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.

In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises

In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent conomic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!

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.

If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon.
The challenge is that these new accountabilities are at once obstructive and enabling of good practice. Through accountability the financial and the moral meet in the twinned precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practices. Audit practices have direct consequences, and in the view of many dire ones, for intellectual production.Yet audit is almost impossible to critique in principle - after all, it advances values that academics generally hold dear, such as responsibility, openness of enquiry and widening of access. The volume therefore examines some of the parameters of professional ethics.
Audit Cultures provides an excellent opening for future debate on the 'culture' of management and accountability. It will be an essential resource for students of social anthropology and management.

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.

Procreation is not just about how human beings come into being - it is also about how relationships come into being. Consequently changes in procreative practice will have repercussions for thinking about the formation of such relationships. What are the cultural and anthropological understandings of new reproductive technologies? Using evidence from cross-disciplinary research carried out in 1990-1991 this text tackles debates relating to the concept of kinship. When first published in 1993, "Technologies of Procreation" introduced many new insights into the anthropological issues associated with these new technologies. In what way do they affect society? What are the effects of the embryo's recent treatment as an individual? What does it mean to be "interfering with nature"? What are the consequences of an increase in multiple births? This text aims to bridge the gap between medical technology and cultural values.

Procreation is not just about how human beings come into being - it is also about how relationships come into being. Consequently changes in procreative practice will have repercussions for thinking about the formation of such relationships. What are the cultural and anthropological understandings of new reproductive technologies? Using evidence from cross-disciplinary research carried out in 1990-1991 this work tackles key debates relating to the concept of kinship.
When first published in 1993, Technologies of Procreation introduced many new insights into the anthropological issues associated with these new technologies. In what way do they affect society? What are the effects of the embryo's recent treatment as an individual? What does it mean to be 'interfering with nature'? What are the consequences of an increase in multiple births?
This book successfully bridges the gap between medical technology and cultural values. Now available in paperback, it is a welcome addition to the growing field of medical anthropology. This book will prove invaluable to academics and practitioners alike interested in the current debates surrounding recent technologies in assisted conception.

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 simultaneously trivialize and aggrandize, or in shifts between what pertains to the general or to the particular.
"Shifting Contexts" offers an original critique of current Western thinking: it does not take for granted that "global" and "local" indicate orders of magnitude or scales of importance. Rather, it addresses the techniques by which people shift the contexts of their knowledge and thus endow phenomena with local or global significance. It is an unusual and original collection of essays by seven leading anthropologists, in the company of two specialists in research policy.
This book will appeal to anthropologists and all those working in areas such as the philosophy of social science, cultural studies and comparative sociology.

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 simultaneously trivialize and aggrandize, or in shifts between what pertains to the general or to the particular.
"Shifting Contexts" offers an original critique of current Western thinking: it does not take for granted that "global" and "local" indicate orders of magnitude or scales of importance. Rather, it addresses the techniques by which people shift the contexts of their knowledge and thus endow phenomena with local or global significance. It is an unusual and original collection of essays by seven leading anthropologists, in the company of two specialists in research policy.
This book will appeal to anthropologists and all those working in areas such as the philosophy of social science, cultural studies and comparative sociology.

In 1971 Marilyn Strathern provided what has now become a classic ethnographic text, Women In Between. Significantly, this pioneering contribution to feminist anthropology focuses on gender relations rather than on women alone. Re-issued now, Women in Between examines the attitudes of the Hagen people and analyzes the power of women in their male-dominated system. Strathern cites case studies of marriage arrangements, divorce, and traditional settlement disputes to illustrate women's status in Hagen society.

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.

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.

How can we hold in the same view both cultural or historical constructs and generalities about social existence? Kinship, Law and the Unexpected takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society - the way we use relationships to uncover relationships. Relationality is a phenomenon at once contingent (on certain ways of knowing) and ubiquitous (to social life). The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a question about the extent to which Euro-American kinship is the kinship of a knowledge-based society. The argument takes the reader through current issues in biotechnology, new family formations and legal interventions, and intellectual property debates, to matters of personhood and ownership afforded by material from Melanesia and elsewhere. If we are often surprised by what our relatives do, we may also be surprised by what relations tells us about the world we live in.

How can we hold in the same view both cultural or historical constructs and generalities about social existence? Kinship, Law and the Unexpected takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society - the way we use relationships to uncover relationships. Relationality is a phenomenon at once contingent (on certain ways of knowing) and ubiquitous (to social life). The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a question about the extent to which Euro-American kinship is the kinship of a knowledge-based society. The argument takes the reader through current issues in biotechnology, new family formations and legal interventions, and intellectual property debates, to matters of personhood and ownership afforded by material from Melanesia and elsewhere. If we are often surprised by what our relatives do, we may also be surprised by what relations tells us about the world we live in.

The question of 'equality' between the sexes has long been of long-standing interest among anthropologists. Originally published in 1987, this volume sets out not to dispose of the question, but rather to examine how to debate it. It recognises that inequality as a theoretical and practical concern is rooted in Western ideas and concepts, but also that there are palpable differences in power relations existing between men and women in non-Western societies that are otherwise, in world terms, 'egalitarian', and that these need to be accounted for. This volume comprises ten essays by anthropologists who discuss the nature of social inequality between the sexes in societies they know through first-hand fieldwork, mostly, though not exclusively, in Melanesia. This regional focus gives an important coherence to the volume, and highlights the different analytical strategies that the contributors employ for accounting gender inequality. The volume will be provocative reading for anthropologists.

Questions the proposition that people in western societies universally make a distinction between that which is natural and that which is cultural, and that there is a universal equation between female and nature and male and culture.

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.

Central as kinship has been to the development of British social anthropology, this is an attempt by an anthropologist to situate ideas about English kinship in a cultural context. Based on the Morgan lectures given at the University of Rochester in 1989, After Nature challenges the traditional separation of western kinship studies from the study of society. Marilyn Strathern looks back at mid-century writings on kinship, both within anthropology and outside, and demonstrates continuities between middle-class folk models of kinship and anthropological kinship theory. She also shows how conceptualisations of change have enabled that past world to produce the present one. The values placed upon individual choice, as well as the vanishing of society as a self-evident point of reference, are part of an evolving cultural explicitness about kinship and the naturalness of connections between persons. After Nature is a reflection at a moment when advances in reproductive technology raise questions about the natural basis of kinship relations. The work is intended for advanced students of anthropology, cultural studies, and women's studies.

C A Gregory's Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology. Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique of neoclassical economics and development theory, a critical history of colonial Papua New Guinea, and a comparative ethnography of exchange in Melanesian societies. This new edition includes a new foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern that discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered, debates that have only become more salient in our ever-more-neoliberal and ever-more-globalized era.

Norway, it is claimed, has the most social anthropologists per capita of any country. Well connected and resourced, the discipline – standing apart from the British and American centres of anthropology – is well placed to offer critical reflection. In this book, an inclusive cast, from PhDs to professors, debate the complexities of anthropology as practised in Norway today and in the past. Norwegian anthropologists have long made public engagement a priority – whether Carl Lumholz collecting for museums from 1880; activists protesting with the Sámi in 1980; or in numerous recent contributions to international development. Contributors explore the challenges of remaining socially relevant, of working in an egalitarian society that de-emphasizes difference, and of changing relations to the state, in the context of a turn against multi-culturalism. It is perhaps above all a commitment to time-consuming, long-term fieldwork that provides a shared sense of identity for this admirably diverse discipline.

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern's Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, 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--an overdue spot in feminist history. Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold 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. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern's vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.

In Commons and Borderlands a leading social anthropologist examines early twenty-first- century interests in interdisciplinarity, with particular attention to the conjunction of science and society. Interdisciplinary practice has become well entrenched in any number of scientific disciplines, or disciplines from the humanities or from social science for that matter. This does not deter current rhetoric which sees new opportunities in new combinations of interests. One arresting strand is the promise that in a strong form - transdisciplinarity - 'science' might thereby be brought into 'society'. Marilyn Strathern's questioning of this process addresses the challenge that notions of property ownership pose to the expected flow of knowledge. As is fitting for a consideration of the flow and transformational properties of knowledge, the contents of this collection are knowingly designated 'working papers', left as open, unfinished statements to highlight their future and the work they may still do. Marilyn Strathern is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Contents Preface; Introduction - In crisis mode: a comment on interculturality; Chapter One - Knowledge on its travels: Dispersal and divergence in the make-up of communities; Chapter Two - Commons and borderland; Chapter Three - Who owns academic knowledge?; Chapter Four - Accountability across disciplines; Endnote - Re-describing society. Also of Interest Lawrence Kalinoe and James Leach, Rationales of Ownership: Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea (January 2004 ISBN 0-9545572-0-4/Hardback $54.99 ISBN 0-9545572-1-2/Paperback: $20.99)

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.