Noted anthropologist Marilyn Strathern will speak on campus, April 7

Strathern

By Franklin Crawford

Dame Marilyn Strathern, the Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England, will present a University Lecture titled "Self-Ownership and Other Ownership: An Anthropological Comment From the Pacific," Wednesday, April 7, at 4:30 p.m. in Room G90 of Myron Taylor Hall at Cornell. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Strathern is renowned for her groundbreaking work on issues of gender, society, kinship, new reproductive technologies, and intellectual property rights. She is widely published and in great demand as a lecturer.

"Marilyn Strathern is by any account one of the foremost anthropologists of her generation," said Annelise Riles, Cornell professor of law and anthropology and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. "Her most recent work, [based] on her earlier work in the Pacific as well as her own involvement in current legal reforms there, rethinks Anglo-American property law in profoundly challenging ways."

Riles said Strathern's University Lecture will address legal and cultural debates about "property in persons -- the commodification of body parts and debates over whether human embryos should be treated as 'property' -- from the standpoint of Melanesian notions of person and property, and feminist theory."

Strathern has conducted extensive field research in Papua, New Guinea, where she studied Melanesian customs ranging from dispute settlement to gender. She published Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen and Women in Between in 1972. Her 1988 book, The Gender of the Gift, is regarded as a classic. More recently, Strathern has written extensively about Western concepts of property, personhood and gender. She was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1976. In 2003 she received the Wenner Gren Institute's Viking Medal, awarded to an exceptional anthropologist for lifetime achievement.

While on campus Strathern also will meet with anthropology students who have been studying a wide selection of her works this semester, said Riles.

The designation of University Lecturer at Cornell is given to speakers whose subjects have wide-ranging appeal. Guest speakers are selected by a University Lectures Committee composed of faculty members and students.

Strathern's lecture is co-sponsored by the Clarke Program and Cornell's Social Sciences Seminar. For more information, contact Riles at 255-2330 or by e-mail at ar254@cornell.edu.