ABSTRACT
Marilyn Strathern is currently William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is a distinguished ethnographer of both the New Guinea Highlands and her native England. Whether she treats New Guinea or England, sexual or sociocultural reproduction, gender or kinship, symbols or roles, Strathern is a trenchant "cultural critic" and is a critic whose approach may well have less in common with that of her colleagues in Great Britain than with that of her colleagues in the United States. Strathern is neither a Durkheimian nor a neo-Durkheimian. Her ultimate data are neither structural nor functional. They are instead the significant bits and pieces of what Clifford Geertz has, following Bronislaw Malinowski, called "the native's point of view." A feminist who rejects every essentializing of either the male or the female, a sociologist who rejects every naturalization of society, Strathern may for all her judicious reserve be closest not even to her colleagues in the United States but rather to Nietzsche. She is not a typical "cultural relativist"; but with Nietzsche—for that matter, with the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics—she seems to agree that human perspectives, human opinions, must always be the ultimate test of any anthropology, of any genuinely "human" science. Such, in any event, is the provisional axiom from which Strathern seems to proceed in the excerpt that follows: a critique at once of the misplaced concreteness and of the misplaced universality of the presumptions, of the "models" that too many of her fellow fieldworkers impose upon relationships between men and women, males and females, male Highlanders and female Highlanders.
