Personal life Leach was born in
Sidmouth,
Devon, the youngest of three children and the son of William Edmund Leach and Mildred Brierley. His father owned and was manager of a sugar plantation in northern
Argentina. After romantic relationships with
Leslie Scott and
Rosemary Firth, both of which nearly led to engagements and the latter of which was rekindled in the late 1960s and 1970s, Leach married
Celia Joyce in 1940. Buckmaster was then a painter and later published poetry and two novels. They had a daughter Louisa (Loulou) in 1941 and a son Alexander in 1946. He returned to England and studied social anthropology at the
London School of Economics with
Raymond Firth who introduced him to
Bronisław Malinowski. He was an active member of Malinowski's "famous seminar". In 1938, Leach went to Iraq (Kurdistan) to study the Kurds, which resulted in
Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds. However, he abandoned this trip because of the
Munich Crisis. He wrote: "I've got an enormous amount of ability at almost anything, yet so far I've made absolutely no use of it... I seem to be a highly organized piece of mental apparatus for which nobody else has any use" (
D.N.B. 258). In 1939 he went to study the
Kachin in the
Kachin Hills area of Burma, and over several months master their language while staying at Hpalang. 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. Leach then joined the Burma Army, from the fall of 1939 to summer 1945, where he achieved the rank of Major. During his time in Burma, Leach acquired superior knowledge of Northern Burma and its many hill tribes. He served as commander of the Kachin irregular forces. After he left the Army in 1946, he returned to the
London School of Economics to complete his dissertation under the supervision of Raymond Firth. In spring of 1947 he received a PhD in anthropology. His 732-page dissertation was based on his time in Burma and titled
Cultural change, with special reference to the hill tribes of Burma and Assam. Later that same year, at the request of Sir Charles Arden Clark, the then Governor of Sarawak (then under British Colonial rule) and a referral by Raymond Firth, the British Colonial Social Science Research Council invited Leach to conduct a major survey of the local peoples. 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. In addition to the report, Leach produced five additional publications from this field work. Upon returning from his fieldwork in Borneo, Leach became a lecturer at LSE. In 1951, Leach won the Curl Essay Prize for his essay
The Structural Implications of Matrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage, which drew on his extensive data on the Kachin to make important theoretical points as it related to kinship theory. In 1953, he became a lecturer at
Cambridge University, and promoted to Reader in 1957. Along with his wife, Celia, Leach spent a year from 1960 to 1961 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Studies in Palo Alto, California. Here he met
Roman Jakobson, the Russian linguist, popularizer of Saussurean structural linguistics, and a major influence on the theoretical thinking of Levi-Strauss, leading to his structural anthropology. In 1972 he received a personal chair. 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. ==Academic contributions==