Edmund Leach

Edmund Leach was a British social anthropologist known for his structuralist approach to political and social organization. In Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), based on fieldwork among the Kachin, he argued against the prevailing assumption that societies exist in a single stable structural type, showing instead that Kachin political organization oscillated over time between more egalitarian and more hierarchical forms, a dynamic, processual model of social structure that challenged the static structural-functionalism dominant in British anthropology at the time. Leach, who later served as provost of King's College, Cambridge, was also an early and influential, though often critical, interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism for English-speaking anthropologists.