Sherry Ortner

AIBR01The Asociación de Antropólogos Ibero- americanos en Red – AIBR presents in its online magazine titled „Género, cuerpo y sexualidad. Cultura y ¿Naturaleza?“ (Gender, Body, and Sexuality. Culture and Nature?) various articles worth reading on the topic.
(Older editions on different topics available also, unfortunately most is in Spanish.)

Within this edition there is an interesting inter- view (also in English) with Sherry Ortner, born in 1941, one of the pioneer anthropologists in gender studies and feminist anthropology, and currently at UCLA as Professor of Anthropology teaching Critical Social Theory and Ethnographic Imagination. The interview reveals Ortner’s academic and personal life, her fieldwork experiences, the New Jersey Project and her current research on the Hollywood industry.

Ortner As one of Geertz’s students she followed in his footsteps with articles like

    On Key Symbols (In: American Anthropologist 1973, 75(5):1338-46), or
    Thick Resistance: Death and Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering (In: Ortner, Sherry (ed.), 1997: The Fate of Culture. Special Issues of Representations, 59:135-61).

Her early breakthrough might have been in 1974 with So is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? (In: Zimbalist Rosaldo, Michelle & Louise Lamphere, (eds.): Woman, Culture, and Society). Other titles are e.g.

    Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (1996),
    High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (1989),
    Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978)

More information on Sherry Ortner:


About this entry

Posted on Dienstag, Juni 6th, 2006 at 17:53, filed under Ethnology. Subscribe to this feed, leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You are also welcome to Print This Post Print This Post .

Please feel free to leave your Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.