Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern was born to Eric Evans and Joyce Evans in North Wales on 6 March 1941.[http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~srw38/walks/tour/atoz/scientistdatabase.php?ppleid=113 University of Cambridge] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130315153355/http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~srw38/walks/tour/atoz/scientistdatabase.php?ppleid=113 |date=15 March 2013 }}, Marilyn Strathern. Her first formal education experience was at Crofton Lane Primary School, followed by her attendance at Bromley High School. Strathern excelled academically, in part thanks to support and guidance from her mother, a teacher by trade. Following school, she enrolled in Girton College to study Archaeology and Anthropology. She then became a research student there{{cite web|url=https://www.girton.cam.ac.uk/discover-girton/girton-past/past-mistresses|title=Past Mistresses - Girton College|website=Girton College|access-date=1 March 2020}} and went on to obtain her PhD in 1968. She married fellow anthropologist Andrew Strathern in 1964 and they had three children together before ending their marriage.{{citation needed|date=August 2020}}

Strathern has held numerous positions over her career, all of which involved her work with the people of Papua New Guinea and her expertise in feminist anthropology. Her career began in 1970, when she was a Researcher for the New Guinea Research Unit of the Australian National University, followed by a stint from 1976 to 1983 where she was a lecturer at Girton College and then Trinity College from 1984-1985, occasionally making guest lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States, Europe and Australia.[http://blog.aaanet.org/2011/03/31/inside-the-presidents-studio-marilyn-strathern/ American Anthropological Association], 2011. Inside the Presidents Studio - Marilyn Strathern.

She left Cambridge to become Professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester University in 1985. She then returned to Cambridge for the final time in 1993 to take the position of William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology until her retirement in 2008. During this time, she also held the position of Mistress of Girton College from 1998 to October 2009.[http://www.girton.cam.ac.uk/fellows-and-staff/mistress/past-mistresses/ Girton College], 2010 Past Mistresses: Marilyn Strathern[http://www.asao.org/pacific/honoraryf/strathern.htm Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130518031340/http://www.asao.org/pacific/honoraryf/strathern.htm |date=18 May 2013 }} by Mark Maosko and Margaret Jolly, April. Strathern was also co-opted member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics while also chairing the Working Party on "Human bodies: donation for medicine and research" from 2000 to 2006 and 2010 until 2011.[http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/content/past-council-members Nuffield Council on Bioethics] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120617135835/http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/content/past-council-members |date=17 June 2012 }}, 2012. "Past Council Members." London, England.

From her doctoral thesis published in 1972 titled "Women in Between" to her more recent publications, Strathern is constantly challenging the definitions and social constructs of gender "norms". In her piece "Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery" (1981), Strathern notes that "[g]ender imagery is… a symbolic mechanism whereby "collective" and "personal" interests are made to seem to be of different orders".Marilyn Strathern. 1981 "Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery." Pp. 370-391 in Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory,edited by Paul A. Erickson and Liam Murphy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. As editor of a collection of articles in "Dealing with Inequality: Analysing gender relations in Melanesia and beyond", she also brings to the surface the issue of gender "equality" and what it really means, asking if the definitions of the Western world are in fact correct, or if there is still a sense of patriarchal dominance.Marilyn Strathern. 1987 "Dealing with inequality: analyzing gender relations in Melanesia and beyond." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taking this approach when studying in such fields as societies in Papua New Guinea has allowed Strathern to push the boundaries of thought on such topics as reproductive technology, intellectual property, and gender in both Melanesia and the United Kingdom.{{citation needed|date=August 2020}}

Strathern has spent much time among the Hagen of Papua New Guinea. From here she has developed one of the main themes occurring across her work, that the world is ontologically multiple.[http://mikalasklumme.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/marily-strathern-and-partial-connections/ Mikala Hansbol], "Marilyn Strathern, ontological multiplicity and partial connections." Mikalas Klumme: A Researchers Blog.Marilyn Strathern 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: relatives are always a surprise. New York: Cambridge University Press. {{clarify|date=December 2012}} The world is made up of identifiable parts; however, these parts are not separate from one another. She does not address society specifically, but rather looks at socially-constructed multiple realities which exist interdependently with one another.

Strathern's work in the 1990s became the basis for a new subdiscipline in anthropology concerned with new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization. In her two 1992 publications, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late 20th Century and Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies, Strathern argued that existing models of nature and culture were transformed by the explicit use of technology to achieve reproduction. In the co-authored study Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception she and her colleagues proposed that new definitions of kinship and descent would emerge as a result of the expansion of new reproductive technologies. These studies paved the way for what has since come to be known as the new kinship studies.{{cite book|last1=Carsten|first1=Janet|title=After Kinship|date=2004|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=0521661986}}{{cite book|last1=Franklin|first1=Sarah|last2=McKinnon|first2=Susan|title=Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies|date=2001|publisher=Duke University Press|isbn=9780822327967}}

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 Connections, 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.{{clarify|date=December 2012}} Gender, she notes, is defined differently there than it is in the United Kingdom.[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n09/mary-douglas/a-gentle-deconstruction Mary Douglas 1989], "A Gentle Deconstruction." The London Review of Books. London: London Review of Books 11(9): 17-18. 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.

• (with Andrew Strathern) Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (1971)
• Women in Between (1972)
• No Money on Our Skins: Hagen Migrants in Port Moresby (1975) {{ISBN|0-85818-027-8}}
• (ed. with C. MacCormack) Nature, Culture and Gender (1980) {{ISBN|978-0-521-28001-3}}
• Kinship at the Core: an Anthropology of Elmdon, Essex (1981) {{ISBN|0-521-23360-7}}
• The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (1988) {{ISBN|0-520-07202-2}}
• Partial connections. Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield (1991). Re-issued by AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA. (2004)
• After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (1992) {{ISBN|978-0-521-42680-0}}
• Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (1992) {{ISBN|978-0-719-03674-3}}
• (with Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin, Eric Hirsch and Frances Price) Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (1993) {{ISBN|9780415170567}}
• Property, substance and effect. Anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone Press (1999) Collected essays, 1992-98 {{ISBN|0-485-12149-2}}
• Commons and borderlands: working papers on interdisciplinarity, accountability and the flow of knowledge (2004) {{ISBN|0-9545572-2-0}}
• (ed. with Eric Hirsch) Transactions and creations: property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia (2004), Oxford: Berghahn.
• (ed) Audit Cultures. Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. (2000) London: Routledge.
• Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are always a surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005) {{ISBN|0-521-61509-7}}
• Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham: Duke University Press (2020) {{ISBN|978-1-4780-0835-4}}

The [https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/about-us/the-strathern-lecture Strathern Annual Lecture] was established in 2011 to honour the multifaceted achievements of Dame Marilyn Strathern, and invites a prominent anthropologist. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Strathern herself, titled "Gifts Money Cannot Buy".

In 1987, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).{{cite web|title=STRATHERN, Dame Marilyn|url=http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/directory/ord.cfm?member=2414|website=British Academy Fellows|publisher=British Academy|access-date=20 June 2014|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://archive.today/20140622225634/http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/directory/ord.cfm?member=2414|archive-date=22 June 2014}}

• Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996)
• Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to Social Anthropology (2001)
• Rivers Memorial Medal, Royal Anthropologist Inst. (1976)
• Viking Fund Medal, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2003) (last awarded in 1972.)
• Huxley Medal (2004)
• 30th Anniversary Independence Medal, Papua New Guinea (2005)
• Elected to the American Philosophical Society (2016){{Cite web|title=APS Member History|url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Marilyn+Strathern&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced|access-date=2021-02-18|website=search.amphilsoc.org}}

In 2000, artist Daphne Todd was commissioned by Girton College, Cambridge, to paint a portrait of Mistress Marilyn Strathern. This painting, which depicted Marilyn with two heads on separate panels, went on to win Todd the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Ondaatje for Portraiture in 2001.[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=164347 Times Higher Education], 2001 "Capturing a two-headed creature." England:London.

• Honorary Degree Sc. Edinburgh (1993)
• Honorary Degree Sc. Copenhagen (1994)
• Honorary Degree Lit, Oxford (2004)
• Honorary Degree Pol., Helsinki (2006)
• Honorary Degree, Panteion University, Athens (2006)
• Honorary Degree Sc., Durham (2007)
• Honorary Degree Philosophy, University Papua New Guinea (2009)
• Honorary Degree Social Sciences, Belfast (2009)
• Honorary Doctorate, Australian National University (2015){{Cite web|title = ANU honours influential anthropologist| work=ANU |url = http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-honours-influential-anthropologist|access-date = 17 July 2015|date = 17 July 2015}}
• Honorary Doctorate, Harvard University (2019)

{{Reflist}}

{{refbegin}}

• Strathern, M. (1992, 17 May). The decomposition of an event. Retrieved from http://culanth.org/supplementals/403-the-decomposition-of-an-event

{{refend}}

• Shayna Loree Collins, [https://web.archive.org/web/20061105003036/http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/strathern_marilyn.html 'Marilyn Strathern 1941-']
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20061230045805/http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/publications/strathern.html List of Strathern's recent publications]
• [http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/strathern.html 'A Community of Critics' R.A.I. Huxley Memorial Lecture, given at University College, London, 8 December 2004 (film)]
• [https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1130673 interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 6 May 2009 (video)]
• http://culanth.org/supplementals/403-the-decomposition-of-an-event
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20150512210239/http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/GRpapers/strathern.htm Virtual Society? Get Real! Marilyn Strathern paper]
• [http://website2.net/mskinship.html Summary of Marilyn Strathern on English kinship]

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{{succession box |

before=Juliet Jeanne d'Auvergne Campbell|

title= Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge|

years=1998–2009|

after=Susan J. Smith

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{{succession box|title=William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology
at the University of Cambridge|years=1993–2008|before=Ernest Gellner|after=Henrietta Moore}}

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Category:1941 births

Category:Academics of the University of Manchester

Category:Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge

Category:British anthropologists

Category:Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Category:Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge

Category:Fellows of the British Academy

Category:British feminist writers

Category:Living people

Category:Mistresses of Girton College, Cambridge

Category:People educated at Bromley High School

Category:People from Bromley

Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty

Category:British women anthropologists

Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society

Category:William Wyse Professors of Social Anthropology