In his foundational 1955 article “The Structural Study of Myth,” Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the program for a structuralist, cross-cultural study of mythology. The basic premise is prototypical structural anthropology: to analyze myths, one must decompose them into their constituent units (or “mythemes”). Thus decomposed, hidden mythical patterns can be made evident. These patterns are the real “content” of myths, according to Lévi-Strauss — they persist across different tellings of the same myth, and they reflect the inner structures of the mind. More important for the structuralist project, they recur in different myths, cross-culturally, reflecting the psychic unity of mankind.¹

Lévi-Strauss’s notecards (1955:435)

Materially, such a structural analysis required note cards. With a mytheme on each card, they could be physically rearranged into a two-dimensional grid, with the rows and columns indicating their shared features.² However, there was a problem. As Lévi-Strauss writes:

At this point it seems unfortunate that, with the limited means at the disposal of French anthropological research, no further advance can be made. […] A variant of average length needs several hundred cards to be properly analyzed. To discover a suitable pattern of rows and columns for those cards, special devices are needed, consisting of vertical boards about two meters long and one and one-half meters high, where cards can be pigeon-holed and moved at will; in order to build up three-dimensional models enabling one to compare the variants, several such boards are necessary, and this in turn requires a spacious workshop, a kind of commodity particularly unavailable in Western Europe nowadays. (443)

This sudden concern for materiality is striking in contrast to Lévi-Strauss’s focus on the abstract structure of mind. According to him, the progress of structuralism is very literally halted by the size of his office! Compounding the problem of proliferating notecards was the proliferation of analytical dimensions. Two or three dimensions could be grasped intuitively and physically, but beyond that, “progress in comparative mythology depends largely on the cooperation of mathematicians who would undertake to express in symbols multi-dimensional relations which cannot be handled otherwise” (436). Computers offered a kind of conceptual space that could substitute for physical space: “as soon as the frame of reference becomes multi-dimensional […] the board-system has to be replaced by perforated cards which in turn require I.B.M. equipment” (443).

Although Lévi-Strauss did not use computers as tools, he used them to imagine the future of structuralist analysis — the recovery of deep patterns from expanding corpora of mythological material, arrayed in dimensions that could only be grasped with the aid of computers. The putative ability of computers to handle boundlessly large data sets and multidimensional relationships between symbols reflects Lévi-Strauss’ structural ideal: the incorporation of all mythological material into a single analysis, sorted along all possible axes. By collapsing boards, cards, and multiple dimensions into a single figurative device, the imagined computer allows Lévi-Strauss’ ideal method to exist, in theory.

Edmund Leach on the computer

In his 1961 Rethinking Anthropology, Edmund Leach focused on a different connection between structuralism and computing: their reliance on binary opposition.

If an engineer tries to explain to you how a digital computer works he doesn’t spend his time classifying different kinds of nuts and bolts. He concerns himself with principles, not with things. He writes out his argument as a mathematical equation of the utmost simplicity, somewhat on the lines of: 0 + 1 = 1; 1 + 1 = 10. (6-7)

In Leach’s imagination, the particularities of actual computers do not matter—they provide a system in which unfathomable (or perhaps simply unfathomed) complexity is spun out from the purest of binaries. This style of explanation, Leach argues, is useful for understanding “what goes on in society, how societies work” (6) and the potency of binary codes: “although the information which can be embodied in such codes may be enormously complex, the basic principles on which the computing machines work is very simple” (7).³ Although imagining culture as 1s and 0s may be “frivolous” (7), Leach nonetheless endorses a kind of mathematical formalism:

The merit of putting a statement into an algebraic form is that one letter of the alphabet is as good or bad as any other. Put the same statement into concept language, with words like paternity and filiation stuck in the middle of it, and God help you! (17)

Algebra — the substitution of variables for constants, so as to describe forms and relationships — allows Leach to think that he can avoid the tangles of “concept language,” purifying cultural heterogeneity into fundamental relationships or topologies. Variables, the language of mathematics and computation, provide the figures Leach desperately wants, neither “good or bad,” but purely symbolic — a status notably unavailable to empirical cultural facts, which tend to be tangled up in all sorts of complicating webs.

To use the ultimate anthropological cliché, we might say that for Leach and Lévi-Strauss, computers proved “good to think.” They served not as tools for calculating, but as tools for thinking about mythical, social, or cultural orders. As computers grew in influence and popularity over the course of Leach’s career, he regularly returned to them as models of mind, society, and culture. In his book on Lévi-Strauss (1970), Leach himself suggested that computers functioned totemically for scientists like classes of animals did for “primitive thought”: as symbolic structures people could use to “make sense of the events of daily life by reference to codes composed of things outside themselves” (95).

The structuralist engagement with computing inaugurated a number of enduring themes for the use of computers in anthropology:

1. Computers frequently function as both tools for studying and metaphors for thinking about objects of anthropological interest, be they minds, social rules, cultural knowledge patterns, or ecological systems.
2. Computers, figured as indefatigable calculating machines, help to imagine promising futures for labor-intensive formal analyses: large-scale data collection and complex symbolic operations are made more plausible by the assumption that imminent technologies will make them easier.
3. Computational methods (or in this case, the imagination of them) draw anthropologists into interdisciplinary methodological discussions about science, systematicity, and rigor: for Lévi-Strauss, this was primarily with mathematicians (see Andre Weil’s mathematical appendix to The Elementary Structures of Kinship); for Leach, with software engineers (Leach was fond of tracing his approach to anthropology back to his own training as an engineer).

Without engaging computation practically or materially, Leach and Lévi-Strauss mine it symbolically for homologies. If computers can spin great complexity out of simple binaries, why not culture? If “explanation” can be reduced to a statement of fundamental principles for the computer, then why not for society? The fact that their computer is an imagined one makes the homology all the more powerful: Leach can think that computers are only about 1s and 0s and Lévi-Strauss can imagine them freeing up the space in his office, working with pure and decontextualized symbols, because these computers do not exist. There is no hot room full of engineers, troubleshooting, coding, and constructing the image of purity and unflappable logic that appears in these texts. The computer, for Leach and Lévi-Strauss, is just an object to think with, providing a decontextualized, rigorously symbolic, and tirelessly iterating model of structuralism taken to its logical limits.

I only met Tambiah once, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Although Tambiah had taught there for only three years a quarter century ago, I was shocked by how well he was remembered. People — even the persnickety people who filled Chicago’s halls — were enthusiastic about his returning to the campus. I was voluntold (as they say) to organize a dinner for him to have with the graduate students. It ended up being an incredibly punishing task for me, I had to find the restaurant where we would eat and drive Tambiah there. Problems began immediately: we were given ‘more money than usual’ to take him out, but not enough to actually take him out somewhere nice. I had no car, had not driven regularly in a decade, and had never driven in a big city like Chicago. The department secretary lent me hers (yes, Chicago people, another good deed by Herself) and I had ended up navigating traffic, sweating profusely, with a Luminary sitting contentedly in the car with me.

Throughout all of this, one of the biggest problems was Tambiah himself. Although I attempted to cater to his needs, this proved almost impossible: in his presence I could do nothing wrong. Any kind of food would be acceptable. It didn’t matter if we got to the restaurant on time. We could have wine, or not, depending on what the students preferred. He was more interested in what we were studying than his own work. Gracious, quiet, and polite, Tambiah was almost too much of a gentleman. So you can see: I don’t study Buddhism, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, so I feel like I am not the right person to write a remembrance of him. But until a fuller appreciate comes along, this is what I will try to do.

The outlines of Tambiah’s career have been convered by most of the googleable sources: he was born in 1929 in the Christian community in Sri Lanka and grew interested in anthropology there. He eventually found his way to Cornell, an area studies center, and earned a Ph.D. in 1954 by writing a dissertation on peasant communities in what was then Ceylon. After graduating, Tambiah began doing work with UNESCO in Thailand (1960-1963), and he eventually became a specialist in this area.

Tambiah worked with many anthropologists on his Ph.D. (Lauriston Sharp, Morris Opler, etc.) in the course of his Ph.D., which dealt with issues raised by Robert Redfield. But I think a real turning point in his intellectual development came in 1963, when he began a ten-year stint as a reader of anthropology at Cambridge. It was there that he became influenced by Edmund Leach. At this point in his career Leach had finished up Pul Eliya, his ethnography of Sri Lanka, and was turning towards Lévi-Strauss. Leach was producing the essays that would later go into Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, and edit The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. I think we can see Leach’s influence on Tambiah in Tambiah’s essays on classification, ritual, magic, and symbolism.

In 1973 Tambiah came to the University of Chicago, as I mentioned, where he taught for three years. I think these years were also highly influential for him, since he helped contribute to the University’s strength in South Asian studies and conveyed a sense of the social-anthropological encounter with structuralism. At the same time, I think Tambiah was influenced by the linguistic-anthropological focus at Chicago, and American versions of symbolic anthropology. This influence is evident in his 1985 volume of collected essays Culture, Thought, and Social Action. His Morgan lectures of the previous year were eventually published in 1990 as Magic, Science, and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Tambiah’s project was, roughly, to understand how it was that ritual was efficacious — this meant understanding how words did not just describe the world, but change it (how they were ‘performative’). It also meant understanding how people deployed classificatory systems and cosmologies in the course of everyday life, and how those shaped action. At the time, Tambiah was one of the many people creating what Sherry Ortner would call, in 1984, ‘practice theory’ by examining how cultural categories were used in action. He never achieved the fame of Victor Turner or Marshall Sahlins — I think he was too interested in ethnography to engage in high-level theorizing. What commanded attention was his powerful ethnographic analysis: not what he said about theory, but how he employed it. He would take this awareness of the cultural/symbolic/cosmological dimension of action with him to his analysis of the religious dimensions of ethnic tensions and mass actions in South Asia.

In 1976 Tambiah moved to Harvard, where he worked until he retired in 2001. There, his interest turned back towards South Asia and ethnic violence, a long-standing preoccupation of his. He produced books in 1986, 1992, and 1996 on this subjects, working in both Sri Lanka and India. As he grew closer to retirement he also began work memorializing Edmund Leach, producing an exhaustive biography of his teacher in 2002.

As I said, I don’t feel confident about my ability to speak about Tambiah’s work in South or Southeast Asia. But if you are interested in learning more about Tambiah, I highly recommend watching Alan MacFarlane’s 1983 interview with Tambiah. The good people at HAU have made one of his most well-known pieces, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia” available in golden (completely free to read) open access — an important way to salvage his legacy, since much of his work was published in obscure journals and collected in edited volumes that are not easily (or cheaply) accessible. I would also recommend Tambiah’s memoir of Edmund Leach, which is, frankly, so well-done that it is the only thing you will ever need to read about Leach, a small masterpiece of rigorous intellectual history. For those of you with access to Culture, Thought, and Social Action, I’d recommend… well, really there aren’t any bad essays in that book. But “A Performative Approach to Ritual”, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit”, and “On Flying Witches and Flying Canoes” are good places to start.