Marilyn Strathern

Career

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.

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. 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.

Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea

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". 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.

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.

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. 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.

Reproductive technologies

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.

Honours

The 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).

• 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)

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.

Honorary degrees

• 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)
• Honorary Doctorate, Harvard University (2019)