Sherry Ortner
Sherry Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist whose work spans practice theory, gender, Sherpa society, and the anthropology of film.
Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?: Sherry Ortner’s 1972 essay proposing that women’s association with nature helps explain their subordination across societies. This influential essay made gender hierarchy a central problem in Ortner’s early work.
Practice Theory: An approach explaining social life through situated actions that reproduce or transform structures and meanings. Ortner helped establish practice theory as a way to link agency with structure.
Sherpa People: An ethnic group of the Himalayan region, especially Nepal, with a long history of mountain livelihoods and Buddhist traditions. Ortner’s ethnographic research among Sherpas anchors her analyses of social change and cultural meaning.
Feminist Anthropology: Anthropological scholarship examining gender, power, and the production of knowledge through feminist perspectives. Ortner’s writing helped shape debates about gender hierarchy and anthropological explanation.
Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties: Sherry Ortner’s 1984 review essay tracing shifts in anthropological theory from structuralism toward practice and agency. It maps the theoretical landscape in which Ortner developed her account of practice.
Agency: The capacity to act intentionally and affect social relations, outcomes, or structures. Ortner treats agency as culturally shaped and entangled with power, not simply individual freedom.
Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherry Ortner’s 1999 ethnography examining Sherpa history, mountaineering, and changing relations with outsiders. The book develops her long-running study of Sherpa society through Himalayan mountaineering.
Nature–Culture Divide: A conceptual opposition that distinguishes natural processes from culturally organized human life. Her early gender argument examines how the association of women with nature can support subordination.
Making Gender: Sherry Ortner’s 1996 book examining gender relations through ethnographic cases and feminist theory. The book extends her analysis of gender beyond the nature–culture argument.
Pierre Bourdieu: A French sociologist and anthropologist known for concepts including habitus, field, and symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s account of practice was one of the major theories Ortner brought into anthropological debate.