A Gentle Deconstruction

Mary Douglas

  • The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia by Marilyn Strathern
    University of California Press, 422 pp, $40.00, December 1988, ISBN 0 520 06423 2

‘What has been happening in anthropology since Margaret Mead died?’ This book would have helped me to answer that casual question. A study of Melanesian culture, it does refer to Mead’s field reports from New Guinea and to her interest in adolescent and sexual behaviour: it also surveys the whole record of anthropological reporting in the region. The state of the art that it reveals is rather disconcerting, but the manner of revealing it is highly original.

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[*] Works and Lives, Stanford University Press, 1988.