Edmund Leach

Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Medical theory and practice of the 1700s developed rapidly, as is evidenced by the extensive collection, which includes descriptions of diseases, their conditions, and treatments. Books on science and technology, agriculture, military technology, natural philosophy, even cookbooks, are all contained here.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++British LibraryT123391Dedication signed: Edmund Leach. The tables are numbered, duplicating the pagination, but are not part of the register.London: printed for Edmund Leach, and sold by Mess. Sewell and Richardson; Mr. Debrett; Mr. Flexney; Mr. Parsley, 1790]. 2], vi, 2],201, 1]p.,5plates, tables: map; 8

A study of elitism particularly concerned with Indian elites in the context of British influence and its aftermath. The problems delineated are by no means peculiar to the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all the developing countries of contemporary Asia, Africa and Latin America are entangled with their post-colonial heritage and the history of political elitism in all these countries has been similar. The papers consider who were members of the elites, in the sense of 'men at the top'. They enquire how they got there, how they continued to recruit themselves and what was their relationship with the British. The contributors, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians, present each other with forms of evidence which are unfamiliar and, in sum, result in a study which destroys many of the conventional clichés of colonial historians.

The aim of these two volumes is to bring together a representative selection of the writings of Edmund Leach (1910–1989), a brilliant and prolific anthropologist known not only in his field but to the educated public at large. Leach perceived anthropology as a vital and broadly based study of the human condition, encompassing methods and ideas from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. His writings reflect the conviction that anthropology is of direct and practical importance to social policy and political debate. These two volumes present more than fifty items—many difficult to obtain and several never before published—displaying the considerable range of Leach’s anthropological interests, the debates he provoked, and the issues he championed.Volume 2Culture and Human Nature reflects the changing focus of Leach’s academic interests, away from a concern with politics, kinship, and social structure toward a structuralist analysis of myth and symbolism and an interest in Freudian psychology. These cogent and provocative pieces shed light on less well-known subjects of Leach’s interest: material culture, art, and cross-cultural aesthetics; the body and the senses; race, ethnocentrism, and the origins of conflict and violence. Alongside such celebrated pieces as “Magical Hair,” the volume also offers a group of Leach’s popular writings and lectures, showing how he applied ideas developed in academic argument to wider public debate—about controversial court cases, current events, and issues ranging from children’s fiction and education to urban planning. Whether addressing an issue as topical as the death of Winston Churchill or as theoretical as the philosophy of Lévi-Strauss, Leach unfailingly leads the reader on a thought-provoking journey.

Through the application of anthropological techniques for analysing myth the essays in this 1983 volume offer interesting and thought-provoking structuralist insights for a variety of particular cases in the Scriptures. They also give some account of past interactions between anthropologists and Christian theologians, and enter the debate on the historicity of Biblical events. Edmund Leach has been interested for many years in the implications of a structuralist mode of myth analysis for the explanation of scriptural texts and problems. His essays in this book continue the line of enquiry he first developed in Genesis as Myth (1969) and he pursues his arguments here with characteristic colour and brilliance of exposition. With the two pieces by Dr Alan Aycock on related themes, this volume makes a fascinating and controversial contribution to the study and interpretation of the Bible.

Through the application of anthropological techniques for analysing myth the essays in this 1983 volume offer interesting and thought-provoking structuralist insights for a variety of particular cases in the Scriptures. They also give some account of past interactions between anthropologists and Christian theologians, and enter the debate on the historicity of Biblical events. Edmund Leach has been interested for many years in the implications of a structuralist mode of myth analysis for the explanation of scriptural texts and problems. His essays in this book continue the line of enquiry he first developed in Genesis as Myth (1969) and he pursues his arguments here with characteristic colour and brilliance of exposition. With the two pieces by Dr Alan Aycock on related themes, this volume makes a fascinating and controversial contribution to the study and interpretation of the Bible.

The recent spread of ‘structuralist’ writing has been hailed as the dawn of a new age and condemned as an intellectual disaster but, like all fashionable diseases, it is more talked about than understood. Edmund Leach’s new book is designed for the use if teaching undergraduates in anthropology, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and related disciplines faced for the first time with structuralist argument; it provides the prolegomena necessary to understand the final chapter of Levi-Strauss’s massive four-volume Mythologiques. The objective is complex, the manner simple. Some prior knowledge of anthropological literature is useful but not essential; the principal ethnographic source is the Book of Leviticus; this guide should help anyone who is trying to grasp the essentials of ‘seminology’ - the general theory of how signs and symbols come to convey meaning. Although, in essence, a textbook, substantial portions of the argument are here presented for the first time; thus Section 16 contains an innovating contribution to general incest theory, and the analysis of the logic of animal sacrifice presented in Section 18 is an advance on anything previous published on this theme. The author’s core thesis is that: ‘the indices in non-verbal communication systems, like the sound elements in spoken language, do not have meaning as isolates, but only as members of set’; the book’s special merit is that it makes this kind of jargon comprehensible in terms of our everyday experience.

Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds