Sherry Ortner

Sherry B. Ortner is one of the most influential anthropologists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, known for her groundbreaking work in feminist theory, practice theory, and cultural critique. With a career that spans from the highlands of Nepal to the cultural landscapes of middle-class America, Ortner has consistently pushed anthropology to grapple with power, gender, class, and agency in new and provocative ways.

A student of Clifford Geertz, she helped shape symbolic and interpretive anthropology before becoming a central figure in the turn toward practice theory and critical cultural analysis. Whether through her ethnographies of Sherpa religion or her studies of American class identity, Ortner’s work challenges static notions of culture and insists on the complexity of human action within systems of meaning and power.

Early Life and Education

Sherry Ortner was born on January 31, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey, into a culturally engaged family-her father, Oscar Ortner, was an art historian, and her mother, Celia Schorr Ortner, was a clinical psychologist. This intellectually rich upbringing fostered her talents in observation, interpretation, and critical thinking.

Ortner began her academic journey at Bryn Mawr College, earning her BA in 1961. While initially exploring social psychology and art history, she became drawn to anthropology’s capacity to decode cultural meaning.

Seeking deeper theoretical engagement, she pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, studying under Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins. There, she embraced symbolic anthropology and developed her analytical tools for interpreting ritual, belief, and power within cultural systems. Ortner completed her PhD in 1971, producing an ethnography that would later serve as the foundation for her study of Sherpa society.

Academic Career and Fieldwork

After completing her doctorate, Ortner began her teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, where she balanced research and mentoring. By the late 1970s, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, significantly expanding her role in graduate education and disciplinary debate.

In the mid-1970s, Ortner embarked on her seminal fieldwork among the Sherpa of Nepal, focusing on their religious rituals, social structures, and gendered practices. This research culminated in her landmark work Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978), which blended thick description with theoretical insight, arguing that Sherpa culture actively constructs and contests religious meaning.

Continuing her academic path, Ortner held appointments at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and UCLA, each move reinforcing her reputation as a leading voice in feminist and cultural theory. Alongside her ethnographic pursuits, she maintained a public profile as an incisive commentator on gender, class, and symbolic systems.

Theoretical Contributions

Sherry Ortner’s influence extends across several major subfields of anthropology. She first gained prominence in the 1970s with her feminist critique of structuralist models, most notably through her essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In it, she argued that the universal subordination of women could be traced not to biology but to symbolic structures that aligned women with nature and men with culture. This essay became a foundational text in feminist anthropology.

Ortner was also instrumental in developing practice theory within anthropology, integrating ideas from Bourdieu and Marx with ethnographic insight. In her model, culture is not a fixed set of values or meanings but a dynamic field in which individuals navigate and sometimes transform power structures. Her essays from the 1980s and 1990s helped shift the discipline toward analyzing agency, resistance, and cultural production.

Ortner applied this framework in studies not only of Himalayan societies but also of contemporary American culture. She explored how class, gender, and ideology intersect in shaping individual lives, challenging anthropologists to examine their own societies with the same depth and critical lens used in studying others.

Key Works and Publications

Ortner’s bibliography reflects the evolution of her intellectual journey. Her early book, Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978), offered a rich symbolic analysis of Himalayan religious practices. A decade later, High Religion (1989) built on this with a historical perspective, analyzing how Buddhism among the Sherpas was both a religious and political force.

In Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (1996), she compiled her most important essays on gender, agency, and power, bridging feminist theory and cultural anthropology. With New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (2003), she turned her lens inward, ethnographically analyzing her own high school cohort to investigate the American class system in the postwar era.

Anthropology and Social Theory (2006) further showcased her synthetic thinking, drawing on her wide-ranging fieldwork to reflect on key theoretical questions in anthropology today. Ortner’s work remains required reading for anyone studying power, meaning, and human agency in cultural life.

References

1. Berkeley News Archive – Sherry Ortner
   https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1995/0201/ortner.html
2. MacArthur Foundation – Sherry B. Ortner
   https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1990/sherry-b-ortner
3. UCLA Department of Anthropology – Sherry B. Ortner
   https://anthro.ucla.edu/person/sherry–ortner
4. University of Chicago Magazine – “The long way home”
   https://magazine.uchicago.edu/9602/9602Ortner2.html
5. AnthroSource / American Anthropological Association – Sherry B. Ortner
   https://americananthro.org/people/sherry-b-ortner/
6. MacArthur Foundation– Tsadra Commons entry (biographic summary)
   https://commons.tsadra.org/index.php/Ortner%2C_S.