Marilyn Strathern
British anthropologist who analyzed kinship, gender, and property in Melanesia and Euro-American contexts.
Most quoted
"Anthropology is not just about understanding others; it is also about understanding ourselves through others."
— from Partial Connections, 1992
"The world is not simply 'out there' to be discovered; it is constantly being made and remade."
— from Partial Connections, 1991
"The anthropologist's task is not to explain away difference, but to render it intelligible."
— from Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things, 1999
All quotes by Marilyn Strathern (107)
Knowledge is a commodity in modern academia.
The self is multiple in non-Western contexts.
Exchange creates sociality.
Feminism and anthropology must dialogue.
Inequality is performed through rituals.
Bodies are sites of cultural meaning.
Trade binds distant worlds.
Globalization fragments identities.
Connections are never total.
Anthropologists must decenter the West.
Contexts shift, meanings persist.
Kinship thinks across domains.
Now is a time for rethinking relations.
Europeans project their own categories onto others.
Nature is a cultural invention.
In interviews, I always emphasize relationality.
Life's meaning lies in the connections we forge.
Humor in fieldwork: sometimes the absurd saves you.
Politics of knowledge shape our discipline.
Borders are conceptual as much as physical.
Contemporaries of Marilyn Strathern
Other Anthropologys born within 50 years of Marilyn Strathern (1941).