Sherry Ortner

Sherry Beth Ortner (b. 19 September 1941) is an American cultural anthropologist and has been Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004. She grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, NJ (and attended the same high school as Philip Roth). She received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She then studied anthropology at the University of Chicago with Clifford Geertz and obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1970 for her fieldwork among the Sherpas in Nepal. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University. She has done extensive fieldwork with the Sherpas of Nepal, on religion, politics, and the Sherpas’ involvement in Himalayan mountaineering. Her final book on the Sherpas, Life and Death on Mt. Everest, was awarded the J.I. Staley prize for the best anthropology book of 2004.

In the early 1990s, Ortner switched her research to the United States. Her first project was on the meanings and workings of “class” in the United States, using her own high school graduating class as her ethnographic subjects. She is currently developing a project on the relationship between Hollywood films and American culture. She also publishes regularly in the areas of cultural theory and feminist theory.

Sherry Ortner was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant in 1990. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded the Retzius Medal of the Society of Anthropology and Geography of Sweden.

Sherry Ortner was previously married to Robert Paul, a cultural anthropologist now at Emory University. She is currently married to Timothy D. Taylor, a Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at UCLA.

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.
• (1981) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (co-edited with Harriet Whitehead). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• (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.
• (1996) Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Beacon Press.
• (1999) Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• (1999) (ed.) The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond. Berkely, CA: University of California Press.
• (2003) New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
• (2006) Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Duke University Press.

External links

• Sherry Ortner faculty profile
• Biography of Sherry Beth Ortner
• The Long Way Home article in University of Chicago Magazine, Feb 1996.
• Review of Ortners book "Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture"