The minor works of Rodney Needham

Somehow, ‘the minor works of Rodney Needham’ is a phrase that has come to symbolize narrow-minded bibliophilia on this blog. Now with Needham having passed on the phrase bears a little more scrutiny.

Most people, I suspect, are not going to take this opportunity to re-evaluate Needham’s work. To be fair, there is much not to like about it — Needham’s scrupulously abstract studies of kinship are exactly the sort of thing that drove kinship studies into the ground (or at least into the arms of political economy). His work could be labeled Cartesian, indulgent, and hermetic. His tendency to dote on the obscure could baffle those who were not interested Hocart, van Cennep, and so forth. If you think The Minor Works Of Rodney Needham are obscure, check out the essays in The Lifegiving Myth

But in retrospect, these drawbacks are out-weighed by what Needham represents. Although his work was nothing if not distinctive, it has deep roots. Needham managed to crystallize a certain Franco-British sensibility that had been floating around his corner of scholarship for some time. Somewhere between Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss, and the Annee Sociologique, Needham managed to create a personal style which, if inimitable, demonstrated the possibility and validity of an elegant and humanistic social science. Leach was ultimately better remembered for epitomizing much of this mood but Needham lacked Leach’s mercurial temperament. He was the hedgehog to Leach’s fox.

Needham also did much to give us our intellectual genealogy. Back in the days before The History of Anthropology, doing ‘theory’ was a much more playful affair. Needham was key in bringing to us the work of scholars like Hertz, Hocart, and van Gennep. And I mean this literally — he somehow managed to get volumes like Imagination and Proof and The Semi-Scholars in print, works that wouldn’t last a cocaine heart beat in today’s publishing environment. Perhaps there is a good reason for this — how widely does Hocart’s essay “On Rotation” need to be read? — but I do think that Needham’s championing of these works was important and wonderful. He gave us so much wonderful work of his own, and of others. Even if it remains ‘minor’ I still look forward to reading it.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

4 thoughts on “The minor works of Rodney Needham

  1. There was a moment a few years back when I went on a Needham binge and bought a bunch of his books. Looks like it’s time to get them out and read them again.

  2. Usually people who point out the typos of others annoy me, but this one was too good to pass up:

    “…dong ‘theory’ was a much more playful affair.”

    Really, more so than today? Who knew. And who knew Needham was a Freudian… Anyway, thanks, I’ve got a bad cold and the laugh cleared me up a little.

  3. Picky picky 😛 I’ve added the ‘i’ to ‘dong’ for future vistor’s reading pleasure — tho’ it sounds like you think _not_ having it is better….

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