[4][5] His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia and his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods.

[3] In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergmann, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Scholem.

During the war he studied under Evans-Pritchard, while in turn deeply influencing him and many lecturers and students of that circle, including Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, Adam Curle, M. N. Srinivas, Paul Bohannan,[14] I.M.

The huge original manuscript, with his research materials, was lost in the spring of 1942, when a heavy suitcase he left outside a toilet, while switching trains at Reading, vanished, or, according to one other variation of what became a local tale, someone stole it from a guarded baggage carriage.

The critique he developed of the imperial cast of Western anthropological writing, and his sympathy for hermeneutic techniques that would recover native terms for the way non-Westerners experienced their world, are grounded in this premise.

The approach he propounded allows him to be claimed now as an early theoretical precursor of that mode of critical analysis of ethnographic reports which identified in Orientalism a structure of cognitive prejudice framing Western interpretations of the Other.

The Western construction of "slavery", in his view, served as an excuse to enslave any other society or group the dominant power in the West might consider as either oriental, savage or primitive.

[30] In his keynote work on the concept and historical denotations of taboo, Steiner pointed out a major difficulty, at once functional and theoretical, in the English tradition of social anthropology.

Steiner was particularly interested in drawing attention to the fact that "the meaning of words appearing in the terminologies of comparative and analytic sociology" had "drifted apart without our noticing it.

In the hands of metropolitan arm-chair specialists, these variegated materials, collected in such famous compendia as J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, were thoroughly studied to elicit theories and concepts of a general descriptive nature about primitive society and its institutions, such as totemism, or taboo.

Somewhere along the line, the large theoretical baggage that had developed from this division of tasks proved too abstract, unfocused and dysfunctional for carrying out analytical enquiries into specific societies.

[ii][31]In his work, he set about to systematically disentangle the problems arising for anthropology from these historic shifts in descriptive traditions and key analytical terminology, focusing particularly on terms like taboo and magic.

He also maintained that (b) religion was a "total cosmology, concerned with active principles of all kinds", and finally (c) he analysed the phenomenon of the sacred in terms of a status of relationship, often being in his view a "hedge or boundary-marking" circumscribing the idea of divine power, adducing in this regard the way the Hebrew qodesh, the Latin sacer, and the Polynesian tabu which lend themselves to such an approach.

[38] His anthropological analysis of taboo had larger implications, which emerge in his remarks on the sociology of danger, and extends to the phenomenon of the rise of Nazism within modern civilisation.

He focused on what he saw as civilization's ambivalence: on the one hand, the progress of modern history helps expand the limits of society; on the other, this expansion opens the door to unlimited forms of power and destruction.

[40]Steiner's struggle to define his Jewish identity, especially as that was inflected by the shock of the Holocaust, and his relation to the Zionist project, were given extensive expression in a letter he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in 1946.

However, for Steiner, "the Jews as a collectivity constitute an alterity internalised by the West in the course of its expansion", and he believed indeed that "the fact of anti-Semitism is essential for the understanding of Christian Europe; it is a main thread in that fabric".

[44] It followed for him that Gandhi's counsel that, in the face of violence, the Jews adopt the tactic of satyagraha would only function if there were a commitment by the dominant to the survival of the Jewish internal minority whom they had historically oppressed.

To the contrary, Steiner deeply admired figures like Yigael Yadin, as exemplifying the strong, activist Zionist values the historical situation of the Jews demanded.

His preliminary work on the ethnography of Somalia, for example, inspired his student, Ioan M. Lewis, who inherited his papers on this subject, to specialise in that society,[50][51] on which he was to become a world-ranking authority.

His Taboo had a decisive impact on Mary Douglas, and her recent biographer calls it "the crucial point of departure" for her early study Purity and Danger (1966).

[33] According to Conradi, Murdoch's portraits of such positive figures in her fiction as Peter Saward (The Flight from the Enchanter, 1956), Willy Jost (The Nice and the Good, 1968) and Tallis Browne (A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 1970) were inspired by her memories of Franz Steiner.