Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University.  Her ethnographic forays are divided between Papua New Guinea and Britain.  Over the last twenty five years she has written on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property, and ‘critique of good practice’, an umbrella rubric for reflections on audit and accountability.  Kinship and gender have woven in and out of work ever since she first began fieldwork in Mt Hagen, which she visited most recently in 2015.  She is probably best known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia.  Her most experimental work is an exercise on the comparative method (Partial connections 1991).