ABSTRACT
The apology is intended to mollify the exasperation caused by an analytical language that immortalizes the ethnographic present. The Gender of the Gift remains one of the most significant achievements to have emerged from Melanesian ethnography, and it continues to inspire anthropological theorization about gender, personhood, property and ownership, anthropology of knowledge and the nature of relationality which has now moved far beyond its original ethnographic enclave. This chapter begins by invoking a particular imagery as a metaphor to capture the curl and vorticity of Marilyn Strathern's analytical dynamism. Anthropology might therefore be able to see how assumptions from other societies or cultures, look like if it abandons the theoretical habit of thinking in terms of concept of 'society'. The axis of 'anthropology/feminism' not only highlights a critique original to Western culture but also provides a critical distance to the analysis as a whole. The idea of epochal shifts implicates how historical climates of thought precipitate into ethical and theoretical stances.
