Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols Are Connected

(Sir) Edmund R. Leach (b. 1910; d. 1989) is acknowledged as one of the towering figures of British social anthropology of his time (Tambiah 2002). Leach did most of his ethnographic work in South Asia (Burma, Ceylon and Thailand).

In 1958, Leach published an essay on hairdressing rituals in which he discussed the remarkable convergence of ethnographic evidence and psychoanalytical arguments, even though the latter are considered methodologically and theoretically inadequate in social anthropology. At the end of his essay, he observes “that magical potency, regarded as a social category, is something which inheres in ‘circumcision’ symbols, but that each symbolization is effective because for each individual the ritual situation is felt to signify ‘castration’” (Leach 1958: 162).

Writing on “magic” in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences from 1964, Leach emphasizes the following key definitional characteristics of “magic”: “The core of the magic act is that it rests on empirically untested belief and that it is an effort at control. The first aspect distinguishes it from science, the second from religion” (Leach 1964: 398).

Our excerpt is taken from Leach's later Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols Are Connected (1976), in which he provides a more original approach to “magic”. For Leach, culture is communication and his book, written for undergraduates, seeks to explore ways to decode communication as a way of analysing culture.