Marilyn Strathern

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Dame Ann Marilyn Strathern, DBE MA, PhD, FBA, (born 6 March 1941) is a British anthropologist, currently William Wyse Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge University and Mistress 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.

Strathern was a visiting professor at 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 the University of Cambridge. She is currently the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and has been Mistress of Girton College since 1998.

Strathern has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and the United Kingdom: 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, the individual, relation, property, substance, effect, nature, culture and so on. She has also written about new reproductive technologies and intellectual property law and her most recent work focuses on the complexities of transparency, accountability, and audit, especially within the academy.

[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) ISBN 0520072022
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 ISBN 0485121492
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) ISBN 0521615097