Murray Leaf

Murray John Leaf (born June 1, 1939) is an American social and cultural anthropologist. He was born in New York City in 1939, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. After active duty for training in the United States Army Reserves in 1957, he attended the University of Arizona and Reed College, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy from Reed in 1961. He received a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1966. He has taught at Pomona College, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Dallas. In practical development work, Leaf has served as Senior Social Scientist on the Irrigation and Water Management and Training Project, in India (1987-89), Senior Socio-Economist for the Bangladesh Flood Response Study (1990-1993), and as a consultant to the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan (1991-95). He has served on the editorial board of Regional Development Dialogue, the journal of the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, and the online anthropological journal Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory. He has held elected positions in the Culture and Agriculture section of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Anthropological Sciences. Leaf’s central concern is the social nature of thought and its relation to organization. Methodologically, his argument is for radical empiricism in opposition to positivism, Marxism, interpretivism, and postmodernism. Major contributions fall into four areas: South Asian Studies, where he is primarily identified with studies of social organization, the Green Revolution, and Indian religion, especially Sikhism. Notable positions include rejecting scholarly claims for an all-encompassing “caste system” and social determinism and arguing for organizational pluralism and individual instrumental rationality. History of anthropological theory, in which he was the first writer to discuss the topic in terms of long-standing philosophical and epis