Books by Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology's key concept of relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking about knowledge-making and kin-making.

Written in the early 1970s, amidst widespread debate over the origins and causes of women's subordination, Marilyn Strathern's exploration of the stubborn paradox of sex and gender was intended as a popular book for a general audience. Had it been published, as planned, in 1974, Strathern's analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code, and sex as a defining mythology, would have offered an unprecedented set of insights into the symbolic leakage later defined by Judith Butler as 'gender trouble'. But after her publisher unexpectedly folded, this extraordinary manuscript went into storage - where it remained for more than four decades. The publication of this missing feminist classic enhances both our understanding of the work of one world's most influential anthropologists, and the enduring legacies of late twentieth century feminist thought. Strathern's direct engagements with many of the most influential feminist authors of the early 1970s, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley and Kate Millett, are as vivid and insightful as are her critical readings of sociobology, romantic literature and structuralist anthropology. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold and sweeping conclusion in which she argues we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our peril, Marilyn Strathern's Before and After Gender remains uncomfortably contemporary in its challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex.

Challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials, focusing on a problem normally thought of as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. This book reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images.

This ethnographic text examines the attitudes of the Hagen people and analyses the power of women in their male-dominated system. It cites case studies of marriage arrangements, divorce and traditional settlement disputes to illustrate women's status in Hagen society.

This book takes the idea of 'village' not for granted, but as a dogma to be accounted for.

With contributions from leading academics from a range of study areas such as anthropology, politics and management studies, this volume is opening up a new area of research to anthropologists and corporations alike.

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.