In the village of Elmdon in north-west Essex, members of certain families are distinguished from other residents as being 'real Elmdon'. Through a detailed ethnography of the structure of the village, and the interrelationships between its various families, work patterns and community activities, Ma[...]

In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness - and wi[...]

Updated with a new Preface, this seminal work challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. She combines a wide-ranging int[...]

C A Gregory's Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology. Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique [...]