Sherry Ortner facts for kids

Sherry Beth Ortner (born September 19, 1941) is an American cultural anthropologist. An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human societies and cultures. She is a retired professor of anthropology at UCLA, a big university in California.

Ortner is famous for her ideas about how societies work and how they change. She also studies how people think about gender. She has done a lot of research in Nepal and the United States. Her work has been shared around the world, and she has won many awards.

Life and Education

Sherry Ortner grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Her family was from Eastern Europe. She is married to Timothy D. Taylor, who studies music at UCLA. She also has a daughter.

Ortner finished high school in 1958. She earned her first college degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. Then, she went to the University of Chicago to study anthropology. She received her master's degree in 1966 and her Ph.D. (a very high degree) in 1970.

Teaching Career

Ortner has taught at several universities:

• Sarah Lawrence College (1970–1977)
• University of Michigan (1977–1994)
• University of California, Berkeley (1994–1996)
• Columbia University (1996–2004)
• University of California, Los Angeles (since 2004, now retired)

She also did research at special places like the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Awards and Honors

Sherry Ortner has received many important awards. These include:

• The "Genius" Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
• A Guggenheim Fellowship.
• Grants from the National Science Foundation.
• The Retzius Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.

She was also chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. This means she is recognized as a top expert in her field.

Important Ideas and Research

Ortner is well known for her ideas about how societies work. She developed her own version of "practice theory." This idea explains that how people act every day shapes both how society stays the same and how it changes. Ortner's theory focuses on how people's actions can lead to big changes. One of her first important articles on this topic was "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties" (1984).

Understanding Resistance

A key part of practice theory, according to Ortner, is understanding "resistance." This is when people push back against powerful groups or unfair rules. She sees resistance as a complex action. Even people who are not in charge might have reasons to keep things the way they are. Ortner explored these ideas in her article "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal" (1995). Many of her articles about practice theory were later put together in a book called Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (2006).

Feminist Theory Contributions

Ortner is also famous for her work in feminist theory. This field looks at how gender affects people's lives and how societies treat men and women. In the early 1970s, she became very involved in the feminist movement. Her studies at that time looked at how male dominance and unfair treatment of women worked. Her most famous article in this area is "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" (1972/1974). This article has been translated into 10 languages and is used in many different collections of writings.

Early Research (1960s - 1990s)

When Ortner was a student at the University of Chicago, she was guided by Clifford Geertz. Geertz was a famous anthropologist who studied "culture" as a system of symbols and meanings. Ortner's own research for her Ph.D. was done in Nepal between 1966 and 1968. She studied the religious ceremonies and daily life of the Sherpa people in the Khumbu region. Her first book, Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978), showed a lot of Geertz's ideas about culture.

Later, Ortner started to look at how societies become unequal and how they change. She used a historical approach to practice theory in her next book about the Sherpas, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (1989).

Ortner wrote another book about the Sherpas. This one looked at the history of how Western mountain climbers worked with the Sherpa people. Sherpas often helped as guides and porters on climbs up the world's highest mountains. Her book, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (1999), won an award in 2004.

During this time, Ortner also continued her work in feminist theory. She wrote more articles that built on her earlier ideas about gender. .....

Later Research (2000s - 2020s)

After finishing her work in Nepal, Ortner started to study the United States. She began a series of projects about capitalism (how money and businesses work), social class, and culture in America from the late 1900s to the early 2000s.

Studying Her High School Class

Her first American project was a study of her own high school graduating class from 1958 at Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. She looked at how social class, race, and gender shaped the lives of her classmates, both in high school and later in their careers. Ortner's book about this study, published in 2003, was called New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58. In this book, she described a group of people who grew up when capitalism in America was generally good, and many of them did well.

While working on New Jersey Dreaming, Ortner also interviewed many children of her classmates. These were people from Generation X. She wrote an article called "Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World" (1998). In this article, she explained how this generation grew up during a big change in capitalism, which shaped how they saw the world. She used interviews and also looked at movies and other media about Generation X.

Culture and Film in America

Ortner's research from this time focused on understanding how society and culture changed because of shifts in the U.S. economy and politics, especially after the 1980s. She started to combine her practice theory ideas with a new interest in how meanings and ideas are shown, especially in modern media like films. She saw films as similar to the myths and stories that anthropologists used to study in other cultures.

From this new focus, Ortner published the book Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream (2013). This book looked at how independent films showed a different view of the American Dream. She noticed that films from the middle of the century often had happy endings, but newer films were darker and more pessimistic. This reflected how people felt about money and whether the American Dream was still possible.

Ortner also looked at how racism and patriarchy (a system where men hold most of the power) connect with capitalism. She explored how these connections are experienced and shown in culture.

In "Dark Anthropology and its Others: Theory Since the Eighties" (2016), Ortner discussed how more anthropologists were studying power and inequality.

Her most recent book, Screening Social Justice: Brave New Films and Documentary Activism (2023), came from studying an activist film company called Brave New Films. She interviewed the filmmakers and analyzed their movies. In this book, Ortner connects the social, economic, and political reasons behind these films with how the filmmakers think about their work and how the films affect people.

Selected publications

• (1974) "Is female to male as nature is to culture?" pp. 67–87 in Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• (1978) Sherpas through their Rituals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521292160
• (1984) "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties." Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1):126-166.
• (1989) High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9788120809499
• (1995) Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1):173-193
• (1999) Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691074481
• (1999) (ed.) The Fate of "Culture": Geertz and Beyond. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520216013
• (2003) New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN: 9780691074481
• (2006) Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN: 9780822388456
• (2013) Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN: 9780822354260
• (2023) Screening Social Justice: Brave New Films and Documentary Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN: 9781478024132

See also

In Spanish: Sherry Ortner para niños