Conceiving Cultures critically reflects on the ways anthropologists come to understand and represent the people and cultures that they study. These ideas are developed through an ethnographic study that explores notions of the gendered person through knowledge and practices relating to reproductive health on the Massim island of Nuakata in Papua New Guinea. Conceiving Cultures makes explicit anthropology's implicit project to understand the self by way of the other.
Shelley Mallett is Research Fellow at the Key Centre for Women's Health in Society at Melbourne University.