Marilyn Strathern - Selected Publications

Selected Publications

Strathern is the author of numerous publications, including 44 single-authored journal articles, 57 book chapters, and over 15 books written alone or with another author. Her topics vary from Melanesian culture to the culture of the United Kingdom. Strathern’s publications on the Melanesian culture focus on gender relations, legal anthropology and feminist scholarship, while her publications on the culture of the United Kingdom lean towards kinship, audit culture, reproductive and genetic technologies. The book she enjoyed writing the most, according to an interview with the American Anthropological Association in 2011, was Partial Connection, written in 1991. Her most famous book, however, is The Gender of Gift published in 1988.

In The Gender of Gift, she uses a feminist approach in a new way to argue that Papuan women are not being exploited, but rather the definition is different. Gender, she notes, is defined differently there than it is in the United Kingdom. For Papuans, the body is made up of many gendered parts which all flow together, much like Strathern's notion of the ontologically multiple world. It places gender as more of an abstract notion and something that is appropriate in certain contexts rather than separate from them. Strathern also brings to the surface the fact that theories are dominating themselves and while she knows as an anthropologist, she cannot separate herself from them, she does state that she offers a “narrative” over an analysis of the situation.