Rodney Needham

Rodney Needham (15 May 1923 - 4 December 2006 in Oxford, United Kingdom) was one of the leading British social anthropologists.

Born as Rodney Phillip Needham Green, Needham changed his name in 1947 - the same year he married Ruth Brysz.

His fieldwork was with the Penan of Borneo (1951-2) and the Siwang of Malaysia (1953-5). He was University Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Oxford University, 1956-76; Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1976-90; Official Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, 1971-75; and Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1976-90.

Together with Sir Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, Needham brought structuralism across the Channel and anglicised it in the process. A prolific scholar, he was also a particularly inspiring teacher and an indefatigable rediscoverer of neglected figures in the history of his discipline, such as Arnold Van Gennep or Robert Hertz.

Bibliography

*1962 Structure and sentiment.
*1971 Rethinking kinship and marriage
*1972 Belief, language and experience
*1973 Right and left. Essay on dual symbolic classifiction.
*1974 Remarks and inventions.Skeptical essays about kinship.
*1978 Primordial characters
*1978 Essential perplexities
*1979 Symbolic classification
*1980 "Reconnaissances", U. of Toronto Press ISBN 0802023657
*1981 " [http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006tn/?&query=&brand=ucpress Circumstantial deliveries] ", Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0585281114
*1983 Against the tranquility of axioms
*1983 Sumba and the slave trade
*1985 "Exemplars", Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0520052005
*1987 Counterpoints
*1987 Mamboru, history and structure in a domain of Northwestern Sumba.

External links

* [http://www.unine.ch/ethno/biblio/2000needham.html Needham Bibliography]
*Obituaries:
** [http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1991060,00.html The Guardian]
** [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1536732/Rodney-Needham.html The Telegraph]
** [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/rodney-needham-428191.html The Independent]
** [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1403456.ece The Times]