Rodney Needham

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Rodney Needham (15 May 1923 – 4 December 2006 in Oxford) was an English social anthropologist.

Born Rodney Phillip Needham Green, he changed his name in 1947; the following year he married Maud Claudia (Ruth) Brysz.^[1][2] The couple would collaborate on several works, including an English translation of Robert Hertz's Death and the Right Hand.^[3][4]

His

Among other things, he contributed to the study of family resemblance, introducing the terms "monothetic" and "polythetic" into anthropology.

He had two children, one of whom, Tristan, became a professor of mathematics.

Bibliography

• 1962 Structure and sentiment
• 1971 Rethinking kinship and marriage
• 1972 Belief, language and experience
• 1973 Right and left. Essays on dual symbolic classification
• 1974 Remarks and inventions – Skeptical essays about kinship
• 1975 Polythetic classification: Convergence and consequences
• 1978 Primordial characters
• 1978 Essential perplexities
• 1979 Symbolic classification
• 1980 Reconnaissances, U. of Toronto Press,
  ISBN 0-8020-2365-7
• 1981 Circumstantial deliveries, Berkeley: University of California Press,
  ISBN 0-585-28111-4
• 1983 Against the tranquility of axioms
• 1983 Sumba and the slave trade
• 1985 Exemplars, Berkeley: University of California Press,
  ISBN 0-520-05200-5
• 1987 Counterpoints
• 1987 Mamboru, history and structure in a domain of Northwestern Sumba

External links

• Filmed in Canberra in 1979 by Timothy Asch, in conversation with James J. Fox.
• Obituaries:
  • The Guardian
  • The Telegraph
  • The Independent
  • The Times
• Full text of doctoral thesis, "The social organisation of the Penan" via Oxford Research Archive

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