ABSTRACT
The Gender of the Gift is in microcosm a disquisition on the nature, character, purpose and scope of anthropology. It most definitely laid the ground for much of the theoretical work done on gender in social anthropology from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and reinvigorated a debate on theories of the person and social agency. This chapter explores one of the major directions these developments have taken and discuss some of the continuities and discontinuities between recent scholarship and M. Strathera's original insights. For example, Strathern talks of multiple persons and multiple genders but says very little about how that affects the individual experience of being gendered. The chapter suggests that 'weak' forms of multiplicity in anthropological analysis often produce elaborate and sophisticated ethnography, but they are compromised by a failure to develop an adequate theory of the subject.
