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.

This book 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 or proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with a minute attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to conserve a sense of proportion between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate. One concerns the writing of anthropology and the representation of societies where all lives seem complex, the other the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where 'too much' seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book, Melanesian anthropology, exemplifies the levels and contexts through which Melanesianists have managed the complexity of their own accounts while, at the same time, unfolding an indigenous commentary on proportion and the mixing of forms. She reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of images that remain to be explained. In doing so, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus. Partial Connections is volume 3 in the Association for Social Anthropology of Oceania Special Publications series.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Do audit cultures deliver greater responsibility, or do they stifle creative thought?We are all increasingly subjected to auditing, and alongside that, subject to accountability for our behaviour and actions. Audit cultures pervade in the workplace, our governmental and public institutions as well as academia...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study draws on the author's long standing interest in the reification of social relations. Its rationale lies in the question about property, ownership and knowledge which these essays bring together. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for ownership...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Technologies of Procreation bridges the gap between medical technology and cultural values. It looks at the ways in which the 'technologies of procreation' affect society from an anthropological perspective. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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 sumultaneously trivialise and aggrandise or in shifts between what pertains to the general or to the particular...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Central as kinship has been to the development of British social anthropology, this is the first attempt by an anthropologist to situate ideas about English kinship in a cultural context. Marilyn Strathern challenges the traditional separation of Western kinship studies from the study of the wider society...read more

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. (view table of contents)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Categories of analysis in the social sciences include the binary pair 'nature' and 'culture', as defined by western societies. Anthropologists have often imputed these categories to the world-views of non-western people and the construct has acquired the status of a universal...read more