Marilyn Strathern Ordine dei libri

In engaging essays, celebrated anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reflects on the complexities of social life. Property, Substance, and Effect draws on Marilyn Strathern’s longstanding interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations are brought into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge that these essays bring together. Twenty years have not diminished the interest in the book’s opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist’s ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Whether one lives in Papua New Guinea or Great Britain, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for reflection—and for the kind of lateral reflection afforded through the “ethnographic effect.”

Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology's key concept of relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking about knowledge-making and kin-making.

Exploring the complexities of sex and gender, this work delves into the cultural codes surrounding femininity and the mythology of sex. Originally intended for a general audience in the 1970s, it offers unique insights into gender dynamics, prefiguring concepts later articulated by Judith Butler. After being shelved for over forty years due to a publisher's closure, this feminist classic highlights Strathern's engagement with key feminist thinkers and critiques various fields, enhancing our understanding of late twentieth-century feminist discourse.

In the fifteenth century, the princess Chokyi Dronma was told by the leading spiritual masters of her time that she was the embodiment of the ancient Indian tantric deity Vajravarahi, known in Tibetan as Dorje Phagmo, the Thunderbolt Female Pig. After suffering a great personal tragedy, Chokyi Dronma renounced her royal status to become a nun, and, in turn, the tantric consort of three outstanding religious masters of her era. After her death, Chokyi Dronma's masters and disciples recognized a young girl as her reincarnation, the first in a long, powerful, and influential female lineage. Today, the twelfth Samding Dorje Phagmo leads the Samding monastery and is a high government cadre in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Hildegard Diemberger builds her book around the translation of the first biography of Chokyi Dronma recorded by her disciples in the wake of her death. The account reveals an extraordinary phenomenon: although it had been believed that women in Tibet were not allowed to obtain full ordination equivalent to monks, Chokyi Dronma not only persuaded one of the highest spiritual teachers of her era to give her full ordination but also established orders for other women practitioners and became so revered that she was officially recognized as one of two principal spiritual heirs to her main master. Diemberger offers a number of theoretical arguments about the importance of reincarnation in Tibetan society and religion, the role of biographies in establishing a lineage, the necessity for religious teachers to navigate complex networks of political and financial patronage, the cultural and social innovation linked to the revival of ancient Buddhist civilizations, and the role of women in Buddhism. Four introductory, stage-setting chapters precede the biography, and four concluding chapters discuss the establishment of the reincarnation lineage and the role of the current incarnation under the peculiarly contradictory communist system.

Exploring the intersection of relationships and knowledge, the author examines how Euro-American kinship reflects the structures of a knowledge-based society. The discussion spans from the scientific revolution to contemporary challenges in biotechnology, family dynamics, and legal frameworks. It also delves into intellectual property issues and concepts of personhood and ownership, drawing on examples from Melanesia and beyond to illustrate these complex themes.

Challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials, focusing on a problem normally thought of as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. This book reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images.

Focusing on the complexities of contemporary society, a prominent social anthropologist explores the concept of commons and borderlands in the early twenty-first century. The book delves into how communities navigate shared resources and cultural boundaries, highlighting the interplay between social practices and environmental challenges. Through rich ethnographic studies, it reveals the dynamics of cooperation, conflict, and resilience among diverse groups, offering insights into the future of communal living and resource management in an increasingly interconnected world.

Exploring the pervasive influence of accountability practices, this book highlights how various political regimes shape cultural dynamics within academia. Featuring insights from twelve social anthropologists across Europe and the Commonwealth, it examines the ongoing evolution of culture in response to research and teaching assessments. The contributors reveal the complexities and controversies surrounding this phenomenon, making it a significant study for understanding contemporary academic culture.

After Nature is a timely account of fundamental constructs in English kinship at a moment when advances in reproductive technologies are raising questions about the natural basis of kinship relations.