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 <i>The Gender of the Gift</i> one of the most sustained critiques of cross-cultural comparison that anthropology has seen, and one of its most spirited vindications.