Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern is one of the world’s most influential anthropologists, presenting as part of the conference, '60 years of Anthropology at ANU: Contesting Anthropology's futures'.

In the UK, ovaries and sperm procured for research or medicine has to be a gift and cannot be reciprocated, creating anonymous recipients who are grateful for a gift they cannot repay. This leads to endless discussions about remuneration or compensation payments that are meant to fall short of outright purchase and Strathern reflects on the way money enters the debates.

Presented jointly by the Department of Anthropology, College of Asia and the Pacific, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the ANU Gender Institute.

LECTURE INFORMATION: How might one consider debt in a highly emotional situation where its discharge is not possible? In the UK arena of bodily material procured for research or medicine, donations cannot be reciprocated. What are called ‘gifts’ are not only to diffuse entities such as society or science; the procurement and treatment process often creates specific, if anonymous, recipients who are burdened with / grateful for a gift they cannot repay. Indeed the ability to pay – and thus pay-off – the perceived debt is usually against the law. The gift entails, and thus summons, the absence of money.

This lecture offers a comment on gifts in a context where money forever hovers on the margins of the imagination, and where the more it is banned from sight, the more it creeps back in. In endless discussions about remuneration or compensation payments that are meant to fall short of outright purchase, people tend to focus on the problematic characteristics of diverse organs and tissues, including gametes, and assume they know what money is or does.This lecture offers some reflections on the way money enters the debates. Although Marilyn Strathern is at present chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ Working Party on Human Bodies in Medicine and Research, the lecture will draw on independent materials.

Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University. Her interests have been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She is probably most well known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she pairs with After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century (1992), a comment on the cultural revolution at home. Her most recent publications concern reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property rights, audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity. She was associated with ANU at two very formative moments (for her) – in 1965 during the course of initial fieldwork in Mt Hagen, PNG, and in 1983-4 as a member of the Gender Relations research group, when The Gender of the Gift was begun.