Nancy Munn

Nancy Munn was an American anthropologist, born in 1931, who earned her doctorate from the Australian National University in 1961 and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1976, where she became the first woman in its anthropology department to hold a tenured professorship. She conducted her principal fieldwork on Gawa, an island in Papua New Guinea's Massim region, and among the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu in central Australia, developing an influential theoretical approach to how societies construct value, meaning and intersubjective space and time through everyday symbolic action. Her books Walbiri Iconography (1973), on Warlpiri graphic design and myth, and The Fame of Gawa (1986), on exchange and value in Melanesian gift economies, are considered foundational texts in the anthropology of symbolism and exchange. She died in 2020.