Needham, Rodney 1923-2006

(Rodney Phillip Needham)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 15, 1923, in Kent, England; died December 4, 2006. Anthropologist, educator, and author. A former Oxford professor, Needham favored the structural anthropology approach first formulated by Claude Levi-Strauss. Before he enrolled in college, World War II broke out and Needham enlisted in the British Army. He fought with the First Gurkha Rifles in Burma and in 1944 was seriously wounded in the leg. Despite his war experiences, he would be fascinated by the cultures of Southeast Asia, where he would later return to conduct field research. Needham was educated at Oxford University, receiving his Ph.D. from Merton College. He also studied Chinese for two years at the School of Oriental and African Studies. During the early 1950s, he did field work in Sarawak, Borneo, and in Indonesia. He returned to England in 1956 and became a lecturer in anthropology at Oxford. Needham was promoted to Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls College in 1976 and retired in 1990. As a scholar, he specialized in social anthropology and was enamored of Levi-Strauss’s idea of structural anthropology, the theory that all people organize their concepts of the world in terms of binary opposites. Needham related his thoughts on structuralism in his first book, Structure and Sentiment: A Test Case in Social Anthropology (1962), as well as in other books, such as his acclaimed Belief, Language and Experience (1972). Also an editor and translator of anthropology books, Needham was the author of such other works as Primordial Characters (1978), Against the Tranquility of Axioms (1983), and Mamboru: History and Structure in a Domain of Northwestern Sumba (1987).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), February 19, 2007, p. 53.