Sir Edmund Ronald Leach
120px Cover for Edmund Leach: an Anthropological life by Stanley J. Tambiah (2002)[1]
Born	7 November 1910 Sidmouth, England
Died	6 January 1989 Cambridge, England
Citizenship	British
Nationality	British
Fields	social anthropology
Institutions	Burma Army London School of Economics Cambridge University
Alma mater	Cambridge University
Doctoral advisor	Bronisław Malinowski Raymond Firth
Known for	Ethnographic work in Sarawak and Burma Theories of social structure and cultural change Kinship as ideal systems Disagreement with French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss[2]
Notable awards	Provost of Kings College (1966–1979) Chairman of Association of Social Anthropologists (1966–1970) President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971–1975) President of British Humanist Association (1970) Knighted (1973) Trustee of the British Museum (1975–1980)[1]

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist of whom it has been said:

"It is no exaggeration to say that in sheer versatility, originality, and range of writing he was and still is difficult to match among the anthropologists of the English speaking world".^[1]

Personal and academic life[link]

He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966–1979, was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975. He introduced Claude Lévi-Strauss into British social anthropology.

He was born in Sidmouth, Devon, the youngest of three children and the son of William Edmund Leach and Mildred Brierley. His father owned and was manager of a sugar plantation in northern Argentina. Leach was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge where he graduated with honours in Engineering in 1932.

In 1940 Leach married Celia Joyce who was a talented painter and also published two novels. They had a daughter in 1941 and a son in 1946.

After leaving Cambridge University Leach took a four-year contract in 1933 with Butterfield and Swire in China. He found out after his contract expired that he did not like the business atmosphere and never again was going to sit on an office stool. On his way home he stopped and spent some time among the Yami of Botel Tobago, an island off the coast of Formosa. Here he took ethnographic notes and made drawings of the Yami.

Back in London Raymond Firth introduced him to Bronisław Malinowski. Leach went to Iraq to study the Kurds, but he abandoned this and went back to London. He wrote: "I’ve got an enormous amount of ability at almost anything, yet so far I’ve made absolutely no use of it…I seem to be a highly organized piece of mental apparatus for which nobody else has any use" (D.N.B. 258). In 1939 he was going to study the Kachin hills of Burma, but World War II intervened. Leach then joined the Burma Army, where he achieved the rank of Major.

After he left the Army in 1946, he became a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. In 1947 he received a Ph.D. in anthropology at the London School of Economics. In 1953, he became a Professor at Cambridge University of Social Anthropology. He was elected provost of Kings College in 1966 and retired in 1979; President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971–1975); a Fellow of the British Academy (from 1972) and was knighted in 1975.

His first major book was Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954); it challenged the theories of social structure and cultural change. His second major work was Pul Eliya, a Village in Ceylon (1961), where he directed his attention to theories of kinship as ideal systems. Leach applied his ability of kinship to his disagreement with French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His book Lévi-Strauss was translated into six languages and ran three editions. His turn of phrase produced memorable quotes, such as this on Lévi-Strauss:

The outstanding characteristic of [Lévi-Strauss' writing], whether in French or English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to a confidence trick".^[3]

Indeed Leach's work on Lévi-Strauss is often relied on by other authors. For example, in Richard Wrangham's (2009) book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, he relies on Leach in describing Lévi-Strauss' analysis of cooking in relation to human culture.^[4]

Bibliography[link]

• Political systems of highland Burma: A study of Kachin social structure (1954). Harvard University Press
• Rethinking Anthropology (1961). Robert Cunningham and Sons Ltd.
• Pul Eliya: a village in Ceylon (1961). Cambridge University Press.
• A Runaway World? (1968). London: BBC.
• Genesis as Myth and other essays (1969). Jonathan Cape.
• Lévi-Strauss (1970). Fontana Modern Masters.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss (1970). Viking Press.
• Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols are Connected (1976). Cambridge University Press.
• Social Anthropology (1982). Oxford University Press.
• The Essential Edmund Leach Volume 1 and Volume 2 (2001). Yale University Press.

Literature[link]

• Tambiah, Stanley J., Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (2002). Cambridge University Press.
• "Leach, Edmund Ronald" Contemporary Authors Vol. 127, Gale Research Inc. 1989.
• "Leach, Sir Edmund Ronald" Dictionary of National Biography 1986–1990. Oxford University Press 1996.
• "Leach, Edmund Ronald" International Dictionary of Anthropologists. Garland Publishing 1991.
• Leach, Edmund R. Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13. 1984.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Biography at Minnesota State University website
• Interview of Edmund Leach by Frank Kermode in 1982 (film)
• Chapter 1 of Tambiah, Stanley (2002) "Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life" Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Accessed 5 May 2010
• Kings College, Cambridge Repository: Papers of Edmund Ronald Leach Accessed 5 May 2010

Edmund George Capon AM, OBE (born 1940) is an art scholar specialising in Chinese art. He was director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales 1978-2011. He was also the Chairman of Football club, Sydney FC 2006-07.^[1]

Early years[link]

Capon, born in London, United Kingdom in 1940, obtained a Master of Philosophy degree (MPhil) in Chinese art and archaeology (including language) from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, and also studied 20th-century painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University. From 1973-1978 he held the position of assistant keeper, Far Eastern Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum, having started there in 1966 in the Textile Department.^[2]

Australian career[link]

Director of AGNSW[link]

Capon left London in 1978 to take up an appointment as Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, on the recommendation of the Premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran.^[1]

During his tenure as Director, Capon became recognised as a world expert in his particular field and has published several books and catalogues including Princes of jade (1974); Art and archaeology in China (1977); Qin Shihuang: terracotta warriors and horses (1982); and Tang China: vision and splendour of a golden age (1989), as well as many articles for Australian and international newspapers and professional art journals. Under his directorship, the gallery focused more on Asian arts in its acquisitions, including the opening of a new Asian wing in March 2003. In September 2008 the gallery announced that it was making its biggest-ever acquisition, Paul Cézanne's landscape "Bords De La Marne", for $16.2 million to mark Capon’s 30th anniversary as Director.^[1]

On 10 June 1994 Capon was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) "in recognition of service to the arts, particularly as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW".^[3] In 2000 he was awarded a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from the University of New South Wales and a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.^[2] On 1 January 2001 he was presented with the Centenary Medal "for service to Australian society and the arts".^[4] Capon was also appointed as a "Cavaliere" of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours, Capon was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the United Kingdom government "for services to the promotion of British art in Australia".^[5] He is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre, a member of the Council of Australian Art Museum Directors (CAAMD) and an adjunct Professor of the University of New South Wales in Chinese studies.^[2]

Capon chose the winner of the Art Gallery Society of NSW prize in the annual Sculpture by the Sea awards. This prize is donated by the Art Gallery and is worth $5000.^[6]

In August 2011, Capon announced that he would be retiring as Director at the end of 2011, with a Picasso exhibition in October being one of the last major events of his tenure at the AGNSW.^[7] During his 33 years as leader of the institution, Capon helped it to "become one of Sydney's most loved cultural institutions, one that received 1.3 million visitors" in 2010. He became "its public face: ebullient, unorthodox, ready with the pithy quote but erudite, a Mandarin-speaking scholar of Chinese art".^[8]

Sydney FC[link]

A longtime football fan, Capon is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club. In addition, he was a founding board Director of Sydney FC, when it was established in 2004.^[1] In September 2006 Capon replaced Walter Bugno as Chairman of Sydney football Club, a position he held until August 2007, when he resigned owing to increasing responsibilities in his role as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW.^[9]

Bibliography[link]

• Chinese painting: 64 reproductions
• Gamarada: Friends [photography by Christopher Snee, Jenni Carter & Ray Woodbury]
• With Bruce James, Art Gallery of New South Wales Handbook
• With Liu Yang and James Hayes, Poetic Mandarin: Chinese calligraphy from the James Hayes collection. (Chinese: Huan hai mo yun: Xu Shu cang Zhongguo Qing dai shu fa)
• Art and Archaeology in China
• Chinese tomb figures
• With William MacQuitty, Princes of jade
• Tang China: Vision and splendour of a golden age, photography by Werner Forman
• With Liu Yang, Masks of Mystery: Ancient Chinese bronzes from Sanxingdui (Chinese: Jia mian zhi mi: Sanxingdui chu tu Zhong Guo gu dai qing tong qi)
• I blame Duchamp

References[link]

Arnaldo Dante Momigliano KBE (September 5, 1908, Caraglio, Piemont–September 1, 1987, London) was an Italian historian known for his work in historiography, characterized by Donald Kagan as the "world’s leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world."

He became Professor of Roman history at the University of Turin in 1936, but as a Jew soon lost his position due to the anti-Jewish Racial Laws enacted by the Fascist regime in 1938, and moved to England, where he remained. After a time at Oxford University, he went to University College London, where he was Professor from 1951 to 1975. Momigliano visited regularly at the University of Chicago where he was named Alexander White Professor in the Humanities, and at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He wrote reviews for The New York Review of Books.^[1]

In addition to studying the ancient Greek historians and their methods, he also took an interest in modern historians, such as Edward Gibbon, and wrote a number of studies of them. With respect to identifying and explaining the forces held responsible for the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire, Momigliano stressed the wasteful futility of that^{[clarification needed]} endeavor while redirecting his students' focus:

Historians, one must admit, were not created by God to search for causes. Any search for causes in history, if it is persistent, ...becomes comic--such is the abundance of causes discovered. ...What we want is to understand the change by analyzing it and giving due consideration to conscious decisions, deep-seated urges, and the interplay of disparate events. But we must have a mental picture, a model of the whole situation as a term of reference, and here, I submit, is where Gibbon helps us.^[2]

After 1930, Momigliano contributed a number of biographies to the Enciclopedia Italiana; in the 1940s and 1950s he contributed biographies to the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Encyclopædia Britannica.

In 1974 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). A number of his essays were collected into volumes published posthumously.

Works[link]

• The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, Clarendon Press, 1963
• Studies in Historiography, Garland Pub., 1985, ISBN 978-0-8240-6372-6
• The Development of Greek Biography: Four Lectures, Harvard University Press, 1971; revised and expanded, Harvard University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-674-20041-8
• Alien Wisdom : The Limits of Hellenization, Cambridge University Press, 1975; reprint, Cambridge University Press, 1978, 1990, 1991, 1993 ISBN 978-0-521-38761-3
• Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Wesleyan University Press, 1977, ISBN 978-0-8195-5010-1
• How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans, North-Holland Pub. Co., 1982
• "Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 58, No. 1, March 1986
• On Pagans, Jews and Christians, reprint, Wesleyan University Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-8195-6218-0
• The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-520-07870-3
• Essays on ancient and modern Judaism, Editor Silvia Berti, University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-53381-0

Further reading[link]

• Bowersock, G. W. "Momigliano's Quest for the Person", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 27–36.
• honorificus: A.D. Momigliano: Studies on Modern Scholarship (eds. G.W. Bowersock and T.J. Cornell, 1994)
• Christ, Karl. "Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Historiography", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 5–12.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. "Momigliano and de Martino", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 37–48.
• Kagan, Donald, "Arnaldo Momigliano and the human sources of history", The New Criterion, Vol. 10, No. 7, March 1992.
• Murray, Oswyn. "Arnaldo Momigliano, 1908–1987: [Obituary]", The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 77. (1987), pp. xi–xii.
• Murray, Oswyn. "Arnaldo Momigliano in England", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 49–64.
• Phillips, Mark Salber. "Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain", Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 57, No. 2. (Apr., 1996), pp. 297–316.
• Weinberg, Joanna. "Where Three Civilizations Meet", History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4, Beiheft 30: The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. (Dec., 1991), pp. 13–26.

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• THE LEGACY OF ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO

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Maurice Bloch, 1982

Maurice Bloch (born in 1939 in Caen, Calvados, France) is a British anthropologist.

He attended the Lycée Carnot in Paris and the Perse School in Cambridge, moving to Britain at the age of eleven. His move to the UK was because his father had been killed by the Nazis when in the French Army and his mother, a marine biologist, had remarried the British biologist John S. Kennedy whom she had met at a conference. His mother was a niece of Emile Durkheim and a first cousin of Marcel Mauss.^[1] Bloch was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, attending lectures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, continuing his training in anthropology at Cambridge University where he obtained his doctorate in 1967. His subsequent career has been almost entirely at the London School of Economics where he was appointed a full professor in 1983.

In 2005 he was appointed European Professor at the Collège de France.^[2] He was until 2009 visiting Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has taught and has been an occasional visiting professor in most European countries as well as Japan. In the US, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and at the New School for Social Research in New York. At present, he is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and an associate member of the Institut Jean Nicod of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

He has supervised many younger anthropologists, several of whom hold prestigious posts in the UK, US, Australia, Japan, France, Canada, the Netherlands, China, Argentina, Madagascar and Malaysia. His writings have been translated in at least twelve languages.

In 1990, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.^[3]

Research[link]

Bloch's field research has been mainly carried out in two different areas of Madagascar. One field site has been among the peasants of central Imerina; and the other in a remote forest inhabited by a group of people called Zafimaniry. His writing deals with religion, kinship, economics, politics and language. His research has been much influenced by French Marxist ideas.

He has been an innovator in always relating social anthropology to linguistics and cognitive psychology.^[4] Much of his theoretical work since the 1970s has concerned the interface between cognition and social and cultural life. What he has written on this subject faces two ways: on the one hand, he criticises anthropologists for exaggerating the particularity of specific cultures; on the other hand, he criticises cognitive scientists for underestimating it.

He has published more than a hundred articles and many books,^[5] half of which concern Madagascar in some way.

Publications[link]

Among the books he has published are:

• 1971 Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar, London: Seminar Press (Extracts translated into Malagasy).

• 1975 Political Language, Oratory and Traditional Society, (ed.) London: Academic Press.

• 1975 Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology (ed.), A.S.A. Studies. London: Malaby Press.

• 1982 Death and the Regeneration of Life (ed. with J. Parry), Cambridge: CUP.

• 1983 Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship, Oxford: Clarendon.

• 1986 From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar, Cambridge: CUP.

• 1989 Money and the Morality of Exchange (ed. with J. Parry) Cambridge: CUP.

• 1992 Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Cambridge: CUP

• 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Studies in Cognition, Memory and Literacy. Boulder: Westview Press.

• 2005 Essays in the Transmission of Culture. Berg: London.

Interviews[link]

• "Interview of Maurice Bloch": Maurice Bloch interviewed by Alan Macfarlane on 29 May 2008
• "The Reluctant Anthropologist": Eurozine interview of Maurice Bloch by Maarja Kaaristo on 29 July 2007
• "Maurice Bloch" La Huit interview of Maurice Bloch

References[link]

External links[link]

• Maurice Bloch’s webpage at the LSE

• Some of Maurice Bloch’s publications are available via LSE Research Online:

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/