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“... This book needs to be handled with care. It may be other than it seems. Possibly the publishers were uncertain about what they had got; so am I. The author is well-known: ‘Colin Turnbull is Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University in Washington DC. He has lived and worked in India and central and eastern Africa. His experiences are reflected in his well-known anthropological works, The Mountain People and The Forest People ...”

“... I refer to the first of these items as ‘Goldthorpe’ and to the second as ‘Halsey’. Both are productions of the Oxford (Social) Mobility Project, a large collaborative exercise which has operated from a base in Nuffield College since 1969. For a long while, politicians and other interested parties are likely to cite them as authoritative sources, but in order to evaluate what is being said, the reader must penetrate a thick layer of mind-boggling numerical tabulations and pseudo-vector diagrams to the egalitarian value schema which lies beneath ...”

“... As the bombs go off in Belfast, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, New Delhi, Beirut or wherever and the police start shooting ordinary citizens in order to preserve the peace, the television watcher develops a clear visual impression of what the word ‘violence’ signifies in contemporary English. To apply the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced ...”

“... Edmund Leach was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, KBE and FBA, a trustee of the British Museum, a senior fellow of Eton College, the president of societies ranging from the Royal Anthropological Institute to the British Humanist Association, and a noted collector of committee chairmanships. I once asked him how he could square all this with his regular insistence that he was a scourge of the establishment ...”

“... than Barr: which is surprising. The Barr-Childs dispute is not one in which one might expect Edmund Leach to be very interested, but if by chance he were, one assumes that for all his religious scepticism he would be on the side of Childs and not of Barr, though he would probably prefer Barr’s prose style. He has his own challenging, even ...”

“... PS501 too) await their textbook writers. Frank Kermode’s masterguides are not such men. As Leach, for instance, explains, he is not offering stock answers to any stock questions. Indeed, he warns, anyone who read him for this would be put down by most examiners as ‘old-fashioned, egocentric, unscientific, escapist’ and altogether ...”

“... decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation came to adulthood during World War Two, and made their ...”

“... states’ vote Republican while its ‘blue states’ vote Democrat. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Marshall Sahlins have pointed out that our normative ‘totemic’ systems of colour – urban gang colours, sports team colours, school colours, gender colours etc – are precisely analogous to those of the indigenous groups ...”

“... an authoritative modern version to match that of King James’s panel. The joker in the pack is Edmund Leach, with ‘Fishing for men at the edge of the wilderness’. Leach despises Biblical scholars, so does not read them: his opening caveat, ‘I lack most of the qualifications of an ordinary biblical ...”

“... in need of a ‘breath of non-Cambridge air’. Next door at King’s, the radical anthropologist Edmund Leach described his college as resembling ‘a seminary for young gentlemen’. Poorer, more recently established colleges, like Churchill in Cambridge and St Catherine’s in Oxford, took up the issue partly because it complemented their identities ...”

“... that if they existed then they must be carved into the brain itself. His erratic English disciple, Edmund Leach, came up with a vivid if unreliable example of what Lévi-Strauss variously termed socio-logic – the science of the concrete – or totemism. Like many peoples, the English tend to classify animals first and foremost according to whether or ...”

“... come in? Early on he became interested in comparative anthropology thanks to Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach at Cambridge. He acquired the idea of a historical anthropology from Jean-Pierre Vernant in Paris. Twenty years ago he took up ancient Chinese science. He has since become the world’s foremost contributor to studies comparing aspects of ...”

“... and didn’t go back there until 1985, when he accompanied Mitterrand on an official visit. Edmund Leach spoke for many Anglo-American anthropologists when he complained in 1970 that Lévi-Strauss’s analyses were ‘very far removed from the dirt and squalor that are the field anthropologist’s normal stamping ground’. But Lévi-Strauss ...”

“... prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this crux, de Waal suggests, that made it possible for Rie to define herself by ...”

“... in the Sudan, where he recruited Anuak tribesmen to fight Italians on the Ethiopian frontier. Edmund Leach, while researching his classic Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), rounded up his Katchin subjects for a counter-insurgency campaign against the Japanese: he perfected the native art of planting shit-encrusted bamboo stakes in the jungle ...”