Marilyn Strathern is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England. She is the 2003 recipient of the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology. Her many writings include The Gender of the Gift(University of California Press), After Nature(Cambridge University Press), and Women In Between(Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Inc).

Strathern's central insight is that much unexplored ground lies between difference and identity, between the many and the one: that is to say, that there are alternatives to the apparently insoluble dichotomies of society and the individual, holism and atomism, comparison and ethnography. This book is provocative and pathbreaking, both as a search for an escape from these antinomies, and as a critique of the intellectual practices which give rise to them.

• Part 1 Writing AnthropologyChapter 2 Ethnography as EvocationChapter 3 Complex society; incomplete knowledgeChapter 4 Feminist critiqueChapter 5 Intrusions and comparisonsPart 6 Partial ConnectionsChapter 7 Full of trees, full of flutesChapter 8 Center and peripheryChapter 9 Historical critiqueChapter 10 Prosthetic extensions

Marilyn Strathern is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England. She is the 2003 recipient of the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology. Her many writings include The Gender of the Gift(University of California Press), After Nature(Cambridge University Press), and Women In Between(Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Inc).

Strathern's central insight is that much unexplored ground lies between difference and identity, between the many and the one: that is to say, that there are alternatives to the apparently insoluble dichotomies of society and the individual, holism and atomism, comparison and ethnography. This book is provocative and pathbreaking, both as a search for an escape from these antinomies, and as a critique of the intellectual practices which give rise to them.

• Part 1 Writing AnthropologyChapter 2 Ethnography as EvocationChapter 3 Complex society; incomplete knowledgeChapter 4 Feminist critiqueChapter 5 Intrusions and comparisonsPart 6 Partial ConnectionsChapter 7 Full of trees, full of flutesChapter 8 Center and peripheryChapter 9 Historical critiqueChapter 10 Prosthetic extensions

Marilyn Strathern is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England. She is the 2003 recipient of the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology. Her many writings include The Gender of the Gift(University of California Press), After Nature(Cambridge University Press), and Women In Between(Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Inc).

Strathern's central insight is that much unexplored ground lies between difference and identity, between the many and the one: that is to say, that there are alternatives to the apparently insoluble dichotomies of society and the individual, holism and atomism, comparison and ethnography. This book is provocative and pathbreaking, both as a search for an escape from these antinomies, and as a critique of the intellectual practices which give rise to them.

• Part 1 Writing AnthropologyChapter 2 Ethnography as EvocationChapter 3 Complex society; incomplete knowledgeChapter 4 Feminist critiqueChapter 5 Intrusions and comparisonsPart 6 Partial ConnectionsChapter 7 Full of trees, full of flutesChapter 8 Center and peripheryChapter 9 Historical critiqueChapter 10 Prosthetic extensions