Knowra Marilyn Strathern Marilyn Strathern Marilyn Strathern is a British social anthropologist whose work transformed the study of kinship, gender, Melanesian societies, and knowledge. Her writing examines how relationships and concepts take shape within particular social worlds.
Relationality : An approach that explains entities through the relations constituting them rather than treating them as independent units. Strathern analyzes persons and social forms as constituted through relations.
The Gender of the Gift : Strathern's 1988 book analyzing gender, exchange, and personhood in Melanesian societies and Western feminist theory. This book presents her best-known account of Melanesian relational personhood.
Mount Hagen : A town and surrounding highland region in Papua New Guinea, known for diverse communities and exchange practices. Strathern conducted fieldwork among the Hagen people in this region.
Annette Weiner : An American anthropologist known for research on gender, exchange, and the Trobriand Islands. Her work on gender and exchange offers a significant comparison with Strathern's Melanesian analyses.
Dividual : A person understood as composed of relations and attributes shared with others, rather than as a wholly bounded individual. Strathern's Melanesian analyses helped make this model influential in anthropology.
Kinship : Social relationships organized through ideas and practices of descent, marriage, parenthood, and relatedness. Her work challenged assumptions that kinship is a universal, natural system.
After Nature : Strathern's 1992 book examining kinship, reproductive technologies, and the nature-culture distinction in Britain. It applies her analysis of kinship to contemporary British debates about reproduction.
Hagen people : The people of the Mount Hagen region in Papua New Guinea, whose social life includes distinctive exchange and kinship practices. Their social worlds informed her analyses of persons, gender, and exchange.
Roy Wagner : An American anthropologist whose work on culture, invention, and symbolism influenced studies of Melanesia. His account of cultural invention intersects with Strathern's analysis of social concepts.
Ethnographic comparison : The systematic comparison of social worlds through ethnographic evidence and explicit analytical concepts. Her work asks how comparison changes when concepts are not assumed to travel unchanged.
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