Marilyn Strathern

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Dame Marilyn Strathern, DBE (born 6 March 1941) is a British anthropologist, currently William Wyse Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge University and Head of Girton College, Cambridge.

[edit] Biography

Born Ann Marilyn Evans to Eric Charles Evans and Joyce Florence Evans, Strathern was educated at Bromley High School and at Girton College, Cambridge. In 1963 she married another anthropologist, Andrew Strathern, though the marriage was later dissolved.

Strathen has visited the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1985 to 1993 she was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, before returning to take a chair at Cambridge. She has been Headmistress of Girton College since 1998.

Marilyn Strathern's fieldwork was undertaken in Papua New Guinea: her anthropological work has used Melanesian conceptions, as well as feminist insights, to question the universality of some Western categories often taken to be fundamental: society, individuals, relation, property, substance, effect, nature, culture and so on.

[edit] Work

Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (1971)
Women in Between (1972)
Kinship at the Core: an Anthropology of Elmdon, Essex (1981) ISBN 0521233607
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (1988)
After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (1992) ISBN 978-0-521-42680-0
Property, substance and effect. Anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone Press (1999) Collected essays, 1992-98
Commons and borderlands: working papers on interdisciplinarity, accountability and the flow of knowledge (2004) ISBN 0954557220
Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are often a surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005)