Leach, Edmund Ronald, 1910–89, British anthropologist, grad. Cambridge (B.A., 1932; M.A., 1938) and Univ. of London (Ph.D., 1947). He was (1957–72) university reader in social anthropology at Cambridge, and in 1972 he was appointed professor. In 1966 he became provost of Kings College. His major areas of study were the kinship, mythology, and social anthropology of South Asia, and structural anthropology. Among his writings are Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon (1961), Rethinking Anthropology (1961), A Runaway World? (1968), Lévi-Strauss (1970), and Genesis as Myth (1970).
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