A LEADING British social anthropologist and an inspiring teacher from Oxford has died, aged 83.

Rodney Green was born on May 15, 1923 in Kent.

He later changed his surname by deed poll to Needham in 1947 - the same year he married his late wife Ruth Brysz.

He went to school in Haileybury, Hertford, before being commissioned into the 1st Gurkha Rifles in 1942.

As a soldier and officer he was renowned for taking an enormous interest in the men under his command, with whom he learnt to talk to in Gurkhali.

His talent for the language was so great that during a meal with friends in an Indian restaurant in 2001 he surprised his friends by spontaneously singing two Gurkha songs.

At the battle of Kohima in 1944 in the Burma campaign, Prof Needham and his platoon, armed with flame throwers, moved up to attack a Japanese bunker.

But he could not light his weapon and was wounded by enemy gunfire, narrowly escaping death thanks to the bravery of one of his men - at great personal risk.

In later life, Prof Needham made friends with several Japanese veterans from Kohima, several of whom visited him in Oxford.

After the war, he went to Merton College for postgraduate studies in social anthropology from 1948 to 1953.

While his experience as a soldier had a lasting impression on him, it was living and working in Oxford where Prof Needham came into his own. The classical music and painting enthusiast then took a job as a lecturer in social anthropology at Oxford University between 1956 and 1976.

He was widely recognised, along with Sir Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, for bringing structuralism across the Channel and was well respected within his field.

Prof Needham was one of just four British scholars who were awarded fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences in Stanford, California, in 1961.

He later accepted the role of Oxford University's new professor of social anthropology in 1976, succeeding the late Dr Maurice Freedman.

As well as teaching anthropology, Prof Needham was a prolific writer on the subject, having penned several critically acclaimed books and essays.

These include Structure and Sentiment (1962), Against the Tranquillity of Axioms (1985), Exemplars (1985) and Counterpoints (1987).

Prof Needham also put his expert knowledge to good use by translating and editing the books of a series of anthropologist predecessors (Arnold van Gennep, Robert Hertz, A.M. Hocart, among others).

But many of these re-editions did not sell and Prof Needham's students later admitted that they only bought copies so that they could read his lengthy introductions.

After his retirement in 1990, he enjoyed repeated visits to New Mexico and Arizona.

Prof Needham, who died on December 4, is survived by his two sons.