Edmound Leach as a Functionalist

Edmound Leach as a Functionalist

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (1910–1989) was a British social anthropologist and regarded as functionalist and structuralist. He is known for his technical studies in the fields of kinship, marriage, ritual and myth, moving rapidly from one topic to another. In his book Political Systems of Highland Burma he elaborates the notion of verbal categories. A contextual structuralist by approach his form of structuralism is more empirically based than the intellectual versions of it offered in Europe. He examined the ways in which humans use categories to distinguish between self and other, we and say, culture and nature. He criticized Radcliffe Brown and his successors who claim to construct typologies and infer social laws directly from ethnographic data. If we Think Leach was an Functionalist,We have to know that what is functionalism and the basic concept of functionalism.

What is Functionalism:

Functionalists seek to describe the different parts of a society and their relationship through the organic analogy. The organic analogy compared the different parts of a society to the organs of a living organism. The organism was able to live, reproduce and function through the organized system of its several parts and organs. Like a biological organism, a society was able to maintain its essential processes through the way that the different parts interacted together. Institutions such as religion, kinship and the economy were the organs and individuals were the cells in this social organism. Functionalist analyses examine the social significance of phenomena, that is, the function they serve a particular society in maintaining the whole (Jarvie 1973).

Functionalism, as a school of thought in anthropology, emerged in the early twentieth century. Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown had the greatest influence on the development of functionalism from their posts in Great Britain. Functionalism was a reaction to the excesses of the evolutionary and diffusionist theories of the nineteenth century and the historicism of the early twentieth (Goldschmidt 1996:510). Two versions of functionalism developed between 1910 and 1930: Malinowski’s biocultural (or psychological) functionalism; and structural-functionalism, the approach advanced by Radcliffe-Brown.

Malinowski suggested that individuals have physiological needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions exist to meet these needs. There are also culturally derived needs and four basic "instrumental needs" (economics, social control, education, and political organization), that require institutional devices. Each institution has personnel, a charter, a set of norms or rules, activities, material apparatus (technology), and a function. Malinowski argued that uniform psychological responses are correlates of physiological needs. He argued that satisfaction of these needs transformed the cultural instrumental activity into an acquired drive through psychological reinforcement (Goldschmidt 1996:510; Voget 1996:573).

Radcliffe-Brown focused on social structure rather than biological needs. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system. Radcliffe-Brown, inspired by Augustus Comte, stated that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality distinct from those of biological forms and inorganic matter. Radcliffe-Brown argued that explanations of social phenomena had to be constructed within the social level. Thus, individuals were replaceable, transient occupants of social roles. Unlike Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-Brown considered individuals irrelevant (Goldschmidt 1996:510).

Edmund Leach As Functionalist:

Sir Edmund Leach was very influential in social anthropology. He demonstrated the complex interrelationship of ideal models and political action within a historical context. His most influential ethnographic works were based on fieldwork in Burma, Sarawak and North Borneo (Sabah), and Sri Lanka. Although his initial theoretical approach was functionalist.

There were two sets of contrasts, or ‘oppositions’ in the structuralist sense, that Edmund Leach frequently employed to characterise the theoretical impulsions and tensions in his writings. One was that he was simultaneously a structuralist and a functionalist; the other was that he was attracted to mathematical equations of relations and transformations.

The statement that he was simultaneously a structuralist and functionalist needs an extended gloss on what he meant by that self-definition. The following is a beginning. While rejecting the Radcliffe-Brownian and Durkheimian notion of ‘function’ as contribution of a component to the maintenance and integration of a social ‘system’ (itself viewed in organismic terms), and the Malinowskian notion of ‘function’ primarily in terms of serving individual ‘biological’ needs and, secondarily societal needs, Leach in various writings seems to have adopted the notion of function as connection between components, such that functional relations constituted an interconnected totality (‘the total interconnectedness of things’).

The ‘interconnectedness’ that Leach meant, however, comprised ‘relational systems’ in the sense that they were ‘transformations’ of one another.38 This conception of functional relations thus rejects the Malinowskian notion of a cultural system as ‘a unique self-sufficient functioning whole’ and the Radcliffe-Brownian notion of ‘whole societies’, bounded and ‘distinguishable as species types and classifiable as such in a kind of Linnaean taxonomy’. These were the perspectives he rejected first in his Political Systems of Highland Burma and even more explicitly and unforgettably as ‘butterfly collecting’ in his famous Malinowski Memorial Lecture in December 1959, urging the view that anthropologists ought to be searching for generalisations for which cultural and social boundaries were quite irrelevant or impossible to impose. This view of function derived from mathematics and not from biology or psychology as was the case with the followers of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. ‘Consequently, from my point of view there was no inconsistency between ‘‘functionalism’’ and ‘‘structuralism’’.

Leach progressively clarified his ‘structuralism’-cum ‘functionalism’ consisted in seeing ‘relational systems’ as ‘transformations’ of one another, that certain devices stemming from or assimilable to his mathematical and engineering training such as binary arithmetic, information theory, computer coding, could be deployed for perceiving patterns in classificatory thought, myth and ritual, and in social processes. More ambitiously, he saw the possibility of establishing ‘cross cultural transcriptions’ as the objective of his notion of the comparative method. These ideas gave an underlying unity and continuity to the way he would tackle many of the issues he undertook to

investigate.

At the same time he also successfully exploited aspects of the ‘functionalist’ perspective he principally associated with Malinowski and Firth, and which dynamically focused on how individual actors used and manipulated ideal categories and rules and norms of social conduct in contexts of action to further their interests and goals. Leach deployed this pragmatic instrumental or strategising perspective on many occasions—how mythological genealogical variants were manipulated by competing Kachin lineages to further their claims or more generally how myth variants were related to ‘function and social change’, how double descent systems might make sense if considered as networks through which different activities were channelled, or how an imposing, intricately carved, but densely populated Hindu temple facade whose details could not be distinguished by the worshipper was meant to convey a sense of power and awe. In this mood Leach would criticise on the one hand the formalism of some of the structural functionalists who reified social systems as organisations of social principles and, on the other, the non-contextualised abstract codes of some structuralist exercises divorced from social uses or lacking empirical grounding.

British anthropologists who figured with varying significance in Leach’s professional concerns in the first phase. There is another from across the channel in France whose writings as the leading French theorist increasingly became more and more important for Leach to take into account and come to terms with, but with whom he did not have a close personal relationship. This person was Claude Le´vi-Strauss. Leach’s intellectual engagement with and preoccupation with Le´vi-Strauss’s ideas in his own writings is a vital part of his biography. Admiration spiced with dissent, however, was not in this case a prescription that could bind the two in a relation of enduring ‘alliance’.

Leach's Burma fieldwork was carried out under difficult circumstances before and during the Second World War, and though his fieldnotes were lost, he managed to put together a monograph - Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) - which has become a classic. In this monograph, Leach (who had remained loyal to Malinowski's and Firth's functionalist anthropology) at the same time contributed significantly to the then dominant structural functionalist focus on political anthropology, and made a noticeable break with this tradition, which pointed forward to the methodological individualism that would soon attain prominence in Britain. The book shows how political leaders manipulate kinship and property rules in their political conflicts, and posits that the outcome of these manipulations is only visible if the entire highland region is viewed as a whole. Individual Kachin villages seemed to be spread out along a continuum from nearly egalitarian to rather hierachical political organizations. Leach argued that these different forms in fact represented phases in a very long-term fluctuation from egalitarianism to hiearchy and back, while confirming Malinowski's old idea that kinship and myth were not morally or jurically binding norms (as structural functionalism claimed), but charters for action, which might be manipulated and reinterpreted by actors in accordance with their interests.

Leach's monograph from Sri Lanka (Pul Eliya, a Village in Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship, 1961) is a classical ethnographic study of economic organization in peasant society.

 Leach was  among the first British anthropologists to be drawn toward Functionalism, and during the 1960's, this became his main passion. He published a short, popular introduction to Lévi-Strauss in 1970, and, in 1983, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth (with D. A. Aycock). When Leach moved from London School of Economics to Cambridge University in 1953, this became the center of the new, methodological individualist movement in British anthropology. Among his most prominent students were Bailey, Barnes and Barth.

Refference:

1.Goldschmidt, Walter.1996. Functionalism. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Vol 2. David Levinson

and Melvin Ember, eds. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

2.Hart, Keith. 2003. British Social Anthropology’s Nationalist Project. Anthropology Today 19(6):1-2.

3. Internet Refference Link

http://www. anthropology.ua.edu /cultures/cultures.php

http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/pers/leach_edmund.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Leach