Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic.
After leaving Cambridge University, Leach took a four-year contract in 1933 with Butterfield and Swire in China, serving in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Qingdao, and Beijing.
While in Beijing, Leach had a chance encounter with Kilton Stewart, a psychiatrist, former-Mormon missionary, and published author who invited him on a trip to the island of Botel Tobago off the coast of Formosa.
Before returning to England, Leach spend several months among the Yami of that island , taking ethnographic notes and studying local boat design.
[3] He returned to England and studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics with Raymond Firth who introduced him to Bronisław Malinowski.
His studies were abruptedly interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, and he lost most of the manuscript material he had gathered during this period.
[9] The resulting 1948 report, Social Science Research in Sarawak (later published in 1950), was used as a guide for many well-known subsequent anthropological studies of region.
He was elected provost of King's College, Cambridge in 1966 and retired in 1979; President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971–1975); a Fellow of the British Academy (from 1972) and was knighted in 1975.
[14] Leach's first book was Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954); it challenged the theories of social structure and cultural change.
Leach applied his analysis of kinship to his disagreement with Lévi-Strauss in Pul Eliya, introducing Levi-Strauss's work into British social anthropology in doing so.