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ARTICLE
Copyright 2010 The Author (www.sagepublications.com) ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 10(2): 280296 DOI: 10.1177/1469605310365117
DUSAN BORIC
Cardiff School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University, UK
IN SEARCH OF A VOCABULARY
DB: At the recent session dedicated to you at the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC, Donna Haraway1 remarked that what she learned from your work is to choose carefully the concepts one thinks with, or that it matters what relations one uses to think other relations as a particular ethical practice of thinking. This care about words and concepts in order to be less captive of their common sense use runs through your whole work. It is as much a methodological tool as a powerful and useful aesthetic. Yet, you dont object that archaeologists pick certain elements of your work at their free will? MS: I dont have any problem at all with people taking off from what I do because I dont have a holistic or a totalitarian approach there is no urge in that sense to be dogmatic, there is no teleology to what I do my tracking is much more like one of Latours networks, in which one nds oneself in a particular situation and then goes off into another direction, another direction and so forth. Now it is not random and I hope there is some consistency but there is no overall end, and because of that my work
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is very unprogrammatic. Its much more a question of inviting people to think and consider, and therefore I would regard its mode of reproduction exactly that: people coming in, seeing something that connects, taking that, going off and doing with it what they will. Having said that, thats one half. For there is another side to it, which you bring up when you comment on Donna Harraways comment about choosing the concepts one thinks with, and what relations one thinks other relations with, and I would say if somebody wanted to understand my work for itself, not to raid though I dont mind being raided, then misunderstanding does become an issue. My project is how to arrive at a good description. I take description in Gary Runcimans sense as subsuming analysis and theory. The end result is a good description that can only proceed through analysis, and analysis can only be informed through theoretical insight, but theory in itself is not an end, the good description is, and therefore the issue is all the time what concepts one is using. In that regard, the concepts I use arent drawn from abstract schemas. Gift and commodity are good examples theyre not drawn from some schema where I want to address gifts and commodities. It is that, faced with analysing the way if you take The Gender of the Gift (Strathern, 1988) the way right across Papua New Guinea people are expanding and reproducing and reecting on their relationships with one another, through the exchange of various items of wealth, of food or whatever, that a solution as to how to describe all this is to say, well, lets use the vocabulary of the gift, rather than the vocabulary of commodity. You understand, the vocabulary is a solution to a problem. Somebody else comes along saying Of course gift is an idealization, Of course gifts and commodities in this particular place are found together. Of course you can say this, but that was not what I was doing. I was drawing on that pair of concepts as a solution to how one can best describe whats going on. DB: When you talk about gift in that context, as your choice of a concept to describe those transactions, do you try then to use indigenous vocabulary since gift is something that can be related to a much broader understanding of transactions? So, when you choose it, what is actually a criterion? MS: Very good point. Ill come back to the criterion in a moment. Can one use the vernacular? Yes, if one were constrained within a single language, but I denied myself that possibility in The Gender of the Gift by drawing across not all but several regions of Papua New Guinea. I deliberately crossed the divide between matrilineal and patrilineal systems and so forth, quite deliberately, so there is no single indigenous language. But I do think that there are some common conceptualizations of the way people move and act in the world that are demonstrably present in many of these very different societies. Somewhere at the beginning of The Gender of the Gift I say that people in Papua New Guinea have no need of my book. The book is not written to displace their view of the world, it is written to expound their view of the world to precisely those people who dont speak their language. And I nd it interesting and challenging to try to turn the English language around, to make it do work it was not made to do. One
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ARCHAEOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENTS
DB: You have often interacted with archaeologists, attending archaeological conferences or participated in them. For many years archaeology and
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anthropology have had perhaps a strange relationship, where archaeology looks up to anthropology for theoretical inspiration. There is a feeling that with the diversication of the eld there is also less understanding between the two disciplines what the methodology of a particular subeld is about and how people get to their conclusions. But also our predecessors in archaeology and anthropology sometimes had problems communicating with each other. For instance, in the past people like Edmund Leach and Jack Goody were rather open about an archaeological inferiority in this relationship. A frequent argument is that archaeology is crippled in its means to develop complex arguments about social reality in the past by not having the possibility to address particular questions to informants. How do you position yourself in all of that? MS: Well, I grew up in Kent, and Kent of course was a Roman suburb, and there were digs all over the place, and as a teenager, to escape families and sundries, I went off digging, and I absolutely, I mean absolutely, loved digging. And then, when I came to Cambridge I realized I could combine archaeology and anthropology, which was wonderful. Because although I enjoyed digging tremendously, actually my interests were in the notions of society and culture and all the rest of it, and I knew I did not want to be an archaeologist. But I tremendously enjoyed digging, and for years in fact had a very well-developed thumb, I mean it is completely gone now, but I really had a lot of muscle in my right thumb. So, I had always had a kind of empathy. I dug with Charles McBurney at the Cte de St. Brelard unforgettable. I had a kind of empathy and kind of understanding I suppose of what archaeology then this was in the 1950s and 1960s, I mean a long time ago was trying to do. And nothing has dislodged it, so there is a kind of bedrock of interest, and it just comes from my own particular history. The very rst article I published myself was in the Journal of Polynesian Society (Strathern, 1965) and the second in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (Strathern, 1966), and these articles were on quarries, the origins of stone axes. This was up in the Papua New Guinea Highlands; when you look at the stone you ought to be able to say straight away what quarry it came from. Fine, ask the next person and they would tell you straight away what quarry it came from, but of course they did not name the same quarries. So, in fact I developed this a little bit systematically and asked several people to look at around 130 different stone axes everybody knew the names, the same 16 names of the quarries. However, agreement between people ascribing names to the axes was incredibly variable. Now, that was extremely interesting because it showed that everybody had tremendous condence in their classicatory system, but that was very different from, that ran on alongside, any practical knowledge one might wish to develop about where the axes come from, and you would need a geologist or an archaeologist to in fact trace particular axe types. Looking back on that, I can also say another interesting thing about it, in response to your question: is that actually asking people does not necessarily give you the kind of information you want because if you
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context your maternal kin are very important because they supply supplementary nurture, so without your maternal kin your paternal kin cannot ourish, and you cannot ourish. You are forever in debt. So you repay with wealth and whatever, giving pigs and food and money, and so forth. The gifts stand for that bit of you that your maternal kin own and own completely. That is, you are them, so this goes back to Eduardo Viveiros de Castros perspectivism. The maternal kin have a perspective on their nephew: this is my man, this is my nephew, and that relationship is a complete one. So, how the nephew appears is as a whole entity, you know, the nephew isnt at that point divided, the nephew appears complete and totalizing in the regard of his maternal kin. And, reciprocally, they to him. Which is very different from the fact that he can then switch perspective, and he can then think about his paternal kin, to which his maternal kin are simply an adjunct this is changing perspectives. So, the kind of literalism of parts and wholes that we English-speakers have, that language wont do; in other words even when one starts to talk about parts and wholes, we are introducing a whole trail of assumptions from our own cultural nexus. And this is where I would diverge from Maurices particular form of irony, when he says that he would love to have found different people whereas he encounters people very similar. There is always that choice, there is always the choice between saying what this people are doing is very similar to what we, e.g. Euroamericans, are doing but it takes this form, or, well, actually, it is very different from what we are doing and it takes that form. In anthropology in the early years, for example, there was a lot of debate over do the x have law, do the y have law. And you can either say no they dont have law or you can say, oh well, the equivalent of Nuer law is A or B. So, differences and similarities are always at the discretion of the person doing the description. And there is no difference, if you like, between saying these people are completely different and saying these people are completely the same. The issue lies in what kind of vocabulary you are going to use to best describe them. DB: To do justice in a way? MS: To do justice. And the early part of the Gender of the Gift, those four chapters (Part I) were actually very important to it, because I show that when it comes to thinking about gender relations, there are four different approaches that I take based on existing arguments up to then. And each approach gets us so far and then we reach an impasse. So how do we break the impasse? Well, maybe the root vocabulary was not sufcient to do all the work it was supposed to do. It only got us a certain way, so, ok, perhaps we should try a different vocabulary. And, that is quite simple and straightforward, there is nothing mystical or profound. DB: And in a way, this kind of methodological practice of shifting ones perspective as an anthropologist reminds me of something that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has in mind when he talks about anthropology as a method of controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). One of the points I was very interested in when I read your Partial Connections is the
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then with assisted conception. Of course people found new areas to be asking about but the issues remained very similar. It has always been an interesting phenomenon I enjoyed that work very much but it led me elsewhere. When I embarked on intellectual property (IP) issues I found that a very rich and engaging eld. Of course, its a whole domain in law, that wasnt what I was encompassing, but it seemed to me both in terms of the materials, case studies, in which IP questions arose, and what it required in terms of quite detailed analyses of conceptions of ownership, authorship, and so forth, there was a challenge for anthropology. Now I would like to go back and think about what has been happening recently in relation to some IP issues. DB: You mentioned that you will be going to Papua New Guinea soon. And I believe that you went to Papua New Guinea in 2006 for a short visit. So, are you returning also to your eldwork, and doing more eldwork in that region? Is that also on your agenda for the future? MS: I was there in 2006, and that was quite interesting. I did a short eld project, visited former acquaintances. It was quite successful. At the same time, the people I was with, the people I know best, are getting old, the same age I am . . . it was a little bit of a strain on them. It was also the case that I was only there a short time, and I became very aware that if I were to embark on any major piece of eldwork again there was a host of issues in my relationship to all kinds of people that would have to be sorted out. Everyone comes forward and says, Do you remember the time when I helped you over the bridge? and Do you remember the time when I looked after your bag?, and that is not only about nostalgia, that is about adequate recognition, about compensation.6 And, also the people I was with, although this was for only a short trip, the people who put me up had and very kindly always put me up . . . If I were to go for a longer period I would have to think about where I placed myself. There is nowhere I can place myself without creating problems for them and for others. And my daughter joined me, and she cooked and distributed a pig by way of thanks for everybody who looked after her when she was little. That went down extremely well. And after that, it was put to me, You know, Marilyn, you are on the way down this is the gesture pointing to the ground you are going to die soon, and your daughter is here, and she is coming up. And of course this is a huge compliment, in other words they were telling me you have a replacement. And thats what that was about. And, its also nice actually to hear something like that in a completely matter of fact way because it is totally true and it will come to pass. But of course my daughter is not going to be a complete replacement. She is a civil servant in Edinburgh, she is not an anthropologist. I am not quite sure in what regard I could go back after that being said. So, I dont know, I dont know. I will return to the eld in another sense, which is that there is a lot of half-digested material and things to sort out that I shall do with some pleasure. And issues to return to . . . One of your questions concerns materiality. Now, Ive not nished with either materiality or questions about substance. Both in The Gender of the Gift and I was reminding myself of an essay I wrote in the book on Gender in Amazonia and
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Andrew Moutu, a Papua New Guinean who did a PhD here in Cambridge and then held a British Academy Research Fellowship. He is now back in Papua New Guinea, and he will be going to Adelaide University. He is reading The Gender of the Gift very closely. He is able to derive value from it, of whatever kind. He is able to nd worth in it. He thinks it is a good thing it was done, and in a way, thats it. I mean I could not really hope for anything more. If this young Papua New Guinean academic is carrying stuff forward then I am happy. DB: Finally, I would like to hear your opinion about whether we will continue to witness an increasing diversication in anthropological theory and practice in the future. And, conversely, are the issues related to cultural heritage as an area of research with a lot of potential something that will bring archaeology and anthropology much closer together? Would you see the burgeoning eld of heritage industry as an area of research that will become even more prominent in the global world of the future? MS: I think you are absolutely right on the second two points. And, in fact I remember, oh, it must have been more than 15 years ago, a conference at UCL that was precisely about bringing archaeologists and anthropologists to talk about cultural heritage, and of course it is where my interest in intellectual property feeds in very directly. I think this is an ongoing political issue of very great interest and I can see archaeology and anthropology converging on it. But I would like to say something else, because you open the question by asking whether we will continue to witness an increasing diversication in anthropological theory and practice. I was thinking of the kinds of things we study these days, thinking of my former student working in a Papua New Guinea prison, and another Cambridge student working in a Papua New Guinea hospital, and the quite fascinating material these studies have produced. And thinking about other colleagues of mine who work, for example, in nancial systems, stock markets, and so forth, nance being interestingly on the cards at the present moment. The important thing as other students attest is that these phenomena are coterminous with other kinds of lives that people live, which should also continue to demand anthropological attention. Then, I thought about this concept of assemblages . . . you know Ong and Colliers book Global Assemblages (2004)? Im thinking how that is driven by the notion of how open-ended the contemporary world can be: as concatenations of actions, of resources and relations, which come together for a moment in time and then move on and move away. And those comings together, and those makings of bits of social life that hold, have a kind of system or structure of their own, which means that they endure due to some interest, circumstance or whatever. And it seems to me that there is something very interesting about time here, the way we make time. We used to make time or social time for ourselves through identifying very specic structures where you would expect certain continuities, certain changes. There are structures, for example, to the relationship between social classes; they are going to change but as they
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Notes
1 The nice thing about relations is that everyone has them: panel in honor of Marilyn Strathern, organized by Debbora Battaglia, Melissa Demian and Ilana Gershon. American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, 29 November 2007. 2 MS: It was after having said this that I went back and checked the JPS article, and it is precisely an example of what I am talking about! I have recalled I wonder if it is apocryphal! the story about almost full agreement on the complement of names and great variability when it came to attaching the names to the axes because this is obviously ltered through my later interests in ideological constructs. The 1965 article itself comments not on this but on the question of whether these names give sufcient information for the archaeologist (or whoever) to go and nd more sites than hitherto known. 3 MS: In a way this is an answer to one of Shillings questions (2008: 149) about performative and other post-structuralist approaches to the body: they frequently remain silent about how the body is possessed of capacities that mean it can be an active source of the social [emphasis removed]. Peoples capacity to classify one another in its most encompassing sense via their relationships is one such. If, in the Melanesian case, constant ows of food and other material items serve as markers and discriminators of these relationships, so do peoples observations on what is happening to a persons health, the rules that govern bodily activities and the modication or decoration of the skin. 4 MS: I had overlooked the piece in Reproducing the Future, and forgotten that it so closely develops out of Partial Connections. 5 MS: Meaning, the individual subject. This mode of thinking also precipitates its critics, of course, as in the long tradition of psychoanalytic criticism and in the theoretical work of early French feminists. 6 MS: My complaint here is half playful. However, verbalizing the situation is my way of giving some weight to what would be entailed in returning again, in the same way as the little bits of recompense for which people look are a way of giving weight to relationships through their necessary (desirable) materialization. My reappearance had awakened memories, and the requests were a mode of linking the present to the past.
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References
Chapman, J.C. (2000) Fragmentation in Archaeology. People, Places and Broken Objects in the Prehistory of South-eastern Europe. London: Routledge. Ginzburg, C. (1980) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by J. and A. Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Godelier, M. and M. Strathern, eds (1991) Big Men and Great Men: Personications of Power in Melanesia. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Leach, E. (1966) Virgin Birth. The Henry Myers Lecture, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain and Ireland 1966: 3949. Ong, A. and S.J. Collier, eds (2004) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell. Shilling, C. (2008) The Challenge of Embodying Archaeology, in D. Bori c and J. Robb (eds) Past Bodies: Body-centered Research in Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 14551. Strathern, M. (1965) Axe Types and Quarries: A Note on the Classication of Stone Axe Blades from the Hagen Area, New Guinea, Journal of Polynesian Society 74: 18291. Strathern, M. (1966) Note on Linguistic Boundaries and the Axe Quarries, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 32(5): 11721. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift. Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. (1991/2004) Partial Connections. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Strathern, M. (1992) Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge. Strathern, M. (1998) Social Relations and the Idea of Externality, in C. Renfrew and C. Scarre (eds) Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 13547. Strathern, M. (1999) Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press. Strathern, M. (2001) Same-Sex and Cross-Sex Relations: Some Internal Comparisons, in T.A. Gregor and D. Tuzin (eds) Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 22144. Strathern, M. (2005) Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Often a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004) Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation, Tipit 2(1): 322. Wagner, R. (1986) Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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MARILYN STRATHERN , DBE, FBA, is former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. First an undergraduate and then a research student at Girton, she has held appointments in Canberra (ANU), Port Moresby, UC Berkeley (visiting) and Manchester University. Papua New Guinea has been a principal area of eldwork, but she has also written on British anthropology (at home). Initial work on gender relations led in two directions: feminist scholarship and the new reproductive technologies (1980s1990s), and legal systems and intellectual and cultural property (1970s, 19902000s). is a Lecturer in Archaeology at Cardiff University with DU SAN BORI C special research interests in European and Near Eastern Prehistory and archaeological theory. He has studied in particular the culture change from foraging to farming in the Balkans, writing about the issues of social memory and cultural identities in the past. His current archaeological eld project is based in the region of the Danube Gorges, Serbia. [email: boricd@cardiff.ac.uk]