Sherry Ortner

Her 1972 essay "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" argued that women have been symbolically associated with nature across many cultures, helping launch feminist anthropology as a major analytical framework. It appeared in the inaugural volume of the journal *Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society*.

Her book *New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58* (2003) studied her own high school graduating class from Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, tracking how class mobility played out over four decades. It represented her shift from Himalayan ethnography to studying American class and culture.

Ortner conducted her early fieldwork with Sherpa communities in Nepal, which produced her first book *Sherpas Through Their Rituals* (1979). She later shifted to studying American class dynamics and also conducted fieldwork on the Hollywood film industry, published in *Anthropology and Social Theory* (2016).

Ortner's 1984 essay "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties" advocated for a "practice" or "actor-oriented" approach, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall Sahlins to study how individual agency and larger social structures mutually shape each other. She argued against treating culture as a static system of symbols divorced from political-economic context.