The Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2024: Marilyn Strathern

We are happy to announce that Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge, will give the Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2024.

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

Strathern studied Social Anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge (PhD 1968). After a spell in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, she held posts in Canberra (ANU) and Port Moresby before returning to the UK. This was when she was Hon. Editor of the RAI journal Man. She moved to her first full departmental appointment in 1985, taking up the chair in Social Anthropology at Manchester University, to be followed by the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1993. Strathern was concurrently Mistress of Girton College between 1988-2009. Papua New Guinea has been a principal area of fieldwork, from 1964 to most recently in 2015, although she is also intrigued by developments in knowledge practices in the UK and Europe. Initial work on gender relations led in two directions: feminist scholarship & the new reproductive technologies (1980s-1990s), and legal systems & intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 1990-00s). Subsequent work on regimes of audit and accountability has attracted interdisciplinary attention. Formerly Presidential Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Trustee of the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, and member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, she is now Hon. Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists.