Volume 21, Number 5 · April 4, 1974
Anthropology Upside Down
By Edmund R. Leach
Reinventing Anthropology
edited by Dell Hymes
Vintage, 470 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The enigmatic title of this antitextbook may best be explained by an analogy. In the flush of radical enthusiasm which was briefly dominant in England between 1645 and 1660, left-wing religious sectarians—Diggers, Seekers, Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men, and what have you—vied with one another to reinvent Christianity. They proclaimed a 'world turned upside down,' a New Heaven and a New Earth. Mutual recrimination apart, the vitriolic pamphlets, sermons, and denunciations of these reformers have much in common; there is a universal flavor of witch-hunting paranoia, an insistence that the new Christianity must be relevant to the mundane affairs of seventeenth-century rural England, an extreme intolerance of past orthodoxies of all kinds, a marked provincialism and lack of sophistication in the theology.
Review, 2545 words
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