Compare Edmund Leach's structuralism with interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. (Answer in 350 words)

- Compare Edmund Leach's structuralism with interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Leach and Geertz both rejected Radcliffe-Brown's natural science of society, but they went in opposite directions. Leach looked for the logic beneath what people say; Geertz for the meaning within it.
Body
1. Leach's structuralism: in Political Systems of Highland Burma he showed gumsa and gumlao as two states of a single oscillating system, and treated models as deliberate fictions rather than descriptions. Rethinking Anthropology dismissed comparative typology as butterfly collecting and proposed topological transformation instead. He took Levi-Strauss's binary logic into essays such as Genesis as Myth and the study of animal categories and verbal abuse, but empirically: structures for Leach lie in communication and in the analyst's model, not necessarily in a universal unconscious mind.
2. Geertz's interpretive programme: culture is webs of significance the actor himself has spun, so analysis is not a search for law but for meaning. The method is thick description, borrowed from Ryle, and the Balinese cockfight is read as a text about status that Balinese tell themselves. Negara pushed it furthest, reading the Balinese state as theatre rather than administration.
3. Where they meet: both treat culture as public and symbolic rather than as something inside heads; both read ritual and myth as communication rather than as institutions performing social functions; both work through close single-case ethnography of a society they knew intimately, Kachin and Sri Lanka for one, Java, Bali and Morocco for the other; and both deny that societies are natural systems.
4. Where they diverge: the object differs, an unconscious relational code against actors' own significances. The method differs, formal analysis of oppositions and transformations against hermeneutic explication. The evidence differs, since Leach compares cases to derive transformations while Geertz generalises within a case and distrusts comparison. So does the standard of proof, model fit and elegance against the plausibility of a reading, which Crapanzano and Roseberry attacked as unfalsifiable and silent about power.
Conclusion
Leach explains contradiction and structural change, which is what Kachin oscillation demonstrates. Geertz explains why a practice matters to those who perform it, and pays for that with a weak account of change.