Leach, Edmund Ronald (1910–1989)

English anthropologist. Leach's Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), based on fieldwork among the Kachin of Burma, overturned the orthodox notion that the structure of society was stable or in equilibrium by demonstrating that this was an ideal model which people alter in their pursuit of power. Equilibrium could be assumed only for purposes of analysis.

He was professor of anthropology at Cambridge University 1972–78.

A student of Bronislaw Malinowski, Leach later criticized the structural functionalism of his predecessors in his book Pul Eliya (1961), which was based on fieldwork in Ceylon.