Anthony Leeds

Anthony Leeds (1925-1989) was an anthropologist best known for his work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and on urban-rural relations in Brazil. He was born in New York City on January 26, 1925 and received a BA in anthropology from Columbia University in 1949. Field work in Bahia, Brazil, led to his dissertation “Economic Cycles in Brazil: The Persistence of a Total-Culture Pattern: Cacao and Other Cases”. Students at Columbia at roughly the same time were Marvin Harris, Sally Falk Moore, Robert Murphy, and Andrew P. Vayda. Leeds earned a PhD in anthropology from Columbia in 1957. He worked at the Baldwin School in New York and at the Pan-American Union’s Program of Urban Development, traveling widely in South America. He taught at Hofstra, the City College of New York, and at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1963-1972; was Visiting Professor at the University of London and University of Oxford with a Fulbright Fellowship for a year, and then moved to Boston University, where he taught from 1973 until his death in 1989.

Leeds conducted field work among the Yaruro in Venezuela, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in the barriadas of Lima, Peru, and on labor migration in Portugal. In 1982 he became one of the first presidents of the Society for Urban Anthropology. His work reflected his wide interests; he wrote on squatters, class, warfare, technology, labor migration, rural-urban relations, systems theory, human ecology, pigs in Melanesia, and reindeer in Siberia, among other topics. He also wrote poetry, was a photographer, and hosted Thursday night gatherings of graduate students and like-minded faculty at his house in Dedham, Massachusetts. His influence continues to shape the work of anthropologists in the United States, Brazil, Portugal, and elsewhere.He was married twice, first to Jo Alice Lowrey, with whom he had three children, Madeleine, John, and Anne, and to Elizabeth Plotkin, with whom he had two children, Jeremy and Jared. Leeds died of a heart attack on February 20, 1989, at his home in Tunbridge, VT, at the age of 64. The Anthony Leeds Prize is awarded in his honor by the Society for Urban, National, Transnational and Global Anthropology (www.sunta.org) (formerly the Society for Urban Anthropology). His papers are housed at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/guide/_l1.htm) and also with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Representative publications:Leeds, Anthony. 1964. “Brazilian Careers and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Model and Case History”. "American Anthropologist", 66:1321-47.

Leeds, Anthony, and Andrew P. Vayda. 1965. "Man, Culture, and Animals: the Role of Animals in Human Ecological Adjustment". Publication No. 78. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Leeds, Anthony. 1973. “Locality Power in Relation to Supralocal Power Institutions, pp. 15-41. In "Urban Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies of Urbanization". Aidan Southall, ed., NY: Oxford University Press.

Roger Sanjek (Queens College) collected a number of Leeds’s articles in Sanjek’s edited volume "Cities, Classes, and the Social Order" (1994) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (ISBN 0-8014-8168-6)