Born as Rodney Phillip Needham Green, Needham changed his name in 1947 - the same year he married Ruth Brysz.
His fieldwork was with the Penan of Borneo (1951-2) and the Siwang of Malaysia (1953-5). He was University Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Oxford University, 1956-76; Professor of Social Anthropology, Oxford, 1976-90; Official Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, 1971-75; and Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1976-90.
Together with Sir Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, Needham brought structuralism across the Channel and anglicised it in the process. A prolific scholar, he was also a particularly inspiring teacher and an indefatigable rediscoverer of neglected figures in the history of his discipline, such as Arnold Van Gennep or Robert Hertz.
Bibliography
1962 Structure and sentiment.
1971 Rethinking kinship and marriage
1972 Belief, language and experience
1973 Right and left. Essay on dual symbolic classifiction.
1974 Remarks and inventions.Skeptical essays about kinship.
1978 Primordial characters
1978 Essential perplexities
1979 Symbolic classification
1980 Reconnaissances, U. of Toronto Press ISBN:0802023657
