The biographical origins of political systems of highland Burma

Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 3, Southeast Asia

Volumn 18, Issue , 2007, Pages 3-29

  Anderson, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84965136900     PISSN: None     EISSN: 01699571     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004160347.i-331.7     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. Edmund Leach, "Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1984, p. 18. Also author's conversation with Stephen Hugh-Jones, Cambridge, September 2004, in which he explained that this remark was not just Leach's conclusion in 1984, but had been repeated by Leach in conversation with many people about Political Systems in the 1970s and 1980s.
2. Adam Kuper, "Interview with Edmund Leach", Current Anthropology, August - October 1986, p. 375.
3. "In Formative Travail With Leviathan", talk at the LSE, 1973, published in R. M. Berndt [ed], special issue of Anthropological Forum, Vol. 4, no. 2, 1977, p. 192.
4. Stephen Hugh-Jones, "Edmund Leach 1910-1989", a memoir prepared by direction of the Council of Kings College, Cambridge, 1989, p. 5.
5. His first popular publication was probably "The Yami of Koto-sho: a Japanese colonial experiment", The Geographic Magazine, October 1937.
6. Michael Young, Malinowksi: odyssey of an anthropologist, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004.
7. Leach got to know Ogden, who reappeared in Rangoon after the war, having courted death on the frontier a number of times. He is described in Rangoon from a young girl's point of view in Maureen Baird-Murray, A World Overturned: a Burmese childhood, 1933-47, London, Constable, 1997. Baird-Murray was abandoned by her parents (or so she thought) in 1942 and was orphaned. Ogden was considered responsible for her by her father, and, indeed, showed up at the convent orphanage in Kalaw in 1945, and took her under his wing in Rangoon, enabling her to travel to live with relatives in Ireland. She provides a fascinating account of this semi-retired Frontier Service officer's life in Rangoon in 1946-47.
8. Adam Kuper, "An Interview with Edmund Leach", Current Anthropology, 1986, p. 376.
9. Edmund Leach, Social and Economic Organization of Rowanduz Kurds, London, LSE Monographs, no. 3, 1940.
10. Edmund Leach, "Letter from Bhamo" in Hugh-Jones & Laidlaw, The Essential Edmund Leach, pp. 217-119.
11. "In Formative Travail⋯", p. 193.
12. Adam Kuper, "An Interview", 1986, p. 377.
13. Orwell was a policeman for seven months (December 1926 to June 1927) not far from Bhamo, on the northern railway line at Katha, a town Leach would visit many times fifteen years later. It is believed that Katha provided the model of 'Kyauktada' in Burmese Days. A most interesting essay on Orwell's experience in Katha and its remnants in 1997 is Steven Martin, "Orwell's Burma" found at http://orwell.ru/library/novels, etc.
14. One wonders also if Leach read Maurice Collis, Trials in Burma. London, Faber & Faber, 1945. Collis was a District Magistrate in Rangoon in the 1930s, and his critical and reflective study of colonial legal culture was written in 1938, but not published until after the war.
15. "In Formative Travail⋯", 1977, p. 58.
16. Kuper, "An Interview⋯", 1986, p. 376.
17. In "Formative Travail⋯.", p. 192.
18. I am grateful to Stephen Hugh-Jones for introducing me to the Leach Papers, and to Kings College archivists for facilitating my use of them. See also Stephen HughJones, "Edmund Leach 1910-1989" Cambridge Anthropology: special issue on Sir Edmund Leach, Vol. 13, no. 3, 1989-90.
19. The following paragraph relies on information in Martin Smith's excellent Burma: insurgency and the politics of ethnicity. London, Zed Books, 2001.
20. There is a curious contrast between his resigning and taking a year off from LSE in 1952 to write Political Systems and his later statement that he was interested in Cambridge because it offered him a higher salary than LSE. Because his father's will was not yet executed (and his mother was still alive), said Leach, "I was rather hard up ⋯ I was in debt" (source: notes of Susan Drucker-Brown's interview with Edmund Leach, Cambridge, April 1984. Quoted in Tambiah, 2002, p. 50). But in his 1984 review essay "Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology" Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1984, pp. 9-10, Leach commented acidly about the willingness of well-paid academic anthropologists elsewhere to give up such jobs and accept lower pay if they could move to Cambridge (or Oxford). His case seems to have been the very reverse, and perhaps he overlooked that.
21. In 1960 Leach wrote his influential essay "The Frontiers of 'Burma'", Comparative Studies in History and Society. Vol. 3, no. 1, 1960, pp. 49-68. In September 1962 Leach completed "The Political Future of Burma", published in Bertrand de Jouvenel (Ed.) Futuribles: studies in conjecture. Geneva, Droz, 1963, but originally written for and presented at the Congress for Cultural Freedom meetings in late 1962 at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, in company of Edward Shils, Oskar Morgenstern, Karl Popper, Michael Postan, Bertrand de Jouvenel. Leach refers to 'falsifiability': is this his first brush with Popper? Source: Kings College Archive, ERL 1/62.
22. "In Formative Travail with Leviathan", Anthropological Forum, 1977, Vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 190-197.
23. "Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology" Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1984, pp. 9-10.
24. "Tribal Ethnography: past, present, future" lecture to Association of Social Anthropologists, [published in Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1987, pp. 1-14]