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Rethinking Anthropology London School of Economics Monographs on Socl\L Anthropology

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Rethinking Anthropology London School of Economics Monographs on Socl\L Anthropology RETHINKING ANTHROPOLOGY LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS MONOGRAPHS ON SOCL\L ANTHROPOLOGY Managing Editor: Anthony For^e The Monographs on Social Anthropology were established in 1940 and aim to publish results of modem anthropological research of primary interest to specialists. The continuation of the series was made possible by a grant in aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and more recently by a further grant from the Governors of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Monographs are under the direction of an Editorial Board associated with the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics and Political Science. LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS MONOGRAPHS ON SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY No. 22 Rethinking Anthropology by E. R. LEACH UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THE ATHLONE PRESS NEW YORK: HUMANITIES PRESS INC Published by THE ATHLONE PRESS UNIVERSITY OF LONDON at 2 Gotcer Street, London wci Distributed by Tiptree Book Services Ltd Tiptree, Essex First edition, 1961 First paperback edition with corrections, 1966 Reprinted, 1968, 1971 ® E. R. Leach, 1961, 1971 U.K. s B N o 485 19522 4 cloth U.K. s B N o 485 19622 o paperback U.S.A. s B N 391 00146 9 paperback First printed in 1961 by ROBERT CUNNINGHAM AND SONS LTD ALVA Reprinted by photo-litho by JOHN DICKENS & CO LTD NORTHAMPTON 4- M75' Preface The title of this collection properly belongs only to the first essay. On 3 December 1959 1 had the honour to deliver the first Malinovvski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. The Editorial Board of the London School of Economics Monographs in Social Anthropology generously offered to publish the text of my lecture but added the flattering suggestion that I should reprint a number of my other essays at the same time. I have accordingly appropriated the title of my Malinowski lecture for the whole collection. The essays extend over a period of fifteen years and I do not pretend that the viewpoint of the latest (Chapter i) is wholly consistent with that of the earliest (Chapter 2) but there is, I think, a certain continuity of theme and method in all of them. When they were first written all these essays were attempts to 'rethink anthropology'. All are concerned with problems of 'theory' and are based on ethnographic facts recorded by others, my own contribution being primarily that of analyst. In each case I have tried to reassess the known facts in the light of unorthodox assump- tions. Such heresy seems to me to have merit for its own sake. Uncon- ventional arguments often turn out to be wrong but provided they provoke discussion they may still have lasting value. By that criterion each of the essays in this book is a possible candidate for attention. Among social anthropologists the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones is almost an occupational disease. Contemporary arguments in social anthropology are built out of formulae concocted by Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss who in turn were only 'rethinking' Rivers, Durkheim and Mauss, who borrowed from Morgan, McLennan and Robertson- Smith—and so on. Sceptics may think that the total outcome of all this ratiocination adds up to very little; despite all our pedagogical subtleties, the diversities of human custom remain as bewildering as ever. But that we admit. The contemporary social anthro- pologist is all too well aware that he knows much less than Frazer imagined that he knew for certain. But that perhaps is the point. The contributions to anthropological pedantry collected in this book add little to the sum of human knowledge but if they provoke some readers to doubt their sense of certainty then they will have served their purpose. A note on the interconnections between the different papers may prove helpful. The first draft of Chapter 2 was written in 1943 while I was still on VI PREFACE active military service and still in direct contact with Jinghpaw speakers. Although it appeared in the 1945 volume of the J. R.A.I, this was not actually published until 1950. These details of dating are relevant because they explain why my paper contains no reference to Chapters 15 and i6 of Levi-Strauss, Les structures elementaires de la parente (1949) and recipro- cally why the latter work ignores the new information provided by my paper. Chapter 3, which was originally a Curl Prize Essay, was completed in the spring of 195 1 and seems to have been the first English language commentar)' on Levi-Strauss's magnum opus though, presumably, my paper and J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong's monograph Levi-Strauss's Theory on Kinship and Marriage (1952) were going through the press at the same time. Although I here criticized Levi-Strauss on the grounds of ethno- graphical inaccuracy my sympathy with his general theoretical point of view is very great. Professor Levi-Strauss has himself noted the similarity between the view of 'social structure' implicit in my first Jinghpaw paper (Chapter 2) and his own (Levi-Strauss, 1953, p. 525 n), and in all my subsequent publications my debt to Levi-Strauss is obvious. The relationship of Chapter 4 to earlier literature will be apparent from the references in the text. Although it was not intended to be contro- versial it provoked Dr Kathleen Gough into a vigorous reply (Gough, 1959). The crucial part of my argument here is that I emphasize the need to distinguish between affinity regarded as an alliance between corporate kin groups and those individual affinal ties which bind a particular wife to a particular husband. This theme recurs in Chapter 5 and again in Chapter i. Chapter 5, as indicated in the text, is linked with a long correspondence which appeared in the pages of Man in 1953 and 1954 but the response which it evoked from my close academic colleagues is only marginally connected with this earlier discussion. Dr Goody has denounced my whole argument as grounded in fundamental error (Goody, 1959, p. 86) and Professor Fortes has taken up most of two issues of Man to expound my fallacies and confusions (Fortes, 1959b). Both these explosions of academic wrath were provoked by a single sentence in my essay, namely —'Thus Fortes, while recognizing that ties of affinity have comparable importance to ties of descent, disguises the former under his expression "complementary filiation" ' (see below p. 122). The exact sense in which this statement is an 'error' is still not clear to me for in the course of his denunciation Fortes reaffirms his view that 'complementary filiation is a function of affinal relations' (Fortes, 1959b, p. 209) which is precisely the argument I sought to controvert. ^ Professor Fortes has called his article *a rejoinder to Leach', and readers of Chapter i of this book need to appreciate that among other things it is intended as 'a rejoinder to Fortes'. Reference to a short note in Man (i960. Art. 6) will perhaps help to make this clear. The two short papers on time symbolism reprinted in Chapter 6 do PREFACE Vll not form a series with the other chapters of the book though again the influence of Professor Levi-Strauss is pronounced. Although my 'Cronus and Chronos' appeared in print in 1953 while Levi-Strauss's 'The Struc- tural Study of Myth' was only published in 1956, I had in fact already heard Professor Levi-Strauss's lecture on this topic before I wrote my essay. Explorations, the Toronto University publication in which my Chapter 6 was originally published, carried on its fly leaf the statement that it was 'designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions' and both my papers are correspondingly brief and tentative. Nevertheless a number of my friends have suggested that the arguments they contain are of more than ephemeral interest; hence the reissue here^ Chapter i contains a considerable amount of matter which was not included in the spoken text of my Malinowski lecture.^ The other essays^ appear as originally printed, except for the correction of misprints, and one or two very minor alterations intended to clarify the argument. The\ Introductory at 2-6 are * Notes the beginning of Chapters new. } j\] -^ Acknowledgements : I am indebted to the Council of the Royal Anthro- pological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for permission to reprint the essays published here as Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 and to Professor E. S. Carpenter and the University of Toronto for permission to reprint the two short essays included in Chapter 6. I am indebted to a personal grant in aid from the Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford Foundation for facilities employed while preparing these papers for publication. E. R. L. Contents 1. RETHINKING ANTHROPOLOGY I 2. JINGHPAW KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY 28 3. THE STRUCTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF MATRILATERAL CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE 54 4. POLYANDRY, INHERITANCE AND THE DEFINITION OF marriage: with PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO SINHALESE CUSTOMARY LAW IO5 5. ASPECTS OF BRIDEWEALTH AND MARRIAGE STABILITY AMONG THE KACHIN AND LAKHER II4 6. TWO ESSAYS CONCERNING THE SYMBOLIC REPRE- SENTATION OF TIME 124 (i) Cronus and Chronos, 124 (ii) Time and False Noses, 132 ; Rethinking Anthropology tET me begin by explaining my arrogant title. Since 1930 British Social Anthropology has embodied a well defined set of ideas and -^objectives which derive directly from the teaching of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown—this unity of aim is summed up in the statement that British social anthropology is functionalist and concerned with the com- parative analysis of social structures.
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