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 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

• Needham Bibliography
• Obituaries:
  • The Guardian
  • The Telegraph
  • The Independent
  • The Times

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