Andrew Strathern

Born on 19 January 1939 in Essex to a farming family, Strathern went to Trinity College, Cambridge. He began in Classics, switched to Anthropology, and completed his doctorate there before embarking on Highlands fieldwork.

Long residence among Melpa speakers around Mount Hagen and among Wiru communities produced The Rope of Moka, One Father, One Blood, Ongka and Inequality in New Guinea Highlands Societies, books that remain central to the anthropology of exchange and big-man politics.

After posts at UCL and as Director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, he became Andrew Mellon Professor at Pittsburgh. With Pamela J. Stewart he co-authored and co-edited dozens of volumes on ritual, healing, disaster anthropology, heritage and European identity, and co-edited the Journal of Ritual Studies.

Their comparative programme reached Taiwanese temple ritual, Scots and Ulster-Scots language politics in Ireland and Scotland, and disaster and heritage studies linking Oceania, Asia and Europe.

On 21 September 2026 it was announced that Professor Andrew Strathern had died in Pittsburgh, USA, aged 87. A Telegraph family notice recalled his Essex childhood, Cambridge studies, Highlands fieldwork, UCL and Pittsburgh chairs, and Port Moresby directorship. Cause of death was not made public.

Andrew Jamieson Strathern was born on 19 January 1939 into a farming family in Essex, England. Public notices after his death emphasised those rural origins as the start of a life that would stretch from English fields to Highland valleys in Papua New Guinea and lecture halls in London and Pittsburgh.

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in Classics before switching to anthropology and earning a doctorate. Cambridge training shaped his lifelong attention to kinship, politics and ritual, and prepared him for intensive Melanesian fieldwork.

Strathern lived for long periods in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, especially Mount Hagen and Wiru. His books The Rope of Moka (1971), One Father, One Blood (1972), Self-Decoration in Mount Hagen (with Marilyn Strathern, 1971), Ongka (1979) and Inequality in New Guinea Highlands Societies (1982, editor) made Melpa exchange, leadership and social inequality central to anthropological teaching. He held a professorship at University College London and served as Director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in Port Moresby.

As Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, Strathern built a long collaborative career with Pamela J. Stewart. They published on ritual, medical anthropology, peace-making, disaster anthropology, heritage and European identities, with fieldwork spanning Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Ireland and Scotland. They co-edited the Journal of Ritual Studies and multiple book series, and their materials are archived at Pittsburgh and UC San Diego.

He married anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in 1964; they had three children and later divorced. He subsequently married research partner Pamela J. Stewart. The Telegraph death notice stated that he left five children and nine grandchildren.

Strathern treated Highland exchange, oratory and ritual as rigorous social theory rather than exotic spectacle. With Stewart he argued that rumour, witchcraft talk and medical ideas remain rational within their own logics, and that violence sits in a triangle of performers, victims and witnesses. Later work on disaster anthropology linked climate stress, cosmology and local resilience.

Generations of students met Highlands politics through The Rope of Moka and through the Disappearing World film Ongka's Big Moka, for which Strathern's ethnography was a key scholarly reference. His joint archive with Stewart preserves photographs, recordings and field materials that continue to support Pacific and comparative research.

He was Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and a fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. Earlier he held a professorship at University College London and directed the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. With Stewart he co-edited major ritual and ethnographic series for academic presses.

Charlie Nairn's Granada Television film The Kawelka: Ongka's Big Moka (Disappearing World) brought Mount Hagen moka exchange to classrooms worldwide and remains closely tied to Strathern's Melpa ethnography and to the big-man Ongka whose self-account Strathern published.