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Our Genius for the Equivocal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jonathan Benthall
Jonathan Benthall*
Affiliation:
Royal Anthropological Institute
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Extract

In 1987, Sir Edmund Leach, the most influential British social anthropologist of his generation, startled a conference in Norwich of the Association of Social Anthropologists by declaring that ethnographic monographs were essentially fictions, expressing the personality of the author. When asked what should be the goal of the anthropologist, he replied, ‘To write another War and Peace’. This and some similar papers were published by him and have come in for much criticism: for instance, from a leading anthropologist of the next generation, Adam Kuper, who has regretted that Leach made such a concession to fashionable post-modernism, the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, shortly before his death (Kuper, 1999: 15-35).

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 188 , December 1999, pp. 22 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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