Marilyn Strathern is a British anthropologist well known for her work on such issues as gender, society, kinship, new reproductive technologies, and intellectual property rights. Much of her fieldwork has been done in Papua New Guinea. She has published numerous articles and books, and has lectured at many different locations.
Strathern was born Ann Marilyn Evans on March 6, 1941 to Eric Charles Evans and Joyce Florence Evans. She attended Bromley High School, then went on to Girton College in Cambridge where she earned her Bachelors Degree, Masters Degree, and her Ph.D. in Anthropology. Strathern says she first became interested in the field of Anthropology by reading Rousseau in a school history class, and by going off visit archaeological sites in southern Britain on weekends.
In 1963, she married fellow anthropologist Andrew Jamieson Strathern. The Stratherns did fieldwork together, and much of her early work was influenced by his style. They had three children, twin sons and one daughter, before their marriage dissolved in 1986.
In the early years of her anthropological career, Strathern made several trips to Papua, New Guinea and spent over twenty-three months doing fieldwork there on topics such as self-decoration, dispute settlement, and gender differences. In 1971, she published Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen and a year later she wrote Women in Between. In 1976, Strathern was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.
During the 1980's, Strathern published Kinship at the Core: an Anthropology of Elmdon, Essex and The Gender of the Gift. She edited Dealing with Inequality, and coedited Nature, Culture and Gender. From 1983 to 1984, Strathern was a member of a study group entitled "Gender Relations in the Southwestern Pacific: Ideology, Politics, and Production" at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. The following year, she was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1985, Strathern was appointed Chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Manchester (a title she held until 1993). The 1990's saw the publication of five books by Strathern entitled Partial Connections, After Nature, Reproducing the Future, Technologies of Procreation (jointly with Jeanette Edwards, Frances Price, Sarah Franklin, and Eric Hirsch), and Property, Substance, and Effect. She also edited Big Men and Great Men in Melanesia and Shifting Contexts.
In 1995, Strathern returned to Papua for two months of fieldwork on compensation. In 1996, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences made her an Honorary Foreign Member. At the same time she was also serving as a member of EC Biomedical Concerted Action Network on Reproductive Choice and Fertility at University of Manchester. In 1997 and 1998, she was Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Currently, Ms. Strathern is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (a position she's held since 1985) and Mistress of Girton College (since 1998). Her latest area of interest and study regards intellectual property issues.
References:
Strathern, Marilyn. Email correspondence. 2 March 2001- 5 March 2001
Who's Who. London: A&C Black, 2001. Borofsky, Robert Ed.
"Assessing Cultural Anthropology". New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994
Written by Shayna Loree Collins