Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science

Recasting Anthropological Knowledge Inspiration and Social Science

This collection of original essays provides an innovative and multifaceted reflection on the impact and inspiration of the scholarship of eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. A distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Strathern, reflect on the impact of their relationship with their teacher and address the wider conceptual contribution of her work through their own writings. The essays provide an accessible entry into Strathern’s scholarship for those new to her work and a rich source of material which mobilises and deploys her concepts, including new ethnographic examples and discussion of contemporary political issues, for those more familiar with her scholarship. The result is a collection that dissects, contextualises and reroutes concepts of relationality, inspiration and knowledge in novel and unpredictable ways. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge will prove invaluable to all students of anthropology and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences. Jeanette Edwards is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger is a Junior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science Edited by

Jeanette Edwards and

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107009684 © Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Recasting anthropological knowledge : inspiration and social science / edited by Jeanette Edwards, Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-107-00968-4 (hardback) 1. Ethnology – Philosophy. 2. Ethnology – Research. 3. Knowledge, Sociology of. 4. Strathern, Marilyn – Criticism and interpretation. I. Edwards, Jeanette, 1954– II. Petrovic´-Sˇteger, Maja. GN345.R429 2011 301.01–dc23 2011020071 ISBN 978-1-107-00968-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Marilyn Strathern

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements 1

Introduction: on recombinant knowledge and debts that inspire jeanette edward s and maja petrovic´ -sˇ t eg er

page ix xii

1

2

Writing the parallax gap: an itinerary debbora b attaglia

19

3

Too big to fail ann eli se ri les

31

4

‘Hybrid custom’ and legal description in Papua New Guinea melissa demian

49

5

Entomological extensions: model huts and fieldworks ann kelly

70

6

Kinship and the core house: contested ideas of family and place in a Ghanaian resettlement township thomas ya rrow

88

Invisible families: imagining relations in families based on same-sex partnerships aivita putnin¸ a

106

Knowledge in a critical mode: feminist expertise in design and planning ee va berglund

125

7

8

vii

viii

Contents

9 Spools, loops and traces: on etoy encapsulation and three portraits of Marilyn Strathern maja p etrovic´ -sˇ teger 10

Inspiring Strathern ad am reed

Bibliography Index

145 165

183 199

Contributors

debbora ba ttagli a is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke and Five College Anniversary Professor. She has published widely on personhood, selfhood, identities and alienness, and recently has turned to nature–culture exchanges in outer space as sites of ethnographic inquiry. eeva berglund is an independent scholar and writer on urban anthropology, environmental thought and politics. Her history of Women’s Design Service, Doing Things Differently, was published in 2007. She is on the editorial team of the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. meli ssa demian is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. Drawing on her fieldwork in the Suau-speaking region of southeastern Papua New Guinea, she has published on the subjects of child adoption, the village court and land mediation systems, historical relationships with missionaries and the idea of ‘culture loss’. She also writes and publishes on wider topics in legal anthropology such as the ‘cultural defence’ and the concept of community in legal discourse. jea nette e dwards is Professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester University. She has published widely on kinship and assisted reproductive technologies and has a long-standing research interest in the anthropology of Britain and, in particular, on changing contours of class, community, indigeneity and expertise. ann kelly is a lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. Her work ix

x

List of contributors

explores the production of scientific facts in Africa, with special attention to the built environments, material artefacts and practical labours of experimentation. She has also published on malaria control interventions, considering how rural and urban spaces are configured to manage the flow of human, parasite and mosquito populations. maja petrovic´ -sˇ teger is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. She explores various contexts where bodies – whether living, dead or in the form of medically usable remains – become the sites of economic, legal, political, scientific and artistic attention. Her publications are based on her fieldwork in Serbia, Tasmania and Switzerland. aivita putnin¸ a is Director and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Bioethics and Biosafety and a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Latvia in Riga. Her long-standing academic interests cover topics of sexuality, homophobia, biotechnologies and reproductive health policies. ad am reed is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He conducted his original fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. That work focuses on issues around cultures of incarceration, including attention to colonial and postcolonial governmentality, the politics of vision, money and aesthetics of documents. More recently, he has conducted research in the UK, with a focus on popular theorisations of the city and urban knowledge, practices of fiction reading, memory, mind and literary subjectivities. He is the author of Papua New Guinea’s Last Place: Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison, and the forthcoming Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of The Henry Williamson Society. annelise riles is the Jack G. Clarke Chair in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of legal theories, doctrines and institutions. She has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan and the Pacific and has written extensively on cultural problems in the law. She is the author of The Network Inside Out,

List of contributors

xi

Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge and the forthcoming Collateral Knowledge. thomas yarrow is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Bangor University. Through research in Ghana and the UK he has developed research interests in a range of areas including NGOs and development organisations, globalisation, civil society, the anthropology of organisations, elites, the anthropology of development, and space and place.

Acknowledgements

This book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Dame Professor Marilyn Strathern. It is one of a number of ways in which her colleagues have attempted to express their gratitude and appreciation of her scholarship, intellectual generosity, kindness and integrity, as well as her unstinting support, over the years, of anthropology and anthropologists. It is, above all, a way of saying thank you. Earlier versions of four of the chapters (Petrovic´-Sˇteger, Putnin¸a, Reed and Yarrow) were first presented at a panel at the biannual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Ljubljana, 2008. The panel brought together anthropologists who had been supervised by Marilyn as doctoral students and was convened as a tribute to her in the year she ‘officially’ retired. The panel also included papers from Lissant Bolton, Tony Crook and James Leach, and the editors would like to thank them and the audience, as well as Samuelle Carlson, Terence Hay-Edie, He´lena Regius and Ilana Gershon, for their different contributions to the more dispersed and broader Festschrift. Jeanette Edwards would also like to acknowledge and thank Verena Stolcke and Christina Toren for early conversations about how best to mark Marilyn’s retirement. For her work on the final manuscript, we would like to thank Patricia Scalco; for his enthusiasm and impeccable professionalism, Richard Fisher at Cambridge University Press; for her help at the beginning and the end of this book, Fay Faunch at Girton College, Cambridge; and an anonymous reader for pertinent and perceptive comments on an earlier version of the collection. The people named here are just a few amongst many who would, we know, want us to add their thanks to those of the editors and authors of this collection to Marilyn Strathern as teacher and colleague par excellence. xii

1

Introduction: on recombinant knowledge and debts that inspire Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

The chapters in this collection are connected through the inspiration they draw from the scholarship of Marilyn Strathern, one of the most compelling and innovative social anthropologists of contemporary times. From early fieldwork and a series of monographs on the Hagen people of Papua New Guinea, Strathern earned a reputation as a Melanesianist, but her theoretical interests have always also been oriented towards Euro-American (that is, her own) society. Scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities know her as a feminist and trailblazing anthropologist of, amongst other things, new reproductive technologies, gender, kinship, economics and law. Over a forty-year career, Strathern has insisted on the constructed nature of such marks of professional and other identification, often convening them into new relations or radically recasting their accepted bearing to each other. Strathern’s reconfigurations have yielded a number of particularly invigorating conceptions of knowledge that have surprised in both their representations and their effects. Her pioneering works on the social and cultural dimension and implications of a range of technological and ethical changes in our time have had a defining, or perhaps a definitively unsettling, role in articulations of what is at stake in a number of current research projects across the humanities and social sciences. How, then, to begin to unpack and introduce Strathern’s enormous contribution to scholarship generally and social anthropology specifically? Chronologically? Thematically? Through an archaeology of her key concepts? A review of her writings? Such strategies seem inadequate – inappropriate even. They go against the grain, risking the imposition of an arbitrary structure on a contribution 1

2

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

that defies a linear account and is as immeasurable as it is uncontainable. Strathern’s writings hold up for scrutiny familiar and ‘taken for granted’ concepts and she pays sharp attention to the premises on which ‘western’ scholarship is built. Such a compulsion is as destabilising as it is exhilarating and its impact, as noted above, is felt beyond the discipline of social anthropology. Yet ‘impact’, again, does not seem quite the right word.1 Strathern’s insights are subtle. They get under the skin and niggle. They work on you as much as you (have to) work on them. The authors of the chapters presented in this collection take various strategies and we take our lead from them. Their brief was to pick up, run with and depart from key Strathernian concepts by way of their own current research. The result is something more stable than such metaphors of flight suggest. Instead of running, the authors of these chapters have decided to dwell. Debbora Battaglia (beginning this volume), for example, remarking on the generosity with which Strathern cites her students and colleagues and on how she reworks and re-worlds their ethnographic accounts, shows what it might mean to accompany rather than depart from Strathern: in her words, to go a-worlding with her. Adam Reed (ending this volume) is more cautious: for him, it is a moot point whether Strathern’s generosity in citing her students is evidence of her having been inspired by them: but, dwelling on the concept of inspiration itself, Reed reveals its unbidden, all-encompassing, dynamic and deeply social and sociable nature. Multiple flows of inspiration run through the various chapters in this volume and not only between Strathern and her students. Bearing in mind, however, that Strathern’s analytical categories have a tendency to dislocate and introduce incommensurabilities of time, place and scale between what, from another perspective, are tokens of the same current social meaning, our attempt to dwell in analytical restlessness poses a particular challenge. In After nature, Strathern outlines a working conception of merographic connection. Similar to but not the same as the relationship between part and whole, a merographic connection depicts the capacity in EuroAmerican thinking to connect up entities, tropes, images and so forth in 1

And even less so at a time when ‘impact’ is mooted in the UK as an appropriate measurement of the worthiness of research.

Introduction

3

domains of knowledge: connection in one domain entails disconnection from another. ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’, for example, are similar (connected) in the sense that they operate in comparable ways while having laws of their own. ‘Culture’ and ‘nature’ work in different fields of fact; each elicits, and is elicited by, sets of connections which differentiate the pair. Difference, then, becomes ‘connection from another angle’ (1992a: 73). Strathern’s tendency and capacity to rework and recombine knowledge originating elsewhere – in other persons and other relations – can itself be seen as an instance of the merographic. She unmoors ethnographic insight from its origins, and unhitches common idioms from familiar domains, mobilising them in a different conversation and connecting them in often unexpected but always productive ways. The authors of the chapters in this book follow suit: they make connections between their work and hers and in so doing make explicit her influence. They also, however, work their ethnography through contiguous research in their field and with the subjects and persons of their study. It is the duplex characteristic of these chapters specifically and the book generally that we want to flag here. While this volume pays tribute and is profoundly connected to Strathern it is also devolved from her and pursues its own lines of enquiry. Continuing the theme of the duplex, we introduce the authors to you twice: once through some of their specific concepts and then through their place in the structure of this book. First we should note that the thematically diverse chapters in this volume are also linked by the person of the authors. They were all supervised by Strathern as PhD students and their diversity in terms of ethnographic sites, styles of writing, and what they have chosen, or felt compelled, to do for a volume that deliberately makes reference to her ideas and influence is indicative of her eclecticism and intellectual generosity. Strathern has a canny capacity for forging and maintaining relationships across institutions and disciplines, but perhaps more noteworthy, here, is her capacity for nurturing relationships with and between individuals ‘across the board’. This latter characteristic is recognised by colleagues (see, for example, Benthall 1994) perhaps because, in itself, it is remarkable in the world of British academia where antennae are often, and still, finely tuned to all kinds of distinction. It is almost an anthropological truism to say that Strathern takes ‘the relation’ seriously at all levels.

4

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

Recombinant knowledge The anthropological relation that Strathern unpacks is a duplex: simultaneously conceptual and interpersonal (and see both Riles and Putnin¸a, this volume). Connections between idioms of thought run in tandem with connections between persons (with specific histories). This volume is itself an example of the duplex nature of the anthropological relation. Its contributors have benefited from their relationship with the person of Strathern and owe a personal debt which they cannot, should they wish to do so, completely unhitch from the relationship between their and her ideas (and see Reed, this volume). Yet even though the duplex nature of ‘the relation’ might mean it is partisan to privilege one aspect (for example, the conceptual) above the other (for example, the interpersonal), our intention was to be partisan: to black box the interpersonal and engage the conceptual. The authors have succeeded in doing this: they have engaged Strathern conceptually and run with her ideas in novel and unpredictable ways. Moreover, in the nature of the anthropological relation, the following chapters are also, and significantly, each an instantiation of a specific interpersonal relationship. The anthropological relation that Strathern unpacks is also a tool: anthropology’s technology. Like the biotechnologist’s use of enzymes to splice and combine DNA where ‘life is put to work on life . . . the anthropologist uses relations to explore relations’ (Strathern 2005a: 7). Extending the analogy with recombinant DNA, we draw on the notion of recombinant knowledge to flag the novel entities forged through splicing and melding different ways of knowing. Recombinant knowledge serves as an organising trope for this collection on various levels. First, as a whole, the volume brings together (recombines in novel form) the writing and ideas (knowledge-making) of anthropologists whose regular stomping grounds do not usually overlap. Here, researchers who work on Melanesian law and aesthetics enter into conversation with those exploring Japanese corporate business models, insect experimentation in Africa, and same-sex parents in Latvia: how might Strathernian projects link relations among such authors? Second, the term introduces individual chapters which themselves recombine

Introduction

5

different kinds of knowledge: for example, anthropological and entomological (Kelly); categorical and relational (Putnin¸a); customary and judicial (Demian); design and feminist (Berglund). Third, each author engages (combines) Strathern. While it might be trite to note that they deploy different Strathernian concepts and draw on different writings, and that, between them, they cover publications that span three decades and more, it is nevertheless exciting to see the range of insights that have ‘grabbed’ them and how they have, in turn, put those insights to work. As Strathern herself remarked, ‘[t]o argue with an idea is to be captured by it’ (2006a: 203). The authors here have clearly been captured by Strathern but their chapters also show that they have not been held captive.

Recombinant technology Paul Berg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his part in developing techniques for recombining DNA in vitro in 1980. The award was not given, however, without dispute over the ‘true’ origins and ‘real inventors’ of the technology. As in all ground-breaking science, perhaps in all science, a linear narrative with a focus on a single scientist hardly captures the sources, pooling and sedimentation of knowledge that makes for any ‘breakthrough’ (a theme explored also in Demian’s and Berglund’s chapters of this volume). Such narratives will not do justice to the ways in which ideas circulate, lose their moorings, get appropriated, rerouted and adapted and are put to work for different ends than those for which they were conceived. Nonetheless the technology that allowed two DNAs to be combined was granted a patent the same year that Berg received the Nobel Prize. The patent named Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, responsible for developing the technique that allowed DNA to be cloned, as ‘sole inventors’. Reconstructing an inevitable multiplicity of origin, Doogab Yi (2008) has assembled the key actors and events that led to the Asilomar Conference of 1974 and the application for a patent on DNA cloning technology the same year. As a historian of science, Yi connects key actors, a chronology of events and the social and political climate in which they occurred. His purview and connections differ from those of the scientists; in Strathernian terms, he ‘summons other contexts’. Berg

6

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

himself writes that the exact chain of events in developing recombinant technology has escaped him: ‘Time and faulty memory have obscured some of the circumstances and events that led to the scientific breakthrough and the path to Asilomar’ (Berg 2004). For Yi, it was Berg’s paper reporting on his method for inserting genetic information into viral DNA, published in 1972, that ‘heralded a new era for gene manipulation’ (Yi 2008: 613). This paper paved the way for the creation of hybrid genes stemming from different organisms. Berg’s subsequent research, which aimed to insert viral DNA into Escherichia coli bacteria, rang alarm bells, however, and concerns were raised about the safety of the procedure. What were the risks in creating transgenic bacteria for which there were no known antibodies? Could they be controlled? Would they constitute a biohazard? The Asilomar Conference of 1974 in northern California is remembered for agreeing a voluntary moratorium on further rDNA research and being instigated by the scientists themselves. Yi writes of how, after the conference and the agreements reached there, the move by Cohen at Stanford University and Boyer at UC, San Francisco to file patent for rDNA came as a surprise. In the subsequent controversy, Cohen and Boyer claimed that universities rather than industry should benefit from the commercial potential of the technology. For their critics, not only was the timing bad but also the fact of the application itself was questionable. Should those who called for a moratorium now be seeking right of ownership on research that had been suspended? Why were there only two named ‘inventors’? Should higher education institutions benefit from research that had been funded by taxpayers? These questions and more exercised critics and supporters alike. The patent application was initially rejected on the grounds of ‘prior arts’. It was, eventually granted, however, in 1980 and two other rDNA patents followed in 1984 and 1988. According to Yi, the first patent of 1980 helped ‘transform this new techno-cultural entity – genetic engineering – into a new legal and commercial form – biotechnology’ (Yi 2008: 628). It struck the spark that ignited the explosion of the biotechnology industry on North America’s west coast. Strathern has eloquently charted the implications of a shift from discovery to invention. Invention, she points out, modifies nature;

Introduction

7

discovery does not. Patents acknowledge modification, inscribing the work and effort of the scientist. Recall here the oft-cited John Moore who the Supreme Court of the State of California decided had no property claim on cells taken from his body (Rabinow 1996). The point was that he had no claim on any financial profit gained from the stem cell line that had been developed, by a team at UCLA, from the cancerous cells of his spleen. The cells had been modified and, no longer the original raw material, they could be, and were, patented. John Moore’s body cells had been cultured-up in more ways than one. Invention, to borrow again from Strathern, cuts the network: in John Moore’s case it cut the links between the source of original material and its beneficiaries. In the case of the Cohen and Boyer patent, it cut out other persons and relations through which knowledge had been routed. Adam Reed (this volume) makes the interesting and eloquent observation that the work of drafting and redrafting a text makes the author. What may have been initially inspired by or borrowed from another is, with effort, reauthored: the inspired, in Reed’s terms, is rendered uninspired or more nearly self-sufficient. Of course, this process, as we can read for ourselves in his chapter, renders the final text no less inspirational. Here, the ‘un-’ in the uninspired merely indicates the cover-up of one source of inspiration. Reflecting on the unmooring necessary for the making of claims to autonomy (and autonomous knowledge), Yi shows how the Cohen-Boyer patent has become a gloss and shorthand for a complicated configuration not only of persons but also of politics and countercultures. By the end of the 1960s, the United States was host to a significant counterculture critical of science and technology. This current coexisted with a mainstream political will to fund biomedical rather than basic research: To some molecular biologists, it seemed that the future of their discipline increasingly depended upon its ability to find available intellectual and institutional niches in order to become a constitutive part of the expanding biomedical complex. (Yi 2008: 602)

Such a conjunction of impulses placed enormous pressure on funding agencies and scientists to produce medical applications. President Richard Nixon had declared, amongst other wars, a ‘war on disease’; this summons, combined with a biomedical interest in viruses, was

8

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

exploited by entrepreneurial biochemists and molecular biologists. There was a mass migration of biochemists and molecular biologists from prokaryotic (bacteria) to eukaryotic (higher order) systems, with viruses being construed as the link between ‘basic’ and disease-orientated research. One further element of Yi’s account of the provenance of recombinant DNA technology is noteworthy among these relations. By the early 1980s, commercialisation had become a significant social activity for North American universities, coming to figure in their mission statements. Universities thus felt bound by the moral imperative that academics should exploit and market their research findings for the financial benefit of the institution. Yi tells a North American story, but one that resonates with research culture in the UK. Turning to British universities and to the keen ethnographic eye Strathern brings to the management of knowledge, and to the conditions in which research thrives (or not), we can follow again the contributors to this volume and attend to Strathern’s analyses of the ratcheting-up of institutional mission statements and the tyranny of institutional practices of audit and transparency (which intriguingly, as Riles addresses in this volume, did nothing to curb the excesses of banks which, amongst other things, precipitated the current financial crisis).

Mission creep Strathern has a prescience second to none for identifying key questions of the day, both political and theoretical. As well as compelling us to look at our own concepts (whether the ‘ours’ is the generic anthropologist or the generic Euro-American) with a critical eye, Strathern has commented astutely on the underlying assumptions and rhetorics of persuasion deployed by the two major political regimes of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain. While Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair do duty as proxies for these two regimes, they also stand for a broader ‘environment of fact’ which Strathern charted and articulated precisely. It may seem odd to emphasise Strathern’s political sensibility – she is not one for public emotion, soapboxes, denunciations or the like. Perhaps this is partly why her critique is so effective; why, indeed, it has been so apt. While statements from Thatcher such as

Introduction

9

‘there is no such thing as society’ were never going to go unremarked, it was Strathern’s fine-grained analysis of its connotations and her merciless unpacking of ‘enterprise’ that captured the mood of the day.2 And while some of us will remember relief bordering on euphoria at the prospect of regime change in 1997, there were already hints that Blair’s New Labour and Thatcher’s Conservatism were in some respects shades of a similar hue. Strathern had her finger on the pulse and did not miss a beat: from ‘enterprise’ to ‘prescriptive consumerism’ she moved on to the tyranny of accountability, transparency and audit. Her analysis of the political zeitgeist was all the more pertinent for not focusing directly on [P]olitics. Her remarkable rendering of the mores of the day was routed first through debates on new reproductive technologies, then through changes in higher education and the management of British universities: both cultural revolutions in their own way. To exemplify the tone and texture of Strathern’s critique of some of the innovations in the management of higher education that have occurred during her watch, we draw on just one of the many seemingly mundane materials that she productively engages – the mission statement (Strathern 2006b). In an unflinching (and witty) analysis of the format (bullet points for the first time in 129 years) and content (a mixture of exhortation and hope) of the 1996 mission statement of Cambridge University, Strathern describes how mission statements have become the University’s (not just Cambridge’s) form of ‘bullet proofing’. Laying out its mission to ‘respond to the needs of the community’ and ‘encourage and pursue research of the highest quality across the full range of subjects’, the University displays evidence of high quality within and wards off accusations of poor governance and intervention by central government. Strathern describes the mission statement as a ‘protective aversion tactic’, and to be effective it borrows the language and format of its auditors. The problem comes when the universities not only respond to external audit in the language of 2

The difference between the last Conservative government and the recently ‘elected’ Con/Dem coalition (2010) might be crudely caricatured as a shift from ‘no society’ to ‘the big society’. Strathern’s unpacking of the concepts underpinning visions of society promoted by prime ministers Thatcher and Blair will be invaluable when we come to investigate the voluntarism and ‘people power’ entailed in prime minister David Cameron’s appeal to the ‘big society’ (launched in July 2010).

10

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

‘assessment-accountability’ but then go on to deploy the same in their internal regimes. This, of course, is not peculiar to Cambridge University. It resonates not only across most other UK universities but also across public and private sector organisations more widely (see Berglund, this volume). Again Strathern’s insight was prescient. As the language, once borrowed to deflect, became ubiquitous, it gained traction shaping not only the way in which institutions reflect on themselves and each other but also, now, on the way in which its members reflect on themselves and each other. After four research assessment exercises, it could be argued that British academia is a leaner and meaner machine. In the exercise of explicitly valuing selected items of academic achievement, which are then made the measures of worth, the phatic – the padding and polite communications required to oil the system – inevitably slides into the interstices of academic life. There, without vigilance, it will atrophy for want of affirmation. But, as we hope this volume exemplifies, not only is vigilance exercised but enthusiasm abounds and the point to underline is that vigilance has been inspired and promoted, in no small part, by treating the academy with the ethnographic seriousness it demands.3 It would be a mistake to think audit culture a bureaucratic quirk of the UK: its reach is long and tragic. As we write, a report on the current British military intervention in Afghanistan is in press. Produced by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, it identifies ‘significant mission creep since deploying to Afghanistan in 2001’. In a creeping and creepily growing list of responsibilities and targets, today’s ‘mission’ in Afghanistan encompasses ‘counter-narcotics’, ‘human rights’ and ‘state building’. While new mission statements displace former ones, they do not fully replace them: traces of earlier wishes, desires and targets remain, and new missions must both consolidate and differentiate themselves from earlier projects. As Strathern has so tellingly analysed their trajectory, there is a built-in expansive nature to mission statements: to reduce, scale back, slow down or back-pedal is to pull away from the dilation of the ‘mission’.

3

For excellent analyses of the contribution Marilyn Strathern has made to ethnographies of bureaucracy and notions of public value see the volume edited by Lebner and Deiringer (2009).

Introduction

11

Recombining persons In Euro-American kinship thinking, a theme Strathern has put firmly on the anthropological agenda, the combination of materials from unique individuals is understood to create a new and unique person. At the molecular level, genetic elements recombine; at the level of the organism, the joining of sperm and ovum creates offspring identical to neither biological parent but containing elements of both. The ensuing infant requires work and effort to socialise – to make it part of society: to cover it up. Persons, in this worldview, are ‘natural hybrids’ (Strathern 1992b: 111). In a seminal paper, first presented at the inaugural conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in 1990 and published in Reproducing the future (1992b), Strathern unpacks the difficulty British social anthropology had in theorising English kinship in what she calls the modernist or pluralist era. Unlike unilineal descent groups, a cognatic kinship system of ‘the English kind’ does not present anthropologists with an obvious model of a social order. Cognatic kinship instead seems to mirror ‘natural’ reproduction, rendering it both unproblematic (since all kinship is cognatic) and uninteresting (as it does not programmatically form the ‘building blocks’ of society). It ‘could neither in a strong sense produce groups nor in a weak sense yield a sense of convention or society’ (1992b: 104). The anthropological and the folk models in this era were themselves intimate or closely akin. In both, a child is known to be born as a unique person from the recombination of elements from both parents. It is not, though, born complete: socialisation needs to make it into a ‘proper’ social being. Kinship (in its mid twentieth-century ‘natural’ manifestation) (pro)created the unique individual, which society had to shape and mould. Persons were part of society, life, communities, families – parts of wholes. It was the relationship between parts and wholes, in both folk and anthropological models, that generated both pluralising and unifying effects characteristic of the modernist era. Moreover, such borrowings are not confined to a classical mid twentieth-century British anthropology. Strathern notes how the language of a postmodern anthropology, deemed more fitting to contemporary post-plural conditions, also draws on procreative idioms of biological

12

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

kinship. Her example is James Clifford’s trenchant critique of the metaand master narratives of mid twentieth-century anthropology in The predicament of culture (1988). Clifford argues that anthropology has too often sanitised and made whole what was, in fact, not only fragmentary but also hybrid. Calling for a more authentic ethnography that takes seriously the unboundedness and fragmentary nature of social life, he posits culture as collage: as bits cut up and capable of various recombinations. Instead of smoothing over the joins, anthropologists are urged to leave visible the ‘cuts and sutures of the research process’ (Clifford 1988: 146, cited in Strathern 1992b: 110). Strathern remarks on the resonances between Clifford’s model of a more fitting and, in his terms, more authentic, anthropology and the idioms of mid twentieth-century biological kinship. Here persons are individuated by the mixing of biological materials from different sources: persons in this conception are unique and ‘natural hybrids’ and the future depends on ‘perpetual hybridisation’. End-of-thecentury recombinant DNA technologies, however, while even more explicitly grounding individual variation in biology, also offer dizzying means to detach persons from ‘natural origins’ – to meld, for example, the humanly genetic with the non-human. Both cyborg and chimera, made of compatible parts, are endlessly susceptible to development. Recombinant technologies create anew and melding is a more appropriate verb than mixing: there are no sutures to either make visible or disguise. We draw on the notion of recombinant knowledge to point to the way in which different knowledges are combined rather than assembled: to the way in which concepts travel, lose their moorings and morph; and to the folly of attempting to unhitch the interpersonal from the conceptual. We ask what happens when we go a-worlding with Strathern: when we combine her insight, concepts, connections and so on with those originating in different persons and conceived for different purposes.

This volume Strathern’s own work is notable for its finely tuned focus on diverse knowledge practices and on different ways in which social worlds come to be ‘known’. In this, she has characteristically and productively drawn on ethnographic detail from one part of the world to illuminate the

Introduction

13

premises and precepts of another. We develop a similar strategy in this book. Between them, the volume’s chapters present ethnography from several parts of the world – Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Japan, Britain, Switzerland, Tanzania and Latvia. The delicately explored ethnographic examples (valuable in their own right) illuminate, extend, reroute and recombine key Strathernian concepts. The authors mean strategically to unstitch and reloop anthropological concepts, theorems and experiences to reflect upon and make explicit not only Strathernian but also general anthropological knowledge and its ethical and aesthetic dimensions and pathways. Debbora Battaglia’s piece, with which the collection opens, reflects on the notion of knowledge paths and routes by ethnographically travelling through and ‘out’ of two iconic sites and texts of Strathernian genderworlding in The self in self-decoration (1979) and ‘One-legged gender’ (1993). Battaglia wants to unpack the notion of a ‘Strathernian gift to anthropology – the fact that, through her writings, Strathern has made us, and herself, akin to birds: drawing us along paths of relations which extend the parallax view’ through an analysis of what it means to liberate an object from attachment to an essential self or identity. A parallax anthropology applied to the analysis of visual communication and stereoptic ‘worlding’ enables Battaglia to extend the invitation Strathern offered as early as 1993 – that is, to pay attention to the social effects of performative aesthetic regimes. Battaglia pushes this call even further by inviting her readers to celebrate ethnographic blind spots and occlusions. The chapter theorises the importance of the relational gaps (or sometimes unspoken contexts) which anthropologists analyse and help establish. The themes of strategic transparency, visibility, opacity and the control of knowledge in anthropology run also through Melissa Demian’s and Annelise Riles’s chapter. Using her ongoing ethnographic work on corporate debt, family law and the legal status of the household in Japan, Riles explores what anthropological notions of personhood might tell us about the nature of legal personhood (the idea of personhood as a selfreflexive effect of exchange) as exemplified by corporations and corporate debt. In other words, she studies the legal person as a question of the visibility of legal techniques. Further, relations of mutual indebtedness – a

14

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

theme running through this collection – are here parsed and understood as transactions. By translating, switching back and forth, and making visible what does and does not get compared, by projecting juridical onto anthropological, and legal onto ethnographic theorems, Riles dissects the meaning of relationality. Moreover, she unpacks and builds upon the duplex character of the ‘relation as a tool’ (Strathern 2005a: 7), by making explicit the legal and anthropological techniques that make persons and things. The chapter shows what significant political and economic consequences of these translations have for a contemporary and novel understanding of property, financial crisis and the public personhood of the state. Demian’s chapter further unsettles classic anthropological conceptions of customary and common law by discussing documentary legalism in the cosmopolitan courts of contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG). One of the ways that PNG describes its heterogeneity and the social complexity arising from it is through the concept of custom. Describing how legal practitioners do their own ethnography of the customs of legalism (for example, through creative sentencing practices, collectively sharing out legal responsibility, and claiming in different ways for universality and particularity), Demian describes the mechanisms through which hybrid customs and the underlying law in PNG courts are established as selfconsciously technical fields. To this, Demian adds another twist to Battaglia’s and Riles’s insight that contexts generate their own techniques. Moreover, Demian theorises relationality by contending that the underlying law, as currently understood in PNG, is a product of a series of analogies, that is, relationships between social forms that are held to be comparable because they stand as versions of one another. Interpreting repellent technologies on the outskirts of Lupiro in Tanzania, Ann Kelly’s chapter continues an exploration of the relationships revealed through techniques of differentiation (Strathern’s model of elicitation in 1988). Kelly analyses the built environment of entomological science – experimental huts – and the relational forms they set in motion as humans and mosquitoes meet and are kept apart. The classical tools of entomological research, experimental field huts, are here described as hybrid knowledge spaces that enable the entomological particularities captured beneath their roofs to be read as patterns operating on the level of an ecosystem. Kelly’s huts press us to think about the anthropologist’s practical and empirical

Introduction

15

position in an environment of (microbiological, political, ecological and infrastructural) facts. Following on these themes of architecture and African ethnography, Thomas Yarrow makes an unexpected link between an Essex village and a resettlement town in Ghana. In the 1960s, Elmdon residents made connections between a common class position (working class), a set of named families (identified as having real Elmdon names) and being a ‘real’ villager (Strathern 1981). Strathern writes of the boundary effect of kinship: Elmdon residents used kinship to distinguish between ‘real Elmdon families’ and ‘incomers’. Yarrow’s ethnographic focus is on Apeguso, a town to which resettlement quarters were added forty years ago to rehouse a small proportion of the villagers displaced in the construction of the Akosombo Dam. Kinship features again as a boundary effect working to classify resettlers and old town residents. In an appealing twist on the notion of core families in Elmdon, to which Kinship at the core refers, the preferred structure of the Volta Resettlement Project is the core house. Yarrow extends Strathern by showing how the resettlers countered old town residents’ claims to belong through kinship with their own claims to belong through rights entailed in the core house. ‘Rather than kinship’, he writes, ‘the core house was at “the core” of what it meant to belong.’ Relational perspectives and themes of kinship are further explored in Aivita Putnin¸a’s ethnography of the imagined and practical effects of the living arrangements of ‘invisible families’ in Latvia. Her research with families that are not visible to the state, such as those created by homosexual partners or heterosexual friends or kin of the same sex living together and caring for children, offers Putnin¸a a new standpoint on conceptualising notions of family, kinship, gender and sexuality in a post-socialist setting. Her point of departure is not gay/lesbian identity per se but living arrangements that entail a kinship tie that is unnamed. For Putnin¸a, the capacity to relate, create and maintain relationships of care lies at the core of contemporary versions of family in Latvia. Paying attention to the relational aspect of invisible families and to unnamed kinship ties suggests for Putnin¸a that ‘what is vanishing is not family values, but the actual relationships behind those values’.

16

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

Eeva Berglund’s chapter celebrates the work of the Women’s Design Service (WDS) in Britain and reprises the influence of feminist expertise on the built environment. The WDS, like many other organisations in the UK, has had increasingly to account for itself in a welter of policy documents, mission statements, audit trails and attempts to standardise and justify its practice; this has detracted from the development of new forms of knowledge. While WDS used to count on ‘open-ended empirical research as a precondition for being able to offer robust expertise’, the inevitable noise this generates is hard to justify in the present goalorientated and outcome-valorised environment. But Berglund also acknowledges the enthusiasms that survive incapacitating forces. It is worth noting here that, given her profound and astute critique of political platitudes, Strathern’s writings also are neither maudlin nor pessimistic. They are rather tempered with constant reminders of what is possible and animated with a range of enthusiasms: for anthropology, ethnography, scholarship and more. As Berglund suggests, Strathern does not shy away from reminders of what open-ended research and the capacity to learn from ‘blind alleys, dead devices and strained conclusions’ can offer (Strathern 2006a: 194, cited in Berglund, this volume). WDS continues to be inspired and ‘events, publications and workshops continue to animate’. Enthusiasm also runs through Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger’s chapter. She describes etoy, an international art collective whose project Mission Eternity sets out to interact with death and dying through digitally archiving materials selected by participants. Workshops enable participants to ‘encapsulate’ personal materials and thus ‘send’ their memories into the future. Yet, as she remarks: ‘[r]eifying, untying, sending away, dismembering . . . [does] not sever or diminish, but rather strengthen[s] the memorial process’. Besides offering a haunting ethnography, Petrovic´-Sˇteger also connects it – recombines it – with portraits of and by Strathern. Bilums, portraits and etoy capsules appear as composite bodies – co-created and co-produced – recombining materials, concepts and social relations which not only memorialise but connect pasts, presents and futures. Petrovic´-Sˇteger passes on, from Issam Kourbaj, a Syrian saying: ‘When your right palm itches, you must give something away, while

Introduction

17

when your left itches, you can count on receiving a gift.’ This adage has inspired Kourbaj’s portrait of Strathern. Etching her hands, he portrays the right in a proud relief and the left in hollow. In Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, a Bomana prison inmate tells Reed that when a prisoner sneezes, he will ask, ‘who calls out my name?’ Rotating his body while bending his forearm up and down, a prisoner will stop at the point his elbow cracks. This tells him in what quarter people are thinking of him: where those people are who outside the jail ‘call his name’. Like hiccups, headaches, dreams – involuntary bodily tics – sneezes are the ‘embodied sensation of agencies acting through’ a person. Inspiration, in its Euro-American version, comes unbidden from elsewhere – from outside oneself. To claim to be inspired by someone is to acknowledge their continued impact on your actions and manner. Yet the final text, in the case of inspired writing, is cut off (dismembered) from its source of inspiration. The text is ultimately authored, and accolade or criticism directed at the author, not his or her inspiration. The category of inspiration may be thought to run through Euro-American kinship thinking. While collateral kin may be traced theoretically ad infinitum, with material traces running down the generations, instead, in practice, ‘networks are cut’ and kin either drop or are dropped off. Reed’s analysis, though, does something bolder than describe these filiations and their cutting-off. Reed routes the category of inspiration through a Melanesian ethnography ‘zig-zagging’ between readerwriters of The Henry Williamson Society, the author inspired by Strathern, and prison inmates in PNG who are at pains to reveal or claim that ‘someone else always causes one’s actions’. Adam Reed ends the collection by beautifully exposing where we began: the point of being inspired by Strathern. He explores what it might mean, as an anthropologist, to claim an intellectual debt. How should one properly recognise the influence of the ideas of another? What exactly might it mean to embody inspiration, or actively to assert and show that we are ‘inspired by Strathern’? The answer, Reed suggests, has to hinge not on a pronounced claim, but on a practice or ongoing activity of embodied assertion. This assertion will perform the relationalities that make up concepts within a community of anthropologists and in anthropological practice. Specifically, here, Reed unpacks and runs with the familiar idiom of inspiration, imaginative flows, processes of

18

Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

composition, authorial mystification and Euro-American conventions of creativity, setting them alongside his own Melanesian material on incarceration to arrive at an altered depiction of Melanesian sociality. In Melanesian societies, as this collection reminds us, an action particularises a relation. This book particularises, acknowledges and analyses an intellectual debt. But it also bespeaks the relation we wish to foster with social anthropology. By re-worlding the interpretive capacities of Strathern’s work, and by unhitching general anthropological analysis from habitual terms and associations, the authors in this collection have attempted not only to celebrate but also to theorise the influence of Marilyn Strathern. Our task has been not to translate her concepts into images of entomological huts, bilums, ies, courts or professional societies, but to differentiate, recombine and recast various forms of sociality and diverse ways of knowing an infinitely intriguing world. Our privileged exercise in recombinant knowledge is an attempt to dwell in a few Strathernian concepts and in so doing acknowledge the unpayable debt that we (and social anthropology) have gladly incurred.

2

Writing the parallax gap: an itinerary Debbora Battaglia

The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply ‘subjective,’ due to the fact that the same object which exists ‘out there’ is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather that . . . subject and object are inherently ‘mediated,’ so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its ‘blind spot,’ that which is ‘in the object more than object itself,’ the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. ‘Sure, the picture is in my eye, but me, I am also in the picture.’ (Zˇizˇek, The Parallax View, emphasis mine).

The exposure of epistemic ‘blind spots’ is a critical operation of the anthropological project; the ethnographic text, its apparatus of choice. This essay is an experiment in reading ethnographic texts as expressions of what Zˇizˇek terms the ‘parallax effect’1 – that is, as inscriptions of knowledge embedded in polyperspectival social acts of ‘solid seeing’ (stereopsis, in New Greek),2 inclusive of the ethnographer’s eye; inclusive, further of the ethnographer’s warm engendered body. It is this last point that intrigues me, since the entities we render often show no visible signs of our physical presence – which is to say, of our embeddedness as ‘blind spots’ amongst them. A little detective work is required for this

1 2

This is a phrase of Kojin Karatani’s (2003: 47–8). Here and throughout I am indebted to Giovanni da Col’s introduction to Zˇizˇek’s and Karatani’s relevant works, and to his boundless generosity in discussing them.

19

20

Debbora Battaglia

presence to appear, and a willingness to follow a writer’s ethnographic itinerary of object relations, as it were ‘on the wing’.3 I can think of no more striking example than Marilyn Strathern’s writings on Melanesian art and body-themed aesthetics and sociality. Specifically, I argue that this work’s analytic stance on body-things and thing-bodies, understood as inhabiting the suspenseful space of their hyphenation, to some degree stands in for her entire project of interrogating culture ‘after nature’, and further, that this project is itself an expression of the parallax effect of polyperspectival ‘solid seeing’. An early case in point is ‘The self in self-decoration’ (1979). Drawing from her fieldwork in Mount Hagen, the author is on one level responding to critiques of Self-decoration in Mount Hagen (1971), and on another carrying Melanesian personhood into the wave of Euro-American gender discourse that was at the time seeking recognition for the performance of gendered identity against selective mechanisms of institutionalised erasure. The second exemplary piece is ‘One-legged gender’ (1993), a selfdescribed ‘experimental’ essay published in Visual Anthropology Review. The author informs us that the essay draws upon her theoretical work in The gender of the gift (1988) and Partial connections (1991; 1993: 50). At this station in her itinerary of engaging aesthetic objects, she is implicitly in dialogue with Judith Butler’s writings on gender performance (Butler 1990; 1993). Also, she is placed not as a participant observer but as a reader of others’ Melanesian ethnographies collected in Art and identity in Oceania (Hanson and Hanson 1990). As the title of her essay indicates, she gives particular attention to a ‘one-legged’ carving employed in Ramu males’ initiation rites. The fact that these two publications are separated by nearly a decade and a half and apparently free-standing is important to note when approaching writing careers as genealogies of lineal and lateral transfers and transformations of knowledge. But such temporal gaps are more than second-order observations. Rather, they map gender aesthetics to point-of-view itineraries that free up their common elements (for 3

Re-voicing Wolfgang Welsch, Schirmacher (1999) casts such a project, along Deleuzian lines, as an ‘unceasing re-valuation of the world [which does not require] a cognitive consciousness of purpose and goal of such a change’.

Writing the parallax gap

21

example, expressions of masculinity or femininity) to recombine and attach to new object relations. In other words, it is in direct consequence of liberating the object from attachment to a singular authoritative context or fixity of perspective that ethnography ‘on itinerary’ offers a unique deliverance from myths of sure and fixed vision – of packaged, self-sufficient knowledge. The point is replayed as a commitment to making her indebtedness to subjects, including her indebtedness to other fieldworkers and their objects of inquiry, explicit. For it is by this device that she positions her writing as always already a counter-gift, and in consequence as a gift-in-suspension, on offer only, not yet for reciprocal ‘squaring’ (its reception being unknown and unknowable), incomplete, its component parts open to taking ethnographic detours to other places and even other times, and, more generally, to recontextualisation.

‘The self in self-decoration’ and . . . a detour ‘The self in self-decoration’ begins by setting up a contrast between selfadornment as persons ‘in the West’ might think of this – namely, as a technology for masking a complex inner person beneath a generic cultural ideal – and how body paint and ornaments acquired through exchange relations and standing in for them can work for Hageners to create a powerful impression of coordinated strength. Focusing on Hagen men’s performances of collective selfhood, Strathern argues that the adorned bodies’ synchronised choreography belies individual interests and shortcomings. Men perform a hierarchy of value in which the ‘skin’ or image of the collective – the stunning fierce flock of dancers exhibiting wealth to their guests – overwhelms any one body or valuable.4 In short, Hagen men’s wealth-enhanced bodies and body-enhanced things create (or perhaps invite) a connection between performers and audience, paradoxically through the fact that the two are held at a distance from one another: the apprehension of a united front, not

4

Andrew Strathern notes the logical and practical alternative to this visual rhetoric of invulnerability in reference to occasions when Hageners, sending messages to themselves about themselves, exhibit ‘shame’ and vulnerability (1975).

22

Debbora Battaglia

individuals ‘in the round’, will set in motion a forward casting of future relations, as the dancers are scrutinised for blind spots in their own assemblage. And all this is a synaesthetic semiotic field, for which the visual is only a standing in. In reality, scents are sent wafting, sounds vibrating through the ground and through bodies. The kinetic messages of the dancers’ dress and superstructures – the up and down movement of their painted images and rhythmically coordinated aprons and feathered superstructures – are indexical of the motional coordinates of the parallax effect, commanding attention, holding the event-artefact of the Hagen dancers in mind as a placed historical moment. It is a moment in contradistinction to, say, the gisarlo dancers of classic Kaluli ethnography (Schieffelin 1976) who, when dancing before their hosts, know success only when the hosts are moved by the performance to ‘break frame’ – to leap up and burn the dancers for inciting them to painful memories. Here, a particular dancer will wear the scar not only of his skill but of the breach which defeats objectivity, honouring this. And yet another detour into psychical pain – a show of modernity’s scars: Will Rollason’s ethnography from the small Melanesian island of Panapompom (2008), where local football teams habitually devolve into brawling which halts their games as a result of critical self-scrutiny before media evidence of world-class players whose skills seem permanently (racially) to outrank them, no breach of the skill gap even imaginable. Unable to compete in a globally mediated field where they can never win the esteem that matters in others’ eyes, a gaze embedded in their own vision of themselves, the Panapompom will their own blind spot to destroy them. The imaging technologies which are an element of these scenarios focus the social issues of parallax effect. For Hageners, the presence of a camera’s spectatorial lens in an ethnographer’s hands was not a problem; indeed, if anything the camera replicated the value of distanced point-of-view that performers needed from their guests. For the Kaluli, Schieffelin tells us, a camera would have been intrusive (and not surprisingly: still and moving picture technology deal in fixed frames). For the Panapompom, team portraits were important: photographic evidence captured them as a team, their self-destruction forever outside the frame. The fact that in none of these ethnographies is the face of the

Writing the parallax gap

23

ethnographer in the picture is significant in ways I consider shortly. ‘Sure, the picture is in my eye, but me, I am also in the picture’ (Zˇizˇek’s paraphrase of Lacanian subjectivity). It is on this point that Strathern’s essay for Visual Anthropology Review turns.

On becoming birds ‘One-legged gender’ attends to the androgynous features of a carved Ramu wooden Kominimung figure. The carving consists of a head and a torso tapering to a point which is carved as two legs in one. What captivates Strathern is a description of how, at one point in a male initiation ritual, an initiator standing wide-legged ‘kicks’ the novice in the back with the pointed end of the one-legged figure. One could of course speculate on the surprise effect of subjects being blind-sided by senior males and jolted into manhood. Or perhaps the message is to expect the unexpected in life, or that invisible forces can have effects felt bodily. For Strathern’s purposes, the relevant point is perspectival – the idea that this artefact might not have been for imparting or eliciting thought of any kind but rather, positioned so that the initiate ‘is directly affected by it’ – blind-sided. No one line of sight or any number of these is sufficient to convey the experience – but neither could this experience have occurred in the absence of a blind spot, which the novice himself was party to creating as a social space. In other words, the event marks a stereo-physical moment of phenomenal and noumenal conversion upon an object relation, where each reveals the insufficiency of the other. She continues, ‘The enthusiastic Kominimung [initiator] who showed . . . what the “one-legged” figures meant was showing what they could do. These wooden figures kicked . . . [and] the novice presented his back to be kicked . . . so that the figure in effect points in either direction, from the body that projects it and from the body that invites it’ (1993: 43). The fact that the wooden figure is also painted with nipples and that the Kominimung initiator wears a string bag fashioned as female breasts on his chest engenders the insight that the two sides of society, the male and the female, deliver the man. Meanwhile, real females are invisible on this occasion, superfluous. Strathern’s interest in this ritual event was preceded in her review by a more general introductory observation about visual interpretation. For

24

Debbora Battaglia

example, she comments on what it means to be placed so as to ‘see’ as a witness, namely, one sees only what is meant to be revealed: one side of the performer, for ‘completion’ by observers. Witnessing is the completion of an object by others with lateral forward facing vision; social stereopsis fixes object relations against a ground, particularly important when the occasion is for placing a relation ‘on the record’. Consider the distance the ethnographer has come – that I/we have come with her – from the Mount Hagen field site over decades past and human objects extending themselves in space for forming social relations, to a wooden cult figure that is ‘specifically aimed at another’ who turns his back to it (1993: 44).5 In perspectival terms we have come full circle: she has mapped us to a possible Melanesia of 360 degree vision. We have become birds, holographisers of the parallax – as Melanesians would and do appreciate, entities liberated from the limitations of (mortal) human perspective to take in and also take on the bigger (social) picture that includes them. That she regards this limitation of human perspective as an issue becomes apparent when she mentions as an aside how yet another Melanesian society contrasts human vision to that of the sun, which is thought to have ‘only one eye’. I have no idea how this notion plays out on the ground and must leave it, as Strathern does, for others to follow this particular line of thought. However, the fact of a transcending eye, in the sense of an action caught in the moment of shutting one eye at a time and so moving the world to ‘life’, is positively Copernican. Marilyn Strathern states early in the experimental essay that her interest in the one-legged object is motivated by its physical features as a ‘play on form’. However, her encounter with the ‘kick’ seems to deliver an expanded consciousness. One can conjecture that the more fully threedimensional, ‘fleshed out’ androgyny of the initiator and his wooden tool – in other words, androgyny extended beyond natural form through wood but also through the movement of a sexuality turning both away from one and towards another sexuality to social effect – is animated by lines of vision and subject positions in the fields the ethnographer has 5

Those who have viewed Dennis O’Rourke’s film Cannibal tours (1988) and have witnessed aghast the moment when the camera asks a young Sepik River man how it feels being photographed from behind by a female tourist, will appreciate this ‘kick’ as commodity fetishism does it.

Writing the parallax gap

25

differently entered, first on foot in Mount Hagen and then by way of text in Ramu. In other words, androgyny in practice requires an ontological engagement with the parallax view, and, no less, a career ethnographer’s dedication to deconstruction. Significantly, Marilyn Strathern returns to Mount Hagen at the end of ‘One-legged gender’ and ‘completes’ the dancing men who figured in ‘The self in self-decoration’ by means of an interpretation of a photograph of (female-associated) Hagen pearlshells, lined up ‘like organs’ on the ground for display, there to be witnessed by men but likewise by ‘the photographer’ (unnamed) from ‘her’ place behind the (situationally masculine) mask of the camera. And so this excursion through fields of androgynous thing-bodies and body-things arrives at its terminus. One needs to know neither the ethnographic content nor the ethnographic context fully to recognise the issue of (in)stability of figure and ground – and the (dis)connect of any singular temporality – that Strathern’s eye realises. She is mobilising theory from inside any parallax gap. She writes that ‘the invitation to “see” is an invitation to witness the appearance of a specific form, and to have in that sense elicited it. The individual witness is inevitably placed by the performer, then, into the position of seeing only what is revealed’ (Strathern 1993: 42). So, too, for her professional stance and self. In addition to iterating the Melanesian social in contradistinction to western ideologies of individualism, her work opens new lines of vision that articulate an approach to the social person as a dividual entity. If writing the parallax gap is, as I have proposed, a ‘found object’ activity of extending the self beyond itself and the spatiotemporally ‘natural’ world by way of elliptical surprises and suspenseful repositionings, then finding the ethnographer in it is a worthwhile enterprise. But in the case of this author, we will need first to find and then to learn to read her ‘skin’.

Professional work and constructs on the skin In 1979, when I made first contact with ‘The self in self-decoration’, my reading had, in addition to its explicit content, another kind of impact. For whilst on one level the ethnographer was writing mainly about visual

26

Debbora Battaglia

culture displayed on the skin, she was to my mind also modelling a kind of serious play, one that both masked and invisibly foregrounded (as I have written of this for Trobriand political strategies of placing valuables on offer (1994)) her own distinctive, meta-canonical game of ethnographic representation – as such. In other words, I took her to be performing her own professional self and worldview. Indeed, it was and is there for anyone to see, visible as the constructs she assembled and displayed on the skin of her texts. Conceptual adornment – which not only is not skin deep but which her students to some extent cite in their own professional lives – relates directly to what Strathern calls the ‘cosmetic paradox’: That personal beautification can draw attention away from the person . . . for them, an effect consciously striven for . . . When as a group they dress themselves in feathers, paint and leaves, the first thing spectators should see is the decoration – so discovering the individual underneath becomes a pleasurable shock . . . They are pretending to be no one but themselves, yet themselves decorated to the point of disguise. This idea is incorporated specifically into aesthetics: a dancer recognized at once has decorated himself poorly. (Strathern 1979: 243, emphasis mine)

And she continues: ‘I would argue that the physical body is disguised by decorations precisely because the self is one of their messages’ (Strathern 1979: 243). Just as decorating the physical body was not claiming to hide the inner self of Hageners, intellectual expression was making no claim to be hiding the inner ethnographer. But the purposes were of course different – or rather, the one (Hagener iteration) was purposed to the local frame of the social and the other (Strathernian iteration) was not. Whereas, for Hageners, the exterior displays freed the inner (cultural) self for making a wider (social) difference in a possible world rendered iconic by public witness, the anthropologist’s worlding reveals the speculative nature of the iconic and refracts its definitional limits, which can be missed, elude witnessing. This is where the element of risk enters into self rhetoric, as regards both Hageners’ political tactics of the body, and our own disciplinary idea-plays and knowledge practices. As Strathern writes (of Hageners), ‘This self-confident display of power is hedged with anxiety; prompting omens used to divine whether there really is a value to these shining claims to an enduring value’ (Strathern 1979: 247). It matters, she argues,

Writing the parallax gap

27

how good or how bad displays of decorations are, because the wrong effect – say, too clever and attention-getting or too heavy and dense – is itself a bad omen, portending a bad ending to the stories of relational shifts of power that people repeat on ceremonial occasions. In short, nothing less than the health and growth of social relational futures were at stake for Hageners then, or are now, for that matter, even as their adornment has been cosmeticised by global tourism and other expressions of cultural commodification. In some ways, the distinction between fields of ‘local knowledge’ and their ‘interlocutors’ blurs under the influence of Strathernian worlding, which refuses to recognise any point of view as privileged over any other on grounds of experiential proximity, or any connection as privileged a priori over any other. It is hardly surprising that this resolutely stereoptic worlding provokes the strongest and most self-righteous resistance from ethnographers who feel that they no longer recognise the objects, contexts and subjectivities that they themselves have laboured to describe and to analyse – which they ‘own’ in the broad sense of having taken responsibility for representing ‘what really matters’ to subjects about the relationship ‘being there’ (to give the Geertzian point a turn in the direction of a Strathernian relationality). So for example, ethnography for resisting social inequality suddenly finds itself conscripted into a programme of post-natural constructs where subjects are being posited as objects, or vice versa. But could a shift in perspective, the effect of parallax, in and of itself render these interchangeable, or power asymmetries invisible?

Coming to roost I began by inviting Slavoj Zˇizˇek (2006; also 2004) to join me on an itinerary through the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the company of Marilyn Strathern.6 I did this in the belief that birds of a different feather can make good company, and by means of detours through different ethnographies and time frames illuminate and beyond this iterate the operation of culture-making, in the style of suspense 6

See also Kojin Karatani (2003: 47–8).

28

Debbora Battaglia

ethnography.7 I hoped also to make apparent the ‘supplement’ to existing discourse (as Sabarl would say it) – the ‘value added’ (as Strathern would) – of a pre-doubled cross-speciated ethnography of engendered thing-bodies and body-things, which as a dioptric anamorphic device refracts Zˇizˇek’s and Lacan’s ‘reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included into the picture constituted by me’ – from ethnography’s slightly different angle of approach, perhaps constructively blind-siding the philosopher’s certain terms of reference.8 Davide Panagia makes the point from political philosophy: the political act is aesthetic at the start, an act of ‘partitioning of sensation that divides the body and its organs of sense perception and assigns to them corresponding postures of attention’ (2006: 2, emphasis mine) – culturally mediated as such, of course. Seafaring Melanesians with whom I’ve lived and worked put the point somewhat differently:

Fieldnotes June 1976: Point-of-view. Sabarl Island, PNG. Today I tacked a map of the Louisiade Archipelago to the wall of the house. A group of young men spied it when they came to talk. Excited exchanges. It seems they haven’t seen a map of their islands before. Suddenly, a shift in the interactions. Now they are reading the map, naming the islands, tracing the paths of the ocean channels with their fingers. When I ask how they’d done this [recognised their territory in the map] one replied, ‘We became birds.’

As with New Guinea Highlanders, Sabarl Islanders identify intimately with birds. Faces are painted with the markings of clan birds in rituals marking new phases of social life: the same designs appear on new babies and adults released from mourning, and on the faces of the dead – their passports to afterworld identities as ancestors. To this day, leave-takings are marked by calls and responses in alternating bird and human 7

8

The essay, ‘Blind spots: Hal Foster on the art of Joachim Koester’ (2006) opens with a quote from Alexander Kluge, author of The Devil’s Blind Spot: ‘Nothing is more instructive than a confusion of time frames.’ The notion guides Foster’s analysis of Koester’s political art and the clash of its visual imagery. Likewise referencing Strathern, Alberto Corsı´ n Jimenez explores anthropological anamorphism in ‘How knowledge grows: an anthropological anamorphosis’ (2010).

Writing the parallax gap

29

‘languages’ – a small ritual of (dis)connection which people find deeply moving. Sabarl also speak of ‘flying’ in their dreams to gather information from the spirit world, following the airways of their totemic clan birds and, more importantly, returning home again along their historic routes. Birds figure in myth as ancestral culture heroes and marry human females who produce human girls. The fact that some species of bird are endowed with 360-degree vision does not escape Sabarl observation; neither does it that master predators like hawks share with humans laterally placed eyes and forward vision. A great hawk created the archipelago they call home from the putrefying remains of a snake it had conquered by tricking her to venture too far from her hole on land. Birds, then, are nothing if not tactical and strategic. They deploy their capacities of perspective towards social futures, and blind spots figure in these as centrally as lines of sight. Indeed, some birds are blind spots embodied; they make use of tonal feather camouflage for concealing themselves from predators, and using ‘motion camouflage’ they hover in such a way as to appear stationary while actually rapidly approaching their prey (dragonflies, classified as birds by Sabarl, do this). All told, the polyperspectival capacities of birds link them to the enterprise of scouting out solid truths and eye witnessing, and to the delusion of taking appearances as in any sense the whole or true picture of reality. One could say on the basis of bird themes alone that interpolated interspeciation is a significant aspect of an aesthetic regime for which illusion is the creative armature. Overall, I have tried to suggest that the parallax gap, taken as an undifferentiated capacity of humanness, creates space for the diversities and inclusiveness that anthropology appreciates in taking at the start our own and others’ blind spots – those occlusions that come with the package of forward-facing vision and can also blind-side – as socioculturally and historically situated acts.9 Anthropology’s work is compelled by the 9

Wagner’s idea of the figure–ground reversal for understanding object relations in the field reveals the limits of the gap but underplays the multiplicity of possible grounds – e.g. an object apparently shifting from a red field to a blue field – and thus how a figure’s apparent stability can orient people to social environments beyond the original frame of reference (cf. Wagner 1986).

30

Debbora Battaglia

possibility that something of the social process is hidden from us, and/or from subjects at one point or another, and that there are reasons for this that are inseparable from their epistemic context which, if understood, can make all the difference to lived experience, moving forward. Conversely, what we do will inevitably offer surprises of convergence which reconstitute ‘the real’ as others regard this. Thankfully, the question of how to shape a comparative project tooled to grapple with the partiality of our vision can only be an open one.

3

Too big to fail Annelise Riles

[W]hat people exchange is a totality: one perspective for another; your view of my assets for my view of yours. Thus are persons and objects created. (Strathern 1992b: 188)

In 2008, in one of the now infamous pivotal events in the financial crisis, the insurance giant AIG (American International Group) came close to defaulting on its obligations. AIG was in the business of guaranteeing others’ debts. Other parties, who had taken on the risk of guaranteeing obligations, turned to AIG to promise to fulfil those obligations should they ever have to pay on them, in exchange for regular payments to AIG. But in 2008 those parties began to doubt AIG’s ability to fulfil its own obligations in the face of the mortgage crisis. And so they began to demand collateral in the present as security for future potential debts. As AIG proved unable to meet these immediate demands these counterparties’ demands for collateral grew greater still. In a matter of days, AIG came unravelled, its inadequate assets on display for all to see. The immediate crisis was diffused when the US Department of Treasury stepped in, declaring AIG ‘too big to fail’, and promising to meet all of AIG’s obligations dollar for dollar. But this precipitated a larger political crisis of sorts, as politicians asked where the limits of the government’s obligations to ‘bail out’ private parties might lie, and as citizens’ groups on the right and the left voiced dismay as tax dollars were funnelled to AIG’s counterparties while ordinary people suffered near record debts of their own. My own work to date on capital markets and on legal knowledge in liberal states has focused on the legal knowledge practices entailed in 31

32

Annelise Riles

financial transactions especially as I have observed them in Japan (Riles 2011, in press). In this respect, my interest has tracked the explicit focus of market participants: what absorbs their energies is the intricacies, financial and legal, of transactions, as transactions, and the quantity and quality of the property transacted. What is the value of the swap? What is the value of the collateral? Is it legally valid? What law will regulate the collateral and the transaction? What kinds of documents, what kinds of theories, what kinds of professionals, what kinds of laws are necessary to sustain these transactions? Yet in Strathern’s terms, this focus ‘yields a remainder’ – the question of the nature of the persons engaged in such transactions. For an anthropologist, what is particularly salient about events such as these is that state, corporation and property (assets, collateral, debts and obligations) are all being explicitly reimagined in a relational way, as potential transacting partners: the argument is anxiously made that without the state the market will fail, and vice versa. And in these moments of ‘crisis’, the potentialities and vulnerabilities of these transactors are suddenly, surprisingly – almost violently – revealed, their interdependence activated. These conditions, these aspects of persons and transactions, are the distinct province of Marilyn Strathern’s formidable contribution to the long-standing anthropological tradition of work on gifts and exchange. It took me some time to see this: the portions of Strathern’s expansive corpus that at first seemed most salient to my subject were rather her work on law and legal institutions, and on the knowledge practices of social science, bureaucracy and regulatory policy, and while she never actually asserts a divide between capitalist economies and the gift economies she has studied, Strathern herself does draw more analytical purchase from contrastive comparisons with ‘Euro-American’ persons and transactions than from analogies. So in this chapter, I want to ask a different question that is nevertheless fundamental to any anthropological account of corporate debt: what kinds of persons are the agents of financial market transactions? At the time of my fieldwork, the parties to any swap or collateral exchange traditionally were large banks, hedge funds and securities firms, although they increasingly included other corporations – manufacturers, trading companies, municipalities, universities, and more. In Japanese law, the

Too big to fail

33

salient term for corporate personality is houjin, literally, the legal person – something translated as ‘corporation’ but that includes entities US law would not count as corporations, such as schools and (as we will see, at least in some circumstances) kin groups. What kinds of legal personhood do market relations presuppose or engender? Here, I hope to demonstrate the illumination that comes from thinking through corporate persons, transactions and debts from the standpoint of Strathern’s work on exchange, kinship and personhood. The nature of debt relations is of course a long-standing theme in the anthropology of economy, personhood and kinship (Strathern 2004b: 85). There are obviously important differences between corporate debt relations and the kinds of debts that emerge from gift exchange relations. One crucial difference is that corporate debt is framed (ideologically, at least) as debt for a limited time: once the debt is paid the parties, formally speaking, will become strangers again and go their separate ways. Whether or not this in fact occurs in any practical sense does not displace the rhetorical force of the formal concept of an endpoint in the parties’ relationship (Keane 2008: 27–42). But there are also parallels. Take for example swaps like the ones that precipitated the crisis for AIG – transactions that practitioners and economic theorists sometimes analogise to barter. They are framed in the first instance as transactions, promises in the present to exchange a certain quantity for another quantity at some future date. But an obligation to pay in the future is a debt, and indeed creating debts is precisely the point, as each party sees itself as having the best of the other. In precisely the sense suggested by Strathern for the case of barter, in the epigraph above, the credit default swap is a swapping of perspectives on the totality of each side’s assets. Hence what is explicitly framed as a transaction is also implicitly understood as a relationship of ambiguous mutual indebtedness, what Strathern has termed an extraction of wealth by one side from the other (Strathern 2004b: 85–109). This fact of mutual indebtedness in turn raises questions about the capacities of each to fulfil its obligations because of the way the capacities of corporate personality are often disassembled and reassembled in the context of ‘sudden death’ or ‘government rescue’, ‘merger’, ‘acquisition’, cash flow problems, exposure to unforeseen market risks or the imposition of constraints by government regulators.

34

Annelise Riles

My hope is that focusing on the constitution of legal personhood through the lens of economic exchange can help move the anthropology of law definitively beyond its lingering addiction to a view of the ‘jural’ (jural relations, jural personhood) as a matter of rules and norms governing rights and obligations, in contrast to the flexible, empirical realities of economic relations (Leach 1961). This implicitly accepted conception of law, in which, for example, the anthropology of the state is something quite distinct from the anthropology of gift exchange, assumes that the jural should be apprehended in a quite different modality, as a target of critique rather than ethnography. This straw man in my view now impedes anthropologists from grasping the potential contributions of their own knowledge to pressing ethical and political questions of the moment. Because the nature of the legal person is not accessible explicitly among my informants in the market, it has been necessary to turn to another site of legal knowledge production, the legal academy, where, in contrast, the legal person has been the subject of great debate. Here, some of the observations of the anthropology of exchange about the nature of relations and of persons turn out to have robust parallels in early twentieth-century jurisprudence. For me, this suggests that we might put the canon of anthropological theory side by side with the canon of legal theory to generative effect for each. My larger suggestion is that a Strathernian approach to ethnography and analysis points the way towards a different kind of ethnography of law as collaborative relation with (as opposed to description of) legal knowledge production.

The legal relation One of Strathern’s early contributions to the anthropology of personhood and exchange was the appreciation that relations might be analytically prior to the subjects and objects of relation (Strathern 1988: 173). It turns out that this appreciation is shared by much of modernist legal theory. For example, it is a point that the venerable Weimar era judge and legal scholar Hans Kelsen wholeheartedly embraced as an account of corporate personality in his canonical treatise, Pure theory of law ([1934] 2002). For Kelsen, law was a system of legally determined obligations of one legally recognised subject to another. What was primary and most

Too big to fail

35

significant were not the relations between individuals but rather the ‘relations between legal norms’ themselves, or between the ‘facts determined by legal norms’ (Kelsen 2002: 165). This view of the primacy of the legal relation framed Kelsen’s understanding of the legal person as a kind of assemblage of legal norms. As he wrote, in terms that predated a generation of poststructuralist theory, not to mention later subdisciplines such as science and technology studies, ‘The so-called physical person . . . is not a human being, but the personified unity of the legal norms that obligate or authorize one and the same human being’ (Kelsen 2002: 174). At the time, the dominant way of thinking about the problem of corporate personality was epistemological – in what sense does the corporation, which unlike ‘real’ persons of flesh and blood is a fiction of law, exist in the world? But for Kelsen there was nothing artificial or fictional about corporate personality. When the law states that the corporation is a person, he argued, it is simply outlining a relationship among legal orders – between the ‘national legal order’ (a total legal order) and a ‘partial legal order’, the corporation. That is, the state as a system of legal relations delegates certain capabilities, potentialities and obligations without regard to who actually activates or appropriates these. To say that the state looks at the corporation as a person is simply to say that it looks no further, with respect to certain kinds of obligations and potentialities. Those juridical relations become opaque from the state’s point of view, visible as if from the outside, so to speak. So as a first step, Kelsen’s work suggests an analogue between modern legal ways of conceptualising the state and modern anthropological ways of conceptualising the social, both of which make these entities appear and disappear in relationality. And this is where Strathern’s work reinvigorates legal debate. In the contemporary moment when more sociological accounts of law are dominant, Kelsenian jurisprudence has often been dismissed as an excessively formalistic attempt to rationalise all relations into a singular legal hierarchy with the state at the top. But from an anthropological vantage point, the fact that state and corporate personality are relational entities by no means suggests that the relations are stable, unchanging, or can be seen from only one point of view. The notion of legal personhood as an effect of relationality has taken a more discursive turn in the work of the eminent private law theorist

36

Annelise Riles

Gunther Teubner. Teubner also writes against the modern version of the same standard legal view of the corporation as a fiction attacked by Kelsen. In the modern version (inflected by economic analysis), the corporation is treated as a so-called ‘nexus of contracts’ – the corporation is an entity in name only; it is nothing more than the coming together of myriad individuals, the shareholders, who through their individual contracts with one another agree to pool their wealth and act collectively – to produce, buy, sell, pay themselves dividends from the profits (Easterbrook and Fischel 1989). The corporation then is simply a useful fiction, a kind of legal shorthand. For Teubner, in contrast, the important point is the reflexive, selfobserving character of economic transactions: ‘What is unique about the corporation is that the communications, the transactions have the ability to refer to themselves, describe themselves, to call themselves by a legal name, to demand that others so call them. They are quite literally personified’ (pers. comm.). Teubner’s approach, with its focus on economic transactions rather than jural relations, comes even a step closer to Maussian understandings of personhood as a self-reflexive effect of exchange. Like Strathern, Teubner presents legal persons as reified exchanges. So what should we make of the parallel between innovations in legal and anthropological theories of exchange? Although Strathern’s work has been celebrated for its focus on relationality, and concepts of the person that follow from this (such as the ‘dividual’), parallels in legal theory suggest that these particular insights are perhaps less unique and perhaps more widespread elements of midcentury social thought, as refracted through multiple disciplines. I suspect that Strathern herself might be rather pleased to find her work already done elsewhere, for this raises the more challenging methodological question of what else the anthropologist might do when the relational analysis is already performed. Her methodological innovations on this point inspire the rest of this chapter, as they have inspired so much of my work.

Inside and outside As it turns out, the analogy of the legal constitution of corporate personhood to problems discussed in the anthropology of kinship and exchange is not a stretch at all in the Japanese context in which I work. It is not

Too big to fail

37

even an analogy. In 1947 the American occupation forces, confident that the Japanese household (ie, literally ‘house’) was a patriarchal institution that discriminated against daughters and wives, abolished the ie’s status as a perpetual property holder and mandated the individualised division of property into equal shares (Bachnik 1983; Hendry 1987: 6; Gordon 1998; Garner 2004: 215–18). During this period, the same occupation forces revised the corporate law and took numerous steps to break up large financial conglomerates and promote the growth of small businesses – a reflection of the occupation forces’ confidence that small-scale capitalism would breed democracy (Gerlach 1992: 109–10; Rider and Tajimi 1998: 153–4; Shishido 2001: 664). The response was dramatic, as companies rushed by the thousands to incorporate. The new corporations were, in many cases, the very households the occupiers had banned three years before. Today, such companies (in which the majority of the shareholders understand themselves to be kin) amount to over 99 per cent of Japanese enterprises and employ more than two thirds of the Japanese labour force (even without including non-waged labour). In Japan, then, we have a recent history of kinship relations becoming reflexive agents of capitalism through the legal techniques of incorporation. Now this was possible because of the particular character of Japanese kinship.1 The Japanese household has always been something of a puzzle for kinship studies because neither relations nor persons are prior, and persons are neither individual nor collective (Strathern 1992a: 53). Rather, what is salient is the form of the house, as a receptacle of wealth and potential of various kinds, and as directed by the office of the head and his or her spouse (positions occupied by various persons over time). Hence the much commented upon practices of adopting successors from outside, and the ease with which biological children are expelled from the household to leave only one office holder in management in each generation (Befu 1962; Brown 1966; Nakane 1967; Wimberly 1973; Yonekura 1984; Kato 1989). Anthropologists have insisted that the ie be understood first as an economic unit (Bachnik 1983) rather than a site 1

Max Weber suggests that the same sort of representation of the ‘joint household’ (an institution not limited to kin but that could expand to encompass entire guilds) as corporate organisation characterised the usage of the corporate form in premodern Europe (Weber [1889] 2003).

38

Annelise Riles

of procreation and genealogy,2 and in a 1971 paper in American Anthropologist Hironobu Kitaoji argued that the corporate law, rather than anthropological kinship theory, provided the proper analytical frame for the anthropology of Japanese kinship. Like the corporation, he argued, the ie is a pool of wealth that exists in perpetuity with a unified management structure that is nevertheless advised by others. All this is rarely commented upon outright by legal elites. Household companies receive barely a paragraph or two in corporate law textbooks and Japanese law professors often express embarrassment at a foreign academic’s interest in this topic. (Why not focus on the serious and sophisticated legal solutions to the problems of global corporations, as imported directly from the United States and Europe, rather than the boring and backward realities of kinship-based companies?) The government refers to these companies euphemistically only as ‘small and medium sized enterprises’ although they are in fact often very large, and nothing in the civil code or the corporate law explicitly acknowledges their existence. Yet practising corporate lawyers take it for granted that a large share of their business involves kinship relations. ‘Japanese corporate law – that’s just family law’, one lawyer told me, of his reason for wanting to get out of corporate law practice. Government policy aimed at promoting local companies is clearly framed with an understanding of the problems of succession, tax and the burdens of legal formalities that come with framing kin relations as corporate relations for most companies. And judges routinely disregard the letter of the corporate law in legal disputes among shareholders where the law would reach a result that does not sit well with the judge’s view of proper kin relations. But if the legal machinations that transform household into corporation remain implicit in the realm of the corporation’s relationship with the outside – with other corporations, with the government – these are very much explicit in relationships on the inside. In a country in which litigation between corporations is very rare, relative to the United States and Europe, legal disputes among shareholders in household companies (disputes over ownership and control within the household/corporation) 2

Sylvia J. Yanagisako’s ‘Family and household: the analysis of domestic groups’ (1979) provides a larger critique of the focus on procreation and genealogy in the anthropology of households.

Too big to fail

39

account for more than 80 per cent of all commercial litigation in the Tokyo District Court (Japan Small Business Research Institute, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry 2009). What interests me in all this are the features and potentialities of the ie form as transposed onto the legal person. First, the form itself is simple, steady, singular and unchanging (Strathern 1988: 181), albeit one that enables and encompasses an almost infinite diversity of ad hoc and contingent practices.3 Second, it is marked by a highly rigid division between inside and outside (Kondo 1990). To borrow a phrase from Strathern, the fact that the corporation is ‘one’ from the vantage point of the state does not negate the way it might be ‘many’ from another point of view (Strathern 1992a: 57). Third, it is relations between kinspersons and the form, and between one form and another, not between kinspersons, that matters. Hence internal relations between persons within the ie are notoriously conflictual and unstable, while relations between persons outside (including expelled biological kin) are notoriously attenuated. Hence also the appeal of the rules of shareholder meetings and fiduciary duties as a register for disputes. Japanese kinship is therefore a textbook case for Strathern’s emphasis on the constraints and effectiveness of form (1988; 1991). But it is important to keep in mind that what is at issue here is not just Japanese kinship but also the constitutive effects of legal form. The Japanese legal person also exemplifies corporate personality as opacity, described by Kelsen as the effect of a hard boundary between legal relations on the inside and outside. The eminent Japanese economist Katsuhito Iwai has written of the general features of the corporate form that external simplification in turn makes for internal complexity (Iwai 1999: 583–632). Iwai later makes what he views as an unrelated claim: the salient feature of the corporate form is that it ‘plays a dual role as both person and thing’ (1999: 584), subject and object – by which he means that it both owns and is owned. A shareholder who walks off with the corporation’s typewriter can be arrested for theft because the typewriter is the property of the 3

On the ad hoc and contingent as if uses of a simplified and stable kinship form as refracted through the law, see Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Coutin’s ‘Backed by papers: undoing persons, histories and return’ (2006) and Marie-Andre´e Jacob’s ‘The shared history: unknotting fictive kinship and legal process’ (2009).

40

Annelise Riles

corporation, as subject of the property relation. On the other hand, in a capitalist economy, a thing is an object of property that can be sold as a commodity, and the stock market exists precisely so that the corporation can be sold in this way (1999: 592). Iwai’s point concerns the flexibility of the legal form:4 Japanese companies deploy the form in a rather personifying way, as for example in the practice of cross-shareholding in which a group of companies mutually own one another’s shares (and often these firms’ leaders make public claims about the roots of the firms’ close relations in kinship ties). This mutual relationship personifies the company because its owner, the other company, does thinks of it not as a mere basket of wealth, to be taken apart and resold, but as the subject of a relationship, Iwai argues. On the other hand, American companies deploy the same form in a way that emphasises the object quality of the corporation – valuing themselves on the basis of the sum total of their assets, from the point of view of their owners, the shareholders, he says. A Strathernian understanding of corporate personhood might entail the following elaboration on Iwai’s observation: from the outside, the Japanese corporation looks like a liberal person – it is a ‘simplification’, in Iwai’s terms, that enables the corporation to act in a relational way. But from the inside it looks like property – it is a pool of assets, the subject of contention among persons who do not see themselves as relationally bound. From this point of view, the distinction Iwai observes between corporations as persons and as things is a distinction between the view from outside and the view from inside. Drawing on Strathern’s insights about the agents and objects of exchange, then, I believe we can understand that the legal person must take a particular form (Foster 2009): from the outside it is a person, ‘simplified’, and a subject of jural relations; from the inside, it is a ‘thing’, property, a target and artefact of legal technique. The Japanese example also sharpens appreciation for the way that this opacity is also a political project. Recall that incorporation was a solution 4

Emi Matsumoto explains that although the German author of the first Japanese commercial code intended to introduce a concept of the corporation as a legal fiction, Japanese jurists from the start creatively mistranslated this notion (borrowing also from the French jurist Raymond Saleilles) to treat corporations as ‘reality’, rather than as fiction (Matsumoto 2010). This understanding of the corporation as ‘reality’ would be more difficult for Euro-Americans who perceive of personhood as naturally individualistic and of corporate forms as social artefacts or fabrications.

Too big to fail

41

to a problem of recognition: the problem of the ie was that the occupation reformers refused to recognise it, as a property owner through time, and as a citizen enjoying state privileges and owing the state a share of its wealth, as a bearer of private rights and one capable of assuming obligations by entering into contracts. But incorporation changed all that, for if the occupation regime would open up the household to recombination, it would not ‘pierce the corporate veil’ (Thompson 1991). In the liberal state, it is the availability of that veil (not in fact submission to demands for transparency) that is so often the marker of legitimacy (vis-a`-vis the state and vis-a`-vis other persons) and the basis of political recognition (Strathern 2000a). Through the example of the legal status of the ie or household in Japan, we can understand legal personification, or recognition, in the liberal capitalist state system, not simply as an effect of being seen and heard (Povinelli 2002; Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003) but also as an effect of being inaccessible to view; as the political effect of maintaining certain opacities between inside and outside. Hence, the calamity that befell AIG, in those crisis days in 2008, was that the demands of others succeeded in exposing the corporate person as just so much property (and the lesson of the ethnography of exchange is that when the ability to fulfil one’s obligations becomes reckoned in terms of crude quantities, those quantities always appear as inadequate). The near failure of AIG, as a corporate person – the radical exposure of the inside to the outside so to speak – was quite literally the effect of its transactions. The next legal step, when this occurs, is bankruptcy or corporate reorganisation – the dissolution and possible reconstitution of the corporate person through the forgiveness or renegotiation of its obligations as mediated by the state in a legal framework in which the corporation (now termed ‘the debtor’) has lost its rights of autonomy and recognition vis-a`-vis both the state and its ‘creditors’.

Legal form But how concretely did AIG’s creditors make demands on its assets and question its ability to fulfil its obligations? Or again, how do kinspersons/ shareholders challenge one another’s leadership or demand that one another’s internal contributions be recognised? In both cases it is

42

Annelise Riles

through technical legal interventions – collateral calls pursuant to contractual obligations in the case of AIG, and more precisely a set of baroque lines of legal interpretation of those obligations regarding how debts and assets should be valued. Or again, in the case of the corporation, internal disputes with the corporate person take the outward form of claims that certain behaviour did not conform to the formal requirements of the corporation law, or constitute a breach of a legal duty to fiduciaries. A view of the corporation from the vantage point of Japanese kinship, in which there is nothing prior to the kinship form – no lineage, no alliances, no relationality to speak of – allows us to see that what is the inside and what is the outside of the legal person is the artefact of the selective activation of the two sides of the same form through the articulation and manipulation of legal technique. In legal anthropology, as in mainstream legal studies, legal form is treated as a largely extraneous by-product of the politics of social and economic relations, something superfluous, dull and old-fashioned – not the focus of serious and exciting scholarly inquiry. I owe its accessibility to me as an ethnographic subject not to the anthropology of law but to Strathern’s analysis of gender as ‘aesthetic’ that brings particular relations and persons into view (Strathern 1988). In an analogous way, legal technique brings the corporate person and property, externally and internally, into view and is also the medium of corporate transactions. Its effectiveness turns on ‘a contrast between the overt personification of relations and the covert techniques that determine the proper forms through which these are recognized’ (Strathern 1988: 180). In practice, the legal relation is activated differently inside and outside the legal person: on the inside, that relation emerges as legal technique. On the outside, it emerges as legal relations. As a person, the corporation is a subject of jural relations – that is to say, it is opaque, that is, the legal techniques that produce it remain implicit. As property, in contrast, the corporation is an explicit target and artefact of legal technique – viewed as if from the inside it invites opening up and recombination through legal manoeuvres. Strathern’s book Kinship, law and the unexpected (2005a) adds an additional formulation of the workings of a special kind of ‘nonepistemological’ relations – relations (like the legal person) that do not seek to describe reality. This sort of relation, what she terms ‘a tool’, has

Too big to fail

43

what she calls a ‘duplex character’. It has two possible directions to it, and hence it is possible, ‘switching back and forth’, to occupy two different positions at once ‘that anticipate each other’ (2005a: 82). In this sense, law is at once both legal technique and juridical relations ‘in the world’, in the act of ‘world-making’. On the one hand there is the world of legal relations and subjects (the world of Kelsen’s relational persons), and on the other hand there is the practice of legal technique, the manipulation of non-epistemological relations. This is obvious in practice: What does it mean to buy and sell shares? How does a corporation go into debt? One can answer these questions either with a relational description of a transaction in the world or with a description of a set of legal techniques and their human and material artefacts (Riles 2006: 1–38). Thus, the corporation can appear alternatively as a set of political relations or as a trick of doctrinal manipulation.

Legitimacy: the personhood of the state In the case of AIG, the corporate person did not actually fail. What happened rather was that the state stepped in to guarantee its debts. This in turn unleashed a fury of debate about the legitimacy of state involvement in markets, and about whether this intervention made sense from the standpoint of either market efficiency or social equity. Doubt even turned on the particular government officials ‘behind’ the actions of the state as journalists and politicians began to ask whether their decision to commit the state to standing behind AIG’s debts might have been motivated by personal interests or relations and to second guess the moves the Department of Treasury had made in its negotiations with AIG’s creditors as possible errors of legal reasoning. This incident made plain that the state was very much a transactor in these exchanges, with internal and external vulnerabilities of its own. I mentioned earlier that incorporation – the performance of legal personhood – involved a problem of recognition. But recognition takes not only the form of political representation but also the form of transaction, of mutual indebtedness and of guaranteeing one another’s debts. I want to consider what conceptions of liberal recognition the anthropological vocabulary of debts and transactions might afford.

44

Annelise Riles

From this standpoint, I want to return to the politics of opacity and to the question of how the legal person and the state come to be mutually recognised. And for this I look to another legal and political theorist who sought precisely to expose the politics of legal personhood, that is, to open it to analysis as just so much legal technique. If Hans Kelsen’s Pure theory of law may be unfamiliar to some anthropologists, most already know well the text and the scholar against whom it was written. Kelsen’s nemesis was Carl Schmitt, leading jurist of the Weimar Republic, leading legal theorist of the German Nazi regime, and icon of poststructuralist theory. Schmitt’s Political theology ([1922] 2006) is read widely across the humanities today for its last chapters on sovereignty, the state of exception, and the theological foundations of the modern state. But if one reads beyond the last chapters, one finds a sociological theory of law in stark contrast with Kelsen’s relational theory. For Schmitt, Kelsen’s emphasis on the relational quality of legal norms without regard for how those norms are shaped through the technical manipulations of lawyers and judges was a perfect example of the self-justificatory ‘ideology of the lawyer-bureaucrat practicing in changing political circumstances’ (Schmitt 2006: 45). Schmitt’s ‘sociological’ approach in contrast focused on the technical knowledge practices of law and on the human actors who make and apply legal norms. The law may in some sense be a system of legal relations, in Schmitt’s view, but as such, it is inherently incomplete. The abstract norms in themselves can never tell a judge how to decide a concrete case – there is always a gap between the ‘juristic deduction’ and ‘its premises’. Hence human judgment – political judgment – is always necessary in legal technique and ‘what matters for the reality of legal life is who decides’ (Schmitt 2006: 34). In this sense, Schmitt’s text lays the groundwork for most contemporary sociolegal and critical studies of law. Schmitt takes the leftist critique of legalism to its right-wing extreme. For him, the rule of law is ultimately a farce: because legal judgment cannot be bound by law, every legal decision carried out by the state’s technocratic agents is in fact a ‘state of sovereign exception’. This illiberal politics is obfuscated, however, by the technical legal morass of the modern liberal legalist state. Dictatorship emerges as the only modern secular form of government that dares to be transparent about the state of exception.

Too big to fail

45

Now this debate between Kelsen and Schmitt was largely about the legitimacy of the public personhood of the state. But it unfolded along the same lines as the manoeuvres surrounding private legal personhood I have described. Kelsen, the progressive centrist, sought to defend the state by making it appear as a closed and coherent set of legal norms, as if viewed from the outside, while Schmitt, at both the far right and the far left at once, sought to critique it by reopening it as just so much legal technique, as if viewed from the inside of the judge’s chambers. And in the neoliberal era, Schmitt can be said to have had the best of this argument. The state is typically imagined today as nothing but an artefact of legal technique and hence a pool of collective resources. Therefore its legitimacy is always open to question, and its activities as a transactor, that is, as a subject of relations (for example, its infusion of cash into troubled banks, its regulatory demands on private parties, or its redistribution of wealth through tax and transfer schemes) are inherently suspect. In legal theory, the difference between Kelsen and Schmitt is framed as a primal and irresolvable battle over which is ultimately fundamental – law (Kelsen) or power (Schmitt). But following Strathern’s exploration of the duplex relation, I believe we can understand the opposition of law and power exemplified by the battle between Kelsen and Schmitt to turn on the double-edged quality of law in the duplex sense she describes. In my view, Kelsen and Schmitt are each merely seeing a different side of the duplex legal relation – persons and relations on the one hand and legal technique on the other. But Schmitt’s totalitarian turn highlights how for states, as much as for private legal persons, legitimacy and recognisability are a question of the implicit quality of legal technique. As Strathern has commented, when cultural practice ‘takes the form of making the implicit explicit, then what was once taken for granted becomes an object of promotion, and less the cultural certainty it was’ (Strathern 1992a: 35). Following Strathern’s comparative insights into the nature of capitalist and noncapitalist exchange, then, this suggests the following: in a liberal capitalist political system, legitimacy (the opacity vis-a`-vis the state and other persons that comes with being a person and not property) is a question of the implicitness of the effects of legal technique. The division of persons

46

Annelise Riles

and things is fundamental in capitalist exchange and the liberal polity, as many have commented – but it is fundamental in a specific way, that is, as an artefact of the different potentialities of legal form. Where technique is left implicit, that is, the subject is not immediately available for opening up and recombination through legal technique, personhood is opaque, relations are explicit, and legal persons become recognised, legitimised – which is just to say that in a capitalist economy, such persons become transactors, property owners. On the other hand, where technique is explicit, that is, where the object is immediately available for opening up and recombination through legal technique, property is reckoned. Property then is also simply the state of being visible as a past or potential object of legal technique. And the corporation is a property form when it is so imagined – as the site of internal disputes among shareholders in the Japanese case, or as the target of external raids in the European and American case.

Conclusion Corporate debt, of course, is now the subject of daily news. Market transactors now complain that they are overwhelmed with bad debt – by which they mean something very familiar to debt economies, that is, debt that can never be repaid. They argue that as a result the parties find themselves excessively ‘exposed’ to one another – the transactions no longer remain on the outside so to speak. What is now being made explicit as the danger of finance in a market economy is actually the very enabling possibility of the swap transaction – that a market economy and a debt economy are not so opposed as we might think.5 Meanwhile, ordinary citizens too are implicated, as the cause of corporate debt is increasingly understood to be the ‘bad loans’ of consumers who borrowed beyond their means to buy houses and consumer goods they could not afford. The state’s debts, too, have become exposed. Sovereign debt is the new source of financial crisis. As a result of the ‘bailouts’, the US national 5

Kelsen would say that this is always the case – legal obligation is essence of legal relation; legal right is just its reflex, the obligation seen from another point of view.

Too big to fail

47

debt has risen dramatically and creditors around the world (most notably the Chinese government) have raised concerns about whether the US could ever make good on its obligations, if called to do so. In such conditions, the state appears as a fragile entity, a mere debtor, its transactions and property subject to technical inspection. The confusion about what to do about this ubiquitous debt – should the government ‘bail out’ private financial interests or not – and the fascinating alliances of the far right and the far left (the Schmittians) against the technocratic middle (the Kelsenians) concerns the way the instability of debt and transaction threatens in turn the stability of the public/private distinction. Private funds and public funds, private debts and public debts, the left and the right say, should remain separate. The debate about ‘too big to fail’ has so far been about the degree to which the state’s obligations to support corporations should be allowed to become explicit. The argument is that as transactors come to be recognised by the state and by other transactors as ‘too big to fail’, they come to have an increasingly explicit promise of support from the state. When what the state will actually do at moments of crisis is entirely known, corporations have little incentive to meet their obligations. For its part, the state’s own involvement in the market seems increasingly illicit and the state loses legitimacy. But thinking of legal persons in terms of the exchange of perspectives entailed in transactions – your view of my assets for my view of yours, in Strathern’s words above – and the demands and obligations these engender gives us a quite different conception of legitimacy and liberal law in market economy. Or more appropriately it asks whether a market economy is at all the right description of our transactions: too big to fail, after all, is the idiom and ethics of gifts and their transactors. From this point of view, what is termed a crisis is a set of relations and their effects that are absolutely germane to the nature of the persons, things and transactions, as debts are cancelled, created, transformed into further debts, and as these engender the unfolding, taking apart, exposure of internal relations, and recombination into other wholes. As Janet Roitman puts it, ‘beyond instrumentalist tactics, the productivity of debt can also be understood in terms of a primary relation that puts debtor– creditor relations at the very base of social relations more generally, and

48

Annelise Riles

hence at the heart of productive associations. This means positing debates as a fundamental social fact, as already there’ in contrast to ‘an abnormal situation that needs to be rectified’ (Roitman 2005: 74). The language of exceptionalism that surrounds talk of financial crisis then shields from view the way exchange partners have their own ways – both mundane and dramatic – of keeping accounts of debts, of calling these into question, of demanding accountability for themselves and for others, and of making of vulnerability its own source of strength. The point at which anthropologists might contribute, I believe, is in bringing into view a richer conception of accountability and legitimacy, and of the wider ethics and politics it interpolates and engenders. The challenge is how to do this without making the very techniques of the activation of debts explicit. But as Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004) suggests, such things cannot and should not be analysed; they can only be replicated. In her own professional and analytical relations, Marilyn Strathern has done precisely this, to formidable effect. Ultimately it is this model that remains the greatest lasting debt, the one that animates my own professional personhood. And anthropologists certainly appreciate the promise of persons and debts that are too big to fail.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter was presented as the keynote lecture at the Conference on ‘Legal Knowledge and Anthropological Engagement’ held at the University of Cambridge, 3 October 2008 and as the Munro Lecture, University of Edinburgh, 4 December 2008. I thank Vinny Ialenti and Guillaume Ratel for their research assistance. I am also grateful to Jeanette Edwards, Marie-Andre´e Jacob, Hirokazu Miyazaki and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger for comments and criticisms that substantially shaped the redirection of this chapter.

4

‘Hybrid custom’ and legal description in Papua New Guinea Melissa Demian

Papua New Guinea’s Underlying Law Act 2000 was on the face of it a radical piece of legislation. It sought, among other things, to direct the courts to apply themselves more assiduously to the task of integrating custom into something called the ‘underlying law’ – that is, by privileging customary law over the common law of the Commonwealth to which Papua New Guinea is an heir. The concept of the ‘underlying law’ comes straight from the Constitution of the country, in which this resource is listed at the end of a seven-tiered hierarchy of laws which govern the country (Constitution Part II Division 1). But it is far more than a bit of documentary legalism; the underlying law was very much alive in my interviews with legal elites in Papua New Guinea that informed the research on which this chapter is based. On repeated occasions, the underlying law was mentioned by my interlocutors as difficult to develop, either because of insufficient judicial activism or initiative by lawyers, because of the reliance on district and national courts to do the job when really the responsibility rests with the village courts, and so on. I was fascinated by the constant invocation of the underlying law as something which was selfevidently desirable but always, frustratingly, just out of reach of the capacity of legal practitioners to bring it into being. Indeed my very presence in the country to conduct this research was a result of the widespread (although not necessarily universal) sentiment that neither before nor since the passage of the Act has much movement towards the development of the underlying law happened (Jessep 1998; Ottley 2002). While I had conceived of the project as an exploration of the use by district and national courts of the ‘customary law’ concept, my research was gently but persistently redirected by legal colleagues and 49

50

Melissa Demian

interlocutors towards the underlying law. For example, the Deputy Chief Justice observed to me that since the common law and equity are derived from case law, a similar process of documentation of customary law could provide an analogous source, a ‘practical way to develop the principles of underlying law’. Customary law was not the issue on anyone’s mind; when I asked about it, the question was invariably reframed through discussion as one of how custom could contribute instrumentally to the development of the underlying law. Filer (2006: 67–8) identifies this notion as having arisen from the nationalist moment of independence, when ‘the legal fraternity, which had formerly dismissed the concept of “customary law” as an oxymoron, now recovered its integrity in the form of an “underlying law” which had survived the colonial encounter, but still lay buried in the ground beneath the colonial edifice of legal institutions’. Where Filer found the underlying law concept archaeological in nature, my interlocutors (in a not unrelated vein) seemed to find it ethnographic: my proper job, some suggested, was to go and learn about customary law in the rural areas of Papua New Guinea and then write it all down for the lawyers and judges to make use of. For this is precisely what the Underlying Law Act was supposed to do: require that courts move customary law up the hierarchy to take precedence over the common law, as a means of uncovering a body of law that would be the analogue of the common law, and in so doing, replace it. My initial response, shared with only a few of my interlocutors, is that the project so conceived is impossible, because custom ‘doesn’t work like that’. I was of course operating with the classic anthropological model of customary law in mind: that it is by definition unwritten and uncodified, ad hoc, contingent, negotiable, a set of ‘relationships’ rather than one of ‘rules’, and all the rest of it. More interesting than my own scepticism, however, was the parallel scepticism of my colleagues. To them, the Act was difficult if not impossible to implement because there are too many customs in Papua New Guinea, and these multitudinous customs are always either potentially in conflict with the Constitution and other laws, or potentially a cause of unmanageable complexity through their combination with each other. These combinations would in turn arise from the cosmopolitanism of contemporary Papua New Guinean society: people

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

51

move about the country in search of employment, education or adventure, and, inevitably, they marry one another. Such ‘mixed marriages’ in turn produce children whose rights of inheritance are in question, debates over the form and quantity in which bridewealth ought to be presented, other debates about the conditions under which polygyny is permissible, and sometimes divorces, in which case all these issues become even more fraught and contested. In other words, the idea that for an anthropologist is a starting proposition (if custom is to be ‘found’ anywhere, it is in social relationships and social organisation) is for Papua New Guinean legal practitioners a can of worms. How is the underlying law to be derived from people all over the country arguing about their relationships in court? The answer, contained in the Deputy Chief Justice’s remark, is that it must operate in a manner analogous to the formation of the common law that the underlying law is meant eventually to replace. The common law is treated in the Constitution as the default to which Papua New Guinea law reverts if there are no more recently enacted statutes or Constitutional provisions to supplant it. As such it would not to be too far a stretch to call it the background against which Papua New Guinea’s ‘own’ laws are foregrounded. And as the milieu against which these locally generated laws appears, it in turn appears to be not the end result of generations of Britons arguing about their relationships in court, but a context that generates its own techniques. These techniques can then be applied to the Papua New Guinean context to produce its own analogous context: the underlying law. So to proceed, I would ask if it is necessary to set aside anthropology’s suppositions of what custom and customary law might be, that is, relations produced in a local context. The dilemma posed by the Underlying Law Act is, instead, how a putatively universal set of techniques can be applied to these local relations in order to produce a local analogue to the universalising process. As Strathern has observed: where systems appear analogous and comparison becomes possible, the possibilities bifurcate again: between the substantive comparisons that elucidate the effects of similar and dissimilar practices in different contexts, and the metaphorical illuminations that come from using concepts derived from the study of one ethnographic arena to deploy in another. (Strathern 2004a: 37–8)

52

Melissa Demian

In other words, research that was originally intended as an ethnography of legalism in custom became one of legal practitioners doing their own ethnography of the customs of legalism.

Hybrid custom The relation between an anthropologist and the people she works with can often take unanticipated forms. I have in mind a moment in a land court hearing in Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province, in 2008. The case before the Senior Provincial Magistrate was a mundane issue of one family applying to have another restrained from building on a parcel of land until the proper ownership of the land in question had been clarified. The two contending families were in fact related by marriage, and the court had been called in response to a woman from one party having arranged to have the land surveyed, an act tantamount to aggression given Papua New Guinea’s notoriously fluid systems of land tenure. Both sides appeared to want the matter settled in court, although the magistrate attempted to steer them towards mediation instead, a preference he had also expressed to me earlier in an interview. He reminded the feuding parties that in a normal court hearing ‘there is a winner and there is a loser’, which would have serious consequences for the settlement of the dispute. The reason he gave for this was that ‘here in Milne Bay, we are matrilineal, so the land goes through the woman’s side’. He was in fact reminding them of their own system of descent and inheritance, which, although not the only form of descent found in Milne Bay, is unusually prevalent there in comparison with the rest of the country. He then proceeded to lecture the litigants on the exceptions to this rule, using his own ‘mixed’ marriage to a woman from a patrilineal group as an example. He said he could make contributions to her side to secure land rights for their children, perhaps implying that this might have been a preferable strategy for the litigants before him, rather than dragging their affines to the District Court. During his speech I was at some pains to suppress utterances of delight at hearing a magistrate from Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands lecturing his court, including its anthropological interloper, about the niceties of matrilineal inheritance. It was not the first time I had been informed that

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

53

matriliny was what I was ‘supposed’ to be focused on (Demian 2007: 156), but to hear it in court, from a Trobriander no less, added an appealing layer of irony to the mix. A number of relations suddenly came into view when the magistrate felt compelled to remind his litigants that they were matrilineal. Not least among these was the heterogeneity of those present in the courtroom itself. Although I was the only actual foreigner in the room, one of the features that struck me on this return visit to Alotau was how much more cosmopolitan it had become in the eight years since I had last been there. Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea’s national creole against which Milne Bay had once been a stubborn holdout in favour of English, was now heard regularly on the streets and indeed in the courtroom. A number of the parties whose cases were heard on this and subsequent days were not from Milne Bay, but other parts of the country, with other ways of reckoning modes of inheritance, obligations to kin, and the appropriate means of settling disputes. The Senior Provincial Magistrate was, in other words, continually faced with a potential dilemma to which I was also alerted by one of his colleagues. The problem was couched in slightly different terms, but pointed to a similar set of concerns. In Port Moresby, the Deputy Chief Magistrate had also been discussing with me the problem of inheritance. He noted, for example, that people from the island of Bougainville were mostly matrilineal. What if a man from that part of the country married a woman from a patrilineal group in another part of the country? Their children would have no rights at all! In cases like this, he said, you ended up with ‘hybrid custom’: his words precisely. So what for his colleague in Alotau had been a question of procedure – why aren’t you exercising your custom? – was for this magistrate a question akin to the conflict of laws – what happens when our customs combine in unexpected ways, and which one should dominate? Like the conflict of laws, the Deputy Chief Magistrate’s hybrid custom is a ‘self-consciously technical field’ (Riles 2005: 977) that is subjected to a ‘technical aesthetics of law’ (2005: 976). That is, both were pointing to a sense of differences between parts of the country, embodied in the obligations that people bring to their relationships with one another. These differences, emblematic of Papua New Guinea’s heterogeneity, are lauded by politicians

54

Melissa Demian

and the press as one of the great strengths of the country, but are also a source of no minor anxiety on the part of legal practitioners. While custom as a category may be considered so fundamental to Papua New Guinean nationhood that it is the anticipated source of the underlying law, custom as a set of practices is too diverse to keep in view at any one time. To manage them, a number of the legal practitioners I spoke to suggested a particular solution that would entail making the techniques of custom exactly analogous to those of law. The solution is that of ‘universal custom’, which I will discuss at greater length below. In this chapter, then, I propose to take seriously the concern of the two magistrates. Their observations, both to me and to the people whom they served in their professional capacity, were the product of a particular moment in Papua New Guinea’s national legal conversation. I might describe this moment somewhat as follows: one of the ways that Papua New Guinea describes its heterogeneity and the social complexity arising from it is through the concept of custom.1 That is, the country is made of different groups of people with different customs, and particularly in the legal arena, ‘conflict’ or ‘hybridity’ between customs can have unanticipated effects. But this description too has its own effect, and the effect is merographic (Strathern 1992a) in that ‘the notion of plurality – of the multiplicity of things – is derived not simply from the number of things in the world, but from the fact that any single entity can be differentiated from a similar entity by some axis other than their similarity’ (1992a: 73). Just as the customs of each social group in Papua New Guinea are seen as part of that group’s identity and internal relationships as a group, and as Papua New Guinea is seen as being made up of very many of these groups (‘ethnic societies’ was the favoured term of the Deputy Chief Justice), so the relations between these groups can be extracted in terms of the relations between their customs.2 To ‘develop the underlying law’, then, becomes a matter of relating these extracted parts to the analogous parts of the law. 1 2

In Tok Pisin it is rendered as kastom, whose meaning overlaps but does not map directly onto English custom (Keesing 1989; Foster 1992; Jolly 1994; Bolton 2003; Demian 2006). Bolton (2003) discusses a highly aestheticised version of this same process during the period of Vanuatu’s transition to independence.

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

55

Eliciting the ‘underlying law’ Some of the commonly discussed obstacles to development of the underlying law in terms of its expression as customary law are fairly straightforward. Lawyers and judges in Papua New Guinea are trained in the ‘black-letter law’ of the state and of the Commonwealth, and are not accustomed to being asked to think in terms of customary rights or obligations except where these are presented as evidence supplementary to an affidavit – and even then, the status of custom as evidence is a contentious one to which I will return shortly. While customary law is taught as a compulsory module at the UPNG School of Law, many lawyers in the country (especially if they go into private practice) can expect, not unreasonably, never to have to confront the topic again after their graduation. So there is some concern that it is the very education and training of legal professionals in Papua New Guinea that disinclines them from taking up the problem of developing the underlying law in the proactive manner envisioned in the Constitution and the Underlying Law Act. So there is a widespread perception by legal scholars that the legal education process itself can constitute an obstacle to the development of underlying law. A second popularly observed obstacle to the development of underlying law is that lawyers think judges should be more activist in the cases they hear, and judges think lawyers are not exerting themselves sufficiently to bring customary law as evidence to bear on their arguments. This observation I can support from my own research, which did seem to indicate that the bench and the bar have each adopted a position of anticipation that the other will take the initiative. Having said this, however, it is important to ask more rigorous questions about why the two sides of the legal profession each feel that their own hands are tied vis-a`-vis bringing customary law into a case. Is it, for instance, a feature of the very relation established between custom and law that it must always originate from somewhere, or someone, else? The question is a component of my contention that the underlying law, as currently understood in Papua New Guinea, is a product of a series of analogies, that is, relationships between social forms that are held to be comparable because they are versions of one another. But they are

56

Melissa Demian

versions of each other by virtue of the fact that they have first been distinguished from each other. It is that initial differentiation which allows lawyers, magistrates and litigants to compare one mode of argumentation to the other in the first place. I am of course drawing here on Strathern’s (1988) model of elicitation in Melanesia, or the revelation of a relationship through the very technique of an act of differentiation. The differentiation in turn instantiates a split between cause and agent, wherein an agent is ‘one who from his or her own vantage point acts with another’s in mind’ (1988: 272). It is this model that has been helpful in asking how it is that this thing called the underlying law is understood to be a product of the analogy between law and custom, because the technique of creating the analogy is the same technique that allows agents in the legal process to attempt to elicit the analogy from each other. In order to demonstrate that an analogic process is at work, I must start with the definition of what is meant by ‘underlying law’ in the first place. Custom in the Papua New Guinea Constitution is recognised insofar as it is part of the ‘underlying law’, a concept that is part of the bedrock of the Constitution, the last in a list of seven sources that form the law of the country. In turn, Schedule 1.2.2. of the Constitution provides the following definition of the term ‘underlying law’: ‘(a) the underlying law provided for by an Act of the Parliament under Section 20(1) (underlying law and pre-Independence statutes); and (b) until such time as there is an Act of the Parliament, the underlying law prescribed in Schedule 2 (adoption, etc., of certain laws)’. And in Schedule 2, we learn that the underlying law consists of a combination of custom, the common law, judicial precedent, laws adopted and adapted from the period before Independence, and new rules composed of, among other things, ‘analogies to be drawn from relevant statutes and custom’. So I want to ask what are the relevant analogies at work in the concept of the underlying law in Papua New Guinea, and whether it is the very nature of these analogies that is preventing the underlying law from ‘developing’, to employ the term of art as it is used in the Constitution itself and in legislation enacted since then. The Underlying Law Act, for instance, offers a much simpler analogic relationship than the Constitution does. In this piece of legislation, the

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

57

‘underlying law’ has two sources only: the ‘customary law’ and ‘the common law in force in England immediately before the 16th September, 1975’. The relationship is analogic because the two sources are considered comparable, and combinable – if not necessarily commensurate. Because one of the more radical aspects of the Act is that it explicitly privileges customary law over the common law, and directs courts to apply customary law to the exclusion of common law wherever the customary law at issue does not conflict with any existing statutes, with the Constitution or with the National Goals and Directive Principles. But this has not happened. In the estimation of almost every legal professional I interviewed, customary law has appeared with decreasing rather than increasing frequency since the passage of the Act. Some of the reasons for this are straightforward and pragmatic. Lawyers I spoke to noted the exhaustive research that successfully pleading custom potentially involves, research for which they may have neither time nor financial or human resources. It is far easier to find the relevant case law, statute or common law principle, all of which are part of the standard legal library, than to do what is essentially anthropological research to ‘discover’ the custom of their client. Some indeed suggested, in the most diplomatic of terms, that my time might better be spent doing what anthropologists are supposed to do, and go discover some custom for them! The notion that custom is something that must be discovered, moreover, points to the distinction between discovery and invention that Strathern (2001) argues is organised by the category of nature: ‘Invention modifies nature; discovery does not’ (2001: 9). But nature is of course not the only ‘container’, in Strathern’s terminology, for this distinction. Society can serve just as well as a containing principle, particularly when society is being made explicit to itself through a process such as legal and constitutional reform. In this case, it is society that is modified by the invention of law, while society is presumably only ‘found’ – made explicit – through the discovery of custom. In practice, however, the process by which custom is introduced and assessed as evidence in a case, or offered as a remedy at the conclusion of a case, can start to look very much like invention.

58

Melissa Demian

Custom, at least by most people’s definition, encompasses the whole life of a group of people – it is fiendishly difficult to extract the ‘law’ aspect of it. Often lawyers and judges must resort to references to customary ‘beliefs’, particularly in cases such as the murder of alleged sorcerers. But attempts to uncover an analogy between belief and law have run courts into trouble, because the work of drawing the analogy is itself the work of invention, of modifying the relation between a practice and the society that putatively pursues that practice. For instance in the landmark Aumane case (Acting Public Prosecutor v. Aumane, Boku, Wapulae, and Kone (1980) PNGLR 510), an attempt at judicial activism on behalf of custom was spectacularly unsuccessful because of a combination of inadequate evidence and the problematic issue of whether a custom is coterminous with a belief. In this case, three defendants from Enga Province pleaded guilty to the murder of a woman they said had killed more than twenty people by means of sorcery. The trial judge at the time, Bernard Narokobi, used the case as an opportunity to make use of the provisions of the Constitution for the application of customary law. He gave each of the defendants brief custodial sentences of a few years, and also ordered them each to pay five pigs to the family of their victim. This experiment in creative sentencing was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected as grossly inadequate, not least because Narokobi was deemed to have placed unwarranted weight on what the defendants said they thought they were doing. He appeared, for example, to accept at face value their assertion that the deceased had killed twenty people with sorcery, and that to kill her was an intelligible response to her alleged misdeeds. So the then judge Narokobi, in a goodfaith effort to use the Constitution as the transformative instrument it was intended to be, was thrown back on the dilemma not of ‘discovering’ a custom to use in sentencing, but of creating one, in the sense that the defendants’ testimony elicited it from him.3 The problem was that there 3

This expedient invention of custom is not as radical as it sounds; judges in Papua New Guinea have frequently been required to resort to invention, particularly in cases involving the calculation of compensation. See Demian 2008 for another example, this time from civil law, and Filer 1997 for a further discussion of the ‘creativity’ inherent in compensation more generally.

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

59

was no provision for compensation to be used in sentencing at the time, which was one of the grounds on which his sentence was rejected by the Supreme Court. However, this case did have the benefit of acting as a catalyst for the Criminal Law (Compensation) Act 1991, in which courts are provided with guidelines for integrating compensation into a sentence. And is compensation custom? Compensation came up in many of my interviews and informal discussions with legal practitioners, as much a problem as it is a solution. It is popularly believed in its present form to have originated in the Highlands, although it could be argued that most if not all Papua New Guinea societies include some provision for making reparations to the victims of damage in material form, if not necessarily on the spectacular scale for which Highlanders are renowned. Compensation is a technique of measurement (Strathern 1999: 220–4), of demonstrating in concrete terms the loss to yourself, your clan, your tribe or some other social unit that resulted from violence, ill-will or accident. As such, compensation appears ideally to be one of the ‘universal customs’ that a number of people I interviewed said was a requirement for any custom to become part of the underlying law. That a custom must be found throughout Papua New Guinea to be applicable to the problem of the underlying law is an interesting requirement, and was the solution proposed by several of my interlocutors to deal with the dazzling array of customs perceived to be in practice throughout the country. To cite universality as an ideal points to one of the aims of the development of the underlying law, that is, to define a set of rules and values that all Papua New Guineans can agree should apply to all Papua New Guineans. It is, in short, a tool for nationmaking, as indeed the framers of the Constitution and many jurists in the period directly following independence deemed it should be. In a related vein, the legal practitioners in my research almost all cited the cultural diversity of the country as one of the most daunting obstacles to introducing evidence of custom into a case. The desire to pin down universal custom is in part a desire to discover what all Papua New Guineans have in common. This has not only ideological but practical effects. Apart from the charter for nationhood it provides, it gives the

60

Melissa Demian

provisions of the Constitution and the Underlying Law Act something to build on: if there is a custom we all ‘have’, then, subject to the test of compatibility with existing laws, it will be a good candidate for formal integration into the underlying law.

The nice thing about custom is that everyone has it However, there is then the problem of what I will call an excess of universality. Compensation suffers from this problem, and so does sorcery; I will treat each in their turn. Compensation was seen by a number of people I interviewed to be as much a hindrance as an aid to the development of any law, underlying or otherwise, in Papua New Guinea. A prime example is the bel kol payment, which certainly did originate in the Highlands but is now practised in much of the country. The principle of bel kol is that, prior to any mediation between injured and offending parties, a payment is made to the injured party to enable him or her to sit down and discuss the issue more or less dispassionately. However, as the Public Solicitor said to me, bel kol is now ‘creeping into the criminal process’ – an assertion that was supported by others I spoke to after him, when I inquired about this phenomenon in particular. In other words, it is now becoming common practice to offer the person you or your family have wronged some sort of compensation before a case goes to trial, or even before any charges are brought. To the great frustration of police and lawyers alike, this has the effect, intentional or otherwise, of causing witnesses to disappear. In some parts of the country, I was told, it is now becoming the practice for the family of the perpetrator to offer the family of the victim compensation precisely in order to prevent the conflict from going to trial. Police may not even make arrests in these instances, as the case will have no chance without witnesses. Much of the assessment of compensation appears, however, to depend on at what point in a case the compensation appears. From the perspective of police and court officials, ‘bad’ compensation is that which is paid before a trial or even an arrest. ‘Good’ compensation is that provided for by the Criminal Law (Compensation) Act 1991. This is compensation which is paid under the auspices of a court as the outcome of the case and

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

61

within the constraints imposed by the Act, such as, that it cannot exceed the value of 5,000 kina.4 But it is precisely the wide range of relationships that compensation can affect that accounts for its appeal to Papua New Guineans, including members of the legal profession. I was given at least one impassioned defence of compensation by another member of the Public Solicitor’s Office, in which it was explained to me that compensation is a far more Papua New Guinean means of redressing wrongs than custodial sentencing. My colleague asserted that if you just punish someone by putting him in jail, you only punish that one person, when, to be really effective, you want his entire family to take responsibility for what he did. This is where compensation comes in. In the example of a rape case, she explained, you can put the rapist in jail, which does not rehabilitate him and does not place any responsibility on his family to monitor his behaviour. Or you can get him to pay compensation, which brings his entire family into the picture, and not only ‘punishes’ all of them (because they must contribute to the payment) but communicates to them the need to keep their kinsman in line. Because jail only affects the perpetrator but compensation affects his entire family, compensation can be asserted as the sort of sentence more amenable to Papua New Guinean values. Now this was just one assessment offered to me, by a lawyer to whom – at least for the sake of a good argument – the timing of the compensation payment was not of paramount concern. Her argument was based explicitly on the notion that, in Papua New Guinea, responsibilities are properly shouldered by groups rather than individuals, and that it is this ethos that underlies compensation. There is of course something to this point, although I think it is also possible to make too much of the communal value/ individual value opposition. But another serious problem lies within the provisions of the Act itself. The tiny sum of 5,000 kina – as I think it would be judged by most people in Papua New Guinea – cannot serve as the measurement of value, that is, of loss or wrong suffered, that compensation embodies. Can it be any wonder then, that people increasingly prefer to save face, materialise the ongoing relations 4

In 2008, K1.00 = £0.20.

62

Melissa Demian

between their group and another, and set the value they choose on a wrong committed, rather than go to court and walk away with such a pittance? So compensation suffers from excess on two fronts: that people choose to engage in it outside the remit of the law, and that it can be used to assess value on a scale that the law does not provide for. Both of these practices are seen as interfering with the process of the law, and as such they disrupt the potential for compensation to be appropriated (in the most positive sense of the term) into Papua New Guinea’s legal repertoire. A slightly different sort of interfering excess is attributed to sorcery cases, which share with compensation the characteristic of universality in Papua New Guinean societies, but which offer an even more contentious association with custom. I was even asked by one interlocutor whether sorcery ‘counted’ as custom. The question made perfect sense to me in the light of my previous experience with Village Courts in Milne Bay Province: sorcery is the artefact of the past that no one wants to own (it is in fact regularly disavowed and repudiated), but that everyone is painfully conscious of at all times (Demian 2006). Sorcery presents a peculiar set of challenges for the contemporary Papua New Guinea court, because it can never satisfy the rules of evidence that are fundamental to the legal process. There exists the Sorcery Act 1971, which provides courts with a set of protocols for dealing with sorcery claims, which of course could not be recognised at all under the common law. But this piece of legislation creates as many problems as it solves, in the respect that it offers courts only the partial solution of recognising the belief in sorcery, without addressing how that belief is to be substantiated with evidence. This is one of the primary factors that ran Aumane into trouble, and that has dogged every case inclusive of a sorcery claim both before and since that case. Sorcery is regularly claimed as a defence in murder cases – that is, defendants will explain that they killed a sorcerer in retaliation for or anticipation of that sorcerer’s killing a member of their family. But to the best of my knowledge, the claim that a victim of a murder was a sorcerer has never been accepted as a defence, or even as much of a mitigation; indeed the Public Prosecutor was of the opinion that courts are handing

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

63

down harsher sentences than ever before in sorcery-related cases. In spite of sorcery’s consistent failure as a defence, I was told that it is also the most consistent manner in which custom emerges in criminal law – these days custom is far more likely to be found in civil law cases, particularly land disputes and those involving adultery and other marriage problems. Again, the Public Solicitor was kind enough to tell me of a case he had recently argued in Bulolo in Morobe Province, where he was, he said, quite happy that the court did not agree with his argument. A man had been suspected of some recent sorcery-attributed deaths; he confessed to causing them and was beaten up, after which he managed to get home to be taken care of by his wife. But three men then went to his house, killed him with their bush knives and burnt down the house. At their trial the Public Solicitor pleaded that this was not just an issue of belief, because the man himself had actually confessed to practising sorcery. In fact he had previously even been imprisoned for sorcery, and admitted to practising it still after his release. The Public Solicitor told me his argument ‘should’ have had more mitigatory effect on the sentences of his attackers, but was glad that it did not. He said if the men had actually received lighter sentences, there would have been ‘no fairness or justice’ because he did not actually feel that the sorcery suspicion provided an excuse for what the men had done. This case points to the problem that an excess of universality presents to courts, and especially to defence lawyers. Sorcery is universally present in Papua New Guinea, but it is at the same time universally absent in Papua New Guinea courts, because no evidence recognised by a court can ever be offered, even in the case of an apparent confession as in the recent case in Bulolo. Underlying the problem of evidence is a historical resistance to sorcery accusations in pre-independence courts; British and later Australian colonial policy was not to recognise the existence of sorcery. And while sorcery is not universally avowed as bad in Papua New Guinea – some societies recognise both harmful and beneficial forms – it seems safe to claim that sorcery is universally a source of anxiety, deemed fundamentally incompatible with some aspect of life in contemporary Papua New Guinea, whether that aspect is Christianity, modernity, education or indeed the ‘rule of law’.

64

Melissa Demian

My two examples of excessive universality, compensation and sorcery, serve as instances of some of the pitfalls of requiring universality as a condition of recognising custom as the analogy to law. Not all my interlocutors suggested this condition, of course. Others, including the Deputy Chief Justice, offered instead the suggestion – the exhortation even – that what Papua New Guinea legal practitioners really need is an exhaustive study of different customary laws throughout the country that is then written down and gathered into one comprehensive source, say a set of volumes representing each province of the country. The underlying law could then be produced through this set of elicited precedents; there might be local variations in how one deals with compensation, sorcery or other matters, but the technique for uncovering and applying these variations is the same no matter which part of the country the custom is drawn from. While the idea of a collection of customs may look like an inversion of the universality requirement, I would submit that it is actually just another expression of it. Some of my interlocutors made this explicit, in that the point of the hypothetical exercise would be to ‘discover’ what kinds of customs in Papua New Guinea really are universal. But others seemed to desire the exercise precisely because it would demonstrate just how many different customs are ‘out there’. Even this perspective, though, is a means of describing what it is that makes Papua New Guineans into Papua New Guineans: they all ‘have’ something identifiable as custom, as distinct from some other category of experience, be it law, business, the church or whatever. Although even these distinctions are not stable: one of my favourite assertions about custom, courtesy of the president of the Suau Local Government Council in Milne Bay in 1999, was ‘our custom is Christian’. This is not an effect of the ‘corruption’ or ‘inauthenticity’ of custom, but an effect of analogy. And analogy cannot be drawn between any terms one chooses, but must be drawn between terms perceived as having structurally relatable features. Christianity, like custom, is held to be a total system by most Papua New Guineans who profess it: it is a world that one inhabits, and my friends in Suau have been inhabiting that particular world for over 130 years now. So to claim that one’s custom is Christian is simply to say that what one does now is analogically comparable to what one presumably

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

65

did in the nineteenth century before the arrival of the London Missionary Society. It was indeed this analogic relation that enabled the missionaries to imagine then, as many of my friends in Suau imagine now, that the life they were offering was an exact inversion of the life people were living at the time. The inversion would not be imaginable if Christianity were not seen as similar in form – as a way of life, not just a system of belief – to what people in Suau were already doing.5 It is precisely these sorts of analogic distinctions, along with the diversity of custom that is their corollary, that permit legal observers (and anthropological ones) to draw a coherent set of relationships between practices that makes them all identifiable as custom. For again it is differentiation that enables the analogic relation: one must distinguish one thing from another as a move preparatory to revealing that the two things are comparable, that they ‘work’ in similar ways. The idea of gathering all the customs of the country into one definitive account is an idea about demonstrating that although people from the provinces of Manus and Enga may appear to have little in common with each other, what enables both to have a relationship with Papua New Guinea law is that both have something ‘like’ law, that is, they both have custom. It is precisely the daunting diversity of custom that also exhibits the capacity for custom to be compared to law, and potentially to be made to act like law.

Describing relations If the issue of ‘developing the underlying law’ has a life beyond legislative rhetoric, it is to do with working out what the proper relationship between customary and common law is. In the Underlying Law Act, 5

Thus Cecil Abel, on the mission founded by his parents in 1890 at the eastern extremity of the Suau language area: ‘Building a new society or community begins with new homes and families and the children in those families. Life in the villages was corrupt and cruel. So Charles and Bea Abel gathered around them a new Christian family of boys and girls . . . And this family became the pattern for the new society, the new way of life in the future’ (Abel n.d.: 1). The Abels, like other successful missionaries throughout the Pacific, used the boarding school, in loco parentis model of conversion, in which the mission partly or entirely replaced the families in which children would otherwise have been raised. The children would then understand themselves to have acquired a ‘new life’ from which they were encouraged to reflect on the ‘old lives’ they had left behind.

66

Melissa Demian

the relationship is a qualified hierarchy: custom is to be privileged over the common law unless it conflicts with the existing body of law or with the set of values enshrined in the National Goals and Directive Principles. But the hierarchy has not functioned in practice, for at least two reasons. The first is that the hierarchy established in the Act works directly against the commensurability that is a necessary condition for customary and common law to be comparable and combinable in the first place. To put it differently and to invoke a very old anthropological idea, a hierarchy implies encompassment: custom should, according to the provisions of the Underlying Law Act, cover or eclipse the common law, presumably because it more authentically expresses the Papua New Guinean or Melanesian experience. Indeed, the very inclusion of custom in the Constitution was an effect of the nationalistic sentiment immediately prior to, and following, Independence in 1975. If the common law was perceived not only to emanate from the United Kingdom but to constitute a particular kind of relationship between the United Kingdom and its former colony (Amet 1995), the underlying law – derived from statutes enacted since Independence and from custom – would, perhaps, alter the nature of that relationship. The second reason is the way custom is framed in popular Papua New Guinean discourse – including the discourse of those I interviewed and in court cases themselves. Custom is nearly always the implicit and specific relation between people, whereas law, common, Constitutional or otherwise, is the explicit and general relation. Custom is what putatively exists between you and your wantoks (co-ethnics); law is what putatively exists everywhere, between everybody and everybody else. This is, after all, the idea enshrined in the phrase ‘the rule of law’. And one of my interlocutors, another National Court judge, offered the intriguing observation that people may actually now prefer to turn to what he called ‘the imposed law’, that is, the law inherited from Britain and the Commonwealth more generally. The reason they might have for doing so, he suggested, is that the common law is ‘independent’ – it has both a traceable source and, significantly, one that lies outside the interests of any particular ethnic group in Papua New Guinea. It is also perceived to be less amenable to manipulation than customary law. But the common

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

67

law, particularly the Criminal Code, can also fairly be said to reflect values that are held by most if not all contemporary Papua New Guineans. To draw too stark a distinction between the values embodied in the common law and those embodied in somebody’s customary law is to act as though there were never any exchange of ideas between Papua New Guineans and others, that that exchange of ideas is not ongoing, and that societies do not change. So to draw again on the formulation ‘our custom is Christian’, wherein another universalising system is appropriated at the scale of local relations, it is worth asking in what ways people seek out analogies that could truly permit custom to operate on the same scale as the common law. I hope to have teased two themes out of this discussion. One is that custom must be particular, and it must demonstrably emanate from a people’s past: one of my legal interlocutors, for instance, when listing persons who might be called as reliable witnesses to a claim of custom, categorically excluded members of the clergy, schoolteachers and young people in general, in preference for Village Court magistrates, Local Government councillors, senior people and ‘traditional leaders’ in general – whilst asserting in the next breath that such leaders are increasingly difficult to find, because they are all ‘dying out’. That is the version of custom as it is held to operate in the case law. Case law is after all the material from which judicial precedent is built, and successive cohorts of judges in Papua New Guinea have carefully and with reasonable success used precedent to create a model for how to approach particular customary claims, from ownership of land to appropriate (and inappropriate) remedies for adultery. It is in other words the particularity of customary claims that allows for the generalising power of the analogic relationship between cases. But custom as a potential component of the underlying law is another matter. The notion of ‘universal customs’ mooted by my interlocutors suggests that custom can also be imagined to operate at the generalised level already imagined for law. If ‘[t]he notion of relation can be applied to any order of connection’ (Strathern 2005a: 63), then, ‘in describing phenomena, the fact of relation instantiates connections in such a way as also to produce instances of itself . . . We could call the relation a selfsimilar or self-organising construct, a figure whose organisational power

68

Melissa Demian

is not affected by scale’ (2005a: 63). Strathern’s observation, derived here from debates about scientific authorship, could apply equally to debates about the sources of law. In order for custom to supplant common law as the resource from which the underlying law is drawn, it must first be made to appear as though it had the same properties as the common law, most significantly the property of universal applicability. But this is an effect of the merographic relation between them, and not of the ‘automatic’ capacity of the common law to create its own context wherever it happens to be transplanted. To put it differently, the effect of describing custom as a hybrid, a combination of orders, is to bring it into relation with other hybrids – such as the common law – by extracting properties such as universality of application. Additionally, by concentrating on the universality of the common law, the origins of the latter in the ‘different and competing “indigenous” interests in eleventh-century England’ (Weiner 2006: 20) are obscured. What made the common law common was not, in other words, an ethnographic process of finding out which values, habits or practices all the peoples of medieval Britain shared. It was a legal process, ‘accrued over time by accumulated precedent and convergence of practice among jurists . . . It became the accepted “common” understanding of rights, interests, and so forth among domains that may have had significant differences in local “custom”’ (2006: 20). To summarise Weiner’s point, the common law of Britain and later the Commonwealth had never been what everyone was found to practise in common: it was what they were caused to practise in common by the instruments and institutions of the state – an effect or elicitation, Weiner suggests, of the relations between states and their subjects, or subjects within states, everywhere. And as I hope I have demonstrated, universality presents its own hazards, in that it contains a constant threat of ‘overstepping’ or ‘outrunning’ the legal framework of which it is supposed to be a part: people who pay compensation before a trial, or who kill someone accused of sorcery, are not acting lawfully. In other words, a custom can be too universal for its own good. This is why I have taken the opportunity to ask what exactly are the effects of looking for universality or even consistency between customary claims, beyond the desire to discover what it is all Papua New Guineans have in common. For it may be precisely the drive

‘Hybrid custom’ in Papua New Guinea

69

to discover universals that gives rise to an apparent discovery of hybridity, when what is actually being discovered is relations.

Acknowledgements The research on which this chapter is based was made possible by British Academy grant no. SG-49399. Various versions of this chapter were aired at the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea, at the conference ‘Legal Knowledge and Anthropological Engagement’ held at the University of Cambridge, 2008, and at the annual meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists held at the University of Auckland, 2008. I thank all who offered comments and criticisms at these venues. I also acknowledge gratefully Deputy Chief Justice Mr Salamo Injia, Mr Justice Panuel Mogish, Public Solicitor Mr Frazer Pitpit, Acting Public Prosecutor Mr Jack Pambel, Deputy Chief Magistrate Mr Stephen Oli and Senior Provincial Magistrate for Milne Bay Province Mr Steven Abisai for being so generous with their time and insights into the current state of the Papua New Guinea legal system. Profound thanks go to Ilana Gershon for heroic reading and editing of a draft of this chapter; thanks also to Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger and Jeanette Edwards for editorial comments. Finally, none of the work discussed here would have been possible without the affiliation to the Constitutional and Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea made possible by Dr Lawrence Kalinoe. This piece is perhaps the first step on the way to repaying a very substantial debt to him and to the Commission, and to materialising a relation begun as co-researchers in the late 1990s.

5

Entomological extensions: model huts and fieldworks Ann Kelly

On the outskirts of Lupiro, a village in south-east Tanzania, four huts occupy a cleared plot of low-lying rice field. Though no different in size and shape from the homes clustered above them, their design is distinctive. The huts’ walls are made of mud-coated canvas and their roofs of corrugated iron, are lined with thatch. Erected on wooden platforms raised on galvanised piping, the huts appear to hover; their stiltfoundations are anchored in water-filled metal moats. Mesh boxes hang along the space between the roof and the wall. Empty during the day, the huts hum with activity at night. In the early hours of the morning, the only light for miles across the Kilombero River Valley is the faint glow radiating from their screened windows. The huts are an experimental extension of the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI), a well-equipped laboratory, training facility and district health centre located 24 kilometres west across the river. Though a novelty in Lupiro, experimental huts are classic tools of entomological research. Designed by British researchers in Kenya in the 1940s, they have been used primarily to study the flight patterns of malaria vectors – mosquitoes. An intermediary between the village and the laboratory, these semifield stations enable scientists to track disease transmission as a dynamic relationship between natural and social landscapes. Their architecture serves a dual purpose: to isolate ‘natural’ mosquito behaviour on the one hand and to represent ‘typical’ village conditions on the other. The huts’ location plays an important role in that compromise. Building where mosquito density is high over a long season of activity enhances experimental sensitivity; the greater the number of samples collected, the more predictive the dataset of mosquito behaviour. But stray too far from 70

Entomological extensions

71

human settlements and those findings lose epidemiological traction. Hybrid knowledge spaces, the huts’ domestic camouflage enables the entomological particularities captured beneath their roofs to be read as patterns operating on the level of an ecosystem (Henke 2000; Kohler 2002; Gieryrn 2006). The significance of place to these experiments is more than ecological. Their heuristic value is both demonstrative and evaluative; huts provide a staging ground from which to forecast the effectiveness of novel environmental management strategies. The persuasive power of these investigations depends upon the social and material connections they forge between test setting and governmental intervention (Millo and Lezaun 2006). Those connections come about through the diverse practices of participation driving these experiments. In the hut, research work is not restricted to entomologists; rather it is the province of students, villagers and oftentimes children. In this way, the huts unite malaria research with both the techniques to control transmission and the local partners responsible for their implementation. The scientific credibility of facts produced in these sites is a product of collaboration; the experimental contribution of non-experts testifies to the sustainability of the method on trial.1 A model for future action, experimental huts occupy a critical space within the landscape of public health. This chapter is concerned with the built environment of entomological science and the relational forms it sets in motion. Focusing on experiments conducted in Lupiro in 2008, I describe the ways in which the human–mosquito blood-relation is developed for the ends of investigation. The evidence-gathering techniques suggest that uncovering facts is only half of the huts’ experimental enterprise: experimental labour enables community-level control. This empirical strategy provides insight into the epistemology of public health as distinct from that of regulatory science (e.g. Jasanoff 2005; Will 2007) or participatory development (e.g. Pigg 1992; Mosse 2001).2 For what is at stake in the situating of experimental work is not only the credibility or utility of its claims but also the 1 2

On the customs of participation in lab and field culture, see Kohler 2002. The former describes an experimental modality whereby evidence is brought to bear on policy decisions, and the latter a practice through which interventions are implemented by enrolling actors on the ground. The hut mixes genres of experimentation and environmental management.

72

Ann Kelly

production of a community of future practitioners.3 The huts coordinate the dynamics of their many inhabitants so as to transform scientific culture. This inductive capacity to move from parasitological exchanges to public health practices presents a provocative analogue for what Marilyn Strathern describes as anthropology’s relation, a ‘duplex that does not rest on nature and culture’ (2005a: 12). However, within the hut, relationality is constituted as a form of dwelling: relations under scrutiny (man– mosquito–parasite) and relations of scrutiny (data–instruments–collectors) are held together as a dynamic process of ‘being in a landscape’ (Ingold 2000). This mode of engagement, I believe, holds lessons for anthropology. Juxtaposing entomological and anthropological methods is a privilege afforded by Strathern’s legacy. Working within a public health context, the relationship between these two knowledge-making practices is generally understood in terms of the context the former brings to the latter. As a consultant on experimental hut trials, I have been asked to collect perceptions of spatial repellent technology with the aims of developing more culturally acceptable delivery formats. However, Strathern’s use of ‘analogic reasoning’ (1991, 2005a, 2007) reveals how one might build connections between different empirical accounts of the world while preserving their distinct epistemic integrities. The task here, then, is one not of translation but of alignment; these huts offer occasions for reflection on the different ways in which conceptual relations might be constituted. This chapter consists of three sections. I begin by describing the techniques of model hut construction and the logic of their design. My discussion centres on the spatial order and material character of the evidentiary context: how the hut’s architecture shapes the data collected under its roof. My analytical focus is the special affordance of the model home as a site of knowledge production (Marres 2009): what version of malaria does this makeshift space instantiate and what species of action does that acknowledgement allow? The second section describes experiments conducted in Lupiro during the summer of 2008. Here, my interests are most straightforwardly anthropological; I explore the kinds of social relationships these domestic experiments set in motion, and consider the ways in 3

For a discussion of how the venue of the experimentation – and the domestic, in particular – creates the conditions through which scientific knowledge can be accepted as credible, see Shapin 1988.

Entomological extensions

73

which they can be regarded as separate from or co-extensive with the making of knowledge. Following Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (1995), I am interested in what the ‘environmental conditions, resources, technology, techniques of construction and types of building . . . say about the social organization of the people who live inside’ (1995: 4) and further, how that organisation is replicated across scales – from the occupant, to Tanzania, to Africa. Finally, in the third section, I consider the epistemological conventions of these huts alongside the relational facility of anthropology’s analytic. Returning to Strathern’s insights into the ethnographic enterprise, I suggest that these huts press us to think about the anthropologist’s practical and empirical position in an environment of fact.

Baffled vectors Because their hosts tend to sleep indoors, Anopheles gambiae and funestus – the principal vectors of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa – are highly domestic.4 This habitat poses certain challenges for entomologists, generally more at home in the field.5 When A. J. Haddow built experimental huts in the 1940s, he was concerned primarily with collection: home furnishings, utensils, clothes and other personal belongings gave mosquitoes too many places to hide (Haddow 1942). Moreover, in the Kenyan villages where he was conducting his research, huts varied widely in size and shape. Inconsistent architecture confounded vector dynamics with the spatial dimensions of the study ground. To overcome this difficulty, Haddow measured the height and width of village homes and built six huts that conformed to the average size. The huts were constructed according to traditional methods. Haddow employed local builders who used mud and poles for walls, reeds for roofs, and papyrus stems for doors. Unlike typical homes, however, model interiors were kept free from clutter. Inside 4 5

For discussion of the mutuality of domestication between animals and humans and the significance to anthropology, see Cassidy and Mullin 2007. The methodological literature attendant to medical entomology suggests an ethos of scientific emplacement. Forged in the crucible of ‘fieldwork’, vector biology consists in the intense and meticulous tracking of the minute through expansive and volatile environments. The memoirs of researchers like Carrington Bonsor Williams (Williams and Wigglesworth 1982), Alex Smith (1993) or Mick Gillies (2000) emphasise the isolated, exploratory and – crucially – simplistic character of their work. Good entomological research is a matter not of refined equipment but of the reliability and thoroughness of the researcher.

74

Ann Kelly

Haddow’s hut there was only a white sheet that doubled as a bed and a backdrop, making it easier to see dead mosquitoes on the floor. These first huts were designed with one purpose in mind: to articulate disease vectors – the movement of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, between mosquito and man. Traditionally, medical entomologists pursue this relational triad at two distinct scales. Under controlled conditions of the insectary, entomologists draw conclusions about the biochemistry of Anophelene/Plasmodium interactions – how, for instance, the frequency and size of blood-feeding impacts metabolic rate and reproductive development. In the field, entomologists collect data on population dynamics, and attempt to correlate the epidemiology of malaria to the dispersal time and range of mosquitoes across landscapes. Experimental huts collapse these evidentiary contexts, bringing microbiological insights to bear on epidemiological ecology. Their standardised architecture not only facilitates collection but also allows for the experimental manipulation of human variables. Haddow’s first experiments examined the impact of odour on feeding-behaviours by noting the number of mosquitoes drawn into huts containing either ‘washed or unwashed natives’ (Haddow 1942). From collections made in huts where one, two, and up to ten volunteers had been sleeping overnight, he was able to assess the effect of body mass. By rotating sleepers between huts on different nights of the study he further ensured that a person’s – or a group’s – attractiveness could be measured independently of the huts’ geographical positions.6 Following Haddow’s example, entomologists would later draw important conclusions about the predisposition of pregnant women to malaria exposure and infection (Lindsay et al. 2000). Though elegant, these short-term assays of mosquito olfaction did not attract much attention from the public health community. The advent of DDT, a powerful (and belatedly controversial) insecticide, changed things.7 Model huts provided a cheap and simple way to evaluate the 6

7

Haddow’s rotation followed a simple random schedule. A younger generation of entomologists would use a Latin Square to allocate the nightly position of participants (or repellent). This statistical framework, initially designed for agricultural experiments, allowed experimenters control for differences in the micro-environments surrounding the huts – for instance, between a hut located closer to the swamp and one built on higher ground. Synthesised in 1864, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was discovered to be a highly effective insecticide, which led to its widespread use as a general pesticide in

Entomological extensions

75

efficacy and safety of DDT and other novel household repellents, such as insecticide treated nets (ITNs). The entomological data accumulated during these trials closely defined the advantages and disadvantages of the huts as tools to pilot public health policy (WHO 1982, 2006). The engineering of huts focused the attention of research, and, over the years, several design improvements were initiated. Independent of Haddow, entomologists working in West Africa developed detachable window traps to monitor habits of mosquitoes entering village homes (Simmons et al. 1945; Muirhead-Thomson 1947). Fitted to the windows of experimental huts, these traps enabled researchers to assess the number of mosquitoes repelled by the insecticide after entering. To capture those escaping through the eaves, mesh strips were fixed between the inside of the roof and the top of the walls. The placement of light apertures could also help confuse mosquitoes trying to leave, and, if attached on the leeward side of the hut, screened verandas could prevent mosquito-egress without hindering those carried into the huts by the wind. In addition to these techniques of capture there are some exquisite examples of the efforts to keep the interspecies encounter intimate. Raised on concrete pillars and surrounded by moats, huts were kept free of scavengers who might remove dead and dying mosquitoes from the ground before they could be collected. In Nepal, entomologists electrified window traps by rigging their wooden frames to an automobile ignition coil powered by a battery. This device, nicknamed the ‘monkey-buzzer’, was useful wherever wildlife posed a challenge to mosquito-capture (Figure 5.1). While their chief function was to test new products, model huts evolved in the direction of a compromise between collection and simulation. To allow mosquitoes to enter and to leave in numbers and at times most similar to those in the local dwellings, researchers would pilot huts with a variety of openings before building a complete set. Experimental architectures came to vary widely. In Belize, where houses are built with high ceilings, cube-shaped agriculture in the 1930s. During the Second World War, scientists saw the advantage of DDT for disease control and over the following decades it became the main agent in global eradication efforts. While the use of DDT dramatically reduced malaria transmission, it entailed harmful effects for wildlife, most famously documented by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). In recent years, DDT has made a comeback and is increasingly a preferred option for many African governments. For an excellent discussion of the history of DDT and its links to state power, see Russell 2001.

76

Ann Kelly EXTERIOR OF EXPERIMENTAL HUT

SECTIONAL VIEWS OF SHUTTERING BOX AND CORNER BLOCK 1"

1 feet

Bolts

3"

1 feet 3" Vertical section of shuttering

Brick wall

1" Floor

9" × 4" Beam

1 feet 1 feet

Ground level

Water channel

Ground level

3"

8" 12" minimum

Concrete

3"

Stone 2 feet SECTION OF LEG

Figure 5.1 R. E. Rapley’s Experimental Hut with Shuttering, ‘Notes on the construction of experimental huts’ (1961)

exit traps (baffles) were hung from the shorn-wood roof and a walkway was built running down the centre of the hut and three metres above the floor to enable their examination. In The Gambia, where doors are left ajar as a gesture of trust, investigators fit the doorframes with small wooden blocks to leave a gap of four centimetres for mosquitoes to enter during the night. But structural adaptations were not the only way to conceal the experiment within the house. Composed of whatever material was commonly used in the area, experimental huts were easy to construct ‘with the more or less unskilled labour available’ (Rapley 1961: 659). The making of the hut was a critical aspect of its epistemic format. Across the methodological literature, semi-field trialists contextualise experimental outcomes with detailed accounts of the time and the number of labourers involved in building their huts (e.g. Sholdt et al. 1976; Lindsay et al. 1993; Grieco et al. 2000). In its 1968 bulletin on vector control, for example, WHO stressed the versatility of the experimental hut; entomological field manuals and

Entomological extensions

77

textbooks continue to emphasise the use of cheap, ready-to-hand materials (e.g. Muirhead-Thomson 1947; Kuhlow 1962; Smith 1963; Moore 2008). It may not be surprising that straightforward and low-cost technologies receive praise from those working in international public health. But what does seem worthy of note is that these values are attributed to investigative tools rather than to health interventions. In other words, in engineering experimental huts a link is made between simple structures and clear outcomes.8 So what is the scientific significance of makeshift experiments? It is certainly true that rudimentary models look much more like African homes than high-tech laboratories. But that mimetic accuracy yields inductive advantages beyond those required by a demo. I suggested above that experimental hut design entails an epistemic commitment to place. Locating the experiment within the social and ecological landscape allows entomologists to build similarity between the test and the wider world. The huts’ mud surfaces, thatched roofs and wooden doorstops articulate that connection. It is important to remember, however, that for these experiments the relevant world is the ecological dynamics of malaria transmission. The model’s resemblance to domestic space is circumscribed, therefore, by the co-determining interactions of mosquito samples and human sleepers. The relationship between behaviours rendered visible in the hut and the characteristics of local vector populations is radically unstable. In Dar es Salaam, for example, mosquitoes could once be counted on to feed indoors. But after decades of spraying homes with insecticide and covering beds with insecticide-treated nets, mosquito populations are now more likely to feed in the streets. These adaptations are not merely behavioural. Anopheles gambiae undergo an ongoing and rapid process of speciation. Across the tropics, entomologists have found new sister species that are resistant to insecticides. The adaptability of the disease vector means that the success of malaria control and the credibility of malaria research must also be elastic. The failure to eradicate malaria and subsequent abandonment of those global efforts in 1969 underscores the resilience of the disease 8

A recent study on the effectiveness of seven-year-old nets explains the value of model huts this way: ‘experimental hut trials measuring personal protection or insecticide-induced mosquito mortality are simple, comparatively cheap to undertake and give clear answers about current effectiveness of older nets’ (Malima et al. 2008: 38).

78

Ann Kelly

and the need for diverse and site-specific methods to control it. The experimental huts’ rough and ready form is intended to preserve that dynamism. For along with resembling the locale, the provisional character of these experiments works to situate their claims. The huts’ aesthetic – their detachable traps, open eaves, wire baffles, automotive coils, sheets and meshes – interrupts the causal linearity of proof. Instead, these rooms provide a momentary resting place to observe and record the site-specific details of man–mosquito interaction. Their experimental framework allows for evidentiary expansion from model to home, but the wiggle room between the two suggests that these extensions are subject to revision and adjustment.9 The subject of the experimental hut is the particularity of change. A built-in uncertainty is as much a feature of experiments today as it was for Haddow. The key innovation of the Lupiro huts was to render them mobile. In doing so, researchers could, with relative ease, set up shop in many different environments over a range of time with a variety of sleepers. The aim here is to widen the scope of experimentation and ultimately develop a more comprehensive picture of mosquito behaviour across the Kilombero Valley. However, I would like to suggest that in this case the mobility of the huts does not create greater distance between domesticates but rather universalises the knowledge science produces. In the following section, we see that, once made portable, the huts became increasingly sensitive both to the vicissitudes of man–mosquito behaviour and to the diverse ways of relating to it.10

The bug-men In the spring of 2008, Sarah Moore, the head of the Public Health Entomology group at the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI), began building her huts out of wood. Drawing inspiration from experimental huts 9 10

For a detailed analysis of the adjustments that take place between the experimental site and the world at large see Trevor Pinch’s analysis of testing (1993). This example of mobility provides an interesting counter-example to the argument made most famously by Latour (1993, 1999) that the authority of scientific claims depends upon its reproducible consistency across a number of settings: the ordered and standardised character of the laboratory works to distance the facts from the quotidian, to abstract universal space from variable place so that facts will not appear contingent on a particular condition.

Entomological extensions

79

constructed in Belize based on the layout of a Mayan house, Sarah drew up designs for two huts, one whose dimensions corresponded to the typical Tanzanian shamba (farmhouse) and the other modelled after rural homes of a more modest size. The Mayan models were intended to be portable and consisted of four modular walls made from untreated wooden planks. The roof was composed of four strips of corrugated zinc. Initially, Sarah’s huts looked rather similar. She and her team bolted wood panels – three with a hinged window and one with a door – to a galvanized pipe framework and hinged the roof to an aluminium strut on site at the IHI. They then disassembled the huts, loaded them into two large trucks and drove them 40 kilometres across the river to the village of Lupiro. To simulate local conditions, the inner walls were fitted with removable mud panels and the corrugated roof was lined with thatch. The whole process, from breakdown to setup, took well over four hours and required a crew of eight. Understandably, Sarah found these huts difficult to handle. She returned to Ifakara and drew up a new design, this one using canvas. Not only could these huts be erected in less than thirty minutes, they could also be collapsed and shipped to sites wherever entomological research of disease vectors was being carried out. But before construction began, Sarah had to negotiate with Lupiro’s residents for access to the land. This turned out to be a rather arduous process, involving debate about the size of the plots she wanted and confusion over who actually owned them. Ultimately she had to pay rent twice over. A great deal of time was wasted in clearing land; Robert Kitende, the farmer with whom Sarah dealt most directly, insisted on waiting for the appropriate time in the rice harvest. Things ran more smoothly when she agreed to build two outhouses and a well for the village. After this point, Robert not only coordinated the transfer of land to the IHI, he mobilised a group of suitable volunteers to participate in experiments. Though the arrangement was improvised, Sarah was in fact following in the footsteps of her predecessors. In his memoir, Alec Smith recalls conditions under which he initiated his research in 1950s: ‘the local people made land available for these studies when I promised and made a deep well, for their use, close to each of two new experimental hut sites at Magugu and Taveta’ (Smith 1993: 91). Smith goes on to describe how securing land is not the only benefit to come from good community

80

Ann Kelly

relations. Semi-field studies of malaria transmission require human bait, and as a mirror of the inoculation rate in the area, it must be of a local variety. This experimental set-up may sound macabre, but researchers would argue that experimental huts expose participants to no greater risks than those they incur by sleeping at home. Over the years, changes in standards of practice have made staying in a hut even safer. Volunteer sleepers are now provided with bed-nets and access to weekly screening for malaria parasites. Another advantage of the huts was that they were raised off the ground, so inhabitants are protected against other invaders such as ants and rats. And though the amount is usually nominal, in most experiments, sleepers will receive some compensation for their participation.11 Like fitting the door with a stop, sleepers enhance an experiment’s representational capacity. Encouraging volunteers to treat huts as if they were their homes provides a degree of realism, but some parameters must be maintained: getting up in the middle of the night to get water is one thing; leaving the hut to sleep at home is quite another. Accurate research demands reliable subjects – another reason why making friends within the local community is so important. Without Robert Kitende, Sarah would not know whom she might count on to follow experimental protocol. Moreover, volunteers serve as witnesses. Along with numbering mosquitoes collected in the traps, researchers record sleepers’ experiences and use their complaints of mosquito annoyance to substantiate data (e.g. Smith 1963). Sarah saw room to amplify this corroborative capacity. Rather than merely attracting mosquitoes, sleepers, she came to believe, could be trained to collect them. In this regard, she parted company with researchers like Smith. Equipped with a flashlight, participants watched for mosquitoes as they entered the hut overnight. The sleepers in Sarah’s huts got very little sleep. The feats of engineering these experiments required are matched by the physical labour needed to make them work. Mosquito collection demands patience and painstaking attention to detail. Because they feed during the night, mosquitoes must be caught before sunrise. Routine 11

As a place to spend the night, one could do much worse than an experimental hut. In The Gambia, where experimental hut trials have been conducted since the 1980s, former sleepers recall their experiences with some fondness, as a privileged time to see friends and to get away from the troubles of family life. Here, enrolling sleepers involves a politically complicated process of selection.

Entomological extensions

81

capture involves aspirating mosquitoes with a rubber tube. Mosquitoes are sucked from the walls, floors, baffles, bed nets and window traps and then blown into one of two plastic cups: one for the dead, the other for the living. Because entomological observations in the huts are made principally to determine the effect of the insecticide, it is critical to note the situation and the state in which each mosquito was captured. After collection is complete, live mosquitoes are emptied into bottles of ethanol and killed. The samples are counted and classified according to species and gender, the females further subdivided into unfed, pregnant and blood-fed. The latter are taken back to the lab for further analysis. The process can take hours, and owing to the high volume and fragility of the samples, it must be done onsite. Conventionally, it is the principal investigator, sometimes aided by a field assistant, who performs these arduous tasks. Though it entailed some training, using volunteers meant that, in the long run, experiments took less time and energy. Sarah’s primary justification, however, was experimental. Her prior research in Bolivia on traditional plant repellents had piqued Sarah’s interest in developing safer and more readily available replacements for DDT. With this goal in mind, she decided to work backwards. Her project in Ifaraka was to investigate the olfactory cues governing mosquito attraction. She had set herself a challenging task: the chemical identity and physiological impact of pheromones remains one of the more poorly understood aspects of animal and human behaviour. Moreover, because DDT made mosquito extermination so easy, little research has been done on host-attraction since the 1960s. Fortunately, Sarah was not starting from scratch. Within the field, it is known that mosquitoes are drawn to human feet, so she set her PhD student, Fredros Okumu, to work analysing his socks.12 After a year of sequentially selecting and deleting compounds, Fredros managed to develop a blend that was not just as attractive, but, according to tests conducted in the insectary, more attractive than humans. These results encouraged Sarah to move swiftly to semi-field studies. Her research promised considerable benefits for public health. If her 12

More precisely, to a bacterium found on the feet, which as it happens is also used in cheese production. Anophelese gambiae are also attracted to the smell of Limburger cheese.

82

Ann Kelly

compound was, indeed, effective, it could drastically reduce the cost of malaria research. Using an aspirator remains the most accurate method of collection, but it is labour-intensive and, because it entails exposure to potentially infectious mosquito bites, ethically unsound. As an alternative, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has developed a light trap. Placed by a sleeper’s bed, the trap sucks mosquitoes into containers, rotated every hour. While reliable and easy to use, the CDC light trap costs over 800 dollars. It also requires six V battery power sources, which are difficult to obtain in Africa and need frequent replacement if used intensively. If Fredros’ blend attracted mosquitoes more effectively than human bait, and could be cheaply synthesised, it would open new research possibilities for poorly funded national institutions. Sarah and Fredros decided on a three-way comparison. In one experimental hut, they set a CDC light trap beside untreated bed nets used by a sleeper. In another, they placed a trap that contained the new blend beside a sleeping man. In a third, volunteers caught mosquitoes as they entered throughout the night. From six in the evening until six in the morning they aspirated in shifts of forty-five minutes, taking fifteen minutes at the end of each hour to eat and rest. Over four days each volunteer and each trap were placed sequentially in each of the huts. This rotation was replicated over four weeks. Collection was exhausting, but the work did not end there. Each morning, with a radio blaring to keep them awake, the volunteers counted and identified mosquitoes that were caught the previous night. To help those sleeping in the CDC hut record the correct moment at which mosquitoes were caught, Sarah recalibrated the light trap to Swahili time (a twelve-hour clock). By the final weeks of the experiment, the sleepers had cut the time it took to sort and identify the mosquitoes by half. Fredros confessed that the sleepers soon surpassed him in being able to detect the minute striations that differentiate one species from another. For his part, Robert Kitende insists that he can tell the difference between an anopholene and a culicine by how they bite him at night – a technique that he is now teaching his sons. The experimental huts generate, then, not only entomological data but amateur entomologists as well. This capacity to extend research practice to the public is closely tied to the epistemic significance of place and

Entomological extensions

83

volatility I discussed above. The entomologists I worked with argue that the technological emphasis of current research – on vaccines, combinational therapies or genetically modified mosquitoes – simply does not suit its object. Mosquitoes change their behaviour in response to human environments, while the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, evolves in tune with the new pharmaceuticals that science develops to combat it. Vaccines are likely to be not only ineffective but, in the light of the potential for developing resistance, dangerous. But ultimately, the current focus of research and funding reflects a failure to understand the epidemiological reality of malaria as being primarily infrastructural. Indeed, the differences between the 1968, 1982 and 2008 World Health Organization bulletins on vector control are striking. While the early reports describe how to engineer drainage ditches, systems of water collection, vertical drainage systems and larval control, the 2008 bulletin discourages methods that entail logistical complexity. Instead the WHO recommends, exclusively, the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs): In very low income countries it is not possible routinely to meet the logistical demands of ensuring that trained spray teams equipped with working spray pumps and sufficient insecticide arrive at each village in time to spray before the malaria season. It can also be argued that it is more feasible to supply ITNs in such circumstances because this does not impose similar logistics requirements. (WHO 2006: 9)

For those whose research takes place in the field, this shift in commitment from engineering projects to magic bullets represents an abandonment of local capacity. That retreat is particularly distressing because, as experience in South America, Europe and North America has repeatedly demonstrated, communities represent the greatest resource available for malaria control. But for the first time in decades, researchers like Sarah are receiving considerable financial support. As resistance to anti-malarial drugs and insecticides becomes a growing concern, controlling transmission by reducing vector or parasite populations has recaptured the attention of global health officials. Advances in bioinformatics and genomics have fuelled this interest, most specifically with the development of mosquitoes genetically modified to be malaria-resistant or sterile. Fundingstreams for basic entomological research have opened up, enabling researchers to pursue a range of translational questions, involving, for

84

Ann Kelly

example, the capacity of laboratory-reared mosquitoes to compete in the wild. Answering such questions requires experiments located in malaria-infected areas (Ferguson et al. 2008), but ironically high-tech genetic solutions run counter to the pragmatic potential of semi-field research. The mosquito hut enables connections between the experiment, the world and our future effectiveness in it. Beyond generating reliable data on mosquito behaviour or developing stronger deterrents for household use, these collapsible, mutable mobiles transmit the practice of public health entomology to those for whom it is most useful. No one understands this better than Fredros. When he was ten, his rural village in northern Kenya became the site of a series of experimental hut trials. He remembers being quite taken with the ‘strange houses’, and though he was initially thought to be too young, he hung around until the researchers let him volunteer as a ‘sleeper’. His motivation and his ability to grasp the purposes and procedures of research left an impression; the team funded Fredros’ secondary and university education. In 2009, he was awarded the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Young Investigator Award.13 For Fredros, experimental huts are democratic instruments. Hanging one of the CDC light traps beside a sleeper’s mattress, he commented: ‘Can you imagine if we didn’t have to use these traps? Studies like this could be conducted by African scientists anywhere.’

Ethnographic dwellings Anthropologists should have considerable sympathy for a science that embeds itself in the world it seeks to understand (Kelly 2008). Crosscultural traffic depends upon the undetermined significance of objects and ideas held in common. In the experimental hut, the formation of hypotheses and analysis of outcomes is inseparable from the work of manoeuvring an expansive, volatile and, quite often, inhospitable world. Demonstrating the linkages between parasite, man and mosquito requires sensitivity to the problems of context and scale, and, ultimately, 13

See Interview with Fredros Okumu: www.malariaworld.org/blog/e-interview-fredrosokumu-kenya-1981.

Entomological extensions

85

to the limitations of description. Anthropology’s affinity with this entomological ethos offers a provocation to revisit our own inductive habits. Understanding how the hut manages to articulate those complex relations should motivate us to reflect on the ways in which we systematise our data and demarcate our analysis. Examining the ways in which the hut materialises public good might shed light on how we proportion ethnographic detail to make consequential statements about the world in which we live. One place to start would be the huts’ capacity to amplify the social context of science. And in that regard, Marilyn Strathern has equipped us with a wealth of theoretical resources. In her subtle analysis of contemporary Euro-American kinship and knowledge-making practices, Strathern meditates on the ubiquity of relational-thinking (Strathern 2005a). She asks us to consider science and society as artefacts of analogous modes of relating: making connections – be they causal, logical, physical or moral – is how we come to know the world and order our lives accordingly. Both conceptual and interpersonal relationality are further specified according to whether their constituent links are found or produced. Science can be understood as either the discovery of pre-existing relations or the invention of novel ones; social groupings might describe biological ties or political alignments.14 As a discipline that studies kinship to draw conclusions about cultural logics, anthropology makes for an interesting case study of this knowledge-practice. Because for anthropologists relationships function both as objects and as heuristic devices, analysis oscillates between the abstract and the concrete: ‘one not only perceives relations between things but also perceives things as relations’ (Strathern 2005a: 63). Ethnography adds a third dimension to this task of seeing double. Anthropological insights follow from long-term fieldwork. As anthropologists’ personal associations with their subjects become more deeply textured, their accounts become more secure. ‘The relation’ is therefore 14

Of interest to Strathern (2005a) are the situations where the difference between these domains is articulated and mobilised as a resource. The ethical and legal turbulence provoked by the new genetics provides her with key examples. Ova-donation, surrogacy and DNA patenting underscore the contemporary challenge of discriminating between the given and the made.

86

Ann Kelly

not only anthropology’s heuristic and object but also its field. Put rather clumsily, anthropologists use relationships (made with informants) to relate social orders (interpersonal relationships) to cultural logics (categorical relationships). So how do anthropologists understand the instrumentality of the relation with respect to their intellectual work? The problem of how to manage theoretically the specific relationships formed during fieldwork may seem of a different order from the analytical operations that focus Strathern’s concern. Indeed, the extent to which ethnography can or should be considered co-authored seems an issue more of ethics than of interpretive mechanics. However, one implication of investigating relationality as a cultural phenomenon is that it allows us to understand how empirical practice drives the worlds we produce through analysis. Though generated at different moments, the connections we make in the field occupy the same conceptual space as the ones we evoke in print. The question I would raise is: what then do we do with this relational thinking? How does a commitment to the epistemic value of our research associations shape the anthropological project? It is a commonplace that defining the outcomes of an anthropological inquiry in advance of its ethnographic investigations is self-defeating. Writing field-notes entails anticipation rather than prediction; anthropologists gather as much as possible with an eye to the very things they would take for granted, knowing that, at some point, they might prove relevant. Anthropological analysis, Strathern argues, moves by bumps and jumps, gains and losses; it continually produces a remainder material that is left over, for it goes beyond the original answer to the question to encapsulate or subdivide that position (the question-and-answer set) by further questions requiring further answers. Or we might say, it opens up fresh gaps in our understanding. (Strathern 1991: xxii)

A ‘home’ of a kind, the experimental hut preserves that space through the practice of dwelling. In ‘Building dwelling thinking’, Martin Heidegger asks what is particular to the character of buildings in which we live. A thinker quite attached to his hut in Todtnauberg (Sharr 2006), Heidegger uses the notion of ‘dwelling’ to express an awareness of and commitment to the surroundings one inhabits. Relational continuity – between land, things, creatures and humans – is brought about through contiguity,

Entomological extensions

87

being in a state of actual contact. Coming together in a space – nearness – precipitates modalities of response and responsibility (Heidegger 1971). Though clearly its foundations are temporary, the experimental hut creates a framework that binds man, mosquitoes and parasites over time; it creates a framework where scientists and publics can linger in a place and become aware of how it might be preserved. Tim Ingold’s anthropological extension of the poetics of dwelling reveals the dynamism of that engagement (Ingold 2000). His notion of ‘taskscape’ (as opposed to landscape) underscores not only the practical character of the conviviality of humans and nature but its movement. Preservation unfolds across space. It is this commitment to recurrently inhabiting and re-inhabiting one’s research that propels the collaborative work we see in Lupiro. Imagining fieldwork in terms of dwelling in a semi-field, rather than as an arrival and a departure, might help us cultivate modalities of practical and intellectual communion. Within the mobile and makeshift space of anthropological engagement – the homes we only partially inhabit – the dialectic between social and conceptual relations articulates the remainders of ethnography, extending the possibilities of participating in and of each other.

Acknowledgements My first thanks go to Steve Lindsay, Matthew Kirby and Sarah Moore, public health entomologists working in The Gambia and Tanzania. This chapter benefited greatly from the keen insight and generous attention of the editors, Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger. For their close reading I would also like to thank Michael Guggenheim, William Kelly and Javier Lezaun. This research was conducted with the support of the Wellcome Trust (grant #2173).

6

Kinship and the core house: contested ideas of family and place in a Ghanaian resettlement township Thomas Yarrow

During the 1960s, over 80,000 people were resettled following the construction of the Akosombo dam in Ghana. The project created what, at the time, was the largest man-made lake in the world, a feat that was a source of considerable national pride. Although resettlement was seen by government officials and planners to entail ‘sacrifice’, relocation was presented as a positive step from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. From this perspective the extended family was equated with ‘tradition’ and although the potentially integrative social function of such kin relationships was sometimes positively acknowledged, their weakening remained an explicit goal. Though often relatively small, resettlements were explicitly conceived as ‘towns’, a terminology that itself engendered the modernising aspirations of the project (Chambers 1970). In these purportedly more urban and cosmopolitan settings, planners, politicians and state officials hoped that the political and economic functions of kinship would diminish as people engaged in more diffuse relations on the basis of common nationality and citizenship. As Diaw and SchmidtKallert observe, ‘resettlement was to produce nationalists in an urban environment rather than myopic and inward-looking tribal communities’ (1990: 19). To this end, movement from the ‘traditional’ extended family system to the nuclear family system was an explicit goal of many of the planners and government officials involved (Obusu-Mensah 1980). Focusing on one of these resettlement communities, this chapter examines how understandings of kinship, home and belonging have been reconfigured in response to forced migration and the aggregation of previously distinct groups that resettlement entailed. Whilst the persistence and continued centrality of kinship has been noted in these 88

Kinship and the core house

89

communities, this has tended to be regarded as a ‘hangover’ from the more ‘traditional’ forms of social life that characterised pre-settlement communities (e.g. Obusu-Mensah 1980; Diaw and Schmidt-Kallert 1990). Yet even to the extent that people in these communities themselves view kinship as a domain of ‘tradition’, the social significance and effects of these discourses cannot be reduced to any straightforward connection with the past. When kinship is taken to be explained by ‘tradition’, we fail to appreciate the different meanings, values and explanations that people attach to this term. The analytic equation of kinship with ‘tradition’ is therefore problematic insofar as it precludes ethnographic understanding of the different ways in which both planners and resettled communities understand the relationship between these domains. By contrast this chapter explores how and in what contexts different people draw on ideas of kinship and tradition, and looks at the consequences of doing so. Rather than premise analysis on a distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, the chapter examines the ways in which these terms are configured in relation to competing understandings of kinship and place. The account illuminates these issues through Strathernian theorisations of kinship, but, in rerouting these through a specific set of ethnographic issues, seeks to extend their theoretical scope. In Kinship at the core (1981), Strathern demonstrates how ideas of kinship are at the heart of English conceptions of place and belonging. In Elmdon, a rural village in Essex, being a ‘real’ villager is a matter not simply of locality or geography, but of having kin relations to a group of ‘core’ families, whose genealogies stretch back beyond living memory. Whilst such claims are naturalised by the apparently immutable fact of ‘birth’, Strathern shows how this idea in fact symbolises a relationship between an individual and his or her village. Since kinship is reckoned in bilateral terms, individuals may locate their origins either maternally or paternally and hence the issue of ‘birth’ is partly a matter of choice. In this way, the distinction between ‘real’ villagers and ‘outsiders’ produces a provocative image of boundary that is in fact less absolute than it appears. In practice who is included and who is excluded changes with context. Classification does not simply delimit pre-defined sociological groups but highlights the interests by which they feel themselves to be united or divided.

90

Thomas Yarrow

Despite significant differences in kinship ideology and practice, this understanding of kinship as a ‘boundary effect’ usefully illuminates the forms of relationship and belonging that have developed in the wake of resettlement in Ghana’s Volta Resettlement Project. The chapter focuses on the central concept of the ‘home-town’, suggesting that like the Elmdon image of ‘the village’ this arises from an equation of kinship and place. This is used to create a boundary that can then be utilised in the service of different interests, by those who were resettled as well as by those living in the towns to which resettlers were moved. As the account demonstrates, however, the centrality of kinship was challenged by resettlers, claiming to belong on the basis of their unique historical circumstances. As a symbol of this difference, the ‘core houses’, to which resettlers were moved, themselves constitute an image of boundary, delimiting resettlers from residents of the towns and defining particular rights. Extending Strathern’s analysis, it could be said that, rather than kinship, the core house is at ‘the core’ of what it means to belong.

Resettlement as modernisation The construction of the Akosombo dam and the Volta Resettlement Project that accompanied this was iconic of globally fashionable developmental ideals of Modernisation Theory and also acted to concretise the specific ‘Pan-African’ visions of the post-independence government (Diaw and Schmidt-Kallert 1990; Miescher 2007).1 As such Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first independent president, lauded the project as ‘one of the major engineering feats of the world’ (Obeng 1979: 37), presenting it as central to the realisation of rapid development of a modern economy through a process of industrialisation. The physical construction of the dam was therefore inextricably linked to the symbolic 1

Modernisation Theory proposed that all societies develop from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ through a series of successive stages and that the task of development planners is to facilitate the ‘take-off’ of this process. These ideas had international currency following the Second World War, during the period in which the Volta Resettlement Project was planned and implemented. As president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah explicitly embraced Modernisation Theory, advocating development from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’, through economic and technological development underpinned by ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ principles.

Kinship and the core house

91

construction of the post-independence nation as an independent and explicitly ‘modern’ entity (Shapiro 2003; Miescher 2007). As part of the process of resettlement, around 740 villages were relocated at fifty-two resettlement towns, built around the newly formed Volta Lake. Whilst some of these were constructed as completely new towns, others were attached to existing settlements. In all cases planners influenced by more widely fashionable theories of Central Place Theory sought to centralise services in a relatively small number of towns in order to minimise costs of infrastructural development and maximise access to services (Huszar 1970).2 Attempts were made to resettle neighbouring villages together, but in practice the project often resulted in the aggregation of people from different ethnic backgrounds and language groups with no prior relationship (Chambers 1970; Dodoo 1970). Those forced from areas inundated by the lake were frequently presented in state discourses as ‘sacrificing’ for the greater good of the nation. Nonetheless, in public discourses of the time, resettlement was itself portrayed as a form of development and a step towards modernity. As Shapiro puts it, ‘the government was not only moving people out of the way of the encroaching waters, but it was turning would-be refugees into model citizens and spearheads for development’ (Shapiro 2003: 1). In a similar vein Diaw and Schmidt-Kallert suggest that resettlement towns ‘were seen as bridgeheads of modernisation in a sea of rural backwardness and underdevelopment’ (1990: 12). While the discourses of planners and bureaucrats emphasised the need to be sensitive to the customs and traditions of these different populations, the process was ultimately conceived as a movement from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. In this vein newspaper reports of the time explicitly portrayed the journey that resettler communities made as the literal movement from one state to the other. Similar ideas of the relationship between tradition and modernity underscored public discourses that contrasted the ‘backward’ forms of planning and construction of the 2

Central Place Theory originated in the work of the German geographer Walter Christaller, who developed a universal model to explain the regional distribution of services within and between settlements. This model was internationally influential during the period in which the resettlement townships were planned and was an explicit inspiration for George Nez, the regional planning advisor to the Volta Resettlement Project (see Shapiro 2003: chapter 3).

92

Thomas Yarrow

inundated villages with the forms of ‘modern’ planning and architecture in the resettlement towns. Central to this vision of development was the ‘core house’ that resettled families were given as part of (or more often in lieu of) monetary compensation for houses, land and possessions submerged by the lake. Although ‘core houses’ took three different forms (named R-type, P-type and D-type), all were underpinned by the basic idea that a common ‘core’ or ‘nucleus’ was to be given which could then be expanded according to predetermined plans and construction techniques supposedly to incorporate infinite variability in family size and cultural preference (Danby 1970). David Butcher, a British social anthropologist in charge of the social survey, described how, ‘like an organism’, the houses were to be ‘capable of growth as the requirements of the householder increase, along with his prosperity’ (Butcher 1970: 88). In this way the core house’s potential for physical expansion was more generally seen by government planners and architects to anticipate the economic expansion they assumed would result. While these economic benefits have failed to materialise in the terms imagined (Diaw and Schmidt-Kallert 1990; Tsikata 2006), the process of resettlement has had profound and long-lasting effects both on those who were moved and on those communities to which resettlement townships were attached. During the 1950s and 1960s, large-scale technocratic development interventions and the resettlement schemes that accompanied these led to a profound shift in the relationship between the state and rural communities throughout Africa (Bernal 1997; Bonneuil 2000; Mitchell 2002). As in other schemes undertaken on the continent during the middle of the twentieth century (Escobar 1995; Bonneuil 2000) the Volta Resettlement Project entailed attempts to redesign rural life and agricultural production. These shifted the balance of power between state and agrarian communities through making the former increasingly legible to the latter. In particular this entailed the ‘domestication’ (Bonneuil 2000) of communities that formerly had little, if any, relationship to the state, and their subjection to various forms of scientific, technical and social scientific ‘expertise’. In the context of the Volta Resettlement Project, this has taken a variety of forms. Though short-lived, domestic science programmes

Kinship and the core house

93

sought to ease the ‘transitional’ period through the regulation of household activities in line with an ‘ordered’, ‘hygienic’ and explicitly ‘modern’ set of practices (Shapiro 2003). Similarly, both the introduction of Town Managers and the later incorporation of resettlement towns within local government (via District Assemblies) have been associated with new forms of planning regulation. Most resettlement townships have only been connected to main power lines through rural electrification projects undertaken since the late 1990s. Although many households have since been disconnected as a result of non-payment of bills, this development also engenders a new relationship to the state. Rural electrification programmes both depend on a more individualistic relationship between the state and ‘consumers’ and technically inscribe it, setting up new relationships between households and electricity suppliers that bypass representatives of wider communities. Because relationships with the state are almost invariably textually mediated, resettlement and subsequent administrative and technical changes that have accompanied this therefore tend to shift power from chiefs and elders to younger, more educated members of these communities (Obusu-Mensah 1980). In various ways the material, conceptual and political changes that accompanied resettlement have therefore extended the reach of the state, resulting in new, if sometimes precarious, forms of governmentality and citizenship.

Resettlement in Apeguso The following account focuses on Apeguso, a town of around 2,500 people located on the main road between Ghana’s capital, Accra, and the regional capital of Volta in Ho, using this as a lens to explore broader issues of kinship and belonging. The majority of residents are Akwamus, one of the clans of the Twi-speaking Akan, that predominate in southern Ghana. Although the economy is predominantly agriculturally based, people from the town are employed in a range of occupations, including as subsistence farmers, traders, and labourers at the nearby textiles factory at Akosombo. Within the Akwamu paramountcy, the chief of Apeguso occupies the position of adontehene, making him second in command to the Akwamu

94

Thomas Yarrow

paramount chief, and giving the town a politically important position within the region. As part of the Volta Resettlement Project people came to Apeguso from a variety of places as the level of the lake rose between 1962 and 1963. Of those resettled, most were Ewe-speaking Tongu fishermen who had earlier migrated along the Volta river from places such as Bato, Mepe and Tefle in south-east Ghana. Although seasonal migration often led to increasingly permanent residence and infrequent return, connections to these home-towns remained symbolically important (Lawson 1958). Following the construction of the dam, some of these people returned to their original home-towns but most chose to move to resettlement townships, seeing this as a preferable option in terms of housing and economic opportunity. Those resettled in Apeguso all retain active connections to lineage members in what they continue to refer to as their ‘home-towns’. As for other Ewe groups (Nukunya 1969), these connections are patrilineally defined and entail a range of ongoing rights and duties, including financial obligations, the desirability of building and maintaining a ‘family’ house and the expectation of the return of the corpse at death. The Apeguso resettlement ‘quarters’ (as they continue to be called) comprised fifty-four P-type houses, along with a purpose-built primary school and central lavatory block. Initially 181 people were resettled there, making Apeguso one of the smallest of the fifty-four resettlement towns (Volta River Authority 1970). Originally the site was set apart from the main town of Apeguso, connected by a single unpaved road. Although the subsequent construction of buildings – mainly by residents of the ‘old town’ – has acted to erode this gap, a distinction remains evident in terms of both the type of building and the layout of the town. In the old town, ‘compound’ houses predominate, comprising rooms arranged around a central courtyard, built either of mud blocks or cement and roofed with thatch or iron sheeting. A number of unpaved roads cross-cut the town and a network of back routes weave between the haphazardly arranged houses. Few plots are fenced, but women and children take pride in the neatness of the patches surrounding their houses, sweeping up leaves and debris in a daily ritual that delimits the extent of the compound.

Kinship and the core house

95

By contrast the resettlement quarters are centrally planned, with houses ranged in linear rows around a central open space occupied by the school and the football pitch. The original resettlement houses were built of ‘landcrete’ (a mixture of lateritic soil and cement) and roofed with iron sheeting. In common with planners’ original conceptions of the houses, residents sometimes positively connect their uniform appearance to their ‘modernity’. However, in general, resettlement houses are unpopular, as evinced by occupants’ frequent complaints concerning their inadequate size and poor state of repair. Lacking the funds to purchase cement, and with the relaxation of an initially stringently applied set of planning laws, core houses have generally been extended through the addition of temporary ‘swish’ constructed bedrooms and kitchens. Though the original plans show a clear demarcation of roads and plots, subsequent developments have acted to blur these boundaries. As in the ‘old town’, most people navigate through the network of paths that weave between the houses. Resettlers and residents from the old town both commonly describe the differences between these places in terms of the quarters’ relative ‘bushiness’, ‘weediness’ and lack of order. Similarly, general consensus has it that houses in the old town are bigger, better maintained and more desirable. These differences are explicitly seen to concretise a relative difference of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. Underlying these shared ideas, however, are competing explanations of this difference. On the one hand people from the resettlement quarters relate problems of housing to economic difficulties deriving from the historical circumstances of their resettlement and hence to broken promises on the part of government and the Volta River Authority.3 On the other hand, old town residents more commonly relate this difference to resettlers’ ‘mentality of dependency’ and to their lack of willingness to help themselves. As in Elmdon (Strathern 1981), so too in Apeguso, descriptions of differences in housing and infrastructure are used to lend sociological boundaries an immutability and permanence that is more imagined than 3

The Volta River Authority (VRA) was established in 1961, under the Volta River Development Act of the Republic of Ghana. It is a publicly owned company responsible for the generation and supply of electricity throughout Ghana. It also retains ongoing legal responsibility for the health and socio-economic welfare of resettlement communities.

96

Thomas Yarrow

real. Ideas about the distinctive characteristics of resettlers and old town residents are in this way literalised in terms of different but overlapping understandings of the physicality of the places where they live. Distinctive forms of planning, architecture and environment themselves participate in the imagination of the differences of identity and social composition explored below.

Kinship and place Although resettlement took place over forty years ago, a distinction between ‘resettlers’ (also referred to as ‘VRA people’ or ‘government’ people) on the one hand and ‘old town residents’ on the other remains salient in a variety of different contexts. Ideas of kinship and relatedness are central to the way in which this boundary between the original residents of Apeguso and resettlers is defined and understood. In claiming Apeguso as their ‘home-town’, Akwamu residents assert connections to the place on the basis of matrilineally defined family membership. Following Middleton (1979), it is possible to construct an ideal type of the ways in which these connections are understood. Focusing on the predominantly Akan town of Akropong, Middleton describes how membership of particular ‘houses’ (efie) confers membership of larger sub-clan units. Ideally each ‘house’ literally occupies a ‘family house’ and acts as a corporate unit to allocate and distribute collectively owned property, including farming land and access to the house itself. According to Middleton: ‘Akropong is thus the nucleus of a complex network of relations between members of its population who are migrants of various kinds who, wherever they move and work, regard it as their “home-town”’ (1979: 251). People define ‘home’ on the basis of family ties which may have nothing to do with their actual place of birth. Moreover the places that people refer to as ‘home’ are frequently not the places in which they permanently reside. Similarly, in Apeguso the definition of a person’s ‘home-town’ ideally derives from membership of matrilineally defined descent groups which need not relate to the actual place where a person lives or was born. Akwamu residents of Apeguso see migration to large urban cities as part of the normal life-cycle. When young men and women move away to gain

Kinship and the core house

97

education and employment, they continue to see themselves as part of their abusua (family) and by extension their home-town, a phenomenon that occurs more widely in Ghana (Hill 1970; Oppong 1981; Manuh 2003) and Africa more generally (Gugler 1997; Geschiere and Gugler 1998; van Santen 1998). Indeed, far from weakening ties, such migration is often seen to strengthen them. By going away, young men – and increasingly young women – gain wealth that can be distributed amongst kin or used for the construction of family houses within the home-town. While not all return, most express the desire to do so and hope to become respected in this context as elders and heads of families. On return, migrants may occupy the room allocated to them within their ‘family house’. However if the family house is small or in poor repair, or if the person is rich, they will often choose to build a new house. As for Akans more generally, building a house is considered to be one of the most important things that a man can do (Geest 1998). People who migrate to find work in larger cities or abroad (Manuh 2003) often send money back to their home-towns for relatives to build on their behalf. In doing so, people literalise ties to ‘home’, and seek to realise the common ideal of retirement spent as a respected elder surrounded by relatives. As Geest puts it: ‘A house stands for successful life, for respect, love, happiness and security in old age. It is a thing of beauty and it provides a sense of belonging to “home” both physically and symbolically’ (Geest 1998: 336). Ideas of ‘home’ as a physical space are thus inextricably linked to the social possibilities that this realises (Corsin-Jime´nez 2003). The Twi proverb ‘Ye bias wo fie, ye mmisa wo sika’ (we ask about your house, not about your money) articulates this idea, implying that houses, by contrast to money, are of inherent social worth (Geest 1998). In this light, enduring ties to family constitute the basis upon which Akwamu residents of Apeguso claim it as their home-town. Although detailed knowledge of actual genealogical ties is often lacking, the image of connection between family and place forms the basis upon which belonging is asserted and boundaries are drawn. Aged sixty-three, Samuel Atara is a respected elder of Apeguso, where he lives in a large block-built compound house that he recently finished building. Born and raised in the town, he spent most of his adult life living and working away, including as a watchman in Accra and later in

98

Thomas Yarrow

the steel factory at Tema. Speaking of his decision to retire to Apeguso, he described his attachment to the place in terms of his own ‘birth’ and kin ties through both his mother and father. By contrast he explained the impossibility of resettlers ever integrating into the community: ‘To me as an Apeguso man I know that this place is not their home-town, only that they stay here. If they die, they can bury them here or bury them there. But anything at all you do here, this place is not your home-town.’ In this vein Akwamu residents more generally claimed ‘real’ connections in distinction to those who were resettled in the 1960s. Since, in theory, ‘home’ is matrilineally defined, the Akan model of descent does not appear to provide the same grounds for equivocation as the bilateral model outlined by Strathern in the context of Elmdon. However, recent studies of Akan kinship show how in practice similar kinds of choices can be made. As against earlier models of lineal descent Clark suggests that: A person can concurrently invoke distinct and contradictory sets of kinship and marriage rules from Akan matriliny, fundamentalist Christianity and Western romantic secularism. Each is widely enough recognised to make an effective bargaining chip without cancelling the others out. The ability to renegotiate and reinterpret obligations of kinship, marriage, chieftaincy, neighbourhood etc., in the context of frequent and dramatic changes in life circumstances seems ironically to be one of the most firmly held and persistent values. (Clark 1999: 70)

Extending this point, it becomes apparent that if kinship idioms in fact constitute a set of plural ideological commitments from which people selectively draw, then the connections that these set up to different places are also negotiable. In Apeguso, as in Elmdon, assertions of belonging routed through kinship are in fact more flexible than they appear. In practice, ‘home’ was defined not simply through matrilineal descent but also through other familial ties. In particular people with paternal ties to Apeguso sometimes emphasised the importance of these relations and spoke of the significance of the role of the father as a spiritual guide to his children. Similarly the significance of such relations was often emphasised when allied to long-term residence. Now in his fifties, Alex Oboubi has lived and worked in Apeguso for most of his adult life. As the headmaster of the town’s largest junior

Kinship and the core house

99

school he is a well-respected member of the community. His mother’s family live in the nearby town of Akwamu Fie, and accordingly he conceded that some would consider this to be his real home. Yet as he explained, this was not his own way of looking upon it: You see we [Akans] believe in matrilineal inheritance. I can say that strictly speaking I don’t have my extended family here . . . But my personal belief, [and what] I normally write on forms, [is] that Apeguso is my home town because I was born and bred here.

In his view, matrilineal ties to Akwamu Fie were relatively insignificant when weighed against the various relationships that connected him to Apeguso. In particular he spoke of the fact he was born there and of family relationships on his father’s side. He also highlighted the friendships he had made and the respect that people gave him as a result of a life spent living and working in the town. ‘Home’, from this perspective, was a matter not simply of inviolable ties of kinship but also of ‘experience’ and of the connections to people and place that develop through this. In a more diffuse sense, Akwamus at times claimed Apeguso as their ‘home’ on the basis of a common ethnic identity. In the context of northwest Ghana, Lentz suggests that: The effectiveness of ethnic discourses is based on the fact that they transfer the emotional power of categories such as ‘family’, ‘village’ and ‘home’ onto larger communities. By claiming to be primordial and non-negotiable, because defined through birth, an ethnic identity creates bindedness, permanence and thus security. But it also excludes producing need and insecurity. (Lentz 2000: 137)

In a similar way, people who migrated to Apeguso from nearby towns and villages drew on ideas of the Akwamu as a single family, with a shared set of beliefs and traditions. Drawing on these ideas of ethnicity and kinship, they claimed Apeguso as ‘home’ and asserted their rights to ‘belong’ there.

Images of home Idealised images of the ‘home-town’ equate kinship and place with ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’. Yet as Manuh (2003) argues in the context of Ghanaian migrants in Toronto, people relate to common images of

100

Thomas Yarrow

‘home’ in different ways. Manuh’s own analysis focuses on the gendered implications of this difference, suggesting that whilst male migrants imagine ‘home’ as a secure place of family and friends in the midst of their own displacements, women tend to embrace the possibilities of freedom offered by migration and correspondingly view ‘home’ as a place of repression. Similarly, in Apeguso images of ‘home’ conflate ideas of kinship, tradition and place which people understand and relate to in different ways. In the old town elder men tended to view the home-town as a place of ‘tradition’, elucidating the virtues of ‘respect’, ‘order’ and ‘tranquillity’ associated with it. By contrast, younger residents sometimes spoke of ‘tradition’ in less positive terms, highlighting the loss of freedom associated with life lived in close proximity to other family members. From this perspective kinship was regarded as a constraint and negatively contrasted with the more ‘free’ kinds of relationship that develop in the city. In a similar vein, Apeguso was sometimes described in derogatory terms as a ‘village’ (akuraa), lacking ‘civilisation’ (anibea) and ‘development’. A similar opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ underscores Ewe resettlers contrasting relationship to Apeguso. Resettlers imagine Apeguso as a place of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ by contrast to the more ‘traditional’ home-towns from which their families originated. Amongst older residents Apeguso is often negatively contrasted with ‘home’, as a place in which the youth forget about family and think only of themselves. For many the desire to return home to build a house and ultimately to be buried remains an overriding preoccupation. Peter Domey was a small child during the time of evacuation and suggested that despite having subsequently schooled and worked in Apeguso he was always made to feel a ‘second-class citizen’. By contrast he related: ‘When we go [to our home-town] it always feels like home. Because our family there want us to be there. The people there know our parents, so they feel we should come there often.’ In this way sentimental descriptions of ‘home’ articulate antipathy both towards the process of resettlement and to the way in which settlers have been treated by Apeguso residents. Apeguso is cast as a place of failed modernity, insofar as resettlement is seen to undermine their former freedom and turn them, as people sometimes claimed, into ‘permanent strangers’.

Kinship and the core house

101

By contrast, a number of the younger and more educated resettlers draw on a similar opposition between tradition and modernity in outlining a more positive image of Apeguso. Now aged thirty, Wisdom was born in Apeguso, where he spent much of his youth. Lacking his own house and farm in his home-town of Tefle, he talked of feeling like a ‘stranger’ there, relating this to his own exposure to ‘modern’ ideas and ways of life: When you come to modernisation and this kind of western life, sometimes we also look at them as people who . . . have lost certain facts [and] values. It is like there is something missing in their life. Looking at their dress, the way they talk . . . in that aspect we also find ourselves on top of some of them.

More generally, those born after resettlement tended to equate Apeguso with a ‘modern’ outlook and way of life, through which life in the hometown comes to be seen in terms of deficit and lack as a place that is ‘backward’ and ‘undeveloped’. Amongst resettlers and old town residents alike, an apparently simplistic dichotomy between tradition and modernity in fact articulates multiple interests and ideas, framing forms of discourse and relation that are not analytically reducible to these terms. Although kin relations are commonly elided with ‘tradition’, the ethnographic consequences of doing so are variable. As a form of tradition, kinship can be seen as ‘backward looking’ and ‘regressive’, or alternatively as integral to the maintenance of individual and social virtues such as morality and respect.

Contesting place and belonging Whilst the idealised models of Apeguso residents imagine kinship to delimit discrete sociological groups, in reality such ideas create images of boundary which are then utilised to different effect. As Strathern (1981) argues in the context of Elmdon, the key issue is not whether these ideas are objectively ‘true’ but why and in what contexts they matter. In Apeguso, many of these issues derive from the fact of resettlement. From the perspective of Akwamus, Ewe resettlers are often regarded as taking scarce resources and impinging on the rights of ‘old town’

102

Thomas Yarrow

residents. For example, resettlers are said to put pressure on school places, as well as on public services such as water pumps and public toilets. In addition, a perceived shortage of farmland is often blamed upon resettlers, who each received three-acre plots as part of the compensation that accompanied resettlement. In the context of these issues, home-town connections are invoked as the basis upon which Akwamu residents claim differential rights. On these grounds, resettlers who have lived in Apeguso for over forty years are sometimes denied rights given to more recent Akwamu residents. For their part, Ewe resettlers voice concerns about the increasing number of people from the old town renting or buying core houses originally given to resettlers. Similarly, a perceived shortage of housing is seen to be exacerbated by the differential and partisan manner in which people from the old town implement planning regulations. In voicing these concerns, resettlers at times foregrounded their rights as citizens of the town on the basis of birth or long-term residence. Having lived and worked in Apeguso, resettlers make claims to equal treatment on the basis that the town is also their ‘home’. More commonly, however, the right to belong is asserted on the basis of resettlers’ particular history and the ‘sacrifices’ this entailed. In this way, resettlers seek to leverage a particular relationship to the state, at times defining themselves as ‘VRA people’ or ‘government people’. For resettlers, economic and political rights are therefore seen to derive from a form of belonging relating to historical circumstance rather than kinship. As a legitimating symbol of this particular history, ownership of a core house was often invoked as the basis for truly belonging as a settler. In debates between resettlers and old town residents, a common boundary is therefore differently constructed in the service of competing arguments about the respective rights of resettlers and natives of Apeguso. Whilst the nature of this boundary is contested, the manner in which it is drawn is also open to negotiation. In this way an apparently static boundary between ‘home-town’ residents and ‘strangers’ is evoked in different contexts to define different groups of people. Akwamus living in the resettlement quarters seek strategically to leverage a position of ambiguity, at times claiming Apeguso as their home-town on the basis of ethnic and kin ties, whilst at other times foregrounding the historical

Kinship and the core house

103

circumstances through which they were resettled. Similarly the location of this boundary becomes problematic in the context of disputes about who can legitimately claim to be a ‘real’ resettler. To the extent that this identity is seen to relate to the historical circumstances of resettlement, this is contested in terms of competing versions of history. In particular, contradictory claims are made regarding who was first to arrive and who the quarters were ‘really’ intended for. Here, again, the significance of having been given a core house is often emphasised. While a variety of people claim affiliation to the old town as the grounds for asserting a position of superiority over resettlers, it is important to note that ties to ‘home’ are not always privileged over other forms of relationship. As Edwards (1998) argues, belonging to a locality is not always regarded as positive, and different elements of identity may be brought to the fore or suspended at different times. In Apeguso those who have lived and worked ‘outside’ foreground a more cosmopolitan identity through talking of the relationships and resources that this gives them access to. The connection to people and things beyond Apeguso also at times privileges an explicitly ‘modern’ identity (cf. Ferguson 1999). By the same token, resettlers turn their own status as ‘strangers’ to their own advantage. In this way resettlers justify lack of participation in communal labour and communal events on the ground they are not ‘really’ part of the town. Similarly relationships to hometowns beyond Apeguso are used to argue for greater political autonomy in the form of an independently recognised chief. Although kinship is in this way used as the basis upon which to draw a range of distinctions, ideas of kinship are also employed in the imagination of a more inclusive future. Both Ewes and Akwamus at times assert their hope that intermarriage will lead to a situation in which all will become one. Talking of the ways in which conflict has afflicted the town, Alex Oboubi, an Akwamu, thus suggested: We are all brothers, we are all black. Forget about the dialect, forget about the ethnic background. When we begin to inter-marry, our offspring, when we are dead and gone, will become one.

Wisdom, a junior school teacher from the resettlement quarters similarly invoked kinship in his more positive assessment of the existing situation:

104

Thomas Yarrow

You will not even identify one from the other. When you move round you will hear people speaking Twi as if they are Twis – Ewes sitting down and speaking Twi. It does happen here. And the Ewe guys are marrying the Twi ladies . . . So that cooperation is there. You will not see any difference.

Despite differences of perspective, both Ewes and Akans imagined the development of kin relations between resettlers and old town residents to provide the grounds for an undivided and prosperous community. While kinship was invoked in the assertion of social and ethnic difference, it was also invoked as a means of erasing these.

Conclusion In her discussion of a compensation dispute between two Minj tribal groups in Papua New Guinea, Strathern (2005a) suggests that the judge’s Euro-American equation of kinship with tradition concealed the capacities of Minj themselves to reflect on the fact of their relationships. Indigenous ideas of kinship and relatedness, she argues, constitute an important intellectual resource that is concealed when kinship is understood to occupy the domain of tradition. As elucidated above, a similar Euro-American understanding of kinship underpins the approach of the planners and state officials responsible for implementing resettlement. According to this logic, as resettlement brought modernity, so the importance of kinship would diminish. In the event, however, changes brought about by this process have intensified interest in kinship as a means of defining and contesting access to a variety of resources. Following Strathern, these ideas about kinship and relatedness can be seen to constitute a significant intellectual resource that cannot be comprehended in the limited analytic terms of an opposition between tradition and modernity. The contemporary importance of kinship cannot be understood as a ‘hangover’ from a more ‘traditional’ era in the sense that understandings of the importance of family relations are configured in response to interests and tensions arising out of the fact of resettlement. Yet Strathern’s (2005a) insight that kinship and tradition should not be analytically equated is partially complicated by the ways in which planners, architects and people living in resettlement townships make

Kinship and the core house

105

precisely this equation. When Akans talk of home-towns and of the matrilineal ties that connect them to these places, they often explicitly present these relations as ‘traditional’, by contrast to the more ‘modern’ forms of relationship imagined to develop elsewhere. By the same token, resettlers frequently speak of Apeguso as a place of ‘modernity’ and oppose this to the ‘tradition’ of their own home-towns. Whilst the presentation of kin relations as traditional may be used to legitimise claims to belong, it may also be used to denigrate them. In this way, Ewe settlers speak of the ways in which kin relations are used to exclude them from town affairs, presenting these as backward and anachronistic. In other words, choices about the kinds of relationship people participate in are inextricably bound up with understandings of tradition and modernity. A similar equation of kinship and tradition underscores much of the planning discourse, albeit to often very different effect. During the process of resettlement, kinship as a form of tradition was seen to entail both positive and negative possibilities. Whilst often seen as a negative brake on the development of more diffuse forms of relationship, and as compromising the emergence of individual, autonomous citizens, it was also at times construed as the basis for social integration. In this sense, the opposition between tradition and modernity is itself an important intellectual resource that is drawn into the imagination of different relational possibilities. Though the use planners make of this opposition may indeed conceal local understandings of kinship, the same opposition also, at times, provides the very terms in which these understandings of kinship are made evident. Borrowing from the model that Strathern developed in Kinship at the core (1981), we might say that this opposition also constitutes an image of boundary which can then be evoked in different contexts and in the service of different ideas and agendas. An apparently simplistic opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ is used to make apparent interests, ideas and agenda that cannot themselves be understood in these terms.

Acknowledgements The research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, through an Early Career Fellowship. Sian Jones and Stephan Miescher provided useful comments on an earlier draft.

7

Invisible families: imagining relations in families based on same-sex partnerships Aivita Putnin¸a

The summer of 2005 was marked by the first Pride march in Latvia. It greatly disturbed the seemingly peaceful and uniform Latvian social order and was the catalyst for a massive protest. Government officials, left-wing and right-wing radicals and members of religious organisations were amongst those who protested against the ‘appearance’ of homosexuality in public places. The Pride march was banned the following year. The official reason given referred to the inability of the government to guarantee the security of participants. Some of the planned events were held privately.1 But this did not stop protesters who claimed to be defending ‘the nation and family values’ staging a protest action, throwing human excrement and splashing holy water on people attending the private events.2 The Latvian Parliament reacted to the situation by revising the official definition of marriage and family in the Latvian Constitution which, until then, had not been specified as a union between a man and a woman. Such amendments were legally pointless, as the Civil Law already used this definition. Parliamentarians, however, claimed it was necessary to protect the family at the highest legal level possible. The Latvian obsession with definitions of marriage also needs to be seen in the light of changes taking place elsewhere in Europe such as decreasing rates of marriage and increasing numbers of children born

1 2

The court later ruled that the prohibition was unlawful. This opened the door to subsequent marches and forced the state to provide security arrangements. For a more detailed description of events see Putnin¸a 2007: 313–14.

106

Invisible families

107

outside marriage.3 Currently around 45 per cent of children in Latvia are born outside marriage, and children are raised by one parent, in most cases the mother, in one third of families.4 At the time of the first Pride march, I was conducting fieldwork on Latvian conceptions of masculinity and virtually every person I interviewed wanted to give his or her opinion on Pride. For example, Marta, a woman in her early sixties, whose life has been one of constant tension between her actual and idealised role as a wife, drew on the commentary around the Pride events in an unexpected way. Marta is the de facto boss in her family, but her idea of a marital relationship is one in which the husband should rule. Indeed she actively pushed her husband into the role of ‘respectable head of the family’ by controlling his activities both inside and outside the home. To the world at large, and even to her husband, she plays the role of a good and submissive wife.5 Nevertheless she feels superior to him. At the end of my interview with her, where she made the gap between her actual and imagined roles explicit, she unexpectedly inquired of me, ‘How do homosexuals do it?’ She was not referring to the intimate, sexual aspects of homosexual relationships, but rather to the way in which same-sex partners manage their family relationships without clear guidelines for the division of gendered roles. Marta’s question about how homosexuals ‘do it’ was triggered by the first Pride march in Latvia. Rephrasing it allows me to formulate the 3

4

5

OECD Family Database Report (2008, SF6: Share of births outside marriage and teenage births) shows that the number of children born out of wedlock has increased in Europe since the 1970s, rising to over 50 per cent in Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Iceland. This also means that the number of parents who were not married at the time of birth of their first child has increased, and that increasing numbers of Europeans (as well as New Zealand and USA inhabitants) do not exclusively link procreation to marriage when creating family arrangements. The OECD Report (2008, SF8: Marriage and divorce rates) also shows that a significant increase in the form of partnership other than marriage has taken place since the 1970s. Latvia’s crude rate of decline in marriage was the highest in Europe between 1970 and 2007. According to Latvia’s Bureau of Statistics, 45.1 per cent of children were born out of wedlock in 2008. Paternity has not been registered for 17.5 per cent of these children, while for the rest it was registered voluntarily or through the court. According to the Latvian census, around a third of households were headed by single parents in 2001. Marta was convinced that biological differences in men and women constitute their subsequent roles in family. She expressed beliefs that men are stronger and therefore do harder jobs, as well as care for, and protect, the family. Similarly, owing to their physiology and brain structure, she believed women better suited for small household tasks and caring for children.

108

Aivita Putnin¸a

research question I want to address in this chapter, namely: what is it that allows people to look beyond a hetero-normative model of what constitutes a family relationship and to see their actual daily experiences and enactments of family relationships from a different perspective? I turn to the conceptual tools furnished by Marilyn Strathern to address this question. Strathern (2005a) not only has developed a relational approach to the study of kinship but also has conceptualised relational thinking as a tool, tout court, for anthropology. For Strathern, anthropology uses ‘relations to explore relations’ (2005a: 7). ‘Anthropology’s relation’, she continues, is divided into two kinds: the conceptual (or categorical) and the interpersonal. The first kind refers to connections that are made through a conceptual logic which has a momentum of its own, and the second to connections that are made between persons who have precise and specific biographies. It is the ability ‘to deal with both together’ (2005a: 7) that Strathern identifies as ‘anthropology’s tool’. In Euro-American kinship, the tandems of connection/disconnection and conceptual/interpersonal are joined by another duplex – relations that are given (already in place) and those that have to be achieved (made). My aim in this chapter is to mobilise ‘anthropology’s relation’ as a tool: first to map the relations (as conceptualised) and the relationships (as enacted) of my Latvian informants and second as an analytical perspective. Attention to both the conceptual and the interpersonal aspects of kinship is equally important in developing an understanding of the situations in which relational thinking operates in Latvia. At another level, relational thinking allows my informants to develop new connections and disconnections which contribute to changes in familial relationships and to the categories through which those relationships are conceptualised. Personal and anthropological accounts help to establish new definitions and to ‘discover’ new kinds of relationships within the family. In this process we see how gender role categories are just one possible means of relating and describing human relationships in a significant way. Strathern points out that there are two arenas (in a Euro-American context) where persons are imagined as relatives rather than individuals: the first is in ‘turbulence in family arrangements’ and the second in

Invisible families

109

‘procreative obligations’ (2005a: 10). She also highlights ‘academic arguments that presuppose relational thinking’ (2005a: 10) such as recent approaches in science and technology studies (for example in actor network theory, and see Latour 1988) and studies of the ways in which individuals, kinship and society are perceived under the impact of emerging biotechnologies (Strathern 1992a, 2005a). The change in perspective seems to come from the impossibility of conceptualising emerging new social relationships along the lines of already existing categories. Thus there are particular life events and particular ways of knowing that promote or emphasise relational thinking. This chapter looks at one arena in which relational thinking is employed. It focuses on how samesex partner families conceptualise their own family relationships. For example, I turn below to the case of a mother and daughter who are raising a child together. They do not categorise their arrangement as a specific kind of child-rearing relationship. But from my perspective, as an anthropologist, their interactions form a pattern. The mother and daughter name the relationship they have between them, and between themselves and their child, in the terms available to them: mother– daughter, grandmother–grandson and mother–son, even if their enactment of these relationships does not fall within the accepted definitions of such relationships but rather links a grandmother and a mother in different ways in relation to the child. I am arguing that the relation (conceptual) between them is at odds with their relationship (interpersonal) and, in this case, disconnects the grandmother from the child. While she hopes that her grandchild will one day have a father, she is also sad, and she cries when imagining that a new family may be enacted which would presumably sever her from her grandson. Usually the relationship between a grandmother and a grandchild is not at odds with that between a father and a child, but here the grandmother fears that a new father could sever the particular kind of relationship that has been forged between herself and her grandson but for which there is no kinship category. There are many situations where people are forced to be creative in making their family relationships work. I argue that the building and maintaining of family relationships in Latvia today draws on relational thinking and the ability to move between conceptual and interpersonal

110

Aivita Putnin¸a

relations. It is not the category (given/chosen, natural/nurtured, biological/social) but the ability to relate, and to create and maintain relationships, however they are categorised, that lies at the core of family and kinship (although a shared background can certainly facilitate mutual understanding). The existence of same-sex partnership makes the relational aspect of family more visible. Kath Weston has looked at the way in which North American gay/ lesbian families are constituted in terms of a transition from friendship and community to ‘families of choice’ (1991: 122–36). This is not only a change in emphasis, but also a change in relations that creates new possibilities for relationships. As Strathern writes, the choice about whether or not biology is the foundation for relationships has always existed (1992a: 196). Love and choice can be seen not only as categories that might oppose biological heredity, but also as aspects of relationships that gain importance in linking people when biological categories are not available (Weston 1991: 213). Gay and lesbian families do not introduce new categories but displace already existing ones by taking a new standpoint on what is already present. Here I want to extend Strathern’s argument to the public perception of the model of the family in Latvia. In describing these families from a relational perspective, certain aspects of their relationships come to light that trouble the current political dialogue about the family in Latvia. The policy field and public debate stick to hetero-normative categorical thinking which allows policy makers to disregard structural changes that mark contemporary Latvian life: changes that can be perceived only by observing the interpersonal aspect of relations. The evidence of a growing divorce rate, the high incidence of co-habitation and a greater number of single mothers contradicts the dominant model of the Latvian family.

Families investigated Weston (1991) took sexuality and sexual identification as the grounds for selecting her informants. My criterion for selection is relational. I have selected a type of family arrangement that is the opposite of the heteronormative family, namely, two same-sex adults raising children.

Invisible families

111

Children are an essential goal of the traditional heterosexual family, as procreation is its ultimate task and the roles of family members are derived from procreation. Procreation has also been a central plank in the argument that gay/lesbian sexuality is not ‘natural’ sexuality (Hayden 1995) which has also been a significant argument in Latvian public discourse on homosexuality (Putnin¸a 2007: 320–2). The other reason for using children as a criterion for informant selection concerns the way in which daily family routines are constructed. Routines differ greatly between childless couples and couples with children, thereby adding an additional dimension to the structure of family relationships. My point of departure, then, is not gay/lesbian identity but a certain kind of living arrangement that can potentially offer a new standpoint on conceptualising family and kinship. The experience of parenting moves sexuality and procreation backstage, revealing the relationships revolving around the child. However, I am aware that my informants consider sexuality and gender important in defining their own relative positions and I do not dismiss the importance of sexuality and procreation in familial relationships. One core group of my informants consisted of homosexual couples raising children from former partnerships (as was the case with the majority of my gay and lesbian interviewees) or, in some few cases, homosexual couples raising adopted children where one of the partners has applied for adoption as a single parent. The second core group of informants was made up of heterosexual same-sex relatives, in all cases women, raising a child or children together. This mostly comprised the mother of the child assisted by her mother, aunt or sister living in one domestic unit and sharing all household and childcare duties.6 Most of the homosexual couples I interviewed valued stability in their relationships and perceived themselves to be stable families. Mother– daughter tandems mostly saw themselves as a temporarily or accidentally created family, even though in some cases this family structure was maintained for as long as three generations, with the biological fathers of the children opting in and out the women’s lives but never being permanently part of the family. 6

Only adults were interviewed, with the exception of one interview with a sixteen-year-old boy, in which case both the biological parents and the father’s partner considered their son mature enough to be interviewed.

112

Aivita Putnin¸a

The nature and nurture of relationships For Strathern, when we imagine identity as nurtured in individuals through the process of socialisation, it becomes the work of society (Strathern 1992a: 125–7). There is no problem with this statement when it refers to the nurturing of heterosexual individuals. But the conflict between ‘nurtured’ and ‘inborn’ features becomes apparent in the nurturing of homosexual individuals. All my gay informants talked about how family and friends encouraged and nurtured them to be heterosexual: for example, they were asked questions about girlfriends and told of the expectations on them to provide grandchildren. They described the pressure they felt from people expecting them to show hetero-normative expressions of sexuality which would lead to heterosexual marriage (a ‘nurtured ideal’). In some cases, boys and young men resisted this pressure and practised celibacy until they met a partner of their own sex, but more often they embarked on heterosexual life. There was no ‘nurturing’ in homosexuality available to them during their childhood and puberty. _ I will now present the story of a composite person I call Janis. His _ biography is compiled from the stories of several of my informants. Janis realised he was fundamentally different from his peers in his childhood but he could neither understand nor name the difference. He engaged in a deep friendship with one of his classmates when he was a teenager. Later, elaborating on his homosexuality, he learned to call this past relationship platonic love. Previously he had thought it was just friendship. Human sexuality was a forbidden topic in the Soviet Union and homosexuality was described as a deviation both in the human and in the animal world. _ Janis’ mother, however, was a biologist and was relatively open about sexuality, so he soon found out, from his mother’s books, how to name his difference. He tried to reconcile his now self-diagnosed homosexual drive with the unquestioned expectation of his family that he be heterosexual by asking his mother directly, ‘What are homosexuals?’ By which he basically meant, ‘Who am I?’ His mother had not recognised the difference in her son and replied that homosexuals were very unfortunate and miser_ able beings, which Janis took to mean that he was ruining his happy

Invisible families

113

family and disappointing his beloved mother just by being a homosexual. _ When he was a teenager, Janis secretly travelled to the distant capital for consultations with a psychotherapist. He coordinated the therapy sessions with his preparation for entrance exams to the university because, he said, he loved his parents dearly and, knowing they had great hopes for him, he wanted them to see him as beyond reproach. However, _ therapy did not help Janis curb his drive for same-sex relations, but he did learn to conceal his homosexuality with heterosexual relationships. He was an attractive young man, good at ballroom dancing and sports and was appealing to women. In the final year of his studies he married his friend and study mate. They had two children – a common trajectory, he explains, for a young man in those days. _ If we imagine Janis’ story as a struggle between two opposite identities _ or roles, we would miss the fact that Janis lived with both. He was the head of his established heterosexual family, the father of his two children, and he experienced sympathy and compassion towards his wife. However, his children realised that their father’s relationship to their mother was somehow unusual and their mother loved their father differ_ ently from the way that their father loved their mother.7 Janis prayed to God to help him maintain this heterosexual identity which was unproblematic in terms of accepted categories. Even so, his family life felt incomplete and not like ‘his’ life. He longed for a singular homosexual _ relationship. Eventually Janis separated from his wife, left all his property behind, and lived alone until he began a stable homosexual relationship. _ Janis’ problem was his simultaneous involvement in two conceptually exclusive categorical sets (one ‘given’ and the other ‘chosen’), and the fact that society accepted only one of these sets. His wife and children came to understand him from a relational perspective that crossed the categories. His son explains it in this way: We had a family. There was love, it came from mother to father and remained unanswered, but it flew from father to us children, from mother to us children. Mom received this love not from our father directly, but through us. Dad gave his 7

This motif occurred in two out of three children’s stories, and also several homosexual parents referred to this. However, it might well be a post-factum interpretation as it comes with ‘then’ and ‘now’ evaluation.

114

Aivita Putnin¸a _

love to us and mom received his love through us . . . I did not like Juris [Janis’ partner] initially, but my feeling changed. When you see your dad, whom you love, loving Juris and Juris loving your dad, you can’t help but feel sympathy with them. Love projects itself – we receive love from Juris and he initially received our love through dad, but now it certainly goes directly from us to him. _

When Janis came out, he was categorised as a homosexual, which in practice meant being expelled from many of his previous relationships, including his church and his job. He was attacked in the street because, as a homosexual, he was not allowed to belong to the public world. Severing relationships was not just a symbolic act on the part of his old _ friends and acquaintances, but also an experience that Janis was forced to live through. He retained some of his previous relationships; his family, several colleagues and some members of his congregation _ supported him. However, this was not Janis’ choice; it was what he was left with. Because homosexuality is perceived as an undesirable deviation from the ‘natural’ relations that are the basis for establishing _ a relationship, both Janis’ supporters and his detractors were presented _ with the choice to take a stand when Janis openly declared his homosexuality. This choice may have caused the people around him some discomfort, but it did not alter their position in relation to their own _ sexuality in the same way that it did for Janis.8 Relationships were very _ important in Janis’ story. He chose to end his first serious homosexual love when his partner tried to hide their relationship in public, pretending they were just casual friends and altering the relation. The last straw that finally resulted in the dissolution of their relationship was _ his partner’s refusal to attend Janis’ father’s funeral and so symboli_ cally denying the relationship that Janis perceived himself to be a part _ of. Janis does not juxtapose ‘natural’ and ‘chosen’ orders of family, but sees both as equally natural and self-evident. He does not see himself as an individual engaging in relationships, but rather as a person who

8

I also had a choice in speaking about the topic. Presenting research results, I explicitly felt that being a married heterosexual woman with children allowed me to speak about the topic without endangering my own relations to other people. My heterosexual and procreative identity was also stressed as some kind of justification when reporting the content of my lecture on same-sex families in a women’s summer camp in 2008. See Daiga Bitiniece’s article (2008) ‘Ka dzıvot pilnvertıgi un laimıgi’ [How to live healthy and happy] at http:// woman.delfi.lv/relationships/children/article.php?id=21819057.

Invisible families

115

contains relations within himself that he is desperately trying to maintain. Kin networks and biological ties are very important for all my informants, as these relationships are central to their identity. In their descriptions, telling parents, siblings and other relatives about their homosexuality was consistently connected to the fear of losing those relationships. Oskars, a thirty-eight-year-old gay man, speaks of accepting his partner’s children as an obvious and ‘natural’ extension of his partner; he accepts his partner’s mother on the same grounds. His partner, in turn, accepts Oskars’ mother as an extension of his partner. As they describe it, she was standing in the greenhouse with her mouth open and a cucumber in her hand when her son introduced his partner in life. For Oskars, this image is symbolically attached to the idea of their partnership and is eagerly evoked several times during our interview. His partner’s mother and her greenhouse are a part of their family. The perceived relations of heterosexual informants within a same-sex, child-rearing partnership are paradoxical in this respect. Ieva, an eighteen-year-old mother, got pregnant when she was in her last year of high school. Her boyfriend was nineteen years old and, after only a short period of partnership, rejected the responsibility for his child and former girlfriend. For him, the child had changed the nature of his relationship with Ieva and he was faced with 24 hours-a-day responsibility for a family which he did not want. Ieva’s mother stepped in, becoming Ieva’s partner in caring for the child. Though childbirth is often considered to be a ‘natural’ feature of being a woman, it was not so in Ieva’s case. Ieva felt guilty for bringing shame to her family. Her unplanned pregnancy had ruined the plans and expectations she and everybody else had for her – a university degree, good job, marriage with children receiving nurture from two parents. She felt inferior to her former schoolmates and a failure and blamed herself for being the ‘black sheep’ of her family. Describing American kinship, David Schneider has examined the contradiction in the dual use of the term ‘nature’ (1968: 107–9). Nature is used to refer to both ‘correct’ or ‘natural’ grounds for kinship (for example, imagining a heterosexual union with children as the result of the natural drive for procreation) and ‘incorrect’ or ‘repulsive’ aspects

116

Aivita Putnin¸a

(for example, an illegitimate form of heterosexual union such as having children out of wedlock). In my interviews, I was less interested in the broader cultural constructions of kinship and more interested in real people coping with situations that do not fit the general constructions. Ieva tried to keep two aspects of procreation conceptually separate. She opted to keep the child because she feared that an abortion might deprive her of children in the future, but she also concealed the childbirth from her classmates and former teachers and lied, saying that she had successfully entered university. She hid every time she saw her former classmates approaching in the street and did not leave her home for a long period prior to and after the birth because of her fear of being thought a failure. Andra, a thirty-four-year-old heterosexual mother, also described her unplanned pregnancy and childbirth as an ‘unrealistic soap opera event’. She had consciously opted for a single and childless life filled with casual sex and entertainment. Giving birth to a child forced her to change her lifestyle radically. She relied completely on assistance from her mother and did not want to relate to the child’s biological father even though he offered his assistance. In both of the heterosexual mother–daughter tandems the choice of the partner with whom to raise the child could be concealed under the patina of ‘nature’ in the mother–daughter relationship. In theory, we can see this as a mother’s choice between partnering with her own mother and partnering with the father of her child. Contrary to the case of families based on homosexual relations, both choices are perceived as ‘natural’ and are legitimate options in the hetero-normative model. The choice between ‘given’ and ‘chosen’ families in the case of a homo_ sexual individual can be deceptive. Janis’ choice to cut off the relationship with his partner who refused to support him at his father’s funeral may well be grounded in the same arguments as Andra’s rejection of assistance from the biological father of her child: not because of the impossibility of keeping these relationships running, but because the quality of the relationship was poor. Of course relationships can also _ be severed by the other party and against one’s will: Janis lost his job because of his homosexuality and Ieva was never given a choice between her mother and the father of her child as prospective partners in raising her child.

Invisible families

117

Focusing on relationships Almost all the homosexual couples I interviewed reported that even their close friends consciously or unconsciously expected their partnerships to end as if these unions were ‘unnatural’. Psychotherapy was quite common for these couples, both as an occupation and as a means of support, and religious and congregational activities were also important. Through these activities my informants focused their stories on the quality of their relationships and strategies for maintaining them. The concept of love, well developed both in psychotherapy and religious belief systems, helped explain and sustain their relationships. Their relational perspective made it possible to glue seemingly broken parts of their homosexual and heterosexual life experiences together. Interestingly enough, daughters in mother–daughter tandems as well as the children who grew up in such families also focused on relationships, but in a slightly different way. Ieva’s story offers an example. Ieva was obsessed with guilt over the fact that her son would be raised without a father figure and would therefore lack the ‘natural’ nurturing into the ‘correct’ gender roles. She read a great many psychology articles and ‘artificially’ forced herself to play both gender roles: _

See, at the moment I am trying to prove to myself and to Martin¸sˇ [Ieva’s son] that I can be both a mother and a father. I try to be strict, persistent, I – I try. For instance, I simply try to play football with him, even if my long skirt is in the way. I don’t want to do it [playing football]. I don’t like to do it. I would rather stand on the sidelines, as I don’t feel comfortable. But I still try to do all things that, stereotypically, a father should do.

Ieva herself had been raised without her father. He left when she was three or four years old. She did not remember her father much, but she remembered him leaving with great relief. Ieva’s mother had also been raised without her father. However, both Ieva and her mother were equally preoccupied with compensating for the missing fathers. They imagined their families as temporarily lacking the father/husband figure. From that categorical perspective, they ignored the stable interrelational pattern of their family life that united mother, daughter and grandchild over three generations.

118

Aivita Putnin¸a

It is striking that in talking about the absence of the fathers, neither Ieva nor her mother showed any self-perceived deficiency. In the interview, Ieva played with the image of parts and wholes, making the paradox of her situation explicit: I felt myself so happy when I met my boyfriend [the future father of her child]. I thought this is it and I won’t search for anybody anymore. We would live our lives happily and there was nothing to separate us. Well, at that moment, yes, I felt as a [pause] half. I was a half when this other [half of] emptiness was filled in. Now I don’t need it. I have Dora [Ieva’s sister], she is my friend, I have somebody to love – _ Martin¸sˇ . I think it will be even better when he grows up. Well, I don’t feel anymore that I am just half of something. I have thought that I don’t want a new relation_ ship, I consider that a burden. But in relation to Martin¸sˇ , I have a strong intuitive feeling that he will miss something [by growing up without a father].

When describing her family relationships, Ieva omitted Anna, her mother. Anna played the role of breadwinner in their partnership. When Anna came home from work she helped her daughter with the child and took care of him during the night. Anna also urged her daughter to go out, hoping that she would meet a man to start a new and happy life. Though Ieva did not openly recognise her mother as a partner in raising her child, she made their partnership explicit on several occasions in her story. For instance, Ieva had decided to build a very close relationship to her son – one that would be different from her relationship with her mother. She wanted to maintain close bodily ties with her son, as in a model suggested in the psychology articles she had read. When Ieva’s son reached the age of one year he refused to hug his mother and to be hugged by her. When Ieva consulted her mother on the subject, her mother said: ‘How can you expect it? He does not see this kind of close [physical] relationship between us.’ Ieva’s mother cried during my interview with her. She described her compassion for her daughter and her simultaneous inability to touch the baby in her swelling abdomen. The relationship between Anna and Ieva centred on competition for _ Martin¸sˇ that superseded their ‘biological’, mother–daughter relation and brought to light their relation as partners in child-rearing. While I was _ conducting the interview, Martin¸sˇ ran between Ieva and Anna, clearly understanding what he could get from each of them and making their family relations visible to the visiting anthropologist. The competition

Invisible families

119

between the two caregivers was an important element of the relationship. The child did not relate to the two women in the same way as he would have had they been linked only as mother and daughter, even though neither recognised this explicitly. This relationship became apparent as Anna struggled between her hope that her daughter would find a ‘proper’ partner and her fear of losing contact with her daughter’s child, with _ whom she had a very close relationship. Anna’s relationship to Martin¸sˇ was based on the child-rearing partnership with her daughter and not on an independent grandmother–grandchild relationship. Anna became the breadwinner and supporting partner while Ieva did the housework and took care of the child’s development and emotional needs. Anna took _ leave from her work when Martin¸sˇ was sick, and was supported by her workmates, even though she was not officially entitled to such leave. Despite the possibility of taking refuge within the category of single parent and thereby fitting Ieva and Anna into the hetero-normative and ‘biological’ family model, this explanation would not account for the stability and durability of the mother–daughter tandems in this family over several generations. A relational perspective also allows informants to see an otherwise contradictory story as complete. The socially accepted, hetero-normative and categorical perspective on child-rearing partnerships delineates categories and the possibilities that stem from these categories according to their implicit characteristics or definitions in any one given context: heterosexual or homosexual, mother or daughter, biological relative or partner and so on. But, when viewed from a relational perspective, it is clear that these relationships cross conceptual boundaries in a multitude of ways. Even if the categories used to describe these relationships are workable for the Latvian social arena, they are imprecise and often misleading, and can mask actual interrelatedness. When looking from the relational perspective, the accounts of the relationships in these child-raising partnerships are revealed to be full of contradictions when mapped on to actual behaviour. The relations, conscious or unconscious, that inform and motivate behaviour for my informants do not fit with socially accepted heteronormative categories. Incompleteness is a common feature in the stories of children brought up in mother–daughter families. The feeling of incompleteness is usually

120

Aivita Putnin¸a

a reaction to experiences of public life which is designed, on the whole, for ‘complete’ families in the hetero-normative sense. Several informants who have been raised without fathers described their childhood trauma and shame when their ‘incompleteness’ was brought out in public by somebody inquiring about their father; or by comparing themselves to peers who had two parents who attended a school event. However, the feeling of completeness depends on the perspective one takes. Andris, a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual man, told me he had never experienced incompleteness as a result of being jointly raised by his mother and grandmother. He believed it gave him a greater understanding of life and relationships. The subject of his father impinged on his life when teachers and other children began asking about his missing father. Andris lied, saying that his father was dead, thus avoiding further questions and cutting his father out of his family forever.

The categorical perspective and hetero-normativity Pierre Bourdieu (2001) describes hetero-normativity as an organisational principle in society. In this view homosexuality can be perceived either as inverted heterosexuality or as implicit in heterosexuality. Using this categorical perspective one can turn stigma into emblem, as in the case of the Pride march. Bourdieu saw the potential of the LGBT movement in its simultaneous ability both to have a distinct homosexual identity and to erase that identity when fighting discrimination or when demanding that sexuality does not count as identity. Bourdieu saw this conceptual contradiction as a powerful tool to challenge what he called ‘masculine dominance’, particularly in its capacity to be simultaneously on two sides of the issue. He was more sceptical about the ability of the women’s movement to initiate change since he saw women as being trapped within a single gender identity. My perspective suggests that relational thinking, rather than gay or gendered identities, allows us to escape the cage of hetero-normative categories. None of the families I studied faced the dilemma that the rural woman Marta mentioned at the beginning. On the contrary, the inability directly to link gender and family roles freed them from Marta’s dilemma. All informants from the ‘invisible families’ had a gendered

Invisible families

121

identity and admitted that roles in the family were gendered. However, these two types of category – gender and role – did not coincide. Informants had both sex and gender but they were not linked to their roles in relationships. Some of the same-sex couples interviewed kept the traditional role division, replacing the ‘missing’ role from outside. Alexander and Paul hired a woman to clean their house, since they shared an understanding that this is female work. Iveta and her mother drew on the help of their male relatives to repair household appliances, since they perceived this as male work. Other women, like Sandra, a fifty-year-old mother of four who was raising two grandchildren together with one of her daughters, did repair work for her family and neighbours. Here Sandra’s individual skills are seen to take precedence over the socially constructed gender roles perceived to be ‘natural’ for her sex. In all cases, family roles were negotiated, depending on the acquired skills of informants and on access to help from outside the relationship. Fixing electrical appliances did not make Sandra less feminine than Edite, who called her grandfather to do the kinds of jobs that Sandra did herself. Roles were also easily swapped. Sandra was breadwinner of the family, while her daughter, the carer, breastfed the baby. After a year, when her daughter stopped breastfeeding, they swapped roles of carer and breadwinner. Both transactions and roles were gender-identified, but hetero-normativity was not the organising principle that could explain these transactions and roles. The lack of opportunity to connect gender roles to identities generated conceptual contradictions and served as grounds for new perspectives. Ieva’s mother was a real parent’s partner and not a grandmother in _ relation to her grandson. Janis’ partner and his son both became more relaxed in their relationship when they could imagine their connection as a network of mutual love which they substituted for gender-identified homosexual and heterosexual relationship. Common gender roles served as available definitions or boxes into which my informants tried to sort their relationships when I or other people from the outside asked about them. The difference was a kind of double vision that allowed them to see their interpersonal relations as separate from the socially accepted categories that only partially reflected their relationship to one another.

122

Aivita Putnin¸a

Conclusion The rigidity of hetero-normative categories foreshadows the need and ability to adjust relationships to social situations. As my informants’ experiences demonstrate, family is not necessarily a stable or given set of relationships. Relational thinking makes the set visible from different angles. Moving from a rigid set of hetero-normative categories to the interpersonal characteristics of family relationships makes it possible to address the quality of relations, and makes the work that is put into relations explicit. A categorical perspective allowed Marta to believe that relationships stem from the categories to which people are assigned. Similarly, Weston’s notion of ‘chosen families’ is constructed upon the assumption that being gay or lesbian presupposes a certain course of action, certain choices, and types of possible relationships. Same-sex partner families trigger not only a change of perspective in kinship studies, but also a change in the family itself, offering a new perspective on what already exists. As the number of relationships that remain invisible when viewed from a categorical perspective increases, the internal pressure to make these relationships visible rises, encouraging us to find a perspective that allows us to perceive what people experience. In that aspect, turbulence in family arrangements can lead to redefinitions of the family through a relational perspective. However, redefinition depends on the skills of people to create, maintain and name their relationships. In the examples I have drawn on, religion and psychotherapy can be instrumental in allowing people to recapture their relationships through notions of love and friendship. Categorical thinking can obstruct our view of interpersonal relations and leads us to take categories at face value instead of looking further at the varied aspects of interpersonal relationships. What matters here is the quality of interaction which depends on the ability to move between categorical and interpersonal relations. My informants had relationships that could not be described by the hetero-normative set of categories readily available to them. Pushed out of the realm of legally and culturally defined interpersonal relationships, they sought new kinds of rela_ tions and new meanings for them. My gay informant, Janis, and the

Invisible families

123

teenage mother, Ieva, dealt with it in different ways. While many of my gay and lesbian informants considered love and friendship to be primary and used these words to give a name to their relationship, mother– daughter tandems mostly created their partnerships via the child they raised together and avoided naming the new relational aspect of their pre-existing relationship. Not fitting into categorically prescribed familial relations makes the availability of connections and disconnections explicit. The ability to reconceive ‘what is left’ gives new legitimacy to actual family situations and, in the best of worlds, could lead to new (kinds of) social interactions. As Strathern says, ‘we come to see that it is through interacting with persons that diverse interactions and further connections become intellectually conceivable, while it is through creating concepts and categories that connections come to have a social life of their own’ (2005a: 8). New kinds of relations call for a new kind of thinking. What holds the invisible family together is the departure from perceiving pre-existing categories as a ‘natural’ source of relations and the ability to create and maintain relationships. In other words, the incommensurability of my informants with heteronormative norms makes them visible as persons and acknowledges the importance of their relational skills. Living in two worlds, one of idealised heterosexual categories and the other of actual relationships, is a contradictory experience. As a result, teenage mother Ieva cuts off her relationships with her peers at the interpersonal level but maintains the (categorical thinking dominated) relation with peers by lying about her successful educational carrier. Living with contradictory relations forces Ieva to take both perspectives into account. Contradiction might lead to conceptualising new kinds of relationship and the need for having those relationships publicly recognised. Conversely, it might lead to situated silencing and a hiding of the ‘illegitimate’ set of relations, which is what Ieva did. Silence and invisibility, however, do not void the relationships, and invisibility might be harmful in cases where families live ‘in the closet’. Displacing relationships with categories can also do harm to those hetero-normative families that fit the categories in general. Defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not guarantee the socially desired stability embedded in the categories husband

124

Aivita Putnin¸a

and wife. Marriage is a relational phenomenon based on the abilities of the persons involved to keep that union working. This is why Marta’s question – ‘How do they do it?’ – is relevant to her own family experience. The incommensurability of same-sex partner families with heteronormative categories facilitates relational and duplex thinking. Acknowledging relational aspects of invisible families in the arena of politics and law would allow us to see that what is vanishing are not family values, but the actual relationships behind those values.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on research funded by Soros Foundation Latvia in 2007. I am grateful for support and trust I received from LGBT and their friends association ‘Mozaika’ Riga, Latvia and my informants. It was first presented as a paper to the EASA biennial conference Ljubljana, August 2008. I thank Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger for their generous input.

8

Knowledge in a critical mode: feminist expertise in design and planning Eeva Berglund

Knowledge isn’t what it used to be Critique and new knowledge tend to go together in western conceptualisations. No wonder then that it seems hard to imagine an anthropology, or indeed any research, that is not, however vaguely or implicitly, activist. But could knowledge production also have quite contrasting effects? Changes in knowledge and its uses have inspired careful description and conceptual innovation in a kind of expanded anthropology largely stimulated by Marilyn Strathern, her students and her colleagues. They have embraced ‘the challenges of doing ethnography in conditions in which the distance between the anthropologist and informant, theory and data are no longer self-evident or even ethically defensible’ (Riles 2006: 5), and have not been afraid to ask ‘large and important political, philosophical, and epistemological questions’ (Riles 2006: 3). The recently established idea that experts value local knowledge and public opinion, in other words, that knowledge has been democratised, raises such large and important questions. This chapter extends the debate on this apparent democratisation by offering a critical commentary on knowledge work in architecture, urban design and planning. Specifically it highlights difficulties faced by would-be counter-experts. My text draws on anthropology and other social science, but also on personal engagement with the built environment professions: planners, architects and other ‘regeneration’ experts. During the last five years, I have been a planning student, a local authority planner, a researcher and writer, and a trustee of Women’s Design Service (WDS), an organisation devoted to promoting gender-aware planning and design. The ideas 125

126

Eeva Berglund

presented here derive from these experiences and from writing the history of WDS (Berglund 2007). Feminist expertise on the built environment may be a marginal form of knowledge production but it has been innovative and influential. By the same token, Women’s Design Service has always been small and precariously funded but it has always sustained enthusiasm for new knowledge. In the UK it remains the only organisation dedicated to feminist expertise in architecture, urban design and planning. Its know-how has provided grounds for changing the world. It still advises government, but recently this work has been frustrated. Partly the frustrations have arisen out of feminism’s own successes, which have rendered the politics of gender increasingly complicated. Another, less obvious but arguably more fundamental problem, is WDS’s need to grapple with information and knowledge ostensibly produced to enhance policy and practice. Not only are the benefits of ever proliferating policy documentation questionable, its excess has arguably shifted the terrain from which critique can be launched. This problem may be widespread in planning and regeneration, but anthropological work on knowledge practices suggests a more extensive cultural phenomenon. It also offers insights for unpacking it. For example Strathern’s discussion of university mission statements (2006b) evokes a restless system, perhaps one of many, that produces nontransformative knowledge. Here aims, objectives, strategic priorities, commitments to excellence and so on are busily produced and updated. The results are reducible to bullet points but admit no intellectual development or growth in capacity, merely contributing to a ‘global . . . network of document production whose underlying cultural tenets remain largely unexamined’ (Strathern 2006b: 195). This is about better communication, specifically about the usefulness of what one is doing, and it sounds so virtuous that it barely admits questioning. As a result, part of the dilemma, Strathern writes, has become ‘how to complain, how to criticize good practice and still appear moral, credible, and public spirited’ (Strathern 2006b: 199). A vignette illustrates the problem as it confronts feminist knowledge production. Sometime in the spring of 2007 I was sitting with the director in the library-cum-meeting room in WDS’s office in London. Behind her,

Knowledge in a critical mode

127

on floor-to-ceiling shelves, was stacked up a unique resource of information embodied in books, Broadsheets (occasional papers1) and other literature, collected or produced over the years. The organisation’s efforts to provide information and advice on the everyday needs of vulnerable women in the built environment have meant that these needs have gradually translated into policy. Yet from within the office it seemed as if this wealth of knowledge was stuck, no longer circulating or, if it was, then not making a difference. Worse still, there was a debilitating sense that criticism itself is futile. The director put it more or less like this: ‘It’s so hard to make the argument, the language has all been taken away. It’s not like you can disagree with what government says it wants.’ Social inclusion became a prominent concern in architecture and planning in the 1990s, similarly community participation, and even listening to so-called hard-to-reach groups, such as ethnic minority women, about their needs and desires. And yet urban development still disadvantages the same marginalised groups on whose behalf WDS has campaigned for so long. Other British feminist organisations also report a sense of having lost the platform for critique. Policies to counter gender discrimination are in place, but they remain ineffectual (Lovenduski 2007). The growing gap between rhetoric and reality feels offensive. For WDS the insincerities of gender politics are compounded by the contradictions of urban development. The last thirty or so years have been characterised by sharpening inequalities that are visible particularly in large cities like London (Massey 2007) which now exemplify the reversal, as Cindi Katz argues, of over 200 years of hard-won improvements (Katz 2006: 111–12). Those who have debated the consequences include anthropologists. For example, Teresa Caldeira and James Holston (2005) identify a shift away from modernist planning to what they call ‘democratic interventions’ in Brazil’s urban space. The state no longer plans directly; rather, it manages more localised, often private interests and orchestrates these together with new forms of active citizenship that require public participation. To date, Caldeira and Holston note, these arrangements have served market interests more than they have enhanced social justice (2005: 411). 1

Produced by WDS with London Women and Planning Forum between 1992 and 2002.

128

Eeva Berglund

Across the world and across government policy, the top-down technocratic modernisms of the twentieth century have been replaced by less hierarchical governance which involves public participation and solicits bottom-up knowledge through consultation. With regard to the UK’s built environment, this process builds on a pre-existing and often voluble dissatisfaction with modern architecture specifically. For decades Britain has seen a ‘strong reaction against the perceived “social engineering” implemented through post-war modernist architecture, as an imposed, utopian vision of how the masses should live, which disregarded local identities in favour of a transcendent, abstract universalism’ (Melhuish 2007: 14, see also Lubbock 2007). The move from modernist technocracy to planning with public involvement therefore typically appears as something to be celebrated. The new regime is, however, highly problematic, as Caldeira and Holston and other academics have noted (e.g. Abram 2002; Connelly 2006). It bolsters elite interests, offers ineffectual self-help remedies for big structural problems and totalises ‘the public’ while floundering on the question of who should represent it. Processes of public involvement in planning are thus best understood as ‘ritual practices and forms of disciplining participants’ behavior and expectations’ (Abram 2002: 32). To these observations we should add, though it feels churlish to do so, that participation frustrates effective uses of knowledge. It is routine in policy making now to enlist more knowledge producers to make better decisions. Where problems are encountered, as they often are, both academic and policy documents tend to promote better and sometimes more public consultation (Atkinson 2000; Connelly 2006; Communities and Local Government, n.d.) and exhort agencies to produce better (and usually more) evidence to remedy the situation (Solesbury 2001). One is left with the image of a society with a senseless yet compulsive urge to respond to an excess of information by creating even more of it. The point is also made each time a guidance document is published that admonishes against producing excessive guidance documents (e.g. English Heritage 2005). Despite the constraints, critique and new knowledge do still go together – in anthropology, for instance, but also in feminist knowledge work on the built environment. To argue the latter case, first I invoke

Knowledge in a critical mode

129

recent arguments within science and technology studies (STS) around expertise and public participation to suggest illuminating parallels with regeneration. I then suggest that WDS has been illustrative of challenges to expertise more broadly. I then go on to consider changes in the knowledge work of the feminist networks operating around WDS, arguing that this work now takes place in a context of proliferating yet sometimes impoverished research, which makes critique and argument difficult.

Authority of experts Expertise operates on the ancient terrain where knowledge, social order and justice meet. In the twentieth century ‘the expertise of modern engineering, technology, and social science’ was applied to ‘improve the defects of nature, to transform peasant agriculture, to repair the ills of society, and to fix the economy’ and, not coincidentally, to constitute nations (Mitchell 2002: 15). Expertise was understood as ‘a species of educated common sense (allegedly) authorized by science’ (Lynch and Cole 2005: 296) and as such it was indispensable to good decision making. By the turn of the millennium, however, politics demanded ‘different forms of engagement between experts, decision-makers, and the public than were considered needful in the governance structures of high modernity’ (Jasanoff 2003: 227). Technological change, and, crucially, the acceptability and the legitimacy of arrangements for containing risks, contributed to social scientists becoming interested in modern science and expertise. Expertise is, broadly speaking, socially useful knowledge. In contrast to science as unending discovery, expertise tends to be understood as an already existing specialism that responds to problems and goals established by society (Nowotny 2003), ready-made to be invoked as grounds for action, in everyday life, courts, product design and elsewhere. In the public domain the authority of expertise is neither stable nor uniform, but it still has substantial purchase (Edwards et al. 2007), as does a notion of good science that is carried out in pursuit of truth and virtue rather than manipulatively to gain power or money (Pestre 2008: 112). And a commitment to ethics as well as competence still stamps the identity of the professional expert.

130

Eeva Berglund

Expertise has been subjected to anthropological scrutiny particularly in relation to environmental hazards (Berglund 1998) and medicine (Strathern 1992c; Edwards 2002). Here disagreements between ‘the experts’ and those whose lives are most affected by their advice typically throw into relief the contradictions of treating science and technology as separate from the social. Social movements, campaign groups and interested individuals have challenged expert power, complicating conventional demarcations between scientific and ‘non-scientific’ knowledge. In the last decades a discernible shift has taken place from ‘old’ to a ‘new’ style of managing science and technology so that they are increasingly understood as already enmeshed in political and economic contexts. Participants are unlikely to be ignorant or naı¨ ve about these (Jasanoff 2003; Pestre 2008) even as they are routinely invited to participate in consultations and ‘big conversations’ about novel technologies (Irwin 2006). These newer practices partly owe their existence to critics beyond the mainstream who, importantly, have not been and are not antiscience. More typically they have warned about its limitations so that it has tended to be official experts’ ‘lack of professionalism and a deficit of humility, not [their] inability to know the truth’ (Berglund 1998: 192) which has irritated critics. Planning and architecture, and their feminist critiques, can usefully be read alongside science and technology studies’ insights.2 After all, expertise in the design of cities and buildings has been more tangible and visible in daily life than most laboratory research. And as an artefact of the knowledge society, public participation in urban regeneration has its parallels in science and technology policy. Built environment expertise does have its own historiography regarding the relationship between experts and publics. Those responsible for urban infrastructure have always had to include the public in their work, as clients and as users. In planning particularly, it has long been recognised that local people have access to expertise that the professionals do not, that is, their personal experience of a place and how it ‘works’ (Collins and Evans 2002: 266–7). And whereas laboratory science 2

Architecture and planning are related but not identical activities, and in the UK their relationship is more distant than in many other countries. Here I use the terms loosely to describe a wide range of expert practices involved in urban regeneration.

Knowledge in a critical mode

131

could banish the social, design work has always involved combining domains imagined in modernity to be separated – technique, context, people, ethics and, of course, aesthetics. It is true that, for many, architecture has always been on the side of power, akin even to the gods (De Carlo 2005: 5), but it is also true that high modernism in architecture and planning lend themselves to caricature, not least by anthropologists.3 Technocrats may have behaved as elites and demonised beliefs and practices simply because they did not understand them, but planning, like health care, education and many other professional domains, originated in democratising ideals long before turn-of-the-millennium neoliberalism, development partnerships or government responsiveness were even dreamt of. Suffice to say that architectural modernism and democracy have long been partners in an ambivalent relationship. Empirically, the pool of practitioners has remained narrowly class-based and often distanced from the real context of society (De Carlo 2005: 7),4 not to mention overwhelmingly male. Despite recurrent efforts from the earliest days to bring technical experts closer to the ‘users’ and the ‘people’, planning has been associated with ‘men in Whitehall’ (traditional home of Britain’s civil service), with the experts identifying ‘standard human needs’ (Lubbock 2007) and imposing norms that wreaked havoc in the lives of those who did not fit them. Paradigmatically, average towns were designed by and for average men.

Designing with women A world made for men has often made life difficult for women. As part of broader debate, by the 1970s feminist historians were looking at how planning and architecture had put women in their ‘proper’ place, literally (Hayden and Wright 1976). Until then women tended to be either invisible or grossly stereotyped – if they were rich, they could be either 3

4

Architectural history, e.g. Forty (2000), discusses modernism as a technical innovation, an ideology of social improvement and an aesthetic, and as an important rupture in architecture’s long history. The lecture in which this reference originates was delivered in 1969 but the critique is still valid.

132

Eeva Berglund

angels or neurotics while the poor were made responsible for social breakdown (Greed 1996: 242). Against such generalisations, the work of recovering gender flourished into a variety of feminisms and forms of counter-expertise. British women and men also began to develop critiques of the elitism and strong male bias that characterised the professions. The Architectural Association convened a conference in 1979 on ‘Women and Space’, creating an awareness of how social and political values were expressed in the built environment. This gave new confidence to feminists and a virtuous cycle of activities developed, including consciousnessraising evenings where young women devoured feminist literature and provided mutual support for coping in a male dominated field. Many who were involved in the 1970s and 1980s said that it was in fact professional and intellectual interest that brought them to feminism. One architect offered a significant and illustrative anecdote about her interview for a place to study. It was a kind of awakening. The panel – I think they were all men – actually asked me how they thought I could fulfil my function as a woman since I was starting my architecture training at such an old age. I was 21.

She recalled ‘sitting on the stairs thinking about what had happened and this group of women went past on their way to some feminist conference. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that such things could exist.’ Her first encounter with feminism, this timely coincidence left its mark on her entire architectural career. She went on to help found the all-female architecture collective Matrix, where, as part of its political mission, the cooperative had an explicit commitment to good professional practice (Dwyer and Thorne 2007), a concern that remains characteristic throughout the networks of feminists in architecture and planning. One of the enduring legacies of this feminist activity is the Women’s Design Service. This is not the place to dwell on its story (for this, see Berglund 2007) beyond noting that it has nurtured influential expertise since it was set up in 1983, the central focus of its critique being the depoliticisation of design. An illustrative quotation demonstrates the organisation’s concern: ‘the concept of women’s safety [was] being reduced to a technical issue, to be resolved by the “experts” – architects,

Knowledge in a critical mode

133

planners, housing researchers and academics in conjunction with the police’ (Ware/WDS 1987: 265). In contrast, WDS was keenly aware that social and cultural factors organise the built environment, even at the most practical level. One former worker admitted it was ‘no good saying “redesign the cities!” It ain’t going to happen.’ However, things like decent public transport, dedicated parking for parents with small children or well-designed women’s toilets were practical interventions that would make a substantial difference. WDS put feminist theory into practice and turned abstract principles into concrete facilities. It also produced a professional milieu where the female was not always opposed to the rational. Around this time the value of local knowledge and participation in regeneration also began its ascendancy. By the mid-1980s councils and community technical aid centres throughout Britain needed experts to provide services to local groups. They would help ordinary people ‘get the building and environmental improvements they want, rather than having to accept designs that the experts think they might have’.5 Being based in London, the women who set up WDS also benefited from the Greater London Council (GLC), where feminism was institutionalised through its Women’s Committee, ‘one of the world’s best-known and most generously funded experiments in municipal feminism’ (Bashevkin 1998:16). There was even a feminist breakthrough for built environment professionals, in that the Greater London Development Plan of 1984 included a chapter called ‘Women in London’. Seizing the opportunity, workers in a technical aid agency sought funding for a politically engaged professional design and building service that would be dedicated to women’s needs. The work involved feasibility studies, advice on finding and upgrading premises, surveying potential sites and drawing up plans and costings. An important shift took place within a few years, however, as WDS moved away from architectural support services and became a research and information resource. A new team, three part-time workers and several active trustees and associates, turned to inter- or trans-disciplinary work in the self-consciously situated and often awkward ways that 5

Association of Community Technical Aid Centres / ACTAC leaflet, no date.

134

Eeva Berglund

feminism has typically nurtured. Frustrated by the way that the experiences of working for women’s construction projects had not built up into a corpus of available expertise, they set out explicitly to produce a new body of knowledge. They undertook research and published the evidence, and then developed their advice services and lobbied for improved facilities, grounding their arguments in their expertise. And so the remit widened considerably beyond the architectural frame to encompass planning process, urban design and local government, with particular emphasis on the importance of local knowledge (Walker and Cavanagh 1999). The concerns WDS raised in its early publications were considered novel then, but today they are, in theory at least, taken-for-granted principles of sound urban design and planning. Between 1988 and 1992 WDS published on safety on housing estates, on play spaces and childcare facilities, and on the design of public toilets, among other things. Even as they were intent on producing new expertise that combined feminist with design insights, they contributed to controversy within feminism – on epistemology, tactics, goals, and so on, not to mention questions of race, class, sexuality and disability. They concentrated their empirical research on social context and sought to reframe urban problems from female experiences. Some of the early workers were training to be architects but others had backgrounds in journalism, campaigning and industrial design, and the trustees also included a historian of architecture. The fact that the core team had no fully qualified architects or planners was probably significant, allowing them more easily and yet with some authority, to work outside the standard paradigms of these professions. The central tenet of their critique was that prevailing expertise tended to ignore ‘the qualitative, social and cultural changes in society’ that could not be ‘mechanically quantified’ (Greed 1996: 263). The mainstream had unthinkingly created environments that disadvantage minorities. This was no idle complaint, since the social reality of the 1980s, radical and radically conservative at the same time, remained wedded to recognisably hetero-normative, white and largely paternalistic norms. ‘It was still possible to map gender roles in the UK onto physical space as patterns of binary opposition and separation’ (Boys and Lloyd Thomas, n.d. no pagination).

Knowledge in a critical mode

135

WDS developed its counter-expertise in a remarkably free intellectual environment which some later credited as responsible for the organisation’s success. Although from the start the areas they could look into were constrained by funding, WDS was able to pursue research whose results might never get published and to exploit its autonomy from other professional and academic institutions. Not hamstrung by cumbersome bureaucracy or by weight of tradition, the workers had what one described as a ‘unique opportunity’ which they exploited to the full. Above all, the early work involved much time-consuming empirical research about what really was going on in social milieux hitherto unseen by the experts. By talking with women in sensitive and respectful ways, WDS could reach the kind of local knowledge that, though recognised by planners and designers as important, was (and still is) difficult to access. WDS addressed what they saw as the simple fact that ‘women’s experience is that they bear the brunt of poor environments’ (Walker and Cavanagh 1999: 150). Around that time, women and other ‘others’ began to have value in academic fashions, including architecture. But the scholarly celebration of marginality and difference jarred with the vulnerability of women’s actual social situation (McLeod 2000: 185). Perhaps with this danger in mind, WDS tried from the start to avoid jargon, whether this served the construction, culture or higher education industries and, at least in its publications, to write accessibly. It had to make sense to both decision makers and lay public. After all, the motivation for WDS stemmed from an understanding that new knowledge was transformative and that it had to be clearly communicated to be effective. WDS was also clear about why better tools for public consultation were necessary. Only by involving a wide range of people and using context-specific strategies to reach potential audiences could their expertise and thus their advice be grounded in reality rather than prejudice or stereotype. By actively consulting with women, WDS shattered the influential stereotype of suburban housewife and explored issues around disability, sexual minorities, older women and racism as well as concerns traditionally associated with women such as parenting. They put into practice the feminist theories of knowledge that argued that personal experience, quite literally one’s point of view, was bound to influence

136

Eeva Berglund

one’s understanding. The shortcomings of mainstream designs and plans were thus attributed not to malice or incompetence, but to the embodied character of knowledge.6 Feminist experts remain busy facilitating and encouraging lay women to become more engaged in a still male-dominated arena. In regular meetings and one-off events with non-experts, women dedicated to feminist critique think through everyday experiences that are both personal and shared. How might street layout affect women differently from men? Who are public buildings designed for? How does the design of the workplace or home affect women differently from men? How do we change space? How do we pay attention to gender, and what changes would we like to achieve? The questions resemble those of twenty years ago, but the context has altered in important ways. In retrospect, efforts to reach the marginalised and to understand their lives and needs emerged as part of a significant transformation in government. As WDS was set up, the welfare state was retreating and local government was moving towards new forms of engagement, including partnerships. The 1990s brought huge interest in local knowledge and community involvement. Tenant participation was seen as a cost-effective way to generate better decisions than aloof expertise, but neither local authorities nor architects’ practices quite had the tools to carry it out. Here the WDS, with its track record of working together with tenants and its understanding of cultural diversity, had a golden opportunity to make its expertise count. Effectively the authorities needed something like the WDS. But government by partnership quickly produced its own dilemmas, not least WDS’s recurrent experience that the new local development scene was never a partnership of equals.7 New political times also meant new funding conditions. WDS had to downplay its original socialist-feminist and cooperative ethos and create a more mainstream working culture and organisational structure. In addition to grants from charitable trusts, academic research bodies and 6 7

A woman’s life experience will sensitise her to design issues that an ‘unencumbered’ male might easily miss, from the size and shape of interior fittings to transport infrastructure. It published several Broadsheets on this, Participation in development in 1993 and Development advice: dealing with the realities in 1995 among others.

Knowledge in a critical mode

137

community organisations, it turned to fee-paying consultancy, for which privatised development created ample demand. Over time, WDS women have also migrated to other organisations and practices where they have nurtured a steady if uneven appreciation of the issues. Working with ‘the community’ has become mainstream and government support to the idea of participation has been massive (Jones 2003). A number of previously maverick players have exploited the apparent democratisation of local development. In the early 2000s, several organisations besides WDS were developing work on gender and the built environment. One is Oxfam, better known for its work abroad. It has applied insights gleaned from those experiences to situations at home and set up ReGender, a project to publicise the problems that a gendered infrastructure creates and to encourage participation in regeneration among under-represented social groups (Oxfam 2009). Noteworthy among academic players is Manchester Metropolitan University, which has worked together with Manchester Women’s Network. In recent years, even under the aegis of the Royal Institute of British Architects, usually associated with conservatism and men, initiatives that champion equality and inclusion have been given support.8 The Royal Town Planning Institute has been publishing research and guidance on gender throughout the 2000s (RTPI 2007). Looking at Canada and Australia, Carolyn Whitzman (2007) has described institutionalisation and success of gender-aware planning, but also its demise. Anecdotal evidence suggests that European feminists view the UK’s relative success with some admiration.9 In 2008, WDS and its academic partners produced an online reference library to make available existing research of which practitioners still appear to be ignorant (Gendersite 2008). The launch of Gendersite brought together many of those working in the field, mostly architectural practices and third-sector organisations. Most have worked on discrete projects involving women’s needs. They share the impulse that was 8 9

As featured on the RIBA website www.architecture.com, and explained by policy officer Zoe Smith. As inferred from email correspondence with European colleagues copied to me by Clara Greed, Professor of Inclusive Planning at the University of the West of England. Liisa Horelli of the Helsinki University of Technology recalls that efforts to establish a Finnish version of the WDS have been unsuccessful despite obvious social need.

138

Eeva Berglund

concretised in WDS’s own early research, to bring about change through expertise. But traditional knowledge work, developing technical expertise and undertaking research have also given way to more diffuse efforts to provoke by being playful or irreverent. Within architecture particularly, these critical voices are increasingly oriented towards protest and not towards policy-change. Before returning to this in my conclusion, let me look at the ways in which new knowledge practices impinge on the critics, now dealing with a profusion of policies, agencies and partnerships.

Knowledge democratised? WDS now operates in a new institutional environment, sometimes referred to as the ‘regeneration maze’. It is a product of what is known as governance. The term indicates a more fluid, more transparent and less hierarchical process than top-down government. As part of governance, regeneration is not just about bricks and mortar as earlier feminists complained it was; it embraces social and economic interventions and it is delivered in partnerships, not imposed by diktat. And, significantly, where governance dominates, it is ‘seemingly impossible to avoid the rhetoric of participation’ (Jones 2003: 582). Andreas Mu¨ller, architect, designer and critic, sees the historical trajectory of participation as follows: A remarkable reassessment has occurred since the early days of participative planning and many of the former claims have been realised. The old figure of the user corresponds to a certain extent with today’s ideal of the autonomous subject who acts creatively and self-responsibly. The promising potentials of participation – self-responsibility, individuality, creativity, etc. – have lost much of their liberating impact, and instead almost turned into demands that are enforced upon today’s consumers of architecture. (2008: 80–81)

Unlike in the mid-twentieth century, the state no longer seeks control of technical expertise. The public sector has become continuous with the rest of the information-producing knowledge economy. With local knowledge explicitly recognised as a kind of expertise (Collins and Evans 2002: 267), the UK’s local authorities invest considerable energies in the careful planning of consultation, and effort is invested in a ‘top-

Knowledge in a critical mode

139

down commitment to the bottom-up’ (Horst 2003, quoted in Irwin 2006: 303).10 So-called hard-to-reach groups, ethnic minority women prominent among them, are actively sought out and invited to contribute. Women as a category have meanwhile achieved new recognition in the shape of the Gender Equality Duty of 2007. This legislation was eagerly awaited, and some claim (Burgess 2008) it should lead to better measures to enhance gender equality into the built environment. A key mechanism for achieving this is ‘inclusive design’ originally associated with disability. Inclusive design has since broadened out from questions of improving physical access to becoming a more generalised goal. It is about technical problem solving, but in a socially and culturally informed manner which helps create ‘a more equal, inclusive and cohesive society’ (CABE 2008: no page numbers). Being a social and cultural matter, inclusive design, of course, requires user involvement. In the UK, one initiative after another has been launched to empower local people and to enhance the accountability of decision making by enlisting their time and skills. While government does not appear to recognise the complexities and difficulties inherent in this approach (Abram 2006) the academic critique is voluminous (e.g. Atkinson 2000; Jones 2003; Raco 2003). In a paper suggestively titled, ‘Is public participation making urban planning more democratic? The Israeli experience’, Nurit Alfasi rehearses the familiar conclusion that no, it merely serves to pacify and manipulate, and to cover up disagreement (2003: 198). Architectural literature also highlights consultation fatigue and the ease with which local knowledge, although solicited, can be dismissed (Till 2005). This echoes STS critiques of science policy, according to which public debate on science appears more as ‘talk about talk’ (Irwin 2006: 317) than as institutionalised listening, let alone learning. The new governance can also ‘aggravate rather than assuage . . . raise expectations and subsequently disappoint’ (Irwin 2006: 317). The point can also be made ethnographically. A major contribution by feminist counter-experts from the mid-1990s has been to help vulnerable groups make sense of the regeneration maze. In workshops and 10

Reforms in 2004 required a ‘Statement of Community Involvement’, documentary evidence of community ownership and involvement in the production of local planning policy. A statutory Duty to Involve was introduced in 2009 across much of local government.

140

Eeva Berglund

seminars, with the help of ‘flash cards’ of old and new acronyms or polystyrene cups for example, individuals and groups seek to understand the mystifying array of funding sources, legal and policy instruments, changing planning laws and local experiences of regeneration. Such events have been organised by WDS and others for those becoming involved, by choice or otherwise, in the regeneration of their own neighbourhood, or for women with a professional relationship to regeneration. Such workshops are a routine part of information sharing around local development. As ‘ordinary’ citizens as well as paid counter-experts like WDS workers find themselves somehow included in the political arena, the knowledge work required becomes a matter of keeping up with a profusion of new information. To use a metaphor one often hears, the goalposts – the guidance, legislation and other policy not to mention active partners – are constantly moving. The agencies involved proliferate, and their activities produce occlusion and confusion rather than clarity or change at all levels (Abram 2007). The activity of making sense of the resulting maze might well be designated an ethnographic object, distinct from the knowledge work which was central in WDS’s earlier existence, that is, its research into women’s experiences. Clearly, in the debate over the power of experts, regeneration outcomes depend largely on power relations. But I am trying to draw on anthropology to make a different point, one about knowledge. Under current conditions, participants obviously participate and do so from different positions of influence. But the ability of almost any of those participants to bring meaningful, transformative knowledge to the process is severely constrained by prevailing knowledge practices. Part of my argument is that as public participation has come to stand in for certain types of expertise it actually contributes less to knowledge. Decisions continue to be made and they are still supposedly grounded in right knowledge held by the right experts. Consulting people about their own troubles is to treat them as experts of their own lives, but it would require considerable stretching of categories to suggest that anything like substantive expertise is forthcoming from ‘the public’ (Abram 2002) or ‘society’ (Strathern 2005a). Consultees, however their identities are defined, do, however, contribute something important. Strathern’s

Knowledge in a critical mode

141

insightful analysis shows that what is key is evidence of public consultation rather than any understanding gained in the process (Strathern 2005a). Thus consultees rarely produce new knowledge, let alone contribute to genuine investigation. If anything is produced, it tends to be standardised information about participation rates, say, which may provide evidence of ‘democratisation’. In short, the requirement to solicit ‘bottom-up’ contributions yields more monitoring information than critical knowledge. More worrying still is the way the profusion of evidence, information and guidance distracts and debilitates. As it emerges from all directions – top, bottom and sides – it overwhelms. Its production involves ample consultation and dialogue, that is, talk, but if it creates consensus, it does so more by virtue of existing (collecting dust) than by what it contains. Increasingly written to be accessible to non-experts, the specialist content and informational force of evidence is reduced. Where the needs of auditors – who in an audit culture represent society – are prioritised over other experts, data for ranking purposes dominates and specialist knowledge and genuinely useful insight about local conditions are lost. As with the universities’ mission statements analysed by Strathern (2006b), or municipal governments’ quality controls (Miller 2003), numerous documents are produced that are so emptied of meaning that they come to seem like ritual incantations. In the world of planning and building, such documents abound, creating what many practitioners themselves call ‘noise’. Such critique alerts us to the frightening possibility that the new knowledge work displaces not only knowledge of the world, but also the invigorating force of critique and the aptitude for self-critique. Where talk about talk reigns and documentation about documentation proliferates, the capacity of institutions like professional bodies, corporations, universities and hospitals to carry out their primary mission must surely be reduced (Power 2004). The same applies to regeneration. Instead of pursuing new knowledge, professionals must prioritise more pressing information needs, namely making their activities explicit as audit and/or seeking funds. The situation produces frustration and anger across the voluntary, corporate and public sectors. Further disquiet is provoked by the gaps between academic and policy research, which I alluded to above.

142

Eeva Berglund

And so, with official knowledge producers creating standardised ‘evidence’, meaningful public involvement constrained and pages of academic critique ignored, much of what is important in the real world goes undetected and unaddressed. One might say that market work (where standard numeric measures have effects) has enveloped knowledge work (where they do not) and enfeebled it.

Amongst the talk, a little argument I have constructed a narrative about expert knowledge in regeneration. I have discussed the frustrations that accompany the apparent democratisation of knowledge and I have suggested how interpretations of public accountability based on public consultation debilitate efforts to produce new knowledge. Yet I must report that, despite the challenges, there are those who remain hugely inspired by their mutual interest. Drawing on domainspecific skills and context-specific user engagement, people, including many associated with WDS, still produce new knowledge in the hope of putting it to transformative use. I conclude with a brief survey of recent developments among feminist architects and planners to make the point. In an academic volume on feminist architecture, Doina Petrescu and her collaborators chart some of the territory. Altering practices includes contributions by some who had been involved in WDS twenty years earlier plus some much younger writers. The book sets out to ‘reappropriate’ theoretical territory as part of a feminist project of ‘knowledge construction and knowledge politics’ (Petrescu 2007: 4) seeking confidence in re-constructing as well as deconstructing knowledge (2007: 5). New knowledge is thus still part of the critic’s toolkit. Around the UK and in international networks other teachers, architects, artists, planners and writers are also working towards critique that cannot easily be co-opted, diluted or drowned out by the noise of mainstream policy making. Without question such activities produce knowledge, much of which is accessible now (to those who know where to seek it), for example online at Gendersite. If the Internet is a place to look for already existing expertise, feminist knowledge of a more critical, open

Knowledge in a critical mode

143

kind is constantly being produced for more contextual, fleeting and mutually determined uses. Members of the artists’ collective Taking Place or the London-based practice muf produce information for public consumption and more context-specific knowledge as part of specific projects that may, or may not, be published. Their politically motivated work is always situated, sometimes small-scale and thus contrasts with earlier efforts to create a body of knowledge. These recent activities are more oriented towards subtle ‘micro-strategies of resistance’ (Stratford 2007). WDS is also seeking new grounds for critique. Shortly after taking office in the autumn of 2008 its newly appointed director told me about her concern to ‘give serious consideration to [feminist organisations’] positioning in terms of what they seek to change and how such change is achieved’ (email 4/12/2008). She told me, ‘It’s a challenging time, funding for gender is fragile. The political context [for feminism] has changed and my job is to work out how we can do business in this new environment.’ Events, publications and workshops continue to animate. They may remain marginal but they are undertaken with much enthusiasm and always linked to critical intellectual effort elsewhere. The list of feminist philosophers, writers and campaigners referred to is long. In addition to specialists in the built environment, they include names such as Linda Alcoff, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva and Lynne Segal. Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault also feature, unsurprisingly given how much their work contributed to questioning ‘the normal’. Anthropology is sometimes invoked as an under-exploited potential ally. This work is still fundamentally concerned with reaching non-experts. In the early days WDS and their associates were able to do open-ended empirical research and then offer expertise informed by this. But the context in which consultation led to discovery as part of ongoing, selfcritical and dialogic research has been replaced by a context of sustained information overload. I have even suggested that in this environment producing new knowledge can impoverish argument. Strathern has discussed how, even in academia, in the clutches of global fashions and market imperatives, research can become impoverished, and lose its capacity to learn from ‘blind alleys, dead devices,

144

Eeva Berglund

strained conclusions’ (Strathern 2006a: 194). Such complaints are confined neither to anthropologists nor to the English-speaking world. The Finnish management economists who recently characterised academia as a world of ‘waffle generation’ (Berglund 2008: 322)11 merely put into print what countless others say in private. Working in institutions guided by global competition and business change, they are trying to cope with what Strathern elsewhere calls an ‘international language of good governance’ (2006b: 195) which cannot fail to take its toll on scholarship. If academia feels thus assaulted, no wonder professionals from accountancy (Power 2004) to local government (Miller 2003) and domain-specific arenas like woman-friendly design or, for argument’s sake, medical care or teaching feel the strain. And yet there is significant unease when ‘everyone talks and nothing is argued’ (Strathern 2006a: 192). This chapter has reported on such discomfort but also on the enthusiasm for the new and the critical that persists regardless. As an animating principle of social life, such enthusiasm is probably more fundamental than political fashions.

Acknowledgements Each interviewee for this research also contributed to its analytical content. Thanks to them all. I am also grateful to Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger and Jeanette Edwards for patient and careful editing and to Julia Markovich for inspiration.

Endnote At the time of going to press the future of WDS looks, once again, precarious. There seems to be little room for its expertise in emerging policy as the ‘localism’ championed by the current coalition government does not include marginalised voices. That said, I wish WDS and its people all the best, and hope its critique will survive political fashions.

11

As translated from the original Finnish in Tienari (2006).

9

Spools, loops and traces: on etoy encapsulation and three portraits of Marilyn Strathern Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

This chapter is rooted in the circumstance that new digital technologies for communication and networking continue to be understood in inherited and long-standing moral terms. A range of media practitioners – Internet users, developers, and media and culture theoreticians – have expressed their delight and fascination with the idea of sharing private and professional data via MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Fotolog, Habbo, Linkedin, V kontakte, BlackPlanet and a number of other social-networking sites.1 Touting these virtual communication platforms as ‘social utilities’, their enthusiasts see them as bringing together new communities of communicators in a world ‘where’, contrarily, ‘disconnection and the value of individuality predominate’ (McLard and Anderson 2008). Harnessing a measure of innovation and activism, new media platforms are presented as the ‘conceptual technologies’ of contemporary social thought.2 At the same time, another group of users and commentators are considerably more sceptical about the possibilities for meaningful social interaction offered by these technologies; after all, networked socialising supposes the same values of individuality and separation critiqued by the new media enthusiasts.3 Media sceptics claim then, astringently, that digital technologies are superficial media that, rather than enhancing social experience, in fact degrade it, trivialising 1

2 3

Twitter, ‘a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time’, is advertised with the following words: ‘Real life happens between emails and blog posts. Find out what your friends are doing via twitter. The updates are very short, under 140 characters.’ http:// twitter.com/ See Palma˚s and von Busch 2006. There is a range of moral opinions on the matter of new media. For ethical and philosophical dilemmas that new media raise see Hayles 1999; Manovich 2001; Thacker and Galloway 2007; van Dijck 2007.

145

146

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

communication and deepening loneliness. In a recent article published in The Times Higher Education Supplement (2009), for example, Facebook is described as an ego trip for its users, lacking in reflectiveness and nuance, with the potential to seriously fracture society.4 Facebook users, it is suggested, are narcissists bombarding their readers with trite detail in the hope that they will thereby secure some kind of intimacy. The aim of this piece is to reflect on contemporary modes of selfrepresentation and self-extension in electronic spaces and informational economies.5 My analytical attention is given over to the moral discourses noted above, but also more generally to an anthropological analysis of portraiture and social software. Ethnographically I focus on a few portraits, and on a particular artistic project known as the etoy Mission Eternity Project, which claims to challenge communication and memory culture by hacking into and morphing traditional concepts of informational archives and memory spaces. The chapter analyses different instances of how people compose and circulate extensions of themselves, and discusses the moral issues that arise when these extensions are also responses to mortality, feelings of proximity and sharing.

etoy’s Mission Eternity Project In early 2007 I started working on and collaborating with etoy, an international art collective and dot.com art brand. etoy is a seventeen-year-old and twenty-plus person community of media theoreticians, architects, disabledpersons carers, coders, designers, squatters, medical doctors, economists, fashion advisers and engineers, based in Zurich and organised as a form of corporation. etoy’s digital and internet art projects, carried out alongside their members’ ‘day jobs’, have won plaudits from media, conceptual and system-based artists and art historians; the group most notably catapulted itself into media consciousness with TOYWAR, a web project through which they successfully defended the URL name etoy from capitalist speculation, by amongst other things mobilising an unprecedentedly sizeable cohort of global hacktivists (see Grether 2000; McKenzie 2001). 4 5

See Deborah Rogers in Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) 18 June 2009. See the excellent article by Adam Reed (2005) on how new media can function as extensions of the self.

Spools, loops and traces

147

However, it is their most recent undertaking Mission Eternity (M1), which projects an understanding of the dead as a form of social software, that has come in for the most prestigious awards, while also attracting a number of especially noteworthy public responses. etoy members found the cremation of a friend and etoy collaborator ‘uncomfortably ordinary and unsatisfying’, and were moved to rethink ways of dealing with and memorialising the death of their loved ones. Enquiring into the notion of the afterlife artistically, technically and affectively, the group’s interactive and multimedia M1 memorials seek to address the trauma of the friends and relatives of the dead and dying. This ultra-long-term project, initiated in 2005, has set out to record the lives of volunteer participants facing death not through conventional likenesses or tombstones (what they consider ordinary forms of commemoration) but rather through the compilation of digital archives of the informational traces left by subjects over the course of their lives. The project thus approaches questions of death and dying through themes of memory and storage. The project’s premise is that after death people leave behind both their mortal remains and a massive body of information that individuated or specified them. etoy artists argue for the continued existence of the dead both as biomass and as traces in global memory, for example in governmental databases, family archives and the brain as the electrical biomemory of human social networks. Yet for these artists, the usual practices of disposing of the dead promote immobility, exclusion and disconnection of the deceased from those emotionally attached to them. Challenging such practices, while simultaneously avoiding being drawn into the orbit of conventional religious or profane mortuary beliefs, the etoy collective puts into practice a multi-modal post-mortem activity plan. Aiming for better ways of remembering and staying in contact with the dead, the project sets out to unite usually distinct communities of the living through orchestrating the engagement of different social groups with a storage system of the data of dead persons. In terms of the project’s vision, the dead are linked to the living by a network of M1 figures dubbed Agents, Pilots and Angels. The Agents, the project’s creators, have designed a digital communication system known as the Arcanum Capsule, namely, a unique interactive, digital portrait of the Pilots or artistic subjects who have died or are approaching death.

148

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

Having chosen to participate in M1, Pilots offer up selected biodata, consenting thereby that their ‘informational remnants’ cross over into a digital afterlife. Capsule data, including pictures and photos of the Pilots, voice samples, mappings of Pilots’ intimate social networks, forms of biodata such as signatures of their heartbeats and eyelash measurements, with any personal messages they wish to send on into the digital afterworld, are assembled with the explicit intention of being showcased after the Pilots’ death. In providing such information, Pilots undergo a process of encapsulation producing digitised audio, visual and textual fragments of their lives. These carefully standardised, controlled and curated digital remains are taken to form an ideal portrait co-created by the members of the M1 community. In order for Capsules, understood as infinite data particles, to circulate around the global infosphere, Capsule data are designed to be hosted by what are known as M1 Angels. In the project, an Angel is simply an ordinary computer user willing to share at least 50MB of his or her disk space (on personal computers and mobile phones) to host the Arcanum Capsules. In order to distribute Pilots’ eternal memory, etoy has created an open source software Mission1 Angel Application, scattering Capsules’ data among Angels’ filespace.6 Running on personal computers and servers as a peer-to-peer network, this application provides M1 with secure, transparent, affordable and ultra-long-term storage, while also constituting the project’s social spine.7 Because it is open source the software provides both the material and the social conditions for Pilots’ perpetuation, particularly in the sense that Capsules are entirely dependent on Angels’ provision of sufficient memory. Indeed, the philosophy of sharing underpins this project and fundamentally characterises etoy’s methods and social ethic. 6

7

The open-source software and code created by etoy is not in the public domain, because of a number of rules that regulate copyright issues. etoy source code is copy-lefted, in order to grant users more rights on the work. etoy uses the GPL for source-code (executables), and the CC-NCND 3.0 for ‘static’ data, e.g. the content of the Arcanum Capsules. The rest of the project is copyright etoy. http://missioneternity.org/licenses/. It is foreseeable that etoy’s work (including the source code) will automatically go into the public domain after a certain period of time (that will differ across different countries), most likely in fifty to a hundred years’ time. In February 2007, etoy pre-released a functional prototype for alpha testing. The tool and the source code are available under the GPL: http://angelapp.missioneternity.org/.

Spools, loops and traces

149

The project thus draws together three types of community members or actors: Agents, who work on the implementation of M1 strategy and facilitate community interaction and integration; Pilots, who provide the data to be assembled and stored; and Angels, who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity in support of the mission. At the same time, and alongside the Arcanum Capsules storing the digital remains of the dead, etoy agents have created another art object to handle physical mortal remains. The M1 Terminus, a plug-shaped repository sculpture, is the final resting place of the Pilots’ cremated ashes. Between January and June 2006 etoy constructed another essential installation, the Sarcophagus or mobile sepulchre for users who prefer to be buried at an indeterminate geographical location. The tomb’s physical location differs from the standard disposal solutions (such as graves, cremation urns and columbaria) that operate in defined (if sometimes multiple) geographical locations. Built in Zurich, the Sarcophagus takes the form of a mobile cemetery tank fitted into a twenty-foot ISO standard white cargo container (6m long, 2.4m wide, 2.6m high and weighing 4 tons). etoy theorises that the complexity of the multimedia portraits and artefacts answers to the dangers and burdens of the memorialisation process in situations of loss. With 17,000 pixels immersively covering the walls, ceiling and floor, the Sarcophagus serves as a bridge between digital and physical data storage, displaying interactive composite portraits on its surface. While rendering Pilots’ private and psychic lives visible in the form of digitised information on a computer screen, the Sarcophagus is also conceived as a real burial place. M1 Agents stress that their project should be understood primarily as an art installation intended to provoke people to think about death and disposal-related practices. The etoy post-mortem plan was not devised to provide metaphysical solutions to situations of loss and is not a commercial service to be made available in the marketplace. etoy Agents are not high-class undertakers. Rather than seeking to displace the dominant forms of mortuary commemoration in Euro-American cultures, the project’s goal is to explore and possibly reconfigure the ways in which information societies deal with memory, time, death and sharing. Thanks to the Angel Application software, etoy has been able to operationalise its vision, with currently sixteen active Agents, two M1

150

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

Pilots (Timothy Leary, a 1960s counter-cultural icon and information society figure, and microfilm pioneer Sepp Keiser) accepted for encapsulation, one completed mortal remains transfer, two Test Pilots and more than 1,100 signed-up Angels. The Angel Application system is now running on hundreds of alpha test computers.8

Stowaway Encapsulation After three years of intensive work, with Pilot Mr Keiser collecting data for his Arcanum Capsule and portrait, Mission Eternity has now moved to a new phase of its project. Whilst continuing work with existing Pilots and recruiting new ones, the Agents have also devised an open documentation subproject called Stowaway Passenger Encapsulation. In order to enhance the process of encapsulation in a way faithful to the original idea of sharing capsule content through open access, etoy has started organising workshops not just for carefully chosen Pilots, but for all interested participants willing to undergo encapsulation by allowing their ‘memories’ to be recorded, digitised and stored. So far the Stowaway Encapsulation workshops have been held in Amsterdam (Holland), Abruzzo (Italy) and Heiligkreuz (Switzerland). I worked with etoy as an ethnographer and an Agent both in Abruzzo and in Heiligkreuz. Before materials were encapsulated, local organisers advertised the workshop, suggesting to potential Stowaway Passengers the kind of thing they might like to bring along: digital files (such as simple.txt data, file systems, still images, movies, sound files, and so forth) on their own computers or USB sticks. Alternatively, Agents at the workshop could digitise whatever Passengers had set aside for the capsules. Participants were advised that they should only submit data they would never regret seeing anywhere on a public network – as these digital memories, although unidentified and scrambled, would become available to anyone willing to search for them. Furthermore, Passengers were advised that they could not violate copyrights or the privacy rights of other people or organisations. In helping Passengers create and curate 8

For an extended description of this M1 project see Petrovic´-Sˇteger (in press).

Spools, loops and traces

151

their own Mini Arcanum Capsules, M1 aims to deepen its understanding of electronic memory culture – why and how it is important, and how it goes about collecting, storing, passing on or forgetting information. The following passage is an excerpt from my diary on the Abruzzo workshop.

From Abruzzo Stowaway Workshop Diary May 2009. Twenty-five-plus balmy degrees. Agents are arriving at the Pollinaria residence that nestles in Abruzzo, recently earthquaked land of boars. They come with their suitcases, cables, expectations, ties, screens, orange shoes, pencils, computers. They come with their regrets for the wine they have had confiscated and DVDs they have forgotten. The house is cold, but the welcome warm. It smells of apple and fresh pasta. Greetings and Montepulciano flow. And the first little capsule is formed, albeit in passing. Describing himself, somebody utters that he had‘a very ordinary childhood, you know . . . I started playing with other kids when I was 6 years old or so . . . ’(Gaetano). Unguarded giggling runs through the evening. The memory is welcomed. Treasured. The night skies observed. The value of value, and the meaning of political demonstrations that are choreographed, discussed. The flower paths made by a friend, a guerrilla gardener, lit again. Risk, fear, security, and order are all broached. I fall asleep on a bed bearing a transgendered image of a (wo)man wearing a 19th century bonnet. The following morning feels stiff, even starchy, with expectation. Breakfasting, walking barefoot over warm terracotta, agents rehash yesterday ’s discussions about guerrilla gardeners, friends, the pharmaceutical industry and cyborgs. Then we descend down into the vaults, mise-en-scèned as a workshop space. Setting an experimental artwork on the technology of memory in the

152

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

Pollinaria vaults insists on its own rhythm. The cameras are set, the ECG calibrated, chairs unfolded. Pencils sharpened. The beaming equipment attains a somewhat solemn veneer against the chamber stones. Or maybe just the reverse: the curved stone walls themselves become shiny. The people who are soon to become Stowaway Passengers start dotting the courtyard. Some are grey-haired and straight-backed, others smiling and paunchy, others still rich-voiced, scarred, star-daubed, authoritative, shy. Kids run round. There are children on the benches, in wombs, and in computer files waiting to be shared. There are dogs sniffing, stretching, stealing into the workshop vaults. The cats are on USB sticks only. There are hushed voices and quick glances stolen in the heat of noon. We observe each other and are observed through the glass doors and windows. Explanations and introductions about etoy begin after food has been shared. There are films and stories, etoy ’s philosophy, history and goals. What is it to share? To share time, risk, ideas, financial investment, knowledge and excitement? Mission1 project is elucidated as an open-source, open-ended project that challenges ideas of the afterlife and of technology by exploring the retention practices of storage systems and cultural commons. What lies beyond infinity, beyond mission eternity? How and why should data be preserved? Some of etoy ’s image repertory and inspiration are taken from astronomy. But the point is made that etoy does not collapse, or seek to infuse, the age of Space and Infinity with New Age-ry. On the contrary. M1 explores a space of a different kind. An intimate space of memory. Of human traces. And the space of imagined afterlife. It is not some naïve attempt at creating a 2.0. web graveyard. It does not promise to provide death or dying-related services. Rather, it is a project that celebrates accessibility, research, innovation, experience and time by delving into what

Spools, loops and traces

153

can be left after life. What can be stored in open formats? What integrated? M1 challenges memory culture. Believes in biomass. Gathers dust and noise. Admires electrical data. Experiments with and records the electricity on which M1 and our bodies run. M1 encapsulates. Its encapsulations set the parameters and conditions for future connection and communication – beyond the spaces experienced and known. The talk electrifies the audience. The evangelisation of memory, after death, is met by wide-open eyes, practical questions, some sidelong criticism, histrionic remarks. By smiling and the irrepressible body language of excitement. But also by caution, even refusal. What visions and images did the audience form in their mind? Did anyone recall J. G. Ballard ’s melancholy future where dead astronauts orbit the earth in beeping satellites, entombed in their lost capsules? How do the passengers imagine capsules? What data did they bring? How will they curate their profiles? What thoughts, scopic traces, objects, images, body parts will stand for participants ’ imagination, their aspirations regarding self-portraiture? What stories will the Stowaways, these architects, DJs, political scientists, farmers, graphic designers, students of sociology and semiotics be willing to share? The process of self-encapsulation begins. The Stowaway Passengers are sent to an agent who assigns each a Capsule ID number. Then some are invited to measure the electric beats of their hearts. The sun stencils naked electrocardiographed bodies behind the orange paravan. Others go in for photo and video sessions. Tattoos of scissors and zippers are recorded. Fingerprints taken. Pimples and pustules scanned. Others allow their encapsulation code numbers to get attached to, what seem, tantalising, forgiving, revoking, and conspiratorial images brought in on USB sticks and laptops. In the interviews and on the

154

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

screens, dead parents, past lovers and estranged sisters are evoked. Adopted grandfathers such as Mr Keiser are remembered. Political programmes on D ’Annunzio ’s birthplace, Pescara, find their way into the capsules. Musical compositions, websites are crammed in. The atmosphere warms up. The Stowaway Passengers and Agents are now seating closer to each other, laughing with each other, exchanging jokes and mp3s. Some kind of nonintrusive, respectful intimacy swells. Technology is not substituted for liturgy, but the practices are getting ritualistic, repetitive. Conversations follow on how Stowaway Passengers conceive surveillance and representation. What do they think of self-curation, self-portraiture and selfmanagement? How do they think bodies, death, decay? What do they think of the project? Some say it is courageous. Others see it as pure experiment and fun. For another group, it will stand as an eternal memory. They believe that sharing is fundamental. An Agent intervenes and explains that the project should not be understood as some sort of facebook (that is, as a social networking site); it aims at a different kind of sharing. Some nod, others glance away. A woman suggests that this workshop is a perfect way of leaving certain memories behind. A way of parting with them. Getting rid of them. Forgetting them. The Capsules get filled with people singing, swimming, dancing. Somebody posts dozens of shots showing an exgirlfriend ’s eye. Another capsule stores a short movie depicting a random day in a Stowaway Passenger ’s friend ’s life. A third commemorates a local communal project. A fourth encapsulates a finger-print drawing of a futuristic industrial landscape, with fires, suns and architectural suggestions. The same capsule holds a scan of a military card. Was it important that this Stowaway Passenger operated radar equipment for the army, I ask:

Spools, loops and traces

155

No, not really . . . but I found the card in my bag today . . . so I thought that it should go into the capsule. Somebody explains smiling:

I ’ve encapsulated a paper that I wrote on digital memory . . . and am looking forward to coming back to it in a couple of years time to see what was I thinking, how was I thinking in 2009 . . . It was hard to choose what material to encapsulate, though. We Italians do not like to part from things, we like to keep and store everything. Another:

If I could put it in the capsule, I would store my hair . . . Whenever I feel that I need a change in my life, I change the colour of my hair. Hair is really me. Meanwhile, warmth seeps in from the terrace above. Sun marks the skin. Cooked boar and lunchtime salad. Postmeal cigarettes. People surprise themselves with what they say. Some harsh words are uttered. Some thoughts are realigned. Feelings bruised. But also gifts are bestowed. A couple, soon to be married, brings images of a cytoblast, an mp3 of the music they have composed, and a photograph of the bride ’s grandmother.

For us, she is the future. She holds the future. She is 100 years old . . . You would understand what we mean if you knew her. Capsule e20c5C2413287908:

My capsule holds a planet version of myself. Recently I have discovered that an asteroid, that bears the same name as I do, was found exactly on the

156

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

day of my birthday, 69 years ago before I was born. It is called 699 Hela. The planet is orbiting the Sun and is composed mostly of iron, magnesium, silicon . . . And the funny thing is that my recent biochemical analysis have shown that I have apparently extraordinarily high levels of iron for a woman. This really amuses me . . . I scanned the analysis, collected the correspondence I have had with NASA, brought some pictures . . . And here it is – my capsule. Capsule e20c6d896032860:

I brought only one thing. A photograph of my youngest friend, first kid friend ever, a kind of virtual son of mine. The photo shows him looking at a painting, or rather print in one of the exhibitions we visited last year. You cannot see his face. Only his legs. Sebastian ’s trunk is covered by the print that hangs from the ceiling . . . I love this photo. It reminds me that there is a hope for the future of art in Italy . . . of course there is, if a 4 year child enjoys it so much . . . True, here he is standing in front of a sex scene. The print shows a couple copulating on a table, in a sort of funny position . . . But that is a truly beautiful painting. There ’s nothing obscene about it. And he was mesmerised by it . . . So I wanted to encapsulate that very moment. He will outlive me. And will be, actually is already, a connection between things that mark my life and those that will exist after my death. Then a family comes with a box filled with photographs. They borrow a shovel, and go to the woods. A tree is chosen, a hole dug in front of it, and the box with the photos planted. The Capsule that the family sends away holds only GPS coordinates of the box and a beautiful video made by an Agent that records the box ’s burial . . .

Spools, loops and traces

157

What did the juxtaposition of etoy’s performance, equipment, panels, measurements and sharing of memories, food and time achieve? How were memories acted upon? What, if any, art forms were produced? What happened? The realisation that most Stowaway Passengers independently use open software programs and subscribe to open software ethics proved an important starting-point for etoy, in that it allowed Agents to understand themselves as doing no more than lending their labour and infrastructural capabilities to bequeath certain Passenger memories into the future. Encapsulation severed memories, made them into digitised, numbered and stored objects. Reifying, untying, sending away, dismembering, did not, however, sever or diminish, but rather strengthened the memorial process. Passengers’ trivia, their hopes, fears and holographic details were transposed and broken up to form some other, experimental entity. The experience opened up and augmented new phantasmagoric possibilities, enabled previously unthought ways of morphing, while attempting to erase and forget certain images. The workshop explored different forms of digital self-representation and portraits. The files and capsules that Agents organised and protected with Angel Application 0.4.2. became swollen with hyperlinks and with the promise of eternal access. Encapsulation felt arcane not only because of the scrambling but because of the relations and proximities that were knitted.

Three portraits of Marilyn Strathern In 2001 Girton College commissioned Daphne Todd to paint a portrait of Marilyn Strathern in her role as the Mistress. The conversation between the painter and the sitter discussing what kind of portrait could be made for this occasion, or rather its recollection, has generated an unusual level of media interest.9 In order to find a way through the skein of chance encounters, and to make a point of contact, we read that Strathern gave Todd her own work, ‘Pre-figured features: a view from the New Guinea Highlands’ (1999), that had been stimulated by a

9

See THES, 10 August 2001 and the Girton Annual Review 2002. Sitter, artist and portrait also featured on a Channel 4 programme on portraiture ‘In Your Face’ made by Bruno Wollheim for Coluga Pictures in 2002.

158

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

conference on Portraiture and the problematics of representation.10 Strathern’s paper was offered as an example of how an anthropologist may think representation and portraiture through an analysis of visual identity in Papua New Guinea. Todd, who later won the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture 2001 for this piece, wrote: Anyway, giving Marilyn two heads seemed appropriate. I cannot remember precisely what led to it – although it would not surprise me to discover that the seed was sown deliberately by the sitter. The painting developed in a straightforward way. (Todd and Strathern 2001)

Apart from this institutional portrait, there is at least one more professional portrait of Marilyn Strathern. Without action there is no reason is the title of the piece by Issam Kourbaj made in 1999 and commissioned by Strathern. Although conceptualised as a portrait, Kourbaj’s installation does not feature a face. Instead all an observer sees are hands. Eight acid-etched zinc plates showing reliefs of protruding and depressing palms are held together by a petroleum-green coloured wooden panel. The memory behind this piece, as Mr Kourbaj kindly retold to me, is also Papuan. During one of their sessions, Strathern presented a Kina shell to Kourbaj. The ochre-coloured pearlshell, put together with wood, bamboo, mud and a gold-lip shell, inspired Kourbaj to translate Strathern’s explanations of Kina ceremonial wealth exchange into images of hands as symbols of giving and taking. Kourbaj recalled a Syrian saying that when a person feels an itching in their right palm, he or she knows that something must be given away. If the itching is felt in the left hand, however, the person believes that they will soon receive unexpected gifts. This image prompted Kourbaj to paint Strathern’s hands with ink, and through the printmaking technique of sugarlift etching produce a hollow relief of Strathern’s left and a proud relief of her right hand. He then juxtaposed the sequences of left- and right-hand reliefs on the plates, arranging them so that within each plate the hand prints would point in two different directions, forming ceremonial lines suggestive of the motion of Kina exchange events. Sinking the plates into acid to attain an effect of weariness and mimicking Kina shell directionality, Kourbaj intended to stress that there is no absolute giving and no absolute taking. 10

See THES, 10 August 2001.

Spools, loops and traces

159

Following Strathern’s explanation that Hageners used to count in twos, and a ‘hand’ of eight shells represented one unit in ceremonial exchange, the piece takes the form of eight plates. The wooden panel holding the plates together was painted numerous times until it took on the perfect petroleum green shade best satisfying both Strathern and Kourbaj’s visions. If Todd’s portrait captures Strathern in her office role, Kourbaj’s portrait invites associative thought – processes and a mulling over her personality as expressed through her work, creativity and professionalism. I read this portrait as a portrait of her as a maker, writer and even sculptress. Recently Strathern herself has conceptualised a piece that might be thought of as another portrait of her, or rather of her work. It is a portrait, one could say, of ethnography in general, and of her work in Papua New Guinea in particular. To wit, for the Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination exhibition, which has set out to explore the technologies that make bodies visible, Strathern has conceptualised, and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has executed, an installation of netbags entitled ‘Bilum Tree’.11 A couple of dozen looped string bags, or bilums, collected across Papua New Guinea in the period from 1922 to 2005 gleam in front of visitors’ eyes in shades of yellow, brown, ochre, purple, red, blue, green, orange and black. Looped from a white wooden pole they suggest a form of a tree. Exhibition signage describes the netbags as made exclusively and usually worn only by Papua New Guinea women using a distinctive looping technique.12 Bilums, these durable, versatile articles are today worn as widely as ever. Stuffed with brown paper, the bags on show at the exhibition mimic bilum’s typical body-like shape – their swelled contours filled with food from gardens or marketplaces, or with babies they cradle or caches of money they conceal. Strathern describes bilums as ever-changing artefacts, especially when compared with the mounted pearlshells exhibited next to the Bilum tree. The pearlshells, objects traditionally handled and transacted only by men, are, by 11

12

The exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opened in March 2009 and was curated by Anita Herle, Mark Eliott and Rebecca Empson. Strathern documents that Telefol and Umeda men sometimes also wear string bags ([1991], 2004: 86).

160

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

contrast, historical objects coming from a very specific time and area of Papua New Guinea.13 Both objects are exhibited in order to suggest to visitors different ways of conceiving of bodies. This proposition – of thinking bodies through bilums and pearlshells and their capacity to produce and reproduce – is not new to students of Strathern’s work. Bodies and bilums, likened to each other in Strathern’s analysis, are analysed through their capability of growing things inside themselves, standing for collectivity (in that they combine elements from maternal and paternal clans) or for an assembly of persons who together produce something (see Strathern 2009: 64). As intimate articles of apparel, bilums are identified with the personal capacities and gender status of their wearers. Men usually wear smaller bags. As Gell (1975) describes, a man and his bag are as inseparable as a man and his dog, in that his bag is said to contain his most personal possessions, existing as a kind of shadow spirit (Gell in Strathern [1991] 2004: 86). Indeed, men’s bags have been taken to function as a kind of exterior bodily skin (Strathern [1991] 2004: 87). By contrast, the larger bags that women carry evince their public role in a society and express a more material presence (86). Why do I suggest we see the Bilum Tree as a portrait of Marilyn Strathern? On Papua New Guinea it is believed that the gift of a netbag helps the recipient recall an image of its maker. Telefol women, Strathern writes, like to picture the face of the recipient of their string bags as they do the looping. Although not depicting faces, the bags carry a permanent trace of their makers’ features (Strathern 2004 [1991]). To loop a bag is therefore in some sense to compose a portrait – both of the maker and of the social relationship that the bag represents. Not only bags but also the empty space enclosed by bags (Strathern writes, after Battaglia) evoke persons. Women looping the bags anticipate the personal objects that men will place 13

The pearlshell label in the exhibition explains the use of shells in wealth exchanges as documented in 1965 Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea: ‘Mounted on resin boards painted with ochre these prized shells have utilitarian handles of old meshing or calico, strong enough to carry heavy items between exchange partners. The valuable is the pearlshell itself, carefully worked to show its colour. A pair, because people count in twos, and a “hand” of eight shells was a unit in ceremonial exchange – the bamboo slats mimic the tallies donors wear. And what is the focus of such concern with wealth? Reproduction! Out of a body (a clan group) comes a body. Look at the shell again, and you see a foetus curled up inside its mother’s womb.’

Spools, loops and traces

161

in there. The string loops are made to hold something besides themselves (Strathern [1991] 2004: 114). Bilums, then, are looped with memories and the anticipation of social alignments. Looping bags tie relationships. If one wanted to develop this perspective further, rather then representing a portrait of Strathern, or of her Papua New Guinean friends and informants, the Bilum tree may be seen as a portrait of relationships. The installation suggests not only an indigenous body in the making, but anthropological analysis in the thinking and writing. Moreover, further looping of this image – of bilums, dense with relations, genealogies, and of the Bilum tree as a portrait – with an image of etoy’s M1 practices described above, invites consideration of the parallel between netbags and Stowaway Capsules. Bilums are like both wombs and data ports.14 Both capsules and bilums are produced as vessels for nourishing people’s relationships through storing their past and future selves and relationships. Recall the capsule holding a photograph of a child observing an art exhibit of a couple procreating. The capsule’s content could be thought of as an indexical portrait: in the workshop participant’s own words, the encapsulated image is her own portrait, phrased as the image of a child who will survive her and so partake in future of the lifeforce of the capsule maker. The capsule is envisaged as a medium to futureproof and guarantee memories, gathering-in the maker and the portrayed child in a ‘looped’ relationship. Further, the relationships knitted by the artefact extend beyond the familial to a form of projected community in that the child is symbolically, rather than biologically, related to the ‘sitter’.

Capsules, portraits, bodies, and the notion of sharing Memory is a structuring concern in etoy’s exploration of borders and spaces beyond body, time and death. How do Encapsulation Passengers want to be remembered? Why would they want to preserve their memories in bytes? Mini Arcanum Capsules are imagined and sculpted as wombs, as places to store hopes for a prosperous marriage, as containers for concentrated, raw, emotionally charged, fattened and fattening, or 14

The bilums are often likened to a womb, for their potential for expanding like the uterus (Mackenzie 1990 quoted in a Strathern 1991 [2004]: 86), and Strathern described Hagen pearlshells as ‘organs’ already in her 1979 text ‘The self in self-decoration’.

162

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

painful incisions into people’s lives. The capsules, in which passengers have stored their chosen digital selves, sometimes resembled armour, sometimes mirrors, sometimes traps. They were equated with the people (or parts of the people) submitting to encapsulation, and experienced as storage for their physiological bodies and multiple agencies.15 One workshop participant chose to describe herself as somebody who paints on her personality, regretting that her hair could not go into the capsule. Other Stowaway Passengers went about putting together their capsules with images of cytoblasts and asteroids. The capsules were imagined as objects capable of holding the future, and materially extending formative relations in people’s lives. They were conceived (or played with) as if able to prosthesise (Stelarc 2005) remembered, existing, lost, feared and desired relationships of passengers, jacking these into virtual terrains. These acts of imagination and encapsulation rendered digital information corporeal. Moreover, another kind of body came into existence in the encapsulation of memories. The metabolic quality of all the exchanges that took place in this workshop suggests that activities of sharing may convene a space that acts like a body, a space that incorporates, excorporates, produces and reproduces, if not people, then digital versions of them.

Conclusion To engage with the question of what, if anything, comes after death is to engage with the most virtual of all questions. etoy has approached these questions not from a religious or moral(ising) angle but by framing a problem in the management of an archive. The project considers death, 15

I should note that it would perhaps be more anthropologically intuitive to draw a parallel between capsules and Malanggans, rather than capsules and bilums. The imaginative force of passengers is released into the capsules, in a similar way to which the life-force of the dead is released from its container when a Malanggan is destroyed. Likewise, Malanggans are said to convert existing relationships into virtual, matter into energy, and living into ancestral agency, heralding the reversal of these transformations at a future stage in the reproductive cycle (Strathern 2005a: 98). Moreover Malanggans are seen as transmitters or conduits (Strathern after Sykes 2000 and Ku¨chler 2002), able to capture, condense and then release power back into the world. However, there are striking differences also between the Malanggan and the capsules, not least that the former is destroyed and the latter is not. The capsule has a potentially infinite shelf-life. By severing, unmooring, disconnecting, sending-away memories, embodied in things and digitalised in archives, the capsules feed immortality.

Spools, loops and traces

163

memory and practices of self-extension philosophically from the perspective of technology. How to organise storage places in the long run? What might a data retrieval system look like? The question, though, that an anthropologist might pose is why are death and memory framed through images of ‘rescuing’, ‘preserving’ and documentation in the first place? In seeking to store memories, Mission1 notably avoids reliance on hitech technologies, instead aiming to put together a human network of people interested in the project and willing massively to share, distribute and lend their gadgets’ memory space to memorialisation. The capsules, that is, infinite data particles, are hosted on the memory of thousands of computers and mobile phones. The nurturance of these devices’ users is crucial. Capsules and digital remains may orbit as long as they are sustained by open software and virtual kinship and networks.16 Filled with and enacted through the contemporary vernacular and by practices of sharing and kopimi values (that reflect on questions regarding information infrastructure and digital culture), the capsules are not imagined as rigid memory artefacts but as vessels of communication.17 A buried box stashed with photographs serves not as a tombstone or memorial, but as a fertile ground for future communication. Encapsulation, performed by severing memories, makes them into objects ready for digitisation, numbering and storage, to be conceptualised and experienced not only as a metaphorical thing, but as a cultural practice. Untying, dismembering, sending artefacts away did not attenuate but strengthened memories’ potentiality, as the hopes and fears passengers wanted to preserve broke up, as it were, into a higher life. By predicting, releasing and rehearsing future desires, etoy project is concerned not only with the preservation, assembling and archiving of memory through an elaborate digitisation of its forms, but with the values of future sharing and communication elicited out of electrical traces of our bodies and our lives. Similarly to Telefol string bags, which ‘do not exist apart from the relationships out of which they are made and for which they either bear women’s produce or men’s personal paraphernalia’ 16 17

For an analysis of Internet and open source software as a social form, see de Landa 2002; Benkler 2006; Kelty 2008. Kopimi is a copyright alternative, invented by Piratbyra˚n, a Swedish think tank that promotes and infrastructurally enables the free sharing of information and culture. For their highly important contribution to the on-going conversation on copyright, file-sharing and digital culture, Piratbyra˚n received an award of distinction at 2009 Prix Ars Electronica.

164

Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger

(Strathern 2004[1991]: 102), the capsules are equally made from and dependent on relationality and networks of sharing. Moreover, their existence is enabled through the notion of proximity. Although concerns such as virtuality, interactivity and dematerialisation are most often cited as the preoccupations of digital art, the capsules described here are imagined as enabling life experiences to be acknowledged, through communicating their value to those around them and those who may come to be around them.18 etoy appears productively to challenge typically polarised moral opinions about new media and ironises commercial memorialising practices and dying-related services, setting up an open-source enabled ethnographic conceptualism to prompt people to think about the social dimensions of death and sharing.19 My analogical reading of bilums, portraits and etoy capsules has sought to describe a mode of contemporary portraiture. The essay suggests seeing and thinking bilums, portraits and capsules as bodies, as composite figures produced collectively. As bodies co-created, produced and curated by Todd and Strathern. By Kourbaj and Strathern. By Papua New Guineans, the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and Strathern. By etoy and Stowaway Passengers.

Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude to Issam Kourbaj for his recollections on the making of Strathern’s portrait. My warm thanks to Jeanette Edwards and Ilana Gershon for their generous comments and insights. Dear Rebecca Empson helped me access some crucial material when I was away from Cambridge. To my etoy friends and colleagues I thank for our time and thought travels. 18

19

Mu¨nster (2001) suggests that one should look at relations of proximity that operate at a number of levels in the digital arts. She invites commentators to pay attention to the closeness digital media continue to maintain and develop with other media such as cinema and photography, to the redistribution of spatial and temporal relations in an experience of virtual nearness, and to the kinship of the immateriality of informatics with the material strata of organic and inorganic bodies. Ethnographic conceptualism is a term introduced by Ssorin-Chaikov and Sosnina to explain practices in which generating and stimulating an audience’s response to a curatorial, ethnographic concept becomes the goal of ethnographic exploration (see SsorinChaikov and Sosnina, forthcoming).

10

Inspiring Strathern Adam Reed

In this chapter, I want to explore what it might mean, as an anthropologist, to claim an intellectual debt. How should one properly recognise the influence of the ideas of another? What is the correct register for acknowledging that person and demonstrating the effect of his or her work? Although the form of these questions is generalised, of course a properly anthropological response must involve a turn to the particular. In short, I need an example to work through and direct my answer. My choice will be necessarily reflexive; it’s hard to contemplate writing about the dynamics of intellectual debt and influence without first considering one’s own experience. Specifically, I wish to investigate the authority of my original teacher, Marilyn Strathern; to embrace that relationship and make it part of the ethnographic record. So here I am the chief subject who claims to be the recipient of ideas. In what follows, I want to examine the outcomes of identifying that my work has been shaped by someone else. But I also need an analytical category that illustrates the connection, makes it come alive or reveal itself. In traversing the example, analysing the narrow and broader influence of Strathern, I choose to evoke the familiar idiom of inspiration. The term appeals to me for a number of reasons. First of all it is not quite conventional. Anthropologists, including Strathern, would readily recognise the claim that a person or work can be inspiring but it is not one they typically draw upon in anthropological writing. Secondly, the choice reflects one of my own fieldwork positionings: a student of Papua New Guinea societies who ends up studying English literary culture, personhood and kinship. For me inspiration is not just an analytical category, it is also an ethnographic one. A further part of its appeal lies in the fact that it is conspicuously not 165

166

Adam Reed

Melanesian. However, at the same time it could be. Indeed, I wish to see what happens to the category when we reroute it through the Melanesian sociality described by Strathern and what happens to that when we reroute it back through Euro-American models of inspiration. Of course this zigzagging strategy also reflects the classic deployments of Strathern; in her work the logic and imagination behind our responses to new reproductive technologies or intellectual property rights, for instance, are thrown into relief by practices and ideas reported from Papua New Guinea and vice versa. Most characteristically of all, she does not just present an analysis or description; she performs it. With all this in mind, what I want to know is what exactly it means to do inspiration, to actively assert and show that ‘I am inspired by Strathern.’ Let me start with a borrowed ethnographic scene. In his study of a British university initiative to bring visual artists and research scientists into collaboration, James Leach (2007) presents a moment of dispute over creative origins. He reports that the scientists and technicians involved in the collaborative process expressed resentment and frustration at the failure of the artists properly to acknowledge the input of others into the production of the art installations eventually exhibited. For Leach, this exemplifies a broader technique of ‘encompassment’ (2007: 181), the Euro-American turn to ensure that a made-thing is ultimately assigned to the creativity of a single mind or talent (Leach points out that this encompassment also worked in reverse; when the scientists came to publish their academic papers, they did not expect to have to cite the artists as co-authors). He states that ‘at any time the object has an effect, it is always displayed as if it were more to do with one person than another’ (2007: 182). Linked to dominant idioms of ownership, this assumption meant that the collaborative project continually struggled to present itself according to the terms by which it was set up. To the dismay of the organisers, participants consistently failed to locate outcomes and forms that reflected their combined work as creative agents. But alongside the tendency to such ‘appropriative creativity’ (Leach 2004) I would suggest that less straightforward attributions of agency also operate. While it is true that at the moment in which the art-object makes its impression, value and authority usually fall on the work of a

Inspiring Strathern

167

single actor, Euro-American conventions of creativity also allow for the recognition of forces external to the artist. Indeed, the process of artistic creation evoked through the category of inspiration rests upon just such an appeal. Artists may present the artwork as their own, encompass the contribution of others, but at the same time insist that they have been inspired. Unlike the implications of collaboration, this claim does not seem to challenge the dominant idiom of ownership. In fact, it seems it can actually reinforce it (cf. Coombe 1998; Newlyn 2000).1 By way of illustration I turn from the visual arts to literature and focus attention on one ethnographic example of the narrated process of literary composition. As an association of readers, members of The Henry Williamson Society are brought together by their love of the works of a single author: the now largely forgotten mid-twentieth-century English nature writer and historical novelist. Drawn from across the United Kingdom, with a membership list that runs to over 500 persons, subjects receive a society journal and newsletter in return for their annual subscription. They can also attend a series of general meetings and special events where the novels are discussed and the geographical settings of the stories explored (see Reed 2004, 2011). According to its prospectus, The Henry Williamson Society ‘aims to encourage interest in and a deeper understanding of the life and work of the writer’. But as well as sharing a passion for the works of Williamson, members of the literary society I knew also share a theory of creativity, which includes an expectation of what it means to write and to be inspired. In fact the value they place on the published volumes of their favourite author is partly derived from the 1

Newlyn (2000: 266) argues that among writers of the Romantic era fears of criticism are linked to wider anxieties about popular reception, borrowing and theft. Indeed, she claims that the mystification of authorship as ‘genius’ and writing as inspired is part of a series of ‘defence mechanisms’ introduced to protect the artist against hostile or unfriendly treatment. Inspiration is a form of ‘auto-legitimation’ – to say a text is inspired is already to assert its extraordinary value, whatever some readers may say (Clark 1997: 109). If the ideas of inspiration and genius are at the centre of a system of artistic safeguards, then, Newlyn states, copyright is the device that insures them (Newlyn 2000: 269). This applies protection to the material form of ideas and words, to the work, which in law becomes less like a property or commodity, something owned or encompassed, and more like an analogue of the artist’s offspring, an entity reproduced by the writer that like a child carries his designation and a semblance of his appearance or character (Coombe 1998; and see Strathern 1999: 175–6).

168

Adam Reed

claims they make for the event of literary creation. Members are very much concerned with how the texts came to be made and with the nature or source of what they take to be the writer’s ‘genius’. As they point out, this was also a concern of Williamson; both his novels and his autobiographical writings are full of scenes of inspired composition. In the quotation below, a typical example, the main character of his fifteen-volume family saga, Phillip Maddison, is about to begin his next novel. On a dull and rainy London evening Phillip drew up his chair to the green baize table, uncapped his pen, wrote Chapter 1, paused, lit a cigarette in a sudden mood of excited satisfaction, pushed back the chair, and began to pace the floor of the room. It was a thrilling moment; he felt that the breath of creation had come upon him, its servant . . . What she would do, how appear, he did not know; he was trusting himself to the spirit of creation, which caused a strange dissolution within. He did not know what he would be writing on the page a moment before it happened. Trusting himself to the imaginative flow, in the secrecy of the empty house, he wrote steadily, light replacing shadow, living creatures the still figures, sunshine the candlelight of the empty room. (Williamson 1998: 219–20)

As readers explain, Williamson and his characters are continually attracted by the prospect of what happens to them while experiencing the creative impulse. This includes both the physicality of composition (elsewhere the author talks of suffering hot flushes, shivers and hairs standing on end) and its effects on the writing-subject’s state of mind. At the heart of this reported experience is a state of displaced agency. Phillip, we are told, is unable to anticipate the words that he will write on the page; instead they appear to emerge independently, to come from elsewhere or ‘outside himself’ (Williamson 1998: 233). It is precisely this shock – the repeated feeling that someone else authors what is created – that Williamson describes and seeks to explain. On occasions, for instance, he ascribes the source to the domain of the subconscious, that part of the self that was ‘repressed’ or ‘mortified’ (Williamson 1937: 24–5). Here inspired writing is said to rise ‘like sap from the roots of my being’ (Williamson in Farson 1982: 23); it is still of him, but not consciously or directly so. Sometimes he ascribed it to a genetic source or form of ‘racial memory’ (Williamson 1984: 36). At other times, the writer spoke of that rare state of being emanating from and connecting him to a plane of

Inspiring Strathern

169

transcendental authority, such as the ‘Imagination’, ‘Nature’ or what he rather vaguely terms ‘Spirit’ (Williamson 1980: 153–4, and 1994: 45). This could mean the spirit world; Williamson or the heroes of his novels regularly evoked the Romantic notion that during periods of inspired writing they were possessed by the genius of dead poets (Williamson 1944: 17). Whichever claim was put forward (neither Williamson nor his readers ever sought to make sense of the differences), the author held that the thrill of inspiration derives from the sensation of acting as a medium, feeling and letting that alien intelligence work through him.2 But these assertions about the nature of literary inspiration are not merely something Society members pick up and consume through reading Williamson. For many, they are also the product of first-hand experiences. Indeed, a number of the readers I met wrote themselves, producing a raft of poems, novels, short stories and imaginative essays. They too claimed to sometimes inhabit equivalent inspired states. One member, for instance, told me that she had written two, as yet unpublished, novels, works she described as contemporary women’s fiction. Begun three years ago, after she made a New Year’s resolution to try and be more ‘creative’, the dynamic process of composition, I was informed, took her completely by surprise. I can hardly remember how it happened. I got the basic idea of the plot and I did a few notes about the central characters. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it. But I started writing and it completely took me over for the next four or five months. I enjoyed it so much, absolutely loved the creative process. You know you sit down to write and you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve no idea that that character was going to do that or even that another character was going to appear, but suddenly they’re there, it’s not planned, it just happens. I got so taken over by it, I’m not saying I didn’t do any work during those months, but I would have days when I started writing in the morning and when I next looked up it would be lunchtime! My husband said I was in an altered state a lot of the time, I totally lost track of the clock.

Another member confided that he had always written poetry, odes to his local landscape. Writing, he explained, was an intensely powerful emotional event. Ideas came to him like ‘physical sensations’; his mind

2

Williamson once compared his mind during inspired states to a radio: ‘I never know what’s coming when it is switched on and the dial turned’ (Williamson 1937: 51).

170

Adam Reed

suddenly got very excited and words would just ‘flow’ as if the poem was writing itself. Long familiar with the creative urge, he told me that he still puzzled over the ‘source of inspiration’, regularly asking himself: ‘How do I do it? Now where does it come from? Where do the words come from?’ The state of literary inspiration then is valued as an event in which action (the flow of words) is unanticipated or unplanned. Both Williamson and his writing-readers observe that at certain moments composition seems automatic; they report not knowing from where and from whom the narrative and characters on the page originate. While anthropologists have had little to say about this phenomenon, not surprisingly it has caught the attention of those working in literary history and criticism. In particular, through the work of Timothy Clark (1997), who seeks to move a critical analysis beyond the typically derisive treatment of inspiration as an example of authorial mystification. As he highlights, recorded claims by writers of inspired states are not unusual. Clark points out that despite the unfashionability within critical circles of evoking the category of inspiration, authors of literature keep insisting that they have been inspired. What is interesting about their anecdotal depictions of this event is that they involve a range of conflicting and unreconciled assertions about subjectivity, worth and output. At their centre, Clark suggests, is a crucial blurring of where agency should be assigned (Clark 1997: 3). Although the literary work is ultimately taken to index the character and virtuosity of the author, the value of the writing itself is held to derive from the intercession of some kind of hidden force or power. He reports that there is a strange ‘transitivity’ and temporality to the term’s use. To be inspired is at once to be possessed or dispossessed, acted upon, and to inspire others; furthermore, the inspired object is not just the writer but the text he or she produces. Most contradictory of all is the core claim of conceptions of inspiration – ‘that writers have most authority when they least know what they are doing’. For Clark, such pretensions form part of a specific bourgeois literary culture that venerates writers and artists more broadly as unique kinds of creative agents (1997: 5). He argues that accounts of their inspired episodes appeal because they take the form of modern miracle stories, ‘secularised versions of religious conversation narratives’. As such, he believes that they have the basic attribute of ritual

Inspiring Strathern

171

(1997: 21), treating written composition as a site of rare and valuable transformations.3 Taking aside his final comments (anthropologists might wish to quibble with a definition of ritual based on assumptions of self-transcendence), I believe Clark does offer us an interesting entry point into the dynamism and sociality (perhaps we might better say cosmology) of Euro-American ideas and reports of literary inspiration. As he states, and the anecdotes of Williamson and his writing-readers perhaps illustrate, the minimal definition of the term is ‘the notion of composition as dictation by an other’ (Clark 1997: 282). In claiming inspiration, writers wish to acknowledge the continuing presence and impact of someone or something else’s mind or talent. There is a notion that the results of composition exceed artistic intentionality and that it is this surplus which makes the text compelling. Encompassment then still takes place – an authorial name remains attached to an individual work – but the attribution of the agency responsible for the object’s effect in the world is less clearly made. For Society members, the novels of Williamson are most definitely the product of the writer’s imagination and creativity. However, at the same time, they acknowledge that in order for these texts to be inspiring their favourite author must first have been inspired, his work displayed as the effect of a crucial intervention. It is precisely this doubling or staged redistribution of causality, Clark’s notion of a blurred agency, which I wish to evoke when claiming that ‘I am inspired by Strathern.’ Like the writing-readers of Williamson, I believe I can recall times when my compositions appeared to have a life or will of their own, inspired with what felt like a Strathernian mode of analysis. Equally I may recognise that the effects that my work has upon 3

Although Clark (1997: 9) states that unlike other literary critics he wishes to take writers’ reports of inspiration seriously, ultimately he relies on a materialist explanation to account for the phenomenon. For him, the subjectivity claimed by writers during inspired states is an effect of the composition process, the result of reading and writing actions during that endeavour. In particular, it is the outcome of the distance felt between the writer’s conscious or deliberate effort and the resulting value of the work on the page. According to Clark (1997: 19), the notion of inspiration is one way in which the subject manages to deal with the fact that it is never feasible to write what one actually intends. While this analysis may meet the aesthetic criteria of a critical approach to inspiration, it is the very opposite of what Henry Williamson Society members seek. They want the act of written composition to signal the possibility of self-transcendence.

172

Adam Reed

others may be borrowed insights; readers may think that the point which interests them comes from me, that I have inspired them, but actually I know it really comes through me from her. Yet in the end that doesn’t really matter; it is my name on the published text, my name listed in the citations of others, I know it is my authority (or lack of it) that will finally be assessed and identified. So yes, Strathern acts upon me, she inspires me, but the remarkable thing is that to others I seem to remain the author or single cause of what they read and digest. Somehow, though, this feels an insufficient explanation of what an inspiring Strathern can mean or do. What occurs, I ask myself, if I address the statement differently? Perhaps, for instance, it might be productive to consider what happens when we run the category of inspiration through my own Melanesian materials; specifically, through an ethnography of incarceration in urban Papua New Guinea. The first thing that strikes me upon working this conceit is that from this perspective my claims of being inspired by Strathern appear rather unexceptional. Far from being noteworthy, a rare and precious sort of creativity and hence a state to be valued, the dynamics of inspiration sound rather like those ascribed to Melanesian sociality. There is nothing out-of-theordinary for the subjects I knew in Bomana jail about the idea that agency may be uncertain and dispersed. Indeed, if one tries to find an analogue in Melanesian societies, then inspiration may appear everywhere, as a rather normative sort of claim and experience. In her reflections upon ethnographic revelation, Strathern reveals that she was mesmerised or ‘dazzled’ by her first sight in Hagen of mounted pearlshells, carried by two men hurrying to a ceremonial exchange (1999: 8). The image anticipated her own emphasis on prestations and the modes of analysis that followed and continue to organise her work. For me, the equivalent dazzle is provided by an image highlighted by prisoners I worked with. It is a gesture that might also be read as a version of the kind of sociality I am wanting to redescribe as a form of inspiration. When an inmate sneezes at Bomana, I was frequently told, he immediately asks himself ‘who calls out my name?’ (Reed 2003: 12– 13). Standing upright, the sneezer extends his arm outwards, bending the forearm up and down, while rotating his body in a clockwise movement. At the point his elbow bone cracks, he freezes and examines the direction

Inspiring Strathern

173

his arm is pointing. That angle is taken to show the location of those beyond the jail that are thinking of him and thus inadvertently causing his nasal expulsion. Inmates offered different variations on this scene. If someone has an earache this too means that kin or friends outside are talking about him. At such moments the man concerned puts his hand to his ear and turns his head back and round; whatever position stops the ringing indicates the direction of those persons. Similar explanations and appropriate responses were provided for headaches, hiccups, pulsating veins and dead legs. Dreams too were interpreted in this fashion (2003: 14). When a relative at home dies it is said that the inmate will see the deceased in his sleep. When a prisoner dreams of sex with a woman, it is said that she must be thinking of him, or that Satan or a spirit is tricking him. Other dreams are attributed to the power and intervention of court, of enemies or of God.4 Partly, the comparison appeals because just like the reports of inspired states given by Williamson and his writing-readers, these events emphasise an embodied sensation of agencies acting through one. In both examples subjects appear to share a belief that certain actions (such as the composition of words in a poem or novel, a dream or a sneeze) have a life of their own, that the individual who enacts them does not straightforwardly originate or anticipate them. They seem to suggest an expectation that persons must acknowledge the source or influence of what happens to them. Indeed, elsewhere, I have postulated that if one imagines a contemporary aesthetic of existence for the prisoners at Bomana it might lie precisely here: in the need or compulsion to demonstrate that someone else always causes one’s actions (2003: 164–5). In this depiction, the ethical subject is one who continually reveals that truth through his or her response to events; or, as it were, by making themselves appear inspired. At Bomana the aesthetic is all the more impressive because inmates find themselves in a place where the performance of ‘inspiration’ and recognition of external causes is disruptive or painful. Being made to 4

The notion that dreams are caused by external actors such as spirits or ghosts is not exclusive to Bomana. Across Melanesian societies, anthropologists report the relational dimension of dreaming, the fact that dreams cannot be reduced to the product or imagination of a single mind or consciousness (cf. Meggitt 1962; Wagner 1972; Stephen 1979; Weiner 1986; Herdt 1987; Lattas 1993; Gillison 1993).

174

Adam Reed

think of those one knows and loves outside the jail can be upsetting, a reminder of what men are missing and of their inability to meet obligations, including the needs of parents, wives and children. What they fear is not just the disturbance of their own minds but also the ruin of the thoughts and feelings of others. If prisoners are made to dwell on kin then the expectation is that those persons will in turn be made to dwell on them and start to worry (2003: 15). It is for this reason that inmates remain ambivalent about receiving letters and visits. In fact what many long-term convicts claim they really want is to forget those they have left behind outside and instead concentrate on life and persons inside the jail. To sneeze or be inspired therefore is something that occurs despite their wish to prevent it. As I readily admit, this definition of their arts of existence is as much my description of the wider Melanesian sociality outlined by Strathern. In particular, it reveals the inspiration of the chapter in The gender of the gift entitled ‘Cause and effect’. Her revelation there is that while Melanesian subjects may insist that they act for themselves, this does not necessarily mean that they claim that they author those actions (1988: 273, and 1999: 239). Indeed, she holds that they are careful to distinguish the action from its cause, which is invariably assigned elsewhere. Strathern’s Melanesians are famously subjects who always claim to act with another in mind. So, ‘if a wife is agent, the one who acts, then her husband is the cause of her acting’ (Strathern 1988: 272). It is that apparently simple observation that allows Strathern to make these subjects display a relational knowledge, to imagine, for instance, that persons may in fact be composites or assemblages of their own connections. Returning to the category of literary inspiration, what her work suggests to me is that the blurring of agency that Clark analyses may contain even more dynamism than he allows. In short, my attention needs to fall on the kinds of interactions that an inspired state really describes. Truly to acknowledge the dilemma of my sneezing prisoners, I hold that this must include an exploration of some of that condition’s constraints or potential problems. Henry Williamson Society members might celebrate the rewards of the creative process, but they also acknowledge its costs. In particular, they highlight the disadvantages of the inspired writer’s life. At Society

Inspiring Strathern

175

meetings (and in the Society journal) this issue is the subject of heated discussion; over drinks and dinner, members exchange anecdotes they have read or heard about Williamson. These include accounts of the author’s quick temper and irritability, his reported mood swings, whimsicality, impatience and single-mindedness. However, for readers, the extreme nature of this behaviour is further evidence of the genius that they identify; I was regularly told that the author’s life should not be measured against the usual standards of social propriety. Just as inspired writers do not control the words that flow through them, so they cannot be held fully responsible for their everyday actions. As one member explained to me, ‘he had to be like that, he was so creative that obviously he was going to be hellish to live with’. In fact readers believe that of anyone, Williamson himself suffered the most from the gift of inspiration that he received. For one of that condition’s worst effects is said to be isolation or loneliness, an inevitable detachment from the mundane world and its concerns. According to Society members, the unhappiness that Williamson felt throughout his writing life was a direct consequence of experiencing inspired states and thus being made to feel apart. As they point out, this dilemma is constantly described in Williamson’s writings. The author presents himself (and his fictional author characters) as a man trapped inside the creative process. ‘Writing’, the reader is regularly told, ‘is not living’ (Williamson 1942: 40); it is the very opposite of normal modes of existence. Instead of acting in the material world, Williamson claims to live almost entirely in the inspired imagination, access to which is blocked to others. This means that ordinary perceptions, those held by the great mass of people, are for him thrown into doubt. The writer who experiences the ‘inner flash’ of inspiration, Williamson claims, cannot help but question the world that others take for granted (1937: 61). Not only does inspiration perceptually separate him from the people immediately around him, it saps all his strength for human contact. After long bouts of composition (Society members are fond of highlighting both the extraordinary length of these writing sessions – it was said that sometimes Williamson wrote all day and all night – and the prodigious amount of text produced: by some accounts, over a thousand words an hour), the author claims to be exhausted and emotionally empty, unable to do anything but rest.

176

Adam Reed

Indeed, the need to be alone is partly presented as a preventative measure, protecting the writer from persons (usually his wife and children) who might further drain his energy reserves. The reader is told that ‘an artist needed periods of freedom and irresponsibility in the true sense of the word in order to prepare himself for the next leap, or act of creation’ (1942: 56–7). Between these inspired states, Williamson fretted, anxiously wondering when the creative impulse would return (and if it did, whether inspiration would be interrupted): ‘I simmer all the rest of the day, “What am I going to write tomorrow? It’ll come, it’ll come”, and I treasure it, as though I’m a hen that’s laid an egg’ (1984: 29). When towards the end of his life the flow of words did eventually stop (Farson 1982: 180; Anne Williamson 1995: 305), it is reported that he felt a range of contradictory emotions; on the one hand grief for a lost imaginative freedom and on the other hand relief for the end of creativity’s tyranny. It is at this point that Society members tend to distinguish themselves from their favourite author. Unlike Williamson, they are not prepared to sacrifice their lives to inspired writing. Those who claim to experience literary inspiration acknowledge the dangers of getting lost in the creative process; they are careful to ensure that it does not override their commitments to family and friends. Indeed, their ability to do so is for them seen as further evidence that they do not share the genius of Williamson. For the truly inspired subject has no choice but to write. According to Society members, Williamson felt compelled to compose, driven by the creative forces that he believed possessed him (as one contributor to the Society journal put it, ‘it was as if writing was as necessary to him as breathing’ (Duncan 1982: 18)).5 Not only did these forces alienate him from his family, they left him unable to act effectively; as the Society’s writing-readers emphasise, Williamson frequently decried the fact that he couldn’t be a ‘man of action’ (1937: 388), someone who took charge or authored events.

5

Wilson argues that compulsive writers treat writing as a form of sacrifice (1999: xix). Instead of ‘self-containment’, the writer is focused on ‘self-expulsion’ (Wilson 1999: xxxi). According to Wilson, his or her recklessness is motivated by a wish to know life fully through writing, irrespective of the consequences. For Williamson, writing may be compulsive, yet it is an act not of self-expulsion but of self-voidance; here the self of the writer is eclipsed by becoming a medium for an external force.

Inspiring Strathern

177

In this peculiarly Euro-American dilemma, the really inspired writer gains the creative impulse at the cost of his ability to act for himself. If inspiration is ‘dictation by an other’ then that alien presence can also be used to challenge the autonomy and composition of both the author and the work. Critics of Williamson, for instance, may argue that the style and sentiment of his writing is too like that of Jefferies, one of the dead authors he claims inspired him. Equally, while asserting inspiration by Strathern may empower my writing, recognition of that claim may also be used to throw its quality into doubt. Others, for example, may complain that when they read me they just hear her; after giving my first department seminar at another university, I remember being taken aside by an eminent professor and advised to ‘drop the Strathern’. In this instance, inspiration is rendered a form of copying or negative possession. The problem might become that inspired writers start to believe the criticism, reach a point where they can no longer locate themselves in the work they produce (another peculiarly Euro-American concern). Indeed, I think most students of Strathern have moments when they suspect that she is the cause of everything: not just the hidden agent in one’s work, but the source of the awards, grants, jobs and publishing contracts that one does get and inadvertently the cause of those one doesn’t get. At such times, there can even develop a desire to expel her, to act in a way that demonstrates she is not at the root of events, not the cause of the effects produced by one’s work. Conceived through the prism of inspiration, Strathern can therefore emerge as a kind of agency or force in the world. Or put another way, as a mode of anxiety, brought on by the compulsion to try and think with her in mind. This can result in desires of expulsion, but also, as I believe the phrase ‘inspiring Strathern’ suggests, in dreams of reversing the flow of causation.6 Alongside the observation ‘I am inspired by Strathern’, some 6

The idea for the phrase and title ‘Inspiring Strathern’ emerged from my experience of another appropriation of the category of inspiration. For some time, the local authority of Edinburgh, my place of residence, has promoted the city through the rather dispiriting logo ‘Inspiring Capital’. Drawing on the quality of transitivity that Clark describes for inspiration, this phrase has a double meaning: the city council wishes to advertise that Edinburgh, the historical capital of Scotland, is an inspiring place to visit but also that the city, as a major centre of financial services, has the capacity to grow or inspire your money. (The latter claim has of course somewhat diminished in power since the financial crisis!)

178

Adam Reed

might hope to add the saving clause that ‘Strathern is inspired by me.’ That is, to locate evidence that we too can make her act with us in mind.7 Finally, of course, all this may create a problem for Strathern herself. Having subjects recognise her in the work of others must be a mixed blessing! Sometimes one wonders if she might wish to deny the authority it bestows. Indeed, one of the interesting things about inspiration, whether figured in its literary form or in its Melanesian analogue, is that it is not really possible for the assigned cause to reject the attribution. If I assert that ‘I am inspired by Strathern’ then there is nothing she can do to counter that claim. In other words, influence always escapes her. Returning to Papua New Guinea (or at least to Melanesian anthropology), I wonder if these reflections on the power of inspiration might tell us something different about the peculiar split between cause and agency that Strathern describes. No doubt some readers will have noticed that there is a good deal of slippage in my attempt to render examples of English literary inspiration into analogues of her Melanesian sociality. While, for instance, the readers of Henry Williamson insist that during composition his words index the creative authority of other agencies, they do not make that claim challenge the moment of encompassment (a point signalled by Leach). Individuals I met have no problem recognising the artistry of the man or applying his name to the published text; they are, after all, members of a literary society concerned to celebrate and promote the works of a single author. Indeed, their narratives of reception insist that any effects from reading a novel are due to ‘Henry’ (see Reed 2004, 2011). In her chapter on ‘Cause and effect’ Strathern too is careful to distinguish between theories of agency and causality in Euro-America and those she identifies for Melanesian societies. In the former, Strathern tells us, agency tends to be viewed as a ‘subject (one person) acting upon an object (another person)’, but in the latter it is viewed as one subject acting on behalf of another subject or ‘with another subject in mind’ (1988: 272). One of the points of the contrast, I think, is to highlight the issue that causes in 7

Strathern is always generous in citing the work of her students, but it is a moot point whether this can provide satisfactory evidence for the reversal of influence.

Inspiring Strathern

179

Melanesia are not necessarily assigned the role of actor or agent. A sneeze at Bomana may index the fact that someone outside the jail is thinking of an inmate; however, that does not mean that he or she plans to make him sneeze. So subjects may claim to act with another in mind but they do not necessarily have to assert that this person exercises intentionality or will.8 As already referenced, a larger point of the contrast is to ensure that Strathern can have this observation reveal the workings of a relational imagination. In Melanesia, we are told, the action particularises a relation and obviates others; similarly, ‘the agent is construed as the one who acts because of those relationships and is revealed in his or her actions’ (Strathern 1988: 273). This may be the case, but what, I would argue, it may obscure is the dramatic accounts of forces and agencies acting in the world that subjects in places like Papua New Guinea do identify. Perhaps we also need a description of registered effect or impact, accounts of the presented arc or flow of actions (whether it is acting upon or acting through) that do not always conclude as indexes of relationality. To return to the example of Bomana, it is clear that for the inmate concerned a sneeze or dream evinces a relation, identifies a split between cause (subject outside the prison) and agent (subject inside the prison), but that does not prevent the impression that for him the sneeze or dream is also an event, something he believes that vitally happens to him. It is in that emphasis that I believe inspiration has something to add to her Melanesian sociality. The category may also throw up an interesting problem. If we wish to retain the idea that a definition of inspired creativity requires an element of exceptionality (a creative act, to be meaningful, must usually be distinguishable from uncreative acts, which must in turn appear the norm) then we may need to ask again what creativity looks like in Melanesia. For once inspiration is rendered as a satisfactory analogue of Strathernian sociality it loses some of its sense of originality. Her 8

In later writings, Strathern seems to weaken the point on intentionality. In Property, substance and effect, for instance, she states that in Melanesia it is ‘to the actions and intentions of persons that all kinds of effects are assigned’ (1999: 180). Here the emphasis is on identified actors who are claimed to intervene wilfully in the world, such as ancestors who deliberately obstruct business projects or orators who determine the location of election campaigns.

180

Adam Reed

Melanesians may well be a forceful illustration of creativity for us, but it cannot be for them. Instead this kind of ‘inspiration’ appears dull and commonplace. In that regard it is not really inspiration at all (in the spirit that we mean it). What then, we might ask ourselves, would an inspired act look like for them? Perhaps, to continue the play of inversions, the creative subject there might be someone who claims to be the cause of their own actions (see Reed 1999, 2003), an assertion, that if we take Strathern’s sociality seriously, would indeed provide an equivalent thrill of exceptionality. In all these twists and turns around the category of inspiration, the readers of Henry Williamson offer us another, final alternative. While the notion of inspired states allows some writing-readers to claim a privileged identity with their favourite author, it forces many other Society members to register a sense of insufficiency. For them, the genius of Williamson reflects back on what they regard as their own lack of creativity, the fact that they do not feel inspired when they write. One woman wistfully told me, ‘I don’t think I’ve got that quality. Oh I’d love to be able to be creative and let it all flow.’ These readers complain that they do not have the ideas or imagination to compose fiction. Instead of text emerging automatically, seemingly received rather than made, to them composition is a constant struggle. As a result they tend to restrict themselves to constructing texts of practical utility (letters, worksheets, lists, accounts, reports). For them, the event of literary writing fails to provide the moments of self-transcendence that Williamson describes; indeed, it achieves the reverse effect, leaving them feeling unremittingly in control of their own actions.9 Those who claim to lack inspiration seek explanations. In particular, they express regret for what they often regard as a failing imposed upon them by life circumstances. One reader, for instance, suggested that her inability to be inspired might be linked to the way she was raised as a child. She explained that her mother was someone who always kept busy 9

Clark points out that a paradox exists in the Romantic conception of inspiration (1997: 103). The writer’s claim to self-transcendence, with its emphasis on interiority and isolation, is only possible within an environment of mass readership, brought about by heightened levels of literacy and improved technology. It is possible because the writer no longer has to share the same space as his or her readers.

Inspiring Strathern

181

(a singer in the local choir, an actor in amateur dramatics, a folk dancer and active member of the local history society and Women’s Institute) and who expected her daughter to do the same. The instruction she remembers best from childhood was ‘You’ve got to be doing something!’ In her mother’s eyes, neither the act of fiction reading nor the act of imaginative writing counted as proper activities, and as a consequence she felt that she never let herself be inspired. This explanation – the idea that individual creativity is forestalled by too much purposeful action – I heard repeated in various forms by other Society members. Most notably, Williamson readers complained that family and work commitments prevented them from ever making time for the kind of writing they desired. When children grew up and left home or members retired, it was said to be too late; as one man expressed it, ‘the creativity had been knocked out of me’. For him and others, the opportunity to be inspired had long since passed them by. Even those readers who do compose stories and claim to experience inspired states highlight the difference between their writing efforts and that of their favourite author. For them, this is not just a matter of degrees of inspiration. The broader contrast lies in the reality that unlike Henry Williamson they are not published authors. In fact, as they are quick to point out, their compositions remain incomplete, just a stack of manuscript papers under the bed or files backed up on a household computer. These writing-readers know that the inspired state should only be the start of the composition process. Periods of creative flow, I was told, must be followed by the labour of redrafting, putting pieces of text together to make a coherent whole. Members often referred me to the hours Williamson spent tirelessly editing his manuscripts; most famously, it is reported that he rewrote one story seventeen times. This action is contrasted to the automatic writing of inspired states and held to be ‘work’, a slow, tedious and painful process. One of the major reasons that writing-readers give for the failure to get published is that they are simply unwilling to do this necessary industry. This may be because they fear the quality of their own intentional actions will be judged harshly, but equally it may be because they just don’t want to do the ‘hard graft’. They argue that for them the event of writing is principally about achieving inspiration (being acted upon and acted through)

182

Adam Reed

rather than making a finished and encompassed text that bears their name. In this regard, the writing-readers appear rather more like Strathern’s Melanesians than the published author. Through the act of redrafting, then, the agency of the literary writer, who is now the cause of her or his words, can at last be unmediated, even if it is now worryingly transparent and accountable. While the inspired text is said to write itself and index the agency of external forces, the published text is held to be the result of the writing subject’s conscious and deliberate intervention (i.e. it is authored). To Williamson readers, ironically, this transition often appears as an obstacle to creativity, the very opposite of the elated and productive state of inspiration that they value. But to the student of Strathern this distinction may allow some relief. I may be inspired by Strathern, but my mistakes, it seems, are reassuringly my own. By turning writing into ‘work’, rendering an inspired text uninspired, I might finally achieve self-recognition. With that promise in mind, I leave it up to you, my reader, to judge the true authority behind this essay.

Acknowledgements This chapter emerged out of a panel presentation at the biannual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Ljubljana, 2008. I am grateful for the support and comments of the panel organisers and volume editors, Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrovic´-Sˇteger, and also to the other panel contributors, in particular Tony Crook, James Leach and Thomas Yarrow. Over the years, conversations about Strathern with Annelise Riles, Hiro Miyazaki and Debbora Battaglia have been crucial. I would also like to thank Shari Sabeti for her comments and criticisms and Oskar Reed for his arrival. My general thanks go to the prisoners at Bomana jail with whom I worked and to the members of the The Henry Williamson Society for their generosity in sharing their enthusiasm for a favourite author.

Bibliography

Abel, Cecil. n.d. ‘The Kwato Story’. Photocopied typescript. Abram, Simone. 2002. ‘Planning and public-making in municipal government’, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 40: 21–34. 2004. ‘Personality and professionalism in a Norwegian District Council’, Planning Theory 3 (1): 21–40. 2006. ‘Materializing identities. Bricks coming out of the ground: reconstructing Norfolk Park’, University of Sheffield, HRI Online Publications. Available at: www.hrionline.ac.uk/matshef/abram/MSabram.htm (accessed April 2009). 2007. ‘Participatory depoliticisation: the bleeding heart of neo-liberalism’, in C. Neveu (ed.), Cultures et pratiques participatives: perspectives comparatives. Paris: l’Harmattan. Alfasi, Nurit. 2003. ‘Is public participation making urban planning more democratic? The Israeli experience’, Planning Theory and Practice 4 (2): 185–202. Amet, Arnold. 1995. ‘Severing the umbilical cord from the common law’, in J. Aleck and J. Rannells (eds.), Custom at the crossroads. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Faculty of Law. Atkinson, Rob. 2000. ‘Combating social exclusion in Europe: the new urban policy challenge’, Urban Studies 37: 1037–55. Bachnik, Jane M. 1983. ‘Recruitment strategies for household succession: rethinking Japanese household organization’, Man (n.s.) 18 (1): 160–82. Bashevkin, Sylvia. 1998. Women on the defensive: living through conservative times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Battaglia, Debbora. 1993. ‘At play in the fields (and borders) of the imaginary: transformations of forgetting in Melanesia’, Cultural Anthropology 8 (3): 20–32. 1994. ‘Retaining reality: some practical problems with objects as property’, Man (n.s.) 29 (3): 631–44. 2007. ‘Where do we find our monsters?’, in J. Edwards, P. Harvey and P. Wade (eds.), Anthropology and science: epistemologies in practice. Oxford and New York: Berg. Befu, Harumi. [1962] 2004. ‘Corporate emphasis and patterns of descent in the Japanese family’, in R. J. Smith and R. K. Beardsley (eds.), Japanese culture: its development and characteristics. London: Routledge. Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 183

184

Bibliography

Benthall, Jonathan. 1994. ‘The raw, the cooked and the Marilynated’, Anthropology Today 10 (6):15–16. Berg, Paul. 2004. ‘Autobiography’, Nobelprize.org. Available at: www.nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1980/berg-autobio.html (accessed August 2009). Berglund, Eeva. 1998. Knowing nature, knowing science: an ethnography of environmental activism. Cambridge: White Horse Press. 2007. Doing things differently: the Women’s Design Service at twenty. London: Women’s Design Service. 2008. ‘I wanted to be an academic, not “a creative” – notes on universities and the new capitalism’, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization (online) www.ephemeraweb.org, vol. 8 (3): 322–30. Bernal, Victoria. 1997. ‘Colonial moral economy and the discipline of development: the Gezira scheme and “modern” Sudan’, Cultural Anthropology 12 (4): 447–79. Bolton, Lissant. 2003. Unfolding the moon: enacting women’s kastom in Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Bonneuil, Christophe. 2000. ‘Development as experiment: science and state building in late colonial and postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970’, Osiris 15: 258–81. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boys, Jos and Lloyd Thomas, Katie. n.d. ‘The changing shape of gender and the built environment in the UK’, Gender and the built environment database. Available at: www.gendersite.org/pages/the_changing_shape_of_gender_ and_the_built_environment_in_the_uk.html (accessed February 2009). Brown, Keith. 1966. ‘Dozoku and the ideology of descent in rural Japan’, American Anthropologist 68 (5): 1129–47. Burgess, Gemma. 2008. ‘Planning and the gender equality duty – why does gender matter?’, People, Place & Policy Online 2 (3): 112–21. Butcher, David A. P. 1970. ‘The social survey’, in R. Chambers (ed.), The Volta resettlement experience. London: Pall Mall Press. Butler, Judith. [1990] 2007. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. 1993. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment). 2008. Inclusion by design: equality, diversity and the built environment. London. Caldeira, Teresa and Holston, James. 2005. ‘State and urban space in Brazil: from modernist planning to democratic interventions’, in A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds.), Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carsten, Janet and Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1995. About the house: Le´vi-Strauss and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, Rebecca and Mullin, Molly H. 2007. Where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered. Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series. New York: Berg. Chambers, Robert. 1970. ‘Introduction’, in R. Chambers (ed.), The Volta resettlement experience. London: Pall Mall Press.

Bibliography

185

Clark, Gracia. 1999. ‘Negotiating Asante family survival in Kumasi, Ghana’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 69 (1): 66–86. Clark, Timothy. 1997. The theory of inspiration: composition as a crisis of subjectivity in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth century ethnography, literature and art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Harry M. and Evans, Robert. 2002. ‘The third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science 32 (2): 235–96. Connelly, Stephen. 2006. ‘Looking inside public involvement: how is it made so ineffective and can we change this?’, Community Development Journal 41 (1): 13–24. Coombe, Rosemary. 1998. The cultural life of intellectual properties: authorship, appropriation and the law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Corsin-Jime´nez, Alberto. 2003. ‘On space as a capacity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 9 (1): 137–53. 2010. ‘How knowledge grows: an anthropological anamorphosis’, Open Anthropology Cooperative Press Working Paper Series 3. http://openanthcoop. net/press/category/working-papers/. Da Col, Giovanni. 2007. ‘The view from somewhen: events, bodies and the perspective of fortune around Khawa Karpo, a Tibetan sacred mountain in Yunnan province’, Inner Asia 9: 215–35. Danby, Miles. 1970. ‘House design’, in R. Chambers (ed.), The Volta resettlement experience. London: Pall Mall Press. De Carlo, Giancarlo. 2005. ‘Architecture’s public’, in J. Blundell, D. Petrescu and J. Till (eds.), Architecture and participation. Abingdon: Spon Press. De Landa, Manuel. 2002. Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London: Continuum Press. Demian, Melissa. 2006. ‘Reflecting on loss in Papua New Guinea’, Ethnos 71: 507–32. 2007. ‘“Land doesn’t come from your mother, she didn’t make it with her hands”: challenging matriliny in Papua New Guinea’, in H. Lim and A. Bottomley (eds.), Feminist perspectives on land law. London: RoutledgeCavendish. 2008. ‘Fictions of intention in the “cultural defense”’, American Anthropologist 110 (4): 432–42. De Oteyza, Carolina. 2006. Gender and the city: gender and community engagement tools and processes. Manchester: Manchester Women’s Network and the Community Audit and Evaluation Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University. Department for Communities and Local Government. n.d. ‘Best value and duty to involve’, Communities and Local Government. Available at: www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/performanceframeworkpartnerships/bestvalue/ (accessed April 2009). Diaw, Kofi and Schmidt-Kallert, Einhardt. 1990. Effects of Volta Lake resettlement in Ghana: a reappraisal after 25 years. Hamburg: Institute fu¨r Afrika-Kunde.

186

Bibliography

Dodoo, Martha. 1970. ‘A case study of a resettlement town: New Mpamu’, in R. Chambers (ed.), The Volta resettlement experience. London: Pall Mall Press. Duncan, Ronald. 1982. ‘Memories of Henry Williamson’, The Henry Williamson Society Journal 5: 18–22. Dwyer, Julia and Thorne, Anne. 2007. ‘Evaluating matrix: notes from inside the collective’, in D. Petrescu (ed.), Altering practices: feminist politics and poetics of space. London and New York: Routledge. Easterbrook, Frank H. and Fischel, Daniel. 1989. ‘The corporate contract’, Columbia Law Review 89: 1416–48. Edwards, Jeanette. 1998. ‘The need for “a bit of history”: place and past in English identity’, in Nadia Lovell (ed.), Locality and belonging. London: Routledge. 2002. ‘Taking “public understanding” seriously’, New Genetics and Society 21 (3): 315–25. Edwards, Jeanette, Harvey, Penny and Wade, Peter. 2007. ‘Introduction’, in J. Edwards, P. Harvey and P. Wade (eds.), Anthropology and science: epistemologies in practice. Oxford and New York: Berg. English Heritage. 2005. Guidance on the management of conservation areas August 2005. London: HMSO. Escobar, Arturo. 1994. ‘Welcome to Cyberia: notes on the anthropology of cyberculture’, Cultural Anthropology 35 (3): 211–31. 1995. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farson, Daniel. 1982. Henry: an appreciation of Henry Williamson. London: Michael Joseph. Ferguson, Heather M., Ng’habi, Kija R., Walder, Thomas, Kadungula, Demetrius, Moore, Sarah J., Lyimo, Issa, Russell, Tanya L., Urassa, Honorathy, Mshinda, Hassan, Killeen, Gerry F., and Knols, Bart G. J., 2008. ‘Establishment of a large semi-field system for experimental study of African malaria vector ecology and control in Tanzania’, Malaria Journal 7: 158. Available at: www.malariajournal.com/content/7/1/158 (accessed 21 February 2009). Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life in the Zambian copper belt. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Filer, Colin. 1997. ‘Compensation, rent and power in Papua New Guinea’, in S. Toft (ed.), Compensation for resource development in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby and Canberra: Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea and Australian National University. 2006. ‘Custom, law and ideology in Papua New Guinea’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 7 (1): 65–84. Forty, Adrian. 2000. Words and buildings: a vocabulary of modern architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson. Foster, Hal. 2006. ‘Blind spots: Hal Foster on the art of Joachim Koester’, ArtForum 44 (8): 212–17, 266, 274.

Bibliography

187

Foster, Robert J. 1992. ‘Commoditization and the emergence of kastam as a cultural category: a New Ireland case in comparative perspective’, Oceania 62: 284–94. 2009. ‘Corporate oxymorons and the anthropology of corporations’, Dialectical Anthropology 34 (1): 95–102. Freud, Sigmund. [1899] 1953. ‘Screen memories’, in James Strachey (ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume IV (1900): The interpretation of dreams (first part). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. Gaonkar, Parameshwar and Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘Technologies of public forms: circulation, transfiguration, recognition’, Public Culture 15 (3): 385–98. Garner, Karen. 2004. ‘Global feminism and postwar reconstruction: the World YWCA visitation to occupied Japan, 1947’, Journal of World History 15: 191–227. Geest, Sjaak Van Der. 1998. ‘Yebisa Wo Fie: growing old and building a house in the Akan culture of Ghana’, Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 13: 333–59. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Gendersite: Gender and the built environment database. 2008. Available at: www. gendersite.org (accessed April 2009). Gerlach, Michael L. 1992. ‘The Japanese Corporate Network: A Blackmodel analysis’, Administrative Science Quarterly 37: 105–39. Geschiere, Peter and Gugler, Josef. 1998. ‘Introduction: the urban–rural connection: changing issues of belonging and identification’, Africa 68 (3): 309–19. Gieryn, Thomas. 2006. ‘City as truth-spot’, Social Studies of Science 36 (1): 5–38. Gillies, Michael Thomas. 2000. Mayfly on the stream of time: a medical naturalist’s life. Hamsey: Messuage Books. Gillison, Gillian. 1993. Between culture and fantasy: a New Guinea Highlands mythology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gordon, Beate Sirota. 1998. The only woman in the room: a memoir. New York: Kodansha America. Greater London Council. 1984. Greater London Development Plan: as proposed to be altered by the Greater London Council. London: Greater London Council. 1986. Changing places: positive action on women and planning. London: Greater London Council. Greed, Clara. 1996. Introducing town planning. Volume 1. Harlow: Longman. Grether, Reinhold. 2000. ‘How the etoy campaign was won: an agent’s report’, Leonardo 33 (4): 321–4. Grieco, John P., Achee, Nicole L., Andre, Richard G. and Roberts, Donald R. 2000. ‘A comparison study of house entering and exiting behaviour of Anopheles vestitipennis (Diptera: Culicidae) using experimental huts sprayed with DDT or deltamethrin in the southern district of Toledo, Belize, CA’, Journal of Vector Ecology 25: 62–73. Gugler, Josef. 1997. ‘Life in a dual system revisited: urban–rural ties in Enugu, Nigeria, 1961–1987’, in J. Gugler (ed.), Cities in the developing world: issues, theory and policy. New York: Oxford University Press.

188

Bibliography

Haddow, A. J. 1942. ‘The mosquito fauna and climate of native huts at Kisumu, Kenya’, Bulletin of Entomological Research 33: 91–142. Hanson, Allan and Hanson, Louise (eds.). 1990. Art and identity in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge. Hayden, Corinne P. 1995. ‘Gender, genetics, and generation: reformulating biology in lesbian kinship’, Cultural Anthropology 10 (1): 41–63. Hayden, Dolores and Wright, Gwendolyn. 1976. ‘Architecture and urban planning’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (4): 923–33. Hayles, Katherine N. 1999. How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, language, thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Hendry, Joy. 1987. ‘Marriage and the family in modernising Japan’, Saeculum 38: 4–18. Henke, Christopher R. 2000. ‘Making a place for science: the field trial’, Social Studies of Science 30: 483–511. Herdt, Gilbert. 1987. ‘Selfhood and discourse in Sambia dream sharing’, in B. Tedlock (ed.), Dreaming: anthropological and psychological interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herle, Anita, Eliott, Mark and Empson, Rebecca (eds.). 2009. Assembling bodies: art, science and imagination. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge: University of Cambridge and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Hill, Polly. 1970. Migrant cocoa farmers of southern Ghana: a study in rural capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humphrey, Caroline and Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1992. Barter, exchange and value: an anthropological approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huszar, Laszlo. 1970. ‘Resettlement planning’, in R. Chambers (ed.), The Volta resettlement experience. London: Pall Mall Press. Independent State of Papua New Guinea. 1975. Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Available at: www.paclii.org/pg/legis/consol_act/ cotisopng534/ (accessed April 2011). 2000. Underlying Law Act 2000. Available at: www.paclii.org/pg/legis/consol_ act/ula2000173/ (accessed April 2011). Ingold, Tim. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge. Irwin, Alan. 2006. ‘The politics of talk? Coming to terms with the “new” scientific governance’, Social Studies of Science 36 (2): 229–320. Iwai, Katsuhito. 1999. ‘Persons, things and corporations: the corporate personality controversy and comparative corporate governance’, American Journal of Comparative Law 47 (4): 583–632. Jacob, Marie-Andre´e. 2009. ‘The shared history: unknotting fictive kinship and legal process’, Law Society Review 43 (1): 95–126. Japan Small Business Research Institute, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry 2009. White paper on small and medium enterprises in Japan: finding

Bibliography

189

vitality through innovation and human resources. Japan Small Business Research Institute. Available at: www.chusho.meti.go.jp/pamflet/hakusyo/ h21/h21_1/2009hakusho_eng.pdf (accessed April 2011). Jasanoff, Sheila. 2003. ‘Technologies of humility: citizen participation in governing science’, Minerva 41: 223–44. 2005. Design on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jessep, Owen. 1998. ‘The elusive role of custom in the underlying law of Papua New Guinea’, Melanesian Law Journal 26: 1–22. Jolly, Margaret. 1994. Women of the place: kastom, colonialism and gender in Vanuatu. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Jones, Peris. 2003. ‘Urban regeneration’s poisoned chalice: is there an impasse in (community) participation-based policy?’, Urban Studies 40 (3): 581–601. Karatani, Kojin. 2003. Transcritique: on Kant and Marx. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kato, Ichiro. 1989. ‘The adoption of majors in Japan’, in J. M. Eekelaar and D. Pearl (eds.), An aging world: dilemmas and challenges for law and social policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, Cindi. 2006. ‘Power, space and terror: social reproduction and the public environment’, in S. Low and N. Smith (eds.), The politics of public space. London and New York: Routledge. Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of recognition: powers and hazards of representation in an Indonesian society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2008. ‘Market, materiality, and moral metalanguage’, Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 27–42. Keesing, Roger M. 1989. ‘Creating the past: custom and identity in the contemporary Pacific’, The Contemporary Pacific 1: 19–42. Kelly, Ann. 2008. ‘Pragmatic evidence and the politics of everyday practice’, in T. Lau, C. High and L. Chua (eds.), Questions of evidence: ethnography and anthropological forms of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kelsen, Hans. [1934] 2002. Pure theory of law. Trans. Max Knight. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelty, Christopher M. 2008. Two bits: the cultural significance of free software. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Kitaoji, Hironobu. 1971. ‘The structure of the Japanese family’, American Anthropologist 73 (5): 1036–57. Kohler, Robert E. 2002. Labscapes and landscapes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kondo, Dorrine. 1990. Crafting selves: power, gender and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ku¨chler, Susanne. 2002. Malanggan: art, memory and sacrifice. Oxford: Berg. Kuhlow, F. 1962. ‘Field experiments on the behaviour of malaria vectors in an unsprayed hut and in a hut sprayed with DDT in northern Nigeria’, World Health Organization Bulletin 26: 93–102. Lattas, Andrew. 1993. ‘Sorcery and colonialism: illness, dreams and death as political languages in West New Britain’, Man 28: 51–77.

190

Bibliography

Latour, Bruno. 1988. The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve. 1979. Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lawson, Rowena M. 1958. ‘The structure, migration and resettlement of Ewe fishing units’, African Studies Review 17 (1): 21–7. Leach, Edmund. 1961. Pul Eliya: a village in Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leach, James. 2004. ‘Modes of creativity’, in E. Hirsch and M. Strathern (eds.), Transactions and creations: property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2007. ‘Differentiation and encompassment: A critique of Alfred Gell’s theory of the abduction of creativity’, in A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds.), Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge. Lebner, Ashley and Deiringer, Sabine (eds.). 2009. Special issue: Bureaucratic knowledge practices, the William Wyse Professorship and the work of Marilyn Strathern. Cambridge Anthropology 28 (3): 2008/9. Lentz, Carola. 2000. ‘Contested identities: the history of ethnicity in northwestern Ghana’, in C. Lentz and P. Nugent (eds.), Ethnicity in Ghana: the limits of invention. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lindsay, S. W., Adiamah, J. H., Miller, J. E., Pleass, R. J. and Armstrong, R. J. 1993. ‘Variation in attractiveness of human subjects to malaria mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) in the Gambia’, Journal of Medical Entomology 30 (2): 368–73. Lindsay, Steve W., Ansell, Juliet, Selman, Colin, Cox, Val, Hamilton, Katie and Walraven, Gijs. 2000. ‘Effect of pregnancy on exposure to malaria mosquitoes’, The Lancet 355 (9219): doi: 10.1016/50140–6736(00)02334–5. Lovenduski, Joni. 2007. ‘Unfinished business: equality policy and the changing context of state feminism in Great Britain’, in J. Outshoorn and J. Kantola (eds.), Changing state feminism. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lubbock, Jules. 2007. ‘1947 and all that: why has the act lasted so long?’, in I. Boyd Whyte (ed.), Man-made future: planning, education and design in mid-twentieth century Britain. London: Routledge. Lynch, Michael and Cole, Simon. 2005. ‘Science and technology studies on trial: dilemmas of expertise’, Social Studies of Science 25 (2): 269–311. Mackenzie, Maureen A. 1990. ‘The Telefol string bag: a cultural object with androgynous forms’, in B. Craig and D. Hyndman (eds.), Children of Afek: tradition and change among the Mountain Ok of Central New Guinea. Sydney: Oceania Monographs. Malima, Robert C., Magesa, Stephen M., Tungu, Patrick K., Mwingira, Victor, Magogo, Frank S., Sudi, Wema, Mosha, Frank W., Curtis, Christopher F.,

Bibliography

191

Maxwell, Caroline and Rowland, Mark. 2008. ‘An experimental hut evaluation of Olyset nets against anopheline mosquitoes after seven years’ use in Tanzanian villages’, Malaria Journal 7: 38. available at: www.malariajournal. com/content/7/1/38. Accessed 21 February 2009. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manuh, Takyiwaa. 2003. ‘Efie or the meanings of “home” among female and male Ghanaian migrants in Toronto, Canada and returned migrants to Ghana’, in K. Koser (ed.), New African diasporas. London and New York: Routledge. Marres, Nortie. 2009. ‘Testing powers of engagement: green living experiments, the ontological turn and the undoability of involvement’, European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 117–33. Massey, Doreen. 2007. World city. Cambridge: Polity Press. Matsumoto, Emi. 2010. ‘Lost in translation: the reception of German law in Japan’, Housei Riron 42 (3): 110–27. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. ‘Towards a sociopoetics of interface design: etoy, eToys, and TOYWAR’, Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 14 (1): 121–38. McLard, Anne and Anderson, Ken. 2008. ‘Focus on Facebook: who are we anyway?’, Anthropology News 49 (3): 10–11. McLeod, Mary. 2000. ‘Everyday and “other” spaces’, in J. Rendell et al. (eds.), Gender, space, architecture. London and New York: Routledge. Meggitt, Mervin. 1962. ‘Dream interpretation among the Mae Enga of New Guinea’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18: 216–29. Melhuish, Clare. 2007. ‘Inhabiting the image: architecture and social identity in the post-industrial city’. PhD thesis. Buckingham New University and Brunel University, London. Middleton, John. 1979. ‘Home-town: a study of an urban centre in southern Ghana’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 49 (3): 246–57. Miescher, Stephan. 2007. ‘The Volta River Authority: a public service company in Ghana’, in European Conference on African Studies, 11–14 July 2007. Leiden: African Studies Centre. Miller, Daniel. 2003. ‘The virtual moment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (1): 57–75. Millo, Yuval and Lezaun, Javier. 2006. ‘Regulatory experiments: genetically modified crops and financial derivatives on trial’, Science and Public Policy 33 (3): 179–90. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2004. The method of hope: anthropology, philosophy, and Fijian knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Moore, Sarah. 2008. ‘Replacing DDT: rigorous evaluation of spatial repellents for the control of vector borne diseases’. Project Grant, Grand Challenges in Global Health, William and Melinda Gates Foundation. Awarded 1 January 2009. Mosse, David. 2001. ‘“People’s knowledge”, participation and patronage: operations and representations in rural development’, in B. Cook and U. Kothari (eds.), Participation – the new tyranny? London: Zed Press. Mshinda, Hassan, Killeen, Gerry F., Mukabana, Wolfgang R., Mathenge, Evan M., Mboera, Leonard E. G. and Knols, Bart G. J., 2004. ‘Development of

192

Bibliography

genetically modified mosquitoes in Africa’, The Lancet, Infectious Diseases 4 (5): 264–5. Muirhead-Thomson, R. C. 1947. ‘The effects of house spraying with pyrethrum and DDT on Anopheles gambiae and A. kelas in and around Lagos’, Bulletin of Entomological Research 38 (3): 449–64. Mu¨ller, Andreas. 2008. ‘The fundamental protagonist’, Field Journal 2 (1): 75–82. Available at: www.field-journal.org/index.php?page=journal-2 (accessed February 2009). Mu¨nster, Ana. 2001. ‘Digitality: approximate aesthetics’, CTheory.net. Available at: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=290 (accessed March 2009). Nakane, Chie. 1967. Kinship and economic organization in rural Japan. London: Athlone Press. Newlyn, Lucy. 2000. Reading, writing, and romanticism: the anxiety of reception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nowotny, Helga. 2003. ‘Dilemma of expertise: democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge’, Science and Public Policy 30 (3): 151–6. Nowotny, Helga, Scott, Peter and Gibbons, Michael. 2003. ‘Introduction – ‘Mode 2’ revisited: the new production of knowledge’, Minerva 41: 179–94. Nukunya, G. K. 1969. Kinship and marriage among the Anlo Ewe. London: Athlone Press. Obeng, Samuel. 1979. Selected speeches of Kwame Nkrumah. Vol. 2. Accra: Affram Publications. Obusu-Mensah, Kwaku. 1980. Ghana’s Volta resettlement scheme: the long-term consequences of post-colonial state planning. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications. Oppong, Christine. 1981. Middle class African marriage: a family study of Ghanaian civil servants. London: George Allen and Unwin. Ottley, Bruce. 2002. ‘Reconciling modernity and tradition: Papua New Guinea’s underlying law act’, Reform 80 (22–25): 70–1. Oxfam. 2009. ‘Regender – working with women, men and regeneration’, Oxfam. org.uk Available at: www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/ukpoverty/regender.html (accessed April 2009). Palma˚s, Karl and von Busch, Otto. 2006. Abstract hacktivism: the making of a hacker culture. Mute Publishing. Panagia, Davide 2006. The poetics of political thinking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pestre, Dominique. 2008. ‘Challenges for the democratic management of technoscience: governance, participation and the political today’, Science as Culture 17 (2): 101–19. Petrescu, Doina. 2007. ‘Altering practices’, in D. Petrescu (ed.), Altering practices: feminist politics and poetics of space. London: Routledge. Petrovic´-Sˇteger, Maja. In press. ‘Digital afterlife: interactive formats of mourning’, Journeys, October 2011. Berghahn Journals. Pigg, Stacey Leigh. 1992. ‘Inventing a social category through place: social representations and development in Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (3): 491–513.

Bibliography

193

Pinch, Trevor. 1993. “Testing – one, two, three . . . testing!”: toward a sociology of testing’, Science, Technology and Human Values 18 (1): 25–41. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Power, Michael. 2004. Briefing: the risk management of everything. London: Institute of Chartered Accountants. Available at: www.icaew.com/index. cfm/route/117635/icaew_ga/pdf (accessed February 2009). Putnin¸a, Aivita. 2006. ‘Men in Latvia. Situation outline. Demographic situation: Present and future’. Strategic Analysis Commission under the Auspices of the President of Latvia. Riga: Zinatne Publishers. 2007. ‘Sexuality, masculinity and homophobia: Latvian case’, in R. Kuhar and J. Taka´cs (eds.), Everyday life of GLBT in Eastern and Central Europe. Ljubljana: The Peace Institute (Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies). Putnin¸a, Aivita et al. 2007. Vardarbība un veselība: zin¸ojums par situāciju Latvijā [Violence and health: report on situation in Latvia]. Ministry of Health, Republic of Latvia, WHO. Rabinow, Paul. 1996. The anthropology of reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raco, Mike. 2003. ‘New labour, community and the future of urban renaissance’, in R. Imrie and M. Raco (eds.), Urban renaissance? New Labour, community and urban policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Rapley, R. E. 1961. ‘Notes on the construction of experimental huts’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 24: 659–63. Reed, Adam. 1999. ‘Anticipating individuals. Modes of vision and their social consequence in a Papua New Guinean prison’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5: 43–56. 2003. Papua New Guinea’s ‘last place’: experiences of constraint in a postcolonial prison. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2004. ‘Expanding ‘Henry’: fiction reading and its artifacts in a British literary society’, American Ethnologist 31 (1): 111–22. 2005. “My blog is me”: texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)’, Ethnos 70: 220–42. 2011. Literature and agency in English fiction reading: a study of The Henry Williamson Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rider, Barry A. K., and Yukata, Tajimi. 1998. Commercial law in a global context: some perspectives in Anglo-Japanese law. New York: Kluwer Law International. Riles, Annelise. 1998. ‘Infinity within the brackets’, American Ethnologist 25 (3): 378–98. 2000. The network inside out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. ‘Law as object’, in S. Merry and D. Brenneis (eds.), Legal legacies, current crises: Fiji and Hawaii. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. 2004a. ‘Property as legal knowledge: means and ends’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10 (4): 775–95. 2004b. ‘Real time: unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge’, American Ethnologist 31: 392–405.

194

Bibliography

2005. ‘A new agenda for the cultural study of law: taking on the technicalities’, Buffalo Law Review 53: 973–1033. 2006. ‘Introduction: in response’, in A. Riles (ed.), Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2011 (in press). Collateral knowledge: legal reasoning in global financial markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogers, Debborah. 2009. ‘I poke dead people: the paradox of Facebook’. Times Higher Education, 18 June 2009. Roitman, Janet. 2005. Fiscal disobedience: an anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rollason, Will. 2008. ‘Football and postcolonial subjectivity, Panapompom, Papua New Guinea’. PhD thesis, University of Manchester. Royal Town Planning Institute. 2007. Gender and planning: good practice note 7. Available at: www.rtpi.org.uk/item/1387/23/5/3 (accessed April 2009). Russell, Edmund. 2001. War and nature: fighting humans and insects with chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, Edward. [1976] 2005. The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schirmacher, Wolfgang. 1999. Art(ificial) perception: Nietzsche and culture after Nihilism. Toronto: European Graduate School. Schmitt, Carl. [1922] 2006. Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, David, M. [1968] 1980. American kinship: a cultural account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, Tatjana and Till, Jeremy. 2008. ‘Alternate currents: an introduction’, Architectural Research Quarterly (ARQ) 12(2): 109–11. Shapin, Steven. 1988. ‘The house of the experiment in seventeenth century England’, Isis, A Special Issue on Artifact and Experiment (September 1988), 79 (3): 373–404. Shapiro, Jordan E. 2003. ‘Settling refugees, unsettling the nation: Ghana’s Volta River resettlement scheme and the ambiguities of development planning, 1952–1970’. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. Sharr, Adam. 2006. Heidegger’s hut. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shishido, Zenichi. 2001. ‘Reform in Japanese corporate law and corporate governance: current changes in historical perspective’, American Journal of Comparative Law 49 (4): 653–77. Sholdt, I. L., Holloway, M. I., Grothaus, R. H. and Schreck, C. E. 1976. ‘Dwelling space repellents: effect upon behavioural responses of mosquitoes in Ethiopia’, Mosquito News 36: 327–31. Simmons, S. W. et al. 1945. ‘Techniques and apparatus used in experimental studies on DDT as an insecticide for mosquitoes’, Public Health Reports, Washington Supplement 186: 3–20. Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry 1988. ‘Share of SMEs in the Japanese economy’. Available at: www.chusho. meti.go.jp/sme_english/outline/07/01.html. (accessed 12 April 2011).

Bibliography

195

Smith, Alec. 1963. ‘Principles in assessment of insecticides by experimental huts’, Nature 198: 171–3. 1993. Insect Man. London: Radcliffe Press. Solesbury, William. 2001. Working paper 1: Evidence based policy: Whence it came and where it’s going. ESRC UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice, Queen Mary University of London. www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/ 03/45/84/wp1.pdf (accessed April 2009). Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai and Sosnina, Olga. Forthcoming. ‘Postsocialism as a chronotope: re-membering post-Soviet public at the exhibition of gifts to Soviet leaders.’ Stelarc. 2005. ‘Prosthetic head. Intelligence, awareness and agency’, 1000 days of theory Available at: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=490 (accessed 16 January 2009). Stephen, Michelle. 1979. ‘Dreams of change: the innovative role of altered states of consciousness in traditional Melanesian religion’, Oceania 50: 3–22. Stratford, Helen. 2007. ‘Micro-strategies of resistance’, in D. Petrescu (ed.), Altering practices: feminist politics and poetics of space. London: Routledge. Stratford, Helen, Petrescu, Doina and Petcou, Constantin. 2008. ‘Form-TransInform: the “poetic” resistance in architecture’, ARQ/Architectural Research Quarterly 12 (2): 149–58. Strathern, Andrew. 1975. ‘Why is shame on the skin?’, Ethnology 14: 347–56. Strathern, Andrew and Strathern, Marilyn. 1971. Self-decoration in Mount Hagen. London: Duckworth. Strathern, Marilyn. 1979. ‘The self in self-decoration’, Oceania 49: 241–57. 1981. Kinship at the core: an anthropology of Elmdon, a village in north-west Essex in the nineteen-sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991. Partial connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield updated edition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. 1992a. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992b. ‘Qualified value: the perspective of gift exchange’, in C. Humphrey and H. Hugh-Jones (eds.), Barter, exchange and value: an anthropological approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992c. Reproducing the future: essays on anthropology, kinship and the new reproductive technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1993. ‘One-legged gender’, Visual Anthropology Review 9 (1): 42–50. 1999. ‘Pre-figured features: a view from the Papua New Guinea Highlands’, in Property, substance and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone Press. 2000a. ‘The tyranny of transparency’, British Educational Research Journal 26 (3): 309–21. (ed.) 2000b. Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. London and New York: Routledge. 2001. ‘The patent and the Malanggan’, Theory, Culture and Society 18: 1–26.

196

Bibliography

2004a. Commons and borderlands: working papers on interdisciplinarity, accountability and the flow of knowledge. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. 2004b. ‘Transactions: an analytical foray’, in E. Hirsch and M. Strathern (eds.), Transactions and creations: property debates and the stimulus of Melanesia. Oxford: Berghahn. 2005a. Kinship, law and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005b. ‘Experiments in interdisciplinarity’, Social Anthropology 13 (1): 75–90. 2006a. ‘A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 12: 191–209. 2006b. ‘Bullet proofing: a tale from the United Kingdom’, in A. Riles (ed.), Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2007. ‘Old and new reflections’, in T. Lau, C. High and L. Chua (eds.), Questions of evidence: ethnography and anthropological forms of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009. ‘Bilums and pearlshells: production and reproduction’, in A. Herle, M. Elliott and R. Empson (eds.), Assembling bodies. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Sykes Karen. 2000. ‘Losing interest: the devaluation of Malanggan in New Ireland’, paper presented to PTC Colloquium, Intergenerational and Intergender Transactions, Cambridge. Cited in Strathern 2005a. Tienari, J. 2006. ‘Eskimoka¨a¨nno¨s’, in M. Ma¨ntyla¨, P. Tiitula and M. Wager (eds.), Pa¨a¨ Hetkeksi Pinnan Alle: Akateeminen Melontamatka. Helsinki: Helsingin Kauppakorkeakoulu. Till, Jeremy. 2005. ‘The negotiation of hope’, in P. Blundell Jones, D. Petrescu and J. Till (eds.), Architecture and participation. Abingdon: Spon Press. Thacker, Eugene and Galloway, Alexander. 2007. The exploit: a theory of networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, Robert B. 1991. ‘Piercing the corporate veil: An empirical study’, Cornell Law Review 76: 1036–74. Todd, Daphne and Strathern, Marilyn. 2001. ‘Capturing a two-headed creature’, Times Higher Education, 10 August 2001. Tsikata, Dzodzi. 2006. Living in the shadow of the large dams: long term responses of downstream and lakeside communities of Ghana’s Volta River Project. Leiden and Boston: Brill. van Dijck, Jose´. 2007. Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. van Santen, Jose C. M. 1998. ‘Islam, gender and urbanisation among the Mafa of northern Cameroon: the differing commitment to “home” among Muslims and Non-Muslims’, Africa 68 (3): 403–24. VRA. 1970. Memorandum by the Volta River Authority on the authority’s resettlement program. Accra: VRA. Wagner, Roy. 1972. Habu: the innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1975. The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bibliography

197

1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. An anthropology of the subject: holographic worldview in New Guinea and its meaning and significance for the world of anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walker, Lynne and Cavanagh, Sue. 1999. ‘Women’s Design Service: feminist resources for urban environments’, in J. Rothschild (ed.), Design and feminism: re-visioning spaces, places and everyday things. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ware, Vron. 1987. ‘Problems with design improvements at home’, Town and Country Planning 56 (October 1987): 265. Weber, Max. [1889] 2003. History of commercial partnerships in the middle ages. Trans Lutz Kaelber. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Weiner, James. 1986. ‘Men, ghosts and dreams among the Foi: literal and figurative modes of interpretation’, Oceania 57: 114–27. 2006. ‘Eliciting customary law’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 7: 15–25. Weston, Kath. [1991] 1997. Families we choose. Irvington, NY: Columbia University Press. Whitzman, Carolyn. 2007. ‘The loneliness of the long-distance runner: long-term feminist planning initiatives in London, Toronto, Montreal, and Melbourne’, Planning Theory and Practice 8 (2): 203–25. Will, Catherine. 2007. ‘The alchemy of clinical trials’, BioSocieties 2 (1): 85–99. Williams, Carrington Bonsor and Wigglesworth, Vincent B. 1982. ‘Carrington Bonsor Williams. 7 October 1889–12 July 1981’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 28: 667–84. Williamson, Anne. 1995. Henry Williamson: Tarka and the last romantic. Stroud: Alan Sutton. Williamson, Henry. 1937. Richard Jefferies: selections of his work, with details of his life and circumstances, his death and immortality. London: Faber & Faber. 1942. The story of a Norfolk farm. London: Faber & Faber. 1944. The sun in the sands. London: Faber & Faber. [1962] 1998. It was the nightingale. Stroud: Alan Sutton. 1980. ‘Some notes on “The flax of dream” and “A chronicle of ancient sunlight”’, in B. Sewell (ed.), Henry Williamson: the man, the writings. Padstow: Tabb House. 1984. ‘Henry Williamson in conversation with Kenneth Allsop’, The Henry Williamson Society Journal 9: 27–36. 1994. Threnos for T. E. Lawrence and other writings. Chichester: The Henry Williamson Society. Wilson, Frances. 1999. Literary seduction: compulsive writers and diverted readers. London: Faber & Faber. Wimberly, Howard. 1973. ‘On living with your past: style and structure among contemporary Japanese merchant families’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 21 (3): 423–8. World Health Organization. 1962. Expert Committee on Malaria. Ninth Report, Technical Report Series No. 243, Vol. 35. Geneva: WHO. 1974. Malaria control where time-limited eradication is not practicable at present. Technical Report Series No. 537. Geneva: WHO.

198

Bibliography

1982. Manual on environmental management for mosquito control: with special emphasis on malaria vectors. Geneva: WHO. 2006. Malaria vector control and pesonal protection: report of a WHO Study Group. Geneva: WHO. Yanagisako, Sylvia J. 1979. ‘Family and household: the analysis of domestic groups’, Annual Review of Anthropology 8: 161–205. Yi, Doogab. 2008. ‘Cancer, viruses and mass migration: Paul Berg’s venture into ekaryotic biology and the advent of recombinant DNA research and technology, 1967–1980’, Journal of the History of Biology 41 (4): 589–636. Yngvesson, Barbara and Coutin, Susan. 2006. ‘Backed by papers: undoing persons, histories and return’, American Ethnologist 22: 177–90. Yonekura, Akira. 1984. ‘Problems involved in the child adoption and foster-parent system in Japan’, Child Welfare: Quarterly News from Japan 4: 2–10. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2004. ‘The parallax view’, New Left Review 25 (January–February): 121–34. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2006. The parallax view (short circuits). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Internet download: www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm. The parallax view: The stellar paradox: The traps of ontological difference: The subject: This ‘inwardly circumcised Jew’. The van Paulus version – Part I.

Index

Abram, Simone, 128, 139, 140 Abruzzo Stowaway Workshop Diary, 151–6 Accra, 93, 97 actions, 43 causes of, acknowledgement of, 173 everyday actions, 175 manner and, impacts on, 17 Afghanistan, 10 After nature, 2 AIG (American International Group), 31, 33, 41, 43 Akosombo dam, 15, 88, 90 Akwamu Fie, 99 Alcoff, Linda, 143 Alfasi, Nurit, 139 Alotau, 52 Altering Practices, 142 American Anthropologist, 38 American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 84 Amet, Arnold, 66 Angel Application software, 149 anthropology, 32, 85 entomological and anthropological methods, juxtaposition of, 72 entomological ethos and, 85 of gift exchange, 34 postmodern, language of, 11 relations, kinds of, 108 technology of, 4 Apeguso, 96, 100 Akwamu residents of, 96, 98, 101 images of home in, 100 kinship and place in, 96–101 place and belonging in, 101–5 resettlement in, 90–3 Architectural Association, 132

architecture, 15, 92, 96, 125–8, 130–5, 137–8, 142 architectural modernism, 131 Art and identity in Oceania, 20 Asilomar Conference, 5, 6 Assembling bodies: art, science and imagination, 159 Atara, Samuel, 97 Atkinson, Rob, 128, 139 Australia, 137 Bachnik, Jane M., 37 Battaglia, Debbora, ix, 2, 13, 19–30, 160, 182 beautification, 26 Befu, Harumi, 37 Belize, 75, 79 bel kol, 60 Benthall, Jonathan, 3 Berg, Paul, 5, 6 Berglund, Eeva, ix, 5, 10, 16, 125–44 Bernal, Victoria, 92 Bilum Tree, 159–61 Bilums. (Telefol string bags): 16, 18, 23, 159–64 bioinformatics, 83 biotechnology, 6 birds, 13, 23, 24, 27–9 Blair, Tony, 8, 9 blindspots, 13, 16, 29 body, 7, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 28, 134, 143, 147, 153, 159, 160–2, 172 Bolivia, 81 Bolton, Lissant, xii Bomana prison, 17, 173, 179 Bonneuil, Christophe, 92 Bourdieu, Pierre, 120 Boyer, Herbert, 5, 6 Boys, J. and Lloyd-Thomas, K., 134 Brazil, 127

199

200

Index

Brown, Keith, 37 built environment, 71, 73, 78, 83, 88, 96, 125–8, 130 Burgess, Gemma, 139 Butcher, David, 92 Butler, Judith, 20, 143 CABE, 139 Caldeira, Teresa, 127, 128 Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 159 Canada, 137 Carlson, Samuelle, xii Carsten, Janet, 73 categorical perspective, 117, 119, 120, 122 Central Place Theory, 91 Chambers, Robert, 88, 91 chimera, 12 chosen families, 122 Christianity, 65 Clark, Timothy, 98, 170, 171, 174 classification, 89 Clifford, James, 12 Cohen, Stanley, 5, 6 Collins, H. M. and Evans, R., 130, 131, 138 Communities and local government, 128 compensation, 58–62, 104 composition, dynamic process of, 169 Connelly, Stephen, 128 consumerism, 9 Coombe, Rosemary, 167 core house, concept of, 92 corporate debt, 13, 32, 33, 46 corporate law, 38 Corsin-Jime´nez, Alberto, 97 Crook, Tony, xii, 69, 182 cross-cultural traffic, 84 culture-making, 27 custom, 50–65, 67–8, 91, 99 ubiquitous nature of, 60 universal customs, 59 customary law, 50, 57, 67 cyborg, 12 Danby, Miles, 92 dancers, 21, 22 Dar es Salaam, 77 DDT, 74, 81 debt, 13, 17, 18, 31–3, 41–3, 46–8 De Carlo, Giancarlo, 131 Demian, Melissa, ix, 5, 13, 14, 49–69 Derrida, Jacques, 143

Diaw, K. and Schmidt-Kallert, E., 88, 90, 91, 92 difference, 3, 19, 26, 53, 82, 90, 133 digital, 147–9, 150, 155, 157, 162–4 disease transmission, 70 DNA, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12 Dodoo, Martha, 91 Domey, Peter, 100 dreams, 173 Duncan, Ronald, 176 duplex (thinking), 3, 4, 72, 108, 124 dwelling, 2, 18, 72, 75, 84, 86, 87 Dwyer, J. and Thorne, A., 132 Easterbrook, F. H. and Fischel, D., 36 Edwards, Jeanette, ix, xii, 1–18, 48, 69, 87, 103, 124, 129, 130, 144, 164, 182 Elmdon, 15, 89, 90, 95, 98, 101 encapsulation, 16, 145, 148, 150, 153, 157, 161–3 English Heritage, 128 Escherichia coli, 6 Escobar, Arturo, 92 ethnographic dwellings, 84–7 ethnographic insight, 3 ethnography, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 27, 28, 34, 85, 125, 172 etoy Mission Eternity Project, 146–51 Euro-American creativity, conventions of, 18, 166 cultures, 149 gender discourse, 20 inspiration, dilemma of, 177 inspiration models, 166 kinship thinking, 11, 17, 85, 104, 108 literary inspiration, ideas and reports of, 171 Europe, 38, 83 European Association of Social Anthropologists, xii, 11 experts, authority of, 129–31 Facebook, 145, 146 Farson, Daniel, 168, 176 feminism, professionalism and, 132, 136 Ferguson, H. M. et al., 84 Ferguson, James, 103 fieldnotes, 28 Filer, Colin, 50 Fisher, Richard, xii Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 Foster, Robert J., 40

Index Foucault, Michel, 143 future, 7, 12, 16, 22, 27, 29, 65, 116, 118, 153, 155–7, 161, 162 Gambia, the, 76, 80, 87 Gaonkar, P. and Povinelli, E., 41 Garner, Karen, 37 gay and lesbian families, 110 Geertz, Clifford, 27 Geest, Sjaak Van Der, 97 Gell, Alfred, 160 Gender Equality Duty (2007), 139 Gender of the gift, 20, 174 Gendersite, 137, 142 genomics, 83 Gerlach, Michael L., 37 Gershon, Ilana, xii, 164 Geschiere, P. and Gugler, J., 97 Ghana, 13, 15, 88, 90, 93 Gieryn, Thomas, 71 gift, 13, 17, 21, 155, 158, 160 of inspiration, 175 Gordon, Beate Sirota, 37 Greater London Council (GLC), 133 Greater London Development Plan (1984), 133 Greed, Clara, 132, 134 Grether, Reinhold, 146 Grieco, J. P. et al., 76 Grosz, Elizabeth, 143 Gugler, Josef, 97 Haddow, A. J., 73, 74, 78 Hageners, 21, 22, 26, 27, 159 Hanson, A. and Hanson, L., 20 Haraway, Donna, 143 Hayden, Corinne P., 111 Hayden, D. and Wright, G., 131 Hay-Edie, Terence, xii Heidegger, Martin, 86 Hendry, Joy, 37 Henke, Christopher R., 71 Henry Williamson Society, 17, 167, 169, 171, 174, 176, 180 hetero-normativity, 110, 119, 120–4 incommensurability with norms of, 123 Hill, Polly, 97 Holston, James, 127, 128 home, 63, 65, 88, 90, 94, 96–101, 103, 107, 116, 118, 136, 137, 173, 181 definition of, 98 images of, 99 homosexual, gay and lesbian, 110–14, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123

201 homosexuality, 112, 114 ‘appearance’ in public places of, 106 homosexual couples, 111 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 73 Huszar, Laszlo, 91 hut, 14, 18, 70–81, 84–5, 86, 87 hybrid knowledge, 14, 71 identity, 54, 103, 112, 180 ethnic, 99 gay/lesbian, 15, 111 gendered, 20 heterosexual and homosexual, struggle between, 113 ie (Japanese household), 18, 37, 38, 41 Ifakara Health Institute (IHI), 70, 78 imagination, 17, 153, 159, 162, 166, 169, 171, 173, 175, 179, 180 incorporation, 37, 40, 43, 93 informational, 146–8 Ingold, Tim, 72, 87 innovation, 36 insecticide treated nets (ITNs), 75 inspiration, 1, 2, 7, 17 conceptions of, 170 Euro-American models of, 166 evocation of, 165 inspired creativity, definition of, 179 inspired states, experience of, 181 lack of, 180 multiple flows of, 2 intellectual debt, 165 invisible, 15, 23, 27, 120, 122–4 inundation, 91 Irwin, Alan, 130, 139 Iwai, Katsuhito, 39 Japan, 4, 13, 32, 36, 37, 40 corporate law in, 38 corporate personhood in, 36–41 corporate relationships in, 38 cross-shareholding in, 40 houjin (corporate personality), 32 household companies in, 38 kinship in, 39, 42 legal form, 41–3 legal person in, 33–6, 39–46 legal relation, 34–6 legitimacy, personhood of the state, 43–6 liberal capitalism in, 41 local companies, promotion of, 38 Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 39

202

Index

Japan (cont.) Small Business Research Institute, 39 Jasanoff, Sheila, 71, 129, 130 Jessep, Owen, 49 Jones, Peris, 137, 138, 139 Kaluli, 22 Kato, Ichiro, 37 Katz, Cindi, 127 Keane, Webb, 33 Keiser, Sepp, 150 Kelly, Ann, ix, 14, 70–87 Kelsen, Hans, 34, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 45, 47 Kenya, 70, 73, 84 Kilombero River Valley, 70, 78 Kina shell, 25, 156, 157, 171 kinship, 89 American, 115 centrality of, 90 cognatic, 11 ideology and practice, 90 idioms of, 98 interpersonal aspects of, 108 kin networks, 115 society and, 11 Kinship at the core, 89, 105 Kinship, law and the unexpected, 42–3 Kitaoji, Hironobu, 38 Kitende, Robert, 79, 80 knowledge construction and politics, 142 democratisation of, 138–42 ‘non-scientific’, 130 knowledge practice, 126 knowledge production, 125 Kohler, Robert E., 71 Kominimung (initiator), 23 Kourbaj, Issam, 16, 158 Kristeva, Julia, 143 Kuhlow, F., 77 Lacan, Jacques, 28 Lacanese, 19 Latour, Bruno, 109 Latvia, 4, 13, 15 Constitution of, 106 family in, political dialogue about, 110 marriage, obsession with definitions of, 106 Pride march in, 106, 107 relational thinking in, 108 law, 1, 3, 4, 13, 32–5, 42, 51, 53, 60, 63–8, 106, 124 corporate law, 37, 38

underlying law, 14, 49–51, 53–7, 59, 64–8 customary law, 49, 53–7, 64, 66 common law, 14, 49–51, 57, 62, 65–8 case law, 50, 67 Lawson, Rowena M., 94 Leach, James, xii, 34, 166 Leary, Timothy, 150 legal order, 35 legal person, 13, 34, 35, 47 legal personhood, 34 Lentz, Carola, 99 Leverhulme Trust, 105 LGBT movement, 120 life events, relational thinking and, 109 Lindsay, S. W. et al., 74, 76 lineal descent, 98 London Missionary Society, 65 Lovenduski, Joni, 127 Lubbock, Jules, 128, 131 Lupiro, 14, 70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 87 Lynch, M. and Cole, S., 129 Maddison, Phillip, 168 Magugu, 79 malaria, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83 Manchester Women’s Network, 137 Manuh, Takyiwaa, 97, 99 Marres, Nortie, 72 marriage, 98, 103, 106, 107, 115, 123, 124 Massey, Doreen, 127 matrilineal descent, 52, 53, 96, 98, 105 Matrix, 132 Mauss, Marcel, 36 McKenzie, Jon, 146 McLard, A. and Anderson, K., 145 McLeod, Mary, 135 Melanesian, 1, 4, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 28, 56, 66, 166, 172–4, 178, 180, 182 Melhuish, Clare, 128 memory, 6, 89, 146–8, 151, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163, 168 Middleton, John, 96 Miescher, Stephan, 90 migration (and migrants), 8, 88, 94, 96, 97, 99, 137 Miller, Daniel, 141, 144 Millo, Y. and Lezaun, J., 71 mission creep, 8–10 Mission eternity, 16, 146–57, 161–4 Mitchell, Timothy, 92, 129 Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 48 modernity, 22, 63, 88, 90, 91, 95, 101, 104, 105, 129, 131

Index development and, 95 tradition and, 88, 91, 100 molecular biology, 8 Moore, John, 7 Moore, Sarah, 78, 79, 80, 81 mosquitoes, 70, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87 linkage between parasite, man and, 84 Mosse, David, 71 motherhood, 116 Mount Hagen, 20, 24, 25 muf, 143 Muirhead-Thomson, R. C., 75, 77 Mu¨ller, Andreas, 138 mutual indebtedness, 33 Nakane, Chie, 37 Narokobi, Bernard, 58 Nepal, 75 Newlyn, Lucy, 167 Nixon, President Richard, 7 Nkrumah, Kwame, 90 North America, 83 Nowotny, Helga, 129 Nukunya, 94 Obeng, Samuel, 90 object relations, 21 Oboubi, Alex, 98, 103 Obusu-Mensah, Kwaku, 88, 93 Okumu, Fredros, 81 ‘One-legged gender’, 13, 20, 23, 25 opacity, 13, 39, 40, 44, 45 Oppong, Christine, 97 Ottley, Bruce, 49 Oxfam, 137 Panagia, Davide, 28 Panapompom, 22 Papua New Guinea, 13, 14, 17, 159, 165, 172, 178, 179 Aumane case (1980), 58 compensation in, assessment of, 60 Constitution and law in, 49, 51, 56, 59 Criminal Law (Compensation) Act (1991), 59 custom and practice in, 60–5 custom and underlying law, 59 ethnic societies in, 54 Hagen people of, 1 heterogeneity, 53 Highlands of, 27, 59, 157 hybrid custom, 52–4

203 land tenure in, 52 legal practitioners, 51 National Goals and Directive Principles, 57, 66 national legal conversation, 54 relationships within society, 65–9 rules and values, definition of, 59 society in, 50, 59 Sorcery Act (1971), 62 Supreme Court, 58 Tok Pisin, 53 Underlying Law Act (2000), 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 65, 66 underlying law, elicitation of, 55–60 UPNG School of Law, 55 wantoks (co-ethnics), 66 parallax anthropology, 13 parallax displacement, 19 parallax effect, 19, 22, 27 parallax gap, 25, 29 parallax holographs, 24 parallax view, 13, 25 Parallax View, The 19 parenting, experience of, 111 Partial connections, 20 Pestre, Dominique, 129, 130 Petrescu, Doina, 142 Petrovic´-Sˇteger, Maja, x, 1–18, 48, 69, 87, 124, 144, 145–64, 182 pheromones, 81 Pigg, Stacey Leigh, 71 planning, 130 planning discourses, 91 political philosophy, 28 political recognition, 41 Political theology, 44 polygyny, 51 polyperspective, 20 Port Moresby, 53 portrait, 16, 17, 157–61, 164 Portraiture and the problematics of representation, 158 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 41 Power, Michael, 141, 144 predicament of culture, The 12 prestation, 172 psychical pain, 22 public health, epistemology of, 71 pure theory of law, The, 34, 44 Putnin¸a, Aivita, x, xii, 4, 5, 15, 106–24 Rabinow, Paul, 7 Raco, Mike, 139

204

Index

Ramu, 23, 25 Rapley, R. E., 76 recognition, problem of, 41 recombinant knowledge, 4–5, 12 recombinant technology, 5–8, 12 recombining persons, 11–12 Reed, Adam, x, xii, 2, 4, 7, 17–18, 165–82 regeneration, 139, 140 Regius, He´lena, xii relationality, 14, 27, 35, 36, 42, 72, 85, 86, 164, 179 relation(s), anthropology, 65–9, 71–4, 80, 85–7, 96, 98, 104, 105 relationships as conceptualised and as enacted, 108 interpersonal relations, categorical thinking and, 122 nature and nurture of, 112–20 Reproducing the future, 11 resettlement, 88, 93, 96, see also Apeguso as modernisation, 90–3 Rider, B. A. K. and Tajimi, Y., 37 Riles, Annelise, x, 4, 8, 13, 31–48, 53, 125, 182 Roitman, Janet, 47 Rollason, Will, 22 Royal Institute of British Architects, 137 Royal Town Planning Institute, 137 Sabarl Island, 28 Sabarl Islanders, 28 same-sex partnerships family relationships and, 107, 109, 110, 111, 122, 123 Scalco, Patricia, xii Schieffelin, Edward, 22 Schmitt, Carl, 44, 45, 47 totalitarian turn, 45 Schneider, David, 115 science and technology studies (STS), 129, 139 scientific significance of makeshift experiments, 77 Segal, Lynne, 143 Self-adornment, 21 self in self-decoration, The 13, 20, 21, 25 Self-decoration in Mount Hagen, 20 self-representation, 146, 153, 157 sexual identification, 110 sexuality, 110 shame, 115, 120 Shapiro, Jordan E., 91, 93 Sharr, Adam, 86 Shishido, Zenichi, 37 Sholdt, I. L. et al., 76

Simmons, S. W. et al., 75 skin, 2, 25–7 Smith, Alec, 77, 79, 80 social context, 85, 134 social inclusion, 127 social movements, 130 social networking, 145 social software, 146, 147 social thought, ‘conceptual technologies’ of, 145 society, 112, 113, 128, 129, 141 custom and, 57 fracture of, 146 hetero-normativity and, 120 kinship and, 11, 109 real context of, 131 social and cultural change in, 134 Solesbury, William, 128 sorcery, 62, 63 South America, 83 sovereign debt, 46 Stelarc, 162 Stolcke, Verena, xii stowaway encapsulation, 150–7 Stratford, 143 Strathern, Marilyn, 8, 14, 20, 24, 27, 39, 42, 104, 125, 140, 141, 157, 165 academic research, impoverishment of, 143–4 adorned bodies, choreography of, 21 agency and causality, distinction between theories of, 178 agency of, 177 analogic reasoning of, 72 analytical categories, 2 anthropological relation in work of, duplex nature of, 4 Bilum Tree, 159–61 biological heredity, 110 biotechnologies, impact of, 109 boundaries, key issue for, 101 capitalist and non-capitalist exchange, 45 cause and action, distinction between, 174 compensation, technique of, 59 connection, relation and, 67 corporate personhood, 40 cosmetic paradox, 26 democratisation of knowledge, 125 duplex relation, exploration of, 45 elicitation, model of, 14, 56 ethnographic eye, 8 ethnographic revelation, reflections on, 172

Index Euro-American kinship thinking, 11–12, 17 exchange and gifts, work on, 32 exchange, agents and objects of, 40 expertise, anthropological scrutiny of, 130 family arrangements, turbulence in, 108 family relationships, 110 form, constraints and effectiveness of, 31–48 gender, analysis of, 42 generosity in citing students, 2 gifts and exchange, work on, 32 ideas and argument, 5 influence of, theorisation of, 18 inspiration, category of, 17 intellectual indebtedness to, 165–82 interactions, connections and, 123 invention, discovery and, 6, 57 Japanese kinship, 37 kinship, boundary effect of, 15 kinship, personhood and exchange, work on, 33 Kourbaj’s portrait of, 17 legacy of, 72, 85 legal debate, reinvigoration of, 35 legal theory, parallels in work of, 36 legitimacy, 45–6 Melanesianist, reputation as, 1 memorialisation, encapsulation and, 163–4 methodological innovation, 36 mission statements, 126 mission statements, critique of, 9 parallax gap, 25 personhood and exchange, anthropology of, 34 persons and objects, creation of, 31 perspective, privilege in, 27 pioneering work, 1 plurality, notion of, 54 political prescience, 8–9 political recognition, personification and, 40–1 political sensibility, 8 portraits of, 157–61 procreative obligations, 108 public consultation, process of, 140–1 recombinant knowledge, 4 relational imagination, workings of, 179 relational thinking, concept of, 108 relationships, capacity for forging and maintaining, 3 relationships, functions of, 85

205 remainder material, 86 research, global fashions and, 143 reworking knowledge, capacity for, 3 scholarship of, 1 socialisation, identity and, 112 sociality of, 179 sociological boundaries, 95 systems, on comparison between, 51 tradition, kinship and, 104 wealth extraction, 33 work of, characteristics of, 12 writings of, 2 writings of, characteristics of, 16 Zˇizˇek, culture making and, 27–8 Switzerland, 13 synaesthetics, 22 Taking Place, 143 Tanzania, 13, 14, 70, 73, 79 Taveta, 79 technocratic modernisms, 128 technological change risk and, 129 Telefol men, 159 Telefol string bags, 163 Telefol women, 160 tenant participation, 136 Teubner, Gunther, 35, 36 Thatcher, Margaret, 8, 9 Thompson, Robert B., 41 Till, Jeremy, 139 Times Higher Education Supplement, 146 Todd, Daphne and Strathern, M., 157, 158, 159 Tokyo District Court, 39 Tongu, 94 Toren, Christina, xii Toronto, 99 TOYWAR, 146 tradition, 67, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 111, 121, 131, 135, 138 transcending eye, 24 Trobriand Islands, 26, 52 Tsikata, Dzodzi, 92 Twitter, 145 United Kingdom, 13, 66, 68, 128, 133, 139 academia in, 10 audit culture, 10 United States, 38 Centre for Disease Control (CDC), 82, 84 Treasury Department, 31, 43 universality, 14, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 68

206

Index

value hierarchy of, 21 of collateral, 32 van Santen, Jose C. M., 97 vision, 9, 15, 21, 22, 24, 29, 30, 128, 147, 149, 153, 159 visual, 13, 20, 21, 166, 167 Visual Anthropology Review, 20, 23 Volta Resettlement Project, 90, 92, 94 Volta River Authority, 94, 95 Walker, L. and Cavanagh, S., 134, 135 Ware/WDS, 133 wealth-enhanced bodies, 21 Weiner, James, 68 Weston, Kath, 110, 122 Whitehall, 131 Whitzman, Carolyn, 137 WHO, 75, 76, 83 wife, role of, 107 Will, Catherine, 71 Williamson, Anne, 176 Williamson, Henry, 168, 173, 175, 178 creative forces. possession by, 176 creative impulse, fretting about, 176

critics of, 177 editing and rewriting, 181 genius of, 180 Wimberly, Howard, 37 Without action there is no reason, 158 witnessing, 24 women, stereotypes of Women and Space, conference (1979), 132, 135 Women’s Design Service (WDS), 16, 125, 126, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143 writing, 19, 20, 21, 25, 165, 167, 168, 169–71, 173, 175–7, 180–2 agency of literary writers, 182 creative impulse in, 168, 176, 177 emotion of, 169 freedom and irresponsibility in, 176 Yarrow, Thomas, xi, xii, 15, 88–105, 182 Yi, Doogab, 5, 6, 7, 8 Yonekura, Akira, 37 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 19, 23, 27