Judith Butler

Marilyn Strathern

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Strathern's book was intended as an analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work, accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler. Strathern engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building toward a conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society.

Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Before and After Gender

Nesta coletânea de 15 dos artigos mais influentes da antropóloga britânica Marilyn Strathern, publicados entre 1980 e 2004, a autora de O gênero da dádiva aborda temas diversos como categorias etnográficas de doméstico e selvagem, gênero, parentesco, economias da dádiva versus economia da mercadoria, noção de pessoa, evento histórico, cultura material, técnicas de fertilização, direitos de propriedade intelectual, além de empreender constantemente uma reflexão sobre a própria antropologia. Com uma linguagem radical e uma abordagem teórica de ponta apoiada em seu trabalho de campo na Melanésia, Strathern adota a descrição – em detrimento da explicação e da representação – como forma de compreender outro pensamento e outra vida possível.

O efeito etnográfico e outros ensaios

Maurice Godelier

The societies of Melanesia have been a constant stimulus to anthropological theory. In this collection of essays, anthropologists who have worked in all parts of the Melanesian region of the Pacific bring their expertise to bear on a single theoretical issue. This is a hypothesis formulated by Maurice Godelier concerning the relationship between power, kinship and wealth. Although tightly focused on Godelier's work, the book opens up a major enquiry into the constitution of society in a part of the world where men of prominence come to personify the nature of power. 'Big men', entrepreneurs of exchanges, and 'great men', who flourish in societies characterised by restricted exchanges and ritual complexity, appear to belong to quite different systems. This book considers how substantial the difference between them really is.

Personifications of Power in Melanesia

Big Men and Great Men

The concept of relation holds a privileged place in how anthropologists think and write about the social and cultural lives they study. In Relations, eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of this key concept and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world. Exploring relation's changing articulations and meanings over the past three centuries, Strathern shows how the historical idiosyncrasy of using an epistemological term for kinspersons (“relatives”) was bound up with evolving ideas about knowledge-making and kin-making. She draws on philosophical debates about relation—such as Leibniz's reaction to Locke—and what became its definitive place in anthropological exposition, elucidating the underlying assumptions and conventions of its use. She also calls for scholars in anthropology and beyond to take up the limitations of Western relational thinking, especially against the background of present ecological crises and interest in multispecies relations. In weaving together analyses of kin-making and knowledge-making, Strathern opens up new ways of thinking about the contours of epistemic and relational possibilities while questioning the limits and potential of ethnographic methods.

An Anthropological Account

Relations

Updated with a new Preface, this seminal work challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with close attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to establish proportionality between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate: The difficulties inherent in anthropologically representing complex societies, and the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where 'too much' seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book emphasizes the context through which Melanesianists have managed the complexity of their own accounts, while at the same time unfolding a commentary on perception and the mixing of indigenous forms. Revealing unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus. This book was originally published under the sponsorship of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.

Partial Connections

In the village of Elmdon in north-west Essex, members of certain families are distinguished from other residents as being `real Elmdon'. Through a detailed ethnography of the structure of the village, and the interrelationships between its various families, work patterns and community activities, Marilyn Strathern provides an understanding of the characteristics of those who most vehemently claim to be 'real' village people. Yet this account goes far beyond ethnographic description. Its inspiration lies with Dr Audrey Richards, a distinguished anthropologist whose most substantial contribution has been in Africa, while Dr Strathern herself has had many years' field experience in Papua New Guinea. As 'outsiders' they bring a fresh approach to English village studies. The book takes the idea of 'village' not for granted, but as a dogma to be accounted for. Dr Strathern argues that in order to appreciate why the village should be so salient a reference point in people's self-classifications, it is necessary to understand what the village stands for in their ideas of the world.

An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-west Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties

Kinship at the Core

Do audit cultures deliver greater responsibility, or do they stifle creative thought? We are all increasingly subjected to auditing, and alongside that, subject to accountability for our behaviour and actions. Audit cultures pervade in the workplace, our governmental and public institutions as well as academia. However, audit practices themselves have consequences, beneficial and detrimental, that often go unexamined. This book examines how pervasive practices of accountability are, the political and cultural conditions under which accountability flourishes and the consequences of their application. Twelve social anthropologists look at this influential and controversial phenomenon, and map out the effects around Europe and the Commonwealth, as well as in contexts such as the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and Academic institutions. The result provides an excellent insight into auditing and its dependence on precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practice. This point of convergence between these moral and financial priorities provides an excellent opening for debate on the culture of management and accountability.

Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy

Audit Cultures

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.

Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia

The Gender of the Gift

To suppose anthropological analysis can shift between global and local perspectives may well imply that the two co-exist as broader and narrower horizons or contexts of knowledge. The proof for this can be found in ethnographic accounts where contrasts are repeatedly drawn between the encompassing realm and everyday life or in value systems which sumultaneously trivialise and aggrandise or in shifts between what pertains to the general or to the particular.

Shifting Contexts

Carol MacCormack

Nature, Culture and Gender

Examines Euro-American kinship as the kinship of a specifically knowledge-based society.

Relatives are Always a Surprise

Kinship, Law and the Unexpected

These essays, written at the time when the Bill for Human Fertilization and Embryology Act (1990) was going through Parliament, touch on the British debate (on in vitro fertilization, gamete donation and maternal surrogacy) from an anthropological perspective. The implications of the medical developments that lay behind the Act are world-wide and these new procreative possibilities formulate new possibilities for thinking about kinship. The essays are informed by recent re-thinking of models of kinship in Melanesia.

Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies

Reproducing the Future

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.

Marilyn Strathern

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