Science Quote by Edmund Leach

Violence, Edmund Leach suggests, isn’t a primitive glitch in human nature so much as a bureaucratic habit of mind: the endless, anxious work of sorting people into “us” and “not us.” The sting of the line is its banality. He doesn’t blame monsters or ideologies first; he blames boundaries - the everyday classifications that feel like common sense until they harden into permission slips for cruelty.

Leach was an anthropologist in an era when “race,” “tribe,” and “tradition” were being interrogated as social constructions rather than fixed facts. Read in that mid-20th-century context - after world war, amid decolonization and Cold War polarization - his claim lands as both diagnosis and warning: modern violence often arrives dressed as administration. Once the category is in place, the moral math changes. Harm becomes “security,” conquest becomes “civilizing,” exclusion becomes “order.”

The subtext is uncomfortable because it implicates ordinary identity maintenance. “Men who are like us” is not a description; it’s a decision, constantly renegotiated. Leach points to the way similarity is selectively emphasized inside the group (we’re all the same here) while difference is exaggerated outside it (they’re nothing like us). That asymmetry is what makes the barrier useful: it reduces the messy individuality of other people into a manageable type.

His intent isn’t pacifist sentimentality; it’s an argument about mechanisms. If violence is produced by boundary-making, then any politics built on purity, tradition, or “real” belonging is playing with matches - even when it swears it’s only protecting home.