Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern is a British social anthropologist known for her ethnographic work in Papua New Guinea and for her influential critique of how Western social theory imposes its own categories onto other societies' understandings of persons and relations. In The Gender of the Gift (1988) she argued that Melanesian societies do not organize gender and exchange around the same individualist, possessive assumptions built into Western concepts of gift and commodity, proposing the idea of the dividual, a person understood as constituted by, rather than opposed to, their relations with others, in contrast to the Western individual. Strathern later extended this relational analysis to Western kinship itself, examining how new reproductive technologies were reshaping ideas of biological and social parenthood, and her work became a central reference point in anthropological theories of personhood, gender, and kinship.