Sherry Ortner

Sherry Ortner is an American anthropologist known for her contributions to practice theory and to feminist anthropology. Her 1974 essay Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? proposed that the near-universal subordination of women could be explained by a widespread symbolic association of women with nature and men with culture, an argument that became a foundational and widely debated text in feminist anthropology. Ortner's later work developed practice theory, drawing on sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu to analyze how social structures both shape and are reshaped by the everyday practices of actors, applied in her own ethnographic research on Sherpa communities in Nepal and on class and culture in the United States.