Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern
Doctor of Social Science
Queen’s University Belfast, 7 July 2009
Dame Marilyn Strathern is one of the most distinguished anthropologists worldwide,
and one of the most original thinkers of her generation. Her research covers a vast
range of topics: gender, kinship, relatedness and personhood; exchange and theories
of action; law and the judiciary; intellectual and cultural property rights; copyright
law; audit and accountability; reproductive technology; ethics and bioethics;
consumer culture; and comparative issues in knowledge. Her regional expertise
includes Britain as well as Papua New Guinea.
These broad research interests identify Dame Marilyn as quintessentially an
anthropologist. But right from the beginning of her career she questioned all
propositions used to describe society, in radical works that destabilised much of the
conceptual basis of her discipline.
Modernist anthropology saw itself as the social science that described other worlds and
understood its project as the discovery of the ordinary in alien strangeness – in ‘making
sense’ of others. It created a context in which the alien culture could be seen as ‘natural’,
even logical. This was the ethnographic monograph, the work of the intensive fieldworker
who had ‘been there’. The authority of the lone fieldworker as an interpreter stemmed from
this claim, that she or he was describing the people’s own experience, their own
understanding of how their culture worked, as seen from their social practices and through
their own eyes. But the claim that anthropologists can evoke this distanced world, by the
use of concepts that already had cultural meaning in their own social world, was fast
becoming intellectually indefensible.
Already as a young fieldworker in the Papua New Guinea Highlands in the 1960s,
Marilyn Strathern found that the descriptive terms she had at her disposal – male and
female, nature and culture, society and the individual – could not capture the reality
she encountered in the field. Here people were composed of social relationships to a
greater extent than in the Western world – they were relational persons rather than
individuals. Her innovatory perspectives on gender and society, begun in her first
book, Women in Between, culminated in the groundbreaking Gender of the Gift, a
book of compelling ethnographic synthesis and theoretical analysis. It provided new
conceptual vocabulary, and ways of thinking, about society and the person, with
enduring influence on anthropological theory. Her subsequent research and
publications, mentioned briefly in this citation, indicate the diversification of her
prodigious intellectual engagement.
Dame Marilyn took her first degree in 1963 at Cambridge. A PhD in Social
Anthropology followed in 1968. After a fellowship at the Australian National
University and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Berkeley, she took up the
chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She had already served
a term as honorary editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In
1993 she returned to Cambridge as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology
and then Mistress of Girton College. Dame Marilyn is the middle link in three
generations of Girtonians in her family.
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Her portrait as Mistress of Girton, painted by Daphne Todd, was awarded the 2001
Ondaatje Prize as ‘the most distinguished portrait of the year’, and hung in the
National Portrait Gallery before moving to Girton. It shows her with two heads, one
deep in contemplation, the other absorbed in some writing. Dame Marilyn, in a quest
to find deeper meaning in this representation, drew parallels with headhunters, for
whom, she informed the alarmed painter, the severed head represented the hunter
rather than the victim. This was a metonymic use of the head as a trophy. Despite this
possible explanation, the pose, though not the doubling of heads, was characteristic.
Dame Marilyn was simply doing two things at the same time. As well she might,
given the prodigious amount of her research and publications.
Unfortunately there is no equally snappy way to capture the essence of Dame
Marilyn’s work in words, and any attempt to summarise her achievements must
remain a daunting task. I can touch on only a fraction. A very important aspect is her
style, and the way she makes connections through it.
Dame Marilyn writes in a way that seduces, not only promising meaning but also making
that meaning important and beautiful. Her confidence draws you in, as if she were speaking
directly to you and she has full confidence in your ability to understand and agree with
what she is saying. There is nothing lineal about the transmission of ideas, she argues, and
imagines her own work as ‘contextualized and recontextualized by others’ in a cycle that
returns authorship to the generality which was its source. Her work, while bearing a
distinctive stamp, can be seen as the container of a certain intellectual Zeitgeist. It
incorporates earlier scholarship, but made visible in a different form. In other words, it’s
contextualised.
Dame Marilyn is the recipient of many honours worldwide. They include the Rivers
Memorial Medal, the Viking Fund Medal for outstanding intellectual leadership, and
the Huxley Memorial Medal for lifetime achievement. In 2005 she was awarded the
30th Anniversary of Independence Medal from Papua New Guinea. She is a Fellow of
the British Academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of
Arts and Social Sciences. In recognition of her services to anthropology, in 2001 she
was created DBE (Dame Commander of the British Empire). Her fellow
anthropologists responded by electing her lifetime President of their professional
association, the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the
Commonwealth – a post previously held by Sir Raymond Firth.
Her prestigious lectures attest to the interdisciplinary character of her work. They
include the Ernest Jones Lecture at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, the Rothschild
Lecture in History of Science at Harvard, the Macquarie Bank Lecture at the Julius
Stone Institute of Jurisprudence in Sydney, the William Fagg Memorial Lecture at the
British Museum, the Huxley Memorial Lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute,
and the Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British Academy. In a less exalted way, she was
invited to Queen’s as Distinguished Speaker in May 2000.
Dame Marilyn also holds honorary degrees from the universities of Edinburgh (1993),
Copenhagen (1994), Oxford (2004), Helsinki (2006), Panteion (Athens, 2006),
Durham (2007), and the University of Papua New Guinea (2009). In addition, she has
been the recipient of several major research awards. Following her membership of the
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Nuffield Council of Bioethics, she is now collaborating on a major ESRC project,
which examines international science collaborations and their ethical governance.
If anthropology is no longer seen as the study of distant societies with little relevance
to the Western world, but instead appreciated as a discipline that engages topics of
concern for everyone, everywhere in the world, Dame Marilyn must take due credit
for her contribution to this change. She has been at the forefront of the
interdisciplinary movement in the humanities. But her own humanity, above all,
inspires the affection in which she is held, an affection which is made visible in the
many events which her colleagues and students have organised in her honour. These
events are also intended to develop the further implications of her work – or, as Dame
Marilyn might put it, to return it to its source.
Vice-Chancellor of the University, with the authority of the Senate, I ask you to confer on
Marilyn Strathern the degree of Doctor of Social Science, honoris causa.
Citation by Professor Lisette Josephides
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