ABSTRACT
Marilyn Strathern is one of today's best-known and most influential anthropologists, but there is reason to doubt whether her work is always well understood. The virtual absence of a diagrammatic channel of communication in GG is particularly puzzling in that, as one reads this text, images of forms, relations and transformations continually materialize before the mind's eye, and one has the strongest impression that while Strathern was writing, she likewise spent a lot of the time seeing forms, relations, and so on, in her mind's eye. Though 'Melanesia as the site for thinking through the consequences of idealist interpretative strategies is a mythical place, the detailed working-out of Strathern's scheme is undoubtedly carried on in terms of ethnographic particulars derived from the regional literature of Melanesian anthropology. Cross-sex unmediated exchange relations are those to which the origin of objectifications can usually be assigned.
