Andrew Strathern

Andrew Jamieson Strathern was a British social anthropologist whose fieldwork in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, and later in Taiwan, Ireland and Scotland, shaped modern Melanesian ethnography and ritual studies for more than half a century.

Born on 19 January 1939 to a farming family in Essex, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in Classics before turning to anthropology and taking his doctorate there. He lived for long periods among Melpa speakers around Mount Hagen and among Wiru communities, writing landmark books on ceremonial exchange, descent and big-man politics. The Rope of Moka (1971) became a classic account of competitive gift exchange. One Father, One Blood (1972), Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (with Marilyn Strathern, 1971), Ongka (1979) and Inequality in New Guinea Highlands Societies (1982) extended that Highlands corpus into kinship, adornment, autobiography and stratification. Students and readers still turn to those works for how Highland societies organise prestige, pigs and speech.

He held a professorship at University College London and directed the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in Port Moresby before becoming Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he remained emeritus. With his wife and research partner Pamela J. Stewart he published more than fifty books and hundreds of articles spanning medical anthropology, ritual, kinship, disaster anthropology, heritage and European identity. Their joint fieldwork reached Taiwanese temple ritual and Scots and Ulster-Scots language and memory in Ireland and Scotland. They co-edited the Journal of Ritual Studies and several monograph series. He had earlier been married to the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. Archives of their photographs and notes are held at Pittsburgh and at the University of California, San Diego, and he was a fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.

A Telegraph family notice published on 21 September 2026 announced that he had died in Pittsburgh, aged 87. He is survived by five children and nine grandchildren. Colleagues remembered a scholar who kept returning to Mount Hagen while widening anthropology's comparative reach across Oceania, Asia and Europe, and who treated ritual, exchange and kinship as living systems rather than closed museum cases.