology,
and his achievements in that area have been very remarkable. From the 1940s to
the 1960s he had a wide variety of personal, but quite informal, ties with senior
civil servants in key positions. He used these contacts with outstanding skill.
At the beginning of the century, Haddon had had similar objectives, but he
wasted his energies organizing futile official delegations from the University of
Cambridge to Ministers in Whitehall (which produced no results at all except
some platitudinous remarks from Prime Minister Asquith about the potential
value of anthropology for the future of the Empire). By contrast, Firth went
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behind the scenes and talked with the people who really mattered. He got
results. Considering the tiny scale of the whole enterprise in Britain of the
1950s, the central funding ofsocial anthropological research was quite disproportionately
generous. It was a phase which only endured while Firth was at the
helm at the L.S.E. All ofwhich, it seems to me, belongs to the same pattern as
Firth's contributions to the subject matter of social anthropology itself.
Firth's published output has been very large. It is widely dispersed and
covers many fields, but by far the major part has been devoted to meticulously
detailed accounts of the ethnography of what Firth himself calls "traditional"
Tikopia society, though the observations thus recorded were made at various
dates between 1928 and 1973 and some ofthem in places other than on Tikopia
itself (9, p. 219). This use of the word "traditional" reflects an underlying
presumption, shared by nearly all "nthropologists of his own and earlier
generations, that until the coming of the white man, primitive society everywhere
had been in a state of Arcadian stability if not of Arcadian bliss.
It has always seemed to me that Firth has rather similar feelings about
England. "Traditional" England was what he first observed when he arrived
from New Zealand in 1924. In objective terms it was a societyundergoingrapid
disintegration, but Firth seems to have perceived this total mess as an intricate
variety of cultural detail grounded in foundations of great stability. He still
gives the impression of believing that the changes that have taken place
subsequently are only on the surface.
Even more striking is the way that Firth's performance as an academic
politician fits in with his anthropological commitment to the concept of "social
organization." This expression was the title of a well-known posthumous
textbook (30) by Rivers (heavily edited by Perry), which first appeared in print
in 1924, the year in which Firth "decided to become an anthropologist" (see
above), but in Firth's private academic language it acquired quite a new
meaning.
The expression recurs throughout his writings, though the personalized
version only emerges in Firth's 1949 paper (7) which formed part of a Festschrift
offered to Radcliffe-Brown on his retirement from the Chair of Social
Anthropology at Oxford, of which he had been the first holder.
Atthis stage in the development ofBritish social anthropology, the "structural-functionalism"
of Radcliffe-Brown had been given a great boost by the
formal simplicity with which the basic theory ofsegmentarylineage structures
(which was barely distinguishable from Durkheim's concept of mechanical
solidarity) had been exemplified by Evans-Pritchard (6), by Fortes & EvansPritchard
(13), and Fortes (10). Firth'spaper is a thinly disguised attack on this
"Oxford" position. He is saying that real life behavior is not determined by
formal structural arrangements and segmentary oppositions. Real life is a
matter of ad hoc improvisation, of getting things fixed up by your friends
regardless of what the formal rules may say.
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BRmSH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 15
In Firth's usage the "social structure" (in this Oxford sense) provides no
more than the formal stage upon which social action takes place. If we are to
understand what actually happens, we must take account of the "social organization,"
that is to say, the way in which individuals play the game of local
politics in order to maximize their individual private satisfactions.
If my own approach to social phenomena has been that of an engineer, a
concern with how the machinery works, Firth's style has been consistently that
of a laissez-faire economist: each individual, in competition with every other
individual, is presumed to be acting so as to maximize his/her personal
satisfactions, subject only to the formal constraints imposedbylocally accepted
cultural conventions.
It may be that personal rivalries were in the background, but I find it
significant that this opposition between Evans-Pritchard and Fortes on the one
hand and Firth on the other should first have become explicit as an antithesis
between an Oxford and an L.S.E. approach to matters anthropological.
Later, when Evans-Pritchard broke away from Radcliffe-Brown's "structural-functionalism"
in favorofan idealist style derived from Mauss and Hertz and
Van Gennep (which was not really very far removed from the structuralism of
Levi-Strauss), the rift in the Oxford-London axis became even more marked.
But by this time it was a triangle, Oxford-London-Cambridge, rather than a
bipolar opposition. But that must be a story for some other occasion. For the
moment let me stick to the contrast between Firth and Fortes.
Firth was the senior by five years, but they were both introduced to the
English academic scene as outsiders through the medium of Malinowski's
L.S.E. seminar. In both cases this introduction was prior to their respective
engagement in field research in Tikopia (Firth) and Taleland (Fortes). The
social adjustment that then ensued was in itself a kind of "dry run" of a field
research experience.
If that is a fair statement, then it is clear that the two men reacted to their
initiation in very different ways. Firth fell in love with the L.S.E.; he joined the
staffat the first available opportunity (in 1932) and remained there for the rest
of his career. He was quite unimpressed by the pretensions of the Oxbridge
setup. Fortes, though briefly on the L.S.E. staffafter his return from the field,
moved on to Oxford at the first opportunity, even though prospects of secure
employment were very bleak. Even at that date (1939) he seems to have been
attracted not only by the formality of Radcliffe-Brown's highly abstract concept
of social structure but by the archaic rigidity of the Oxford academic
environment, though one ironical consequence of this rigidity was that Fortes
was never offered a College Fellowship.
The "social structure/social organization" debate reflects this difference in
basic attitudes as does the contrast in style between Firth's writings about the
Tikopia and Fortes's writings about the Tallensi. Neither author had the gift of
literary elegance, but whereas the reader of Firth finds himself in a trackless
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jungle of ethnography which abounds in botanical rarities of the most exotic
kind, the ethnographic terrain inhabited by Fortes's Tallensi appears as a
product of well-ordered landscape gardening from which most ofthe botanical
exotica have been excluded.
From Firth we learn a vast amount about the details of the "traditional"
Tikopia way of living, but somehow the ordering of Tikopia society remains
obscure. From Fortes we learn a greatdeal about the formal ordering ofTallensi
society, but only in bits and pieces do we get an impression of what "traditional"
Tallensi life was really like.
In terms of my engineering metaphor, Fortes describes the social machinery
and its component parts but is unconvincing when he tries to explain how the
system works. Firth gives us an instruction manual for operating the machinery,
but he does not tell us what the bits and pieces would look like ifwe took it
apart. Or to pursue my art and architecture model: it is wholly appropriate that
Firth should be entranced by the highly decorated solidity of the Romanesque
Cathedral at Conques and that Fortes should have been overawed by the
symmetrical Gothic fragilities of King's College Chapel. At both levels my
personal taste has repeatedly led me into conflict with both my teachers.
There can be no point in pursuing any further this comparison by nuance, but
what I am getting at is that if we consider the membership of Malinowski's
L.S.E. seminar and the leaders ofBritish academic social anthropology who
emerged from it, then in various ways the individuals concerned, notably
Malinowski himself, Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Schapera, Richards, Fortes, and
Nadel, present us with an interestingspectrum ofpersonal characteristics which
are reflected in their respective contributions to anthropology. One of the
component variables in this spectrum was "Englishness."
At one extreme stands Evans-Pritchard, a very English Englishman despite
his Welsh name, educated at the ultraprestigious Winchester College (founded
1387) and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read history. At the other extreme
stands Nadel, British only by naturalization, remaining always at heart a very
typical Viennese Jewish intellectual whose wide-ranging interests in musicology,
psychology, and philosophy were prior to those in anthropology. In
between we have Richards, true English but handicapped by the prevailing
prejudice against women academics; Firth, near English but a "colonial";
Fortes and Schapera, both South African Jews; and Malinowski himself, a
permanent Central European who was very much aware from the start that his
potential audience was much wider than the inward-looking parochial community
of British academia. He liked to claim that he was a Polish aristocrat.
Evans-Pritchard was a "true scholar" in a typical British sense, never
seeming to be altogether serious, making a point of carrying his very considerable
learning lightly. Nadel was equally a "true scholar" but typical in the
Germanic sense. He was at all times deadly serious.
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 17
Where Evans-Pritchard eventually came to think of social anthropologyas an
art rather than a science, Nadel was deeply committed to the view that
anthropologists are engaged in a scientific discipline which is capable of
revealing facts of (social) nature in much the same way as experiments in
physics reveal the facts of physical nature. In this antithesis I am quite
emphatically on Evans-Pritchard's side, just as my "Englishness" is unqualified
by either gender or birthplace.
Nadel's ethnographic studies of the Nupe and the Nuba still stand out as
landmark contributions to the field, but it is surely most unlikely that anyone
other than an historian now tackles The Foundations ofSocial Anthropology
(27) or The Theory ofSocial Structure (28). Nadel himself tells us that he had
originally planned that the former work should bear the titleProlegomena to the
Study ofSociety: Being an Inquiry into theNature ofSociologicalKnowledge.
Presumably his publisher had rightly diagnosed that any English reader would
be inclined to treat the whole idea as a joke!
Between the arts man and the theoretical scientist we have the no-nonsense
fieldworkersfor whom "theory" mustalways besubordinatedto direct observation.
The crucial feature which linked Malinowski with his closest followers
was a down-to-earth empiricism and a marked skepticism concerning any kind
of generalization which might suggest an antipositivist idealism. In the background
were behaviorist theories of psychology as viewed through the philosophic
attitudes of Bertrand Russell and the logical positivists.
It was not until the mid-1950s that, under the influence of the later Wittgenstein
and Oxford linguistic philosophy, British social anthropologists began to
show a serious interest in ideas rather than in behavior. This shift was initiated
by Evans-Pritchard though the presence of Louis Dumont in Oxford for several
years wa� also relevant, as was my own hereticalidealism which had a variety
of sources. It was certainly tied in with my early grounding in mathematics,
though mathematicians are not necessarily of an idealist inclination.
So perhaps it is time that I turned to autobiography. Needless to say, I hold
that I have been misunderstood. I must admit that Kuper's recent book (15),
which is a substantial revision of an earlier work, provides on pages 155-65 a
perceptive summary of my theoretical standpoint regarding the empiricisU
idealist dichotomy, but even so, he is only the most prominent among a number
of commentators upon th� post-1945 British social anthropological scene who
have claimed that I was responsible for introducing into British social anthropology
a novel style of "structuralism" which derived from Levi-Strauss rather
than Radcliffe-Brown. This is not how it has seemed to me.
Derivations are never clear, but my article on Jinghpaw kinship terminology
(17), which Levi-Strauss himself recognized as having some kinship with his
own work (22, p. 525), was completed in wartime Calcutta in 1943 at a time
when I had never heard of "structuralism" of the French variety; nor had I
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encountered the work of Roman Jakobson. But Jakobson's subsequent fascination
with Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (34) and my own fascination with
Jakobson's phonology represent a convergence of ideas. I never had the
makings of a true mathematician, but I was mathematically literate. I learned
about "transformational" theory (in the form of advanced algebra and the
nineteenth century developments ofprojective geometry) severalyearsbefore I
entered Cambridge as an undergraduate. If some of my anthropological work is
"structuralist" in style, it is for that reason.
Moreover, when I switched from pure mathematics to engineering as an
undergraduate, I developed a bias against abstract theory as an end in itself. Itis
quite true that later on, as an anthropologist, I was often exasperated by the
obsessive ·empiricism of Firth and Fortes and several of Malinowski's other
pupils, but I never came close to sharing Levi-Strauss's view that theory is the
only thing that matters, and that if the ethnography does not fit, it can simply be
discarded.
It was precisely on that issue that my own relationship to French structuralism
became defined. I first became interested in the work of Levi-Strauss
because the Kachins of North Burma provided his type example of a "generalized
exchange" marriage system (21 , Chap. 15, 16). I was intrigued by the fact
that while his theory, in an odd sort of way, fitted some of the facts on the
ground (with which I was intimately familiar and Levi-Strauss was not), there
was a very wide discrepancy between the details of the ethnography and what
Levi-Strauss had supposed to be the case. Afterward I was shocked to discover
that he himself was in no way put outby these discrepancies; he blandly assured
his readers that myethnographymust be wrong! From then on I knew that when
it came to the crunch I was just as much an empiricist as any of my British
colleagues.
My book PoliticalSystems ofHighlandBurma (18) was published in 1954. It
was certainly my most influential work, though much that it contains has been
seriously garbled by my critics. I had moved from the L.S.E. to Cambridge in
the autumn of 1953, though the book had been written some while before that.
Its "idealist" standpoint provoked hostile comment in both localities. Firth's
anxieties about the direction in which I might be heading are apparent in his
"Foreword." The notion that the persisting element in social relationships is a
patterned structure of verbal concepts (which are open to very diverse interpretations)
rather than a patterned structure of empirically observable "groups"
knit togetherby mysterious "ether" called "kinship" was as repugnant to Fortes
in 1980 as it had been in 1954.
My next fieldwork monograph, Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (20), did
nothing to improve matters on the home front, for while it conformed to
structural-functionalist dogma in providing a great deal of formally organized
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 19
ethnographic detail, it argued quite explicitly thatkinship isnota thing in itself.
I argued that, in the case of my Sri Lankan peasants, the material that Fortes and
his pupils were wont to discuss under the heading of kinship was simply a way
of talking about rights in land and water.
This book appeared in 1961, which was for me a kind of watershed. In the
same year I brought out a book of essays, RethinkingAnthropology (19), which
showed much more clearly than anything I had produced previously just how
far I had distanced myself from my teachers. They had been interested in the
particularity of other cultures and other societies, both of which were thoughtof
as existing in the plural.
Malinowski and Firth had both taught and written as if it might be possible to
describe a cultural system as a unique self-sufficient, functioning whole. Such
a description would specify the Trobrianders or the Tikopia as differentfrom all
other people. Likewise, Fortes had followed Radcliffe-Brown in holding that
whole societies are distinguishable as species types and classifiable as such in a
kind of Linnaean taxonomy. In the lead essay of Rethinking AnthropoLogy,
which had been delivered in lecture form in December 1959, I denounced al�
such approaches to the data of anthropology as "butterfly collecting" and urged
that what anthropologists ought to be doing was searching for generalizations
for which cultural boundaries were quite irrelevant. In that same essay, to the
mystification of most of my audience, I referred to the potential significance of
binary arithmetic and computer machine code as devices for modeling sociological
process (19, pp. 6-7). Another key point, about which I was also quite
explicit, was that my use of "function" derived from mathematics and not from
biology or psychology, as was the case with the followers of Radcliffe-Brown
and Malinowski. Consequently, from my point of view, there was no inconsistency
between " functionalism" and "structuralism" (in its then novel continental
sense).
I spent the academic year 1960/61 atthe Palo Alto "Think Tank" where I met
Roman Jakobson and thus began to understand what I had been playing at ever
since I ceased to be an engineer. Jakobson was concerned at that time with the
search for linguistic universals. Our problems were of essentially the same
kind. I began to see that my deepest concerns were with what is now discussed
under suchgrandioselabels as semiotics and cognitive science. Everything that
has happened in the subsequent 22 years has reinforced my belief that those
insights were ones that I could stick with.
All this ties in with my later obsession with Vico. Vico, in his own way and
in his own time, was likewise interested in structuralist transformations as
generalized products of human thinking. His key perception in his New Science
(33) was that only the maker of an object fully understands its nature; e.g. a
carpenter understands why the chair he has made does not collapse. But human
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society was made by man, so man should be able to understand society, in an
engineering sense, e.g. why it holds togetherand does not collapse. Behind this
there is the further perception that all the artifacts (including human society)
which man thus "makes" must necessarily be projective transformations of
what the human brain already "knows." This implies, to use computer terminology,
that social products are generated by "software programs," operating
through but limited by the computer-like machinery of the human brain. The
"software" comes from our cultural environment; the "hardware" derives from
our genetic inheritance.
Many social anthropologists think that model making of this kind is just
verbal eyewash. I find it valuable, and it has dominated my thinking now for
nearly a quarterofa century. I reject the notion that I have swung back and forth
between being a functionalist and being a structuralist; I have quite consistently
been both at once. But both my functionalism and my structuralismderive from
my grounding in mathematics and engineering. Furthermore, I have an engineer'sinterestin
design, in how localregions ofcomplex unbounded systems
"work." Indeed, I have consistently maintained that the social systems with
which anthropologists have to deal are not, in any empirical sense, bounded at
all. To discuss the plurality of 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 is
obvious. Here is an example.
Kuper (15, Chap. 6) pairs me with Max Gluckman. We were more or less
contemporaries. Although Gluckman was a year my junior, he had read
anthropology as an undergraduate at Witwatersrand, so his grounding in the
subject was earlier and much more thorough than my own, but he had missed
out on other things. As was the case with Fortes, Gluckman's family background
was Russian-lewish-South African and, like Fortes, he ended up with
an irrational devotion to stable systems in general and to Oxford in particular.
Fortes and Gluckman were close personal friends over many years. Gluckman
and I first met very briefly at one of Radcliffe-Brown's Oxford seminars in the
winter of 1938/39. I took an instant and lasting dislike to the whole setup and to
Gluckman in particular.
If anyone had asked me then or later what I thought of Gluckman, I would
probably have said that Iconsidered him to be an uncivilized and fundamentally
uneducated egocentric whose attempts at theoretical generalization were of
quite puerile incompetence. My views of Radcliffe-Brown were not all that
different, though perhaps I would have qualified the uneducated.
Since Brown was at Trinity College, Cambridge, in several distinguished
capacities, from 1901-1910, it might perhaps be thought that, in terms of the
general argument of this essay, I should have found in him some mental
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affinity. In fact, I was constantly offended by the characteristic which Stanner
(32), in a highlylaudatoryassessment, mentions as: "he (Radcliffe-Brown) was
somewhat given to instructing other scholars in their own subjects." Our very
first meeting was marked by just such a contretemps in which R-B gave me a
lecture about a branch of mathematics in which I happened to be expert and
about which he clearly knew nothing whatsoever.
In the latter part of his life, Radcliffe-Brown tried to give the impression to
the more gullible members of the non-English audiences that he was usually
addressing that he was, by lineage and upbringing, an English country gentleman.
The fact that in 1926, on moving from Cape Town to Sydney, he should
have taken the trouble to change his name from Brown to Radcliffe-Brown
gives anindication ofthe value that he attached to such matters. Inactual fact he
was not born into the English social class which reacts favorably to hyphenated
names. His education started at the Royal Commercial Travellers School at
Pinner in Middlesex.
Such arrogance and prejudice on my part reflects no credit on me but, if I am
honest, I have to admit that I feel today as I felt then. But in the case of
Gluckman it was a radical difference of social background rather than any
fundamental disagreements concerning social theory that lay at the roots ofour
mutual antipathy. Marx, Durkheim, and Freud were palpable influences on
Gluckman's thinking (see 5); even a casual glance at my library shelves would
suggest that they must have been powerful influences on my own.
So where does that lead us? One persistent tradition in British social anthropology
is indicated by the frequency with which the practitioners refer to their
discipline as a "science." They mean many different things by this word, but
few of them mean what Vico meant.
One common model is that of Radcliffe-Brown, who thought of social
anthropology as somehow analogous to a very primitive kind of nineteenth
century taxonomic zoology. Brown took over this idea from Haddon, who had
started out as a zoologist. In this model it is supposed that the "facts" with
which social anthropologists have to deal are somehow "out there" and that
they can be discussed and analyzed as objects and species types without
reference to the prejudices of the observer or to the fact that the process of
"participant observation" which has somehow become the hallmark of professional
(as distinct from amateur) social anthropology must necessarily distort
whatever it is that is being observed. The majority of contemporary social
anthropologistswill not, ifpressed, seek todefend such an attitude, yet it seems
to underlie all varieties of social anthropological empiricism.
At the opposite extreme are those who believe that the phenomena discussed
by social anthropologists exemplify "science"in the way that Newton's laws of
motion exemplify science. There are mathematical principles that will explain
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22 LEACH
everything; the ideal ethnographic monograph would be one which consists
almost entirely of mathematical equations and graphical representations of
social vectors. There are not many authors who have as yet managed to
persuade their publishers to put out monographs in this form, but one suspects
that the number who would like to do so is considerable. In this case, as in the
zoological model, there is an underlying assumption that the ethnographic
"facts" recorded by anthropological observers in the field hav� some kind of
objective reality.
The implication of my present essay is quite the reverse; the data which
derive from fieldwork are subjective not objective. I am saying that every
anthropological observer, no matter how well he/she has been trained, will see
something that no other such observer can recognize, namely a kind of harmonic
projection of the observer's own per&onality. And when these observations
are "written up" in monograph or any other form, the observer's personality
will again distort any purported "objectivity."
So what should be done? Nothing. Anthropological texts are interesting
in themselves and not because they tell us something about the external
world. When we read anthropological texts we can read them in two quite
different ways. In the first case text is text just as the Bible is text. It may be interesting
in itself; structured in discoverable ways; full of hidden "meanings"
both intended and unintended. But we cannot assume that what is discussed
in the text corresponds to any kind of "reality." In the second case we
can read a text with the set purpose of discovering projections of the author's
personality, of finding a record of how he or she reacted to what was going
on.
Some might say that neither of these approaches to the published evidence
has anything to do with social anthropology. I am not so sure of that; but of one
thing I am quite certain. Unless we pay much closer attention than has been
customary to the personal background of the authors of anthropological works,
we shall miss out on most of what these texts are capable of telling us about the
history of anthropology.
At the back of the "sense" of social anthropology, there is also the "nonsense"
of social anthropology. The huge gaps in my story give some indication
of how difficult it is to investigate this "non-sense" even when it is part of
one's personal expeIience, as, in one way or another, must always be the
case.
As a final coda for the curious . . . While my taste in architecture would put
Romanesque ahead of Gothic, I tend to prefer the Baroque style to either. From
an engineering point of view, it tackles much more complicated problems and
solves them in a wider variety of different ways.
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BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23
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