#19 Journeying anew, with or without knowledge w/ Marilyn Strathern

Anthropology on Air

Welcome to a special episode of Anthropology on Air.
In this episode you will hear the recordings of the 2024 Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture, held by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern. The episode begins with an introduction by Synnøve Bendixen who is head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Strathern then takes us on a historical and global tour through various ethnographic signposts from the Melanesian Baktaman to current activism, on this tour, inviting us to think about “Journeying anew, with or without knowledge” in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.
About the lecture, 'Journeying anew, with or without knowledge'
Global consciousness of climate change and biodiversity loss endures in the face of what we know to be inadequate responses. For all the attempts to act on knowledge, failure to scale up reactions – by citizens, by governments - makes one wonder where the power of knowledge has gone. Not dealing very well with relations and connections is one widely acknowledged short-coming; it is of course a shortcoming to which many anthropologists would point (speaker included), in promoting the relational insights of their interlocuters. This makes Fredrik Barth’s 1975 monograph on the Melanesian Baktaman, then an unusual voice against the easy making of connections, now appear rather intriguing. His own search was for places new. Starting a twenty-first century journey there brings one to a point where the power of knowledge – when it is tied to action - is not quite what it promises.
About the lecturer, Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern
Professor Marilyn Strathern studied Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (PhD 1968). She held posts in Canberra (ANU), Port Moresby and UC Berkeley (visiting) before returning to the UK in the 1970s. In 1985 she took up the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, followed by the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1993-2008. Professor Strathern was elected to the British Academy of Sciences in 1987 and made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She was the Presidential Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Trustee of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and is now Honorary Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK. Strathern’s work has focused on Melanesian and British ethnography. Papua New Guinea was her principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2015. Her research has explored developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. She developed her work on gender relations in two main directions: feminist scholarship and new reproductive technologies (1980s-1990s), which led to her groundbreaking books “The gender of the gift” (1988) and “After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century” (1992), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990-00s). Her subsequent work on regimes of audit and accountability, including the edited volume “Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy” (2000) has attracted broad interdisciplinary attention. The Strathern Annual Lecture was established at Cambridge University in 2011 to honor her significant achievements.