Edmund Leach quotes

Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts. (Edmund Leach)
Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents. View quote
Edmund Leach
The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us. View quote
Edmund Leach
Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization. View quote
Edmund Leach