Edmund Ronald Leach

This is a collection of the author's most important papers and include a remarkable logical exercise on Jinghpaw kinship terms as well as articles on theoretical problems of the concept of marriage.

"For the first time a modern type of sociological analysis has been applied to the rich ethnographic material of northern Southeast Asia in this book. While making full use of the techniques which social anthropologists had developed during the previous decade, mainly on the basis of African materials, this book marked a departure from then current orthodoxies and has come to be recognized as constituting an outstanding development in the field of anthropological theory."--Back cover.

A study of elitism particularly concerned with Indian elites in the context of British influence and its aftermath. The problems delineated are by no means peculiar to the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all the developing countries of contemporary Asia, Africa and Latin America are entangled with their post-colonial heritage and the history of political elitism in all these countries has been similar. The papers consider who were members of the elites, in the sense of 'men at the top'. They enquire how they got there, how they continued to recruit themselves and what was their relationship with the British. The contributors, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians, present each other with forms of evidence which are unfamiliar and, in sum, result in a study which destroys many of the conventional clichés of colonial historians.--Publisher description.