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An Interview with Edmund Leach Adam Kuper Current Anthropology An Interview with Edmund Leach Adam Kuper Current Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 4. (Aug. - Oct., 1986), pp. 375-382. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0011-3204%28198608%2F10%2927%3A4%3C375%3AAIWEL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 Current Anthropology is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sun Jun 17 04:38:28 2007 REPORTS An Interview with Edmund Leach1 by ADAMKUPER King's College, Cambridge, England. XI 85 ERL: An autobiographical interview must begin with family mythology rather than history. My background is 19th-century Lancashire. All four of my great-grandfathers were Rochdale mill-owners living within four miles of one another. By mid-century the families were already very closely intermarried. The numbers were huge. My mother's mother's mother was one of 17 children; my father, who was 59 on the day I was born in 1910, was one of 13. I had 30 first cousins, all of them older than I. Even in childhood I thought of the world as consisting exclusively of kinsmen and family domestics, a good start for an anthro- Edmund Leach pologist. My mother was already related to my father before they were married, but she was 22 years his junior and of quite different upbringing. AK: Is that why you made your escape by going to China? By that time the Leaches had got out of textiles, and the family fortunes were linked with a sugar plantation in northern ERL: Well, who knows? Argentina-a country that I have never visited, though my brother and sister and many of my cousins were born and bred AK: But first you were sent to a public school? there. I saw very little of my father (who died in 1932), and both ERL: Oh, yes, I had to follow family tradition. I went to my grandfathers died before I was born, but I had a splendid Marlborough. My father and all his brothers and many of my deputy "grandfather figure" in the person of my mother's un- cousins had been there beforehand. I was the twenty-first cle, Sir Henry Hoyle Howorth, author of a celebrated five- Leach. Until I arrived, all Leaches had automatically become volume History of the Mongols (1876-1927). HHH, who died members of the cricket eleven. When it was discovered that I in our house in 1922, was a thoroughly unorthodox member of could hardly see the ball, my housemaster lost all interest. the intellectual Establishment: Member of Parliament, Fellow Much later, when I had made my way into the Upper Sixth, I of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, was ruthlessly coached so that I could bring honour to the President of the Royal Archaeological Institute, Member of the school by winning a mathematics scholarship to Clare College, Council of the Anthropological Institute and of the Zoological Cambridge. Without question, my years at Marlborough were Society, Trustee of the British Museum, notable art collector the unhappiest days of my life, worse even than the six years of (a number of his pictures are now in the National Gallery, army service 1939-45. London), author of works with titles such as The Mammoth I went up to Cambridge in 1929. I was not a real mathema- and the Flood (1887) and The Golden Days of the Early English tician. After a year I switched to engineering and graduated Church (1917). I had no sympathy for the cricket-playing, with a First in 1932. I was still very immature, but Cambridge pheasant-shooting enthusiasms of my cousins. Uncle Henry was a glorious experience. provided me with an alternative goal which I have consistently On graduation I first looked for employment in England, but pursued with some success. the best thing on offer was a job in a gas-works, and this time the family tradition-"go abroad, young man, go abroad!" (my AK: Can I ask you about your mother? Was she a strong father had gone to New Zealand in a windjammer)-served influence? me well. I signed up with the Far Eastern trading firm of John Swire and Sons (Butterfield and Swire), whose present inter- ERL: Yes, very definitely so. Because she was so much young- ests include ownership of Cathay Pacific Airways. After a year er than my father and because I was the youngest child (my in the London office I went out to China and had spells of duty sister was eight years older, my brother four years older), my in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chungking, Tsingtao, ending up in mother fastened her attention on me, particularly when I Peking. It was very much an "old school tie" sort of firm. What showed signs of being intellectually rather bright. She herself mattered was that you had an Oxbridge degree; what sort of could have been a professional singer when she was young, but degree was irrelevant. her marriage, which had clearly been "arranged," put an end On holiday I travelled widely. I recall that I climbed four of to that. She was obviously frustrated by the complete absence the five sacred mountains of China. Chungking itself was still a of intellectual and artistic interests among her husband's rela- mediaeval city, all steps and sedan chairs. No roads or motor tives. She concentrated her energies on being the spider at the vehicles except the odd half-disintegrated bus. I did not speak centre of the vast network of "relations"; "Aunt Mildred" made good Chinese but enough to get around. I was fascinated by it her business to keep in touch with everyone, but I was her the whole cultural system, which was so very different from nearest and dearest. It made it very difficult to grow up. She anything that I had encountered in Europe, but I had no plans slaughtered my girl friends one after another. as yet to become an anthropologist. At the end of my contract, in the fall of 1936, I was offered a renewal, but I had had enough of commerce and sacked my- self. The visit to Peking was to plan a voyage home by the O 1986 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re- Trans-Siberian Railway with a friend in the British Embassy. search, all rights reserved 0011-320418612 704-0006$1.00. The theory was that we would get as far as Moscow by rail and Vol. 27 . No. 4 August-October 1986 Kilton Stewart with Yami in Botel Tobago, 1936-37 then float down the Volga on a barge. Anything seemed plausi- days was a law unto himself. If he liked you, he liked you, and ble in those days! At that point Stalin started bumping off his you could do no wrong. Fortunately, he did like me. For the generals. The great Stalinist purges had begun. Our contact in next 18 months (in retrospect it seems much more) I was in the Russian Embassy said that all visas were cancelled but that Malinowski's pocket. He was intensely charismatic. I did not perhaps if we hung around for three months things would know him at all well personally, but I attended his seminars. clarify. He was supposed to give a weekly lecture to undergraduates, Peking in those days was a dream city. The Chinese centre but this he disliked doing. He was deeply offensive to his audi- of government and the "real" foreign embassies were located at ence, especially to the women. When they walked out in pro- Nanking on the Yangtse, but the foreign embassies retained test, the lecture session was transformed into a graduate semi- their language schools in Peking, and there was a large poly- nar. The seminar had an official allocated time from five to glot community of Western artists of diverse kinds who had seven on the same day, but it usually started at two and went fetched up there more or less by mistake and found Peking the on indefinitely. By that time it was notorious, a sort of circus most beautiful (and also the cheapest) city in the world. I attended by all kinds of celebrities who were not necessarily gather that very little of the Peking that I knew has survived. connected with anthropology at all. But somehow we learned a The Westerners indulged themselves in drink and de- lot. My own contemporaries included William Stanner and bauchery at the embassies' expense. At a party in the British Phyllis Kaberry. Ian Hogbin was a visitor. Radcliffe-Brown Embassy a very drunk American named Kilton Stewart, a had only very recently arrived from Chicago to take up his former Mormon missionary, announced that he was on the Oxford chair, and the rivalry between Oxford and the London way to "Bottle the Bugger." "Would anyone like to come to School of Economics was not yet apparent.
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