Moses among the Anthropologists. A Note

Extract

Sir Edmund Leach has ranged far in his anthropological interests. As a prime inheritor of the sociological tradition in British anthropology, he has done field work in Burma, Sri Lanka, and Borneo. During the last two decades he has expanded his interests to include a wide variety of cultures and has widened his theoretical vision under the influence of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Having studied the Old Testament in a lively and controversial collection of essays published in 1969, he has returned to the text of the Bible in his latest book. The volume includes four essays by Sir Edmund as well as two short chapters by D. Alan Aycock. It is characteristically iconoclastic of Leach that the two have never met, and, while he offers high praise of his co-author, he nevertheless manages in the introduction to criticize one of Aycock's contributions to the book.