Political Systems of Highland Burma

This book presents a collection of brilliant and provocative essays from Edmund Leach, one of the most original voices in the social anthropological tradition.

This book presents a collection of brilliant and provocative essays from Edmund Leach, one of the most original voices in the social anthropological tradition.

Political Systems of Highland Burma

The North Central Province of Ceylon was the focus of a major civilisation which flourished between the third century BC and the twelfth century AD. The area is an arid plain where habitation is possible only with the help of an elaborate irrigation system; and the existing villages use the same irrigation works as the villages of antiquity. This 1961 book is a detailed analysis of how land was owned used and transmitted to later generations in one of these irrigation-based communities, the village of Pul Eliya. The main emphasis is placed on the way the ties of kinship and marriage are related to property rights and the practices of land use. The approach to this question provides a critical test of certain features of the theory and method of contemporary social anthropology. The factual evidence is very detailed, and the author allows the facts to speak for themselves wherever possible.

When this book was originally published in paperback in 1971, one of the most hotly debated themes in Indian sociology was the meaning of the term caste. At one extreme Professor Dumont argued caste is an aspect of Hinduism that cannot be isolated from its religious matrix; on the other, certain American-trained sociologists represented the caste order as a specially rigid form of social class hierarchy. Aspects of Caste endeavoured to test these two hypotheses against the data. The first paper, by E. Kathleen Gough, describes the caste order of a village in Tanjore that corresponds closely to Dumont's ideal type. The second paper, by Michael Banks, relates to a Jaffna Tamil community in Northern Ceylon. Nur Yalman's paper describes a Buddhist Sinhalese community in Central Ceylon. Fredrik Barth's study of Swat in Northwestern Pakistan exhibits an even more divergent case. Edmund Leach's introductory essay discusses the general theoretical issues raised by these examples and their importance for an understanding of social issues in South Asia.