Rodney Needham

Rodney Needham (b. 1923–d. 2006) was a brilliant and daring anthropologist, possessed of considerable imagination and theoretical sophistication; a facility for languages, both European and Asian; and a broad-ranging comparativist outlook that transcended his immediate specialisms in Borneo and Indonesia. He enjoyed a keen sense of the historical depth of anthropology as a way of looking at the world, and a sharp awareness of the discipline’s wrong-turnings and recently acquired blind spots, though also a generous desire to recover the insights of those unsung but ingenious pioneers who were overlooked in the conventional canon of the discipline, for which Needham had scant regard. Needham was utterly original, as all who encountered him on the page or in person were soon aware, and did not foster a school. Indeed, he seemed to repel rather than woo potential allies. Needham was involved in several biting academic feuds with fellow anthropologists, and there is a significant roll call of anthropologists with whom he broke a lance. There was a major falling-out with Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom Needham was for a time an acolyte and—as translator and practitioner of structuralism—the Frenchman’s most zealous missionary in the anglophone world. But things went spectacularly awry, and the reason is to be found in the temperaments of both men. For Needham was not the only English anthropologist of his generation—Leach was another—who, while finding structuralism persuasive, was to experience exasperation and disillusionment with the French master’s evasiveness in the face of uncomfortable ethnographic fact and error. Needham’s own positive contributions to the discipline were rich and multifarious, sometimes arresting. He remained unconvinced about aspects of the human condition that other anthropologists cavalierly took for granted, such as the notion that “belief” was a universal ingredient of mental life. Rather, Needham was persuaded by an accumulating mass of ethnographic evidence that certain modes of classification were intrinsic to the human mind. This was the point of departure for his anthropological project. The structuring capacity of the human mind came close to the elusive hard rock on which a robust discipline might be built.