Focusing on the concepts of scale and proportion, Marilyn Strathern's influential work critiques traditional anthropological approaches to complexity and materiality. By uncovering surprising parallels in thought processes and the portrayal of ambiguous images, she offers a fresh perspective that enriches the field of anthropology. The new preface adds further depth to her unique contributions, inviting readers to reconsider established notions within the discipline.
Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology's key concept of
relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing
how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking
about knowledge-making and kin-making.
In engaging essays, celebrated anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reflects on the complexities of social life. Property, Substance, and Effect draws on Marilyn Strathern’s longstanding interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations are brought into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge that these essays bring together. Twenty years have not diminished the interest in the book’s opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist’s ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Whether one lives in Papua New Guinea or Great Britain, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for reflection—and for the kind of lateral reflection afforded through the “ethnographic effect.”
After Nature is a timely account of fundamental constructs in English kinship at a moment when advances in reproductive technologies are raising questions about the natural basis of kinship relations.
Focusing on the complexities of contemporary society, a prominent social anthropologist explores the concept of commons and borderlands in the early twenty-first century. The book delves into how communities navigate shared resources and cultural boundaries, highlighting the interplay between social practices and environmental challenges. Through rich ethnographic studies, it reveals the dynamics of cooperation, conflict, and resilience among diverse groups, offering insights into the future of communal living and resource management in an increasingly interconnected world.
In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness--and with equal good humor--the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes The Gender of the Gift one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications. In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness--and with equal good humor--the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes The Gender of the Gift one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.
Exploring the complexities of sex and gender, this work delves into the cultural codes surrounding femininity and the mythology of sex. Originally intended for a general audience in the 1970s, it offers unique insights into gender dynamics, prefiguring concepts later articulated by Judith Butler. After being shelved for over forty years due to a publisher's closure, this feminist classic highlights Strathern's engagement with key feminist thinkers and critiques various fields, enhancing our understanding of late twentieth-century feminist discourse.
Exploring the interplay between relationships and knowledge, the book delves into how Euro-American kinship reflects a knowledge-based society since the scientific revolution. It addresses contemporary issues such as biotechnology, evolving family structures, legal interventions, and intellectual property debates. By drawing on examples from Melanesia and beyond, it examines themes of personhood and ownership, highlighting the complexities of social relations in anthropological studies.
Categories of analysis in the social sciences include the binary pair 'nature' and 'culture', as defined by western societies. Anthropologists have often imputed these categories to the world-views of non-western people and the construct has acquired the status of a universal. It has been further argued that culture (that which is regulated by human thought and technology) is universally valued as being superior to nature (the unregulated); and that female is universally associated with nature (and is therefore inferior and to be dominated) and male with culture. The essays in this volume question these propositions. They examine the assumptions behind them analytically and historically, and present ethnographic evidence to show that the dichotomy between nature and culture, and its association with a contrast between the sexes, is a particularity of western thought. The book is a commentary on the way anthropologists working within the western tradition have projected their own ideas on to the thought systems of other peoples. Its form is largely anthropological, but it will have a wide appeal within the social sciences and the humanities, especially among those interested in structuralist thought and women's studies.
