Rodney Needham (15 May 1923 – 4 December 2006 in
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
) was an English
social anthropologist
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...
.
Born Rodney Phillip Needham Green, he changed his name in 1947; the following year he married Maud Claudia (Ruth) Brysz.
The couple would collaborate on several works, including an English translation of Robert Hertz's ''Death and the Right Hand.''
His
fieldwork was with the
Penan
The Penan are a nomadic indigenous people living in Sarawak and Brunei, although there is only one small community in Brunei; among those in Brunei half have been converted to Islam, even if only superficially. Penan are one of the last such pe ...
of
Borneo
Borneo (; id, Kalimantan) is the third-largest island in the world and the largest in Asia. At the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, in relation to major Indonesian islands, it is located north of Java, west of Sulawesi, and eas ...
(1951-2) and the Siwang of
Malaysia
Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...
(1953-5).
His
doctoral thesis on the Penan was accepted in 1953.
He was University Lecturer in Social Anthropology,
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
, 1956–76;
Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1976–90; Official Fellow,
Merton College, Oxford, 1971–75; and Fellow,
All Souls College
All Souls College (official name: College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows (i.e., full members of t ...
, Oxford, 1976-90.
Together with
Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropologi ...
and
Mary Douglas, Needham brought
structuralism from France and anglicised it in the process. A prolific scholar, he was also a teacher and a rediscoverer of neglected figures in the history of his discipline, such as
Arnold Van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957) was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist.
Biography
He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg (since 1871, part of the G ...
and
Robert Hertz
Robert Hertz (22 June 1881, Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine – 13 April 1915, Marchéville, Meuse (department), Meuse) was a French sociologist who was killed in active service during World War I.
Hertz was a student at the École Normale Supérieure ...
.
Among other things, he contributed to the study of
family resemblance
Family resemblance (german: Familienähnlichkeit, link=no) is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the best known exposition given in his posthumously published book ''Philosophical Investigations'' (1953). It argues tha ...
, introducing the terms "monothetic" and "polythetic" into anthropology.
He had two children, one of whom,
Tristan
Tristan (Latin/ Brythonic: ''Drustanus''; cy, Trystan), also known as Tristram or Tristain and similar names, is the hero of the legend of Tristan and Iseult. In the legend, he is tasked with escorting the Irish princess Iseult to we ...
, became a professor of mathematics.
Bibliography
*1962 ''Structure and sentiment''
*1971 ''Rethinking kinship and marriage''
*1972 ''Belief, language and experience''
*1973 ''Right and left. Essays on dual symbolic classification''
*1974 ''Remarks and inventions – Skeptical essays about kinship''
*1975 ''Polythetic classification: Convergence and consequences''
*1978 ''Primordial characters''
*1978 ''Essential perplexities''
*1979 ''Symbolic classification''
*1980 ''Reconnaissances'', U. of Toronto Press,
*1981
Circumstantial deliveries', Berkeley: University of California Press,
*1983 ''Against the tranquility of axioms''
*1983 ''Sumba and the slave trade ''
*1985 ''Exemplars'', Berkeley: University of California Press,
*1987 ''Counterpoints''
*1987 ''Mamboru, history and structure in a domain of Northwestern Sumba''
References
External links
Filmed in Canberra in 1979 by Timothy Asch, in conversation with James J. Fox.*Obituaries:
The TimesFull text of doctoral thesis, "The social organisation of the Penan"via Oxford Research Archive
1923 births
2006 deaths
English anthropologists
Social anthropologists
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows
Alumni of Merton College, Oxford
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