Rodney Needham

Rodney Needham was an English social anthropologist, born in 1923, who spent his career at Oxford University, first as a lecturer from 1956 and then as professor of social anthropology from 1976 to 1990, alongside fellowships at Merton College and All Souls College. Working alongside Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, he helped introduce French structuralist anthropology to the English-speaking world, and his own research addressed kinship and marriage systems, symbolic classification, and belief, notably in Structure and Sentiment (1962), Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification (1973) and Belief, Language and Experience (1972). He introduced the distinction between monothetic categories, defined by a fixed set of shared features, and polythetic categories, defined by overlapping family resemblances, into anthropological classification theory, and helped revive scholarly attention to earlier theorists including Arnold van Gennep and Robert Hertz. He died in Oxford in 2006.