Categories of analysis in the social sciences include the binary pair 'nature' and 'culture', as defined by western societies. Anthropologists have often imputed these categories to the world-views of non-western people and the construct has acquired the status of a universal. It has been further argued that culture (that which is regulated by human thought and technology) is universally valued as being superior to nature (the unregulated); and that female is universally associated with nature (and is therefore inferior and to be dominated) and male with culture. The essays in this volume question these propositions. They examine the assumptions behind them analytically and historically, and present ethnographic evidence to show that the dichotomy between nature and culture, and its association with a contrast between the sexes, is a particularity of western thought. The book is a commentary on the way anthropologists working within the western tradition have projected their own ideas on to the thought systems of other peoples. Its form is largely anthropological, but it will have a wide appeal within the social sciences and the humanities, especially among those interested in structuralist thought and women's studies.

If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon. The challenge is that these new accountabilities are at once obstructive and enabling of good practice. Through accountability the financial and the moral meet in the twinned precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practices. Audit practices have direct consequences, and in the view of many dire ones, for intellectual production.Yet audit is almost impossible to critique in principle - after all, it advances values that academics generally hold dear, such as responsibility, openness of enquiry and widening of access. The volume therefore examines some of the parameters of professional ethics. Audit Cultures provides an excellent opening for future debate on the 'culture' of management and accountability. It will be an essential resource for students of social anthropology and management. Marilyn Strathern, Richard Harper, Cris Shore, Susan Wright, Eleanor Rimoldi, Maryon McDonald, Peter Pels, Ananta Giri, Vassos Argyrou, Vered Amit, Thomas Fillitz, Dimitra Gefou-Madianou

In the most original and ambitious synthesis yet undertaken in Melanesian scholarship, Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness - and with equal good humor - the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life. This makes "The Gender of the Gift" one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.