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Journal of Social Archaeology

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Arriving at a good description : Interview with Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern


Dusan Boric Journal of Social Archaeology 2010 10: 280 DOI: 10.1177/1469605310365117 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jsa.sagepub.com/content/10/2/280

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Journal of Social Archaeology

ARTICLE

Copyright 2010 The Author (www.sagepublications.com) ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 10(2): 280296 DOI: 10.1177/1469605310365117

Arriving at a good description


Interview with Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK

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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of the resources that the English language, well, any language, offers is that it sets up certain dichotomies and oppositions, and one can quite fruitfully use these to make the language work in unaccustomed ways. I pick up the opposition between gift and commodity, which, of course, belongs to a commodity economy. I am taking, from within Euroamerican congurations, a particular pair that Euroamericans oppose, gift and commodity, and I deliberately use it to say: right, suppose we run with one of these terms as the basis of to use it for my description as opposed to the other, can this actually give us a useful set of descriptives? And the reason I do this, I did a little homework, what the initial four chapters of The Gender of the Gift are about (chapters 36), is to look at the way gender had been debated up to when I rst wrote it in 1984 (I rst gave those chapters as lectures in Berkeley), how gender had been analysed. It seemed to me that there were actually some common assumptions in the way people, anthropologists mainly, were dealing with gender that to my mind tted a commodity logic if you like, so it was a critique of what until then had been an approach to gender. It was not simply me plucking gift and commodity out of anywhere. Thats why. However, a problem I have come to realize with my writing is that I appear to do little tricks and sleights of hand, in that I dont always tell people where I am in an argument. I try hard not to, never mind the intention, but I am afraid it is often the result. Anyway, I used the metaphor of language, suppose we speak in terms of a gift economy, to introduce my vocabulary. I do not mean here a well-worked contrast between a gift economy and commodity economy. Thats not, was never, my intention. DB: Or that this is a direct reection of a reality . . . MS: Yes, I am always in search of a vocabulary, I mean, that is what drives me. DB: If I may come back to archaeologists: if we sometimes misunderstand your work, or work of other anthropologists, it might perhaps come out of slight carelessness about the terms one uses to describe a past reality. People are sometimes very quick in using certain terms and concepts borrowed from social anthropology or other related disciplines in an instant way, without actually thinking carefully about what these concepts mean and what is their original context of making. MS: I nd it completely appropriate that when social explanations are brought in, or people are developing ideas, they feel free to take from the anthropological repertoire. One would hope that the anthropologists themselves would do enough of the precision work to make their constructs reasonably intelligible, but I think it is up to anthropologists to do that kind of precision work.

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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want to trace trade routes, people would very happily tell you everything they know, but what they know wont necessarily be in the form you wish to know.2 So, I dont see that asking people is all that superior. In fact, you mention Edmund Leach, and Edmund Leach ought to know better, because Edmund Leach has a fascinating paper (1966) on the fact that people in the Trobriands dont see any connection between sexual intercourse and conception (they have no theory of conception), and he said that this was not the kind of question to be asking. They had a great ideology about where their children came from, but this was a question of their construction, of their ideology, as the notion of conception thereby turns out to be, and he ought to have known perfectly well that people arent going to give you archaeological type information necessarily. So, that was an early skirmish with archaeology . . . but having done that couple of papers, I dont know, this early interest in archaeology, I didnt in fact, I didnt pursue it at all systematically, and it has really remained very dormant until quite recently. So I would not have said that there was a constant dialogue. DB: I remember your very interesting paper (Strathern, 1998) published in the volume Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage edited by Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre. I thought it was wonderful in that paper inverting the whole concept of material culture seen as an external depository, or memory storage, to something completely different: when particular groups through their relationship with other social groups use the other as a depository of their sense of belonging. If I understood it correctly? MS: No, I thought that was a lovely gloss, and in fact, if I may say, so was the way you have understood that . . . I mean this is a very good example of picking up something and doing something a little bit different from what I intended. Because what you say, I respond to immediately, it is a lovely way to think about it, but it was not actually what I was saying. So, if you want to use an example of reproduction, of archaeologists carrying off something that I have done and then doing something else with it, which then becomes theirs, thats a perfect example. I like a lot what you said there but it was not quite what I meant! I think what I meant was a little bit more didactic. What I meant was you dont only need to look at, or nd, material objects because among themselves, people classify themselves, people dene themselves, they give qualities to themselves in different kinds of relationships with one another, which is what we do with material: we dene, classify and give qualities to things that enable us to manipulate material as objects, but people do this also to themselves.3 So, your mothers brother, your brother-in-law, your cousin, your enemy, your afne, people are their own resources: they do things with one another in their arrangements of the social world. And then I was just wondering, can we also think of the way they divide themselves off of one another and so forth, and create other people who are external to them (which is the point you picked up) without even beginning to ask what material objects they are circulating?

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STRUCTURE OF PARTS AND WHOLES


DB: At the beginning we talked about how you dont aspire to a totalization when it comes to your work, and I would like to contrast that perhaps to the system of Lvi-Strauss, and I think some people would qualify you as coming from a structuralist tradition in thinking about the evidence, about reality, about the world. But is it a very different type of structuralist thinking than the one of Lvi-Strauss? MS: You are quite right, it very much started off like that, or rather from Lvi-Strauss through Edmund Leach. The two teachers who were most inuential, among those to whose lectures I went, were Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach. And, there is no doubt that Edmund was very exciting as a lecturer and he was introducing Lvi-Strausss ideas to the British anthropology. And, indeed, there are early articles of mine that very much mimic some Lvi-Straussean manoeuvres. But when I said there is nothing totalitarian or programmatic in my mode of analysis, that is because there is no closure, no end-point, no teleology in that sense. But there is, there is certainly a recognition of systemic practices, or of the replication of practices, or of the reproduction of similar positions, throughout stretches of social behaviour, or types of thinking, which is why I would hold on to, say, the notion of culture. Not because one is talking about bounded entities, or whatever, that you can map onto people, but because there are certain consistencies in what people do, which means that they make a whole terrain familiar to themselves. Because whether they are eating a meal or going to a cinema or voting for a candidate there are certain recurrent themes or ideas that they would practice or think in all these different situations, and the extent to which people can make their social environment familiar to themselves through the way they think or act or set their values, an anthropologist would pick up and say we are dealing with a common set of practices, for which the word culture is as good as any. I dont want to use the word pattern because that would really put us back to before the Second World War, but there are systemic recurrences, things are not random. In fact, I hate the vocabulary of randomness or messiness, or anything to suggest that things are confused in themselves. I am personally averse to that . . . DB: Perhaps that is reected in some of your criticism of the type of anthropology and anthropological thinking about culture that is advocated by James Clifford. I think there is one essay in Reproducing the Future (Strathern, 1992: 10914), where you criticize Cliffords approach of taking the culture into pieces, or scraps of culture being everywhere, needing an anthropologist to put them back together. MS: Yes, yes, thats right, in fact there is another piece in Property, Substance and Effect (Strathern, 1999: chap. 6) that deals with Clifford straight on. Absolutely and for the same reason I am averse to the notion of, I dont like the idea of, fragments either . . . oh, yes, it is at the end of the Partial Connections (Strathern, 1991/2004).4 Fragment to me implies

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something broken, a part, and therefore something that was once whole, and of course I would not start from that premise. But you see what I have just done: I have appropriated the word fragment there in a very particular way to criticize it, implying there is a whole of which the fragment is a part. The individual/society binarism does a similar thing you know, the individual implies that there is a society that brings individuals together. . . I have appropriated the word fragment and, having done that, I cannot now use it as I possibly could in other senses. For example, someone might wish to look at fractals in terms of the repetition of fragments, but I have denied myself that possibility by hijacking it in this critical way. One must keep track of what one writes. DB: Chapman (2000), among others, talks about how social relations in southeast European prehistory might have been structured in such a way that people were fragmenting material culture intentionally, and taking parts of that material culture, and in that sense created relationships through their movement to other places. He describes two parallel processes, notably enchainment and accumulation, as general principles governing social interactions that were mediated through material culture. . . MS: I mean you have this lovely comment in the notes for the interview: Is this a very literal understanding of what you call partibility? Absolutely! In fact, that is very much like one colleagues complaint that he has never met a dividual. No, of course, of course dividual and partibility are to do with how people discriminate and classify different dimensions of the person. So, yes, I can look at this colleague and if I were a Papua New Guinean, I would probably be very interested in his relationships with his maternal kin and his paternal kin and be interested in how he embodied these two relations . . . because the way you relate to your paternal kin is very different from the way you relate to your maternal kin. Here is the dividual. When the difference becomes materialized, and you then give gifts to your maternal kin that you derived from your paternal kin, and you then trace that chain of relationships, there is a sense in which the maternal kin have extracted those gifts from you, but it does not imply my good colleague cutting off his arm. DB: I recall a conference where Maurice Bloch remarked that in Melanesia you found people very different from us, Westerners or Euroamericans. He wished he had found similarly different people in the course of his work in Madagascar but what he had encountered were people very similar to us. This is an ironic remark that revolves around the question of cognitive universals in all cultures worldwide. How do you position yourself in relation to these types of debates? MS: I could actually refer you by way of example to something in the most recent book I did in 2005 (Strathern, 2005: chap. 5), which looks at parts and wholes as a way to address that question, and the one that we have just been talking about. Because I comment on my understanding of the partibility of persons, and the way the person in Melanesia is in a sense owned, not in the sense of property but in the sense of being owned by another person. Let me give you an example. If you are in a patrilineal

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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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question of scales, and how one moves between different scales. I am interested to know whether you have any comment in relation to claims made by the advocate of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg (e.g. 1980), that ephemeral details and single events can be representative of the spirit of a particular historical period. Is it something that can be compared to your idea from the Partial Connections that at a small scale we always have the information that applies to the large scale? MS: I think this is a completely fascinating extrapolation. I think one ought to know more about how one recognizes a historical epoch. In fact, Roy Wagner does that to some extent. Do you know Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Wagner, 1986)? He takes one through what is eight or nine centuries of thinking about the relationships between nature and society and symbol, and shows how these three terms change their relationship to each other when they precipitate other possibilities. Thus the starting point is man and the eucharist and divinity. Each conguration, and within each its micro-congurations, we could call an epoch. No, I was very intrigued by that extrapolation but I need to think about that in detail. Because I still have not worked out in my mind quite what I might do when I really retire. And this remains an area to work on further. I have not worked out in my mind what it means in terms of talking about analysis, or whether in some other mode we are talking about human practice in general. So, just an obvious example I think, take Maurice Godeliers account of leadership in Papua New Guinea. He divides Papua New Guinean political systems into two types: one of Great Men and the other of Big Men. Doesnt matter what these are, but he does. And you can map whole societies of Papua New Guinea according to one or the other type. You can even draw a map and shade it in and colour it. If you then look at the denitions behind these two terms, you then realize that in any one of these societies you would nd that same contrast within. And the most brilliant case is in the book actually called Big Men and Great Men (Godelier and Strathern, 1991). There is an article there by Don Tuzin. He shows that within any particular set of kin in the area where he lived (the East Sepik region, Papua New Guinea), elder brother and younger brother are differentiated by precisely that same concatenation of elements by which one could perhaps differentiate an entire range of societies of Papua New Guinea, and I have not really yet thought that through. Thats all still unnished in my mind. I have not really come to the resolution of the best way to think about that. So, I just leave it as a productive, a nice little, problematic. However, I was going to say, a propos the comment you make about scales in Partial Connections: I think what I meant to say in Partial Connections is that, at whatever scale one is at, it is completely full of information. So whether you are talking to an individual or you describe a nation you can still produce ve pages of information, thats what I meant, and that we always generate sufcient information for whatever scale we are currently at. It is just a comment on the fact that one can detect complexity and sets of interconnections whatever it is one is dealing with.

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BODY, MATERIALIT Y, FIELDWORK


DB: Here is more of a rhetorical question in order to take us to a particular context of discussions about the body and embodiment: what is so feminist about the body? I say it is a rhetorical question since it seems quite clear that the context of feminist movement brought the body to the forefront of theoretical discussions, and you were from the start engaged in these discussions. MS: I think that the body is imagined to do two things, well the European body should we say: one is that of course its a register of interactions in the sense that you know: techniques of the body, disciplines of the body, how people behave, and move and so forth, appear to register other peoples presence and not just the presence of the actor. I think the early feminist perception was that it was actually in the female body itself that you saw the effects of social differences, values, other persons. I mean that was quite a powerful image for talking about how women are positioned, to recall that vocabulary, in their social milieux. The second thing is that, in what I broadly call Euroamerican-Christian-Enlightenment-scientic thinking, the social/ideological category of the individual is assimilated to the body, that is, we take the integrity of the body, its discreteness, its apparent boundaries and so forth, as an icon of the individual.5 Because the body has such a powerful cathexis, by appealing to the body, one is also appealing to the individual, and you arrive at the notion that somehow the individual owns the body, and it is one way of making this connection apparent. And that was the second, a powerful set of images when in those early days women were trying to assert themselves, the notion that there is some natural right as it were to do with ones body what one wishes. It was a powerful rhetoric. DB: This relates primarily to second wave feminism, if you want to use that terminology, but would also be applicable to third wave feminism, and could thus be brought under a much broader banner? MS: Oh, absolutely. In fact, there is a direct parallel, because of the discovery of subaltern discourse and so forth, the beginnings of the notion of postcolonial societies and therefore how one might rethink colonialism, was all happening at about the same time that feminist anthropology was also getting off the ground, and these things were going in parallel. That is, as part of the genealogy of what was to be third wave feminism. DB: Talking about the body, we primarily talk about the Euroamerican body. What happens then with the rest of the world, and can the body be an analytically useful concept when we discuss other ontologies? MS: Of course it can. Then we get back to the point I think we were talking about earlier, which is that you can make almost any concept work in one of two ways. Because you can either say, this is very useful for describing the x, we can see links and continuities, or you can say, well actually, this is not useful at all for the x, and we need something quite different, their

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version of the body is not what we would call the body. So, as an analytical tool its entirely what one makes of it. I think my complaint, if I have a complaint, is that this process isnt taken as the rst major step. The rst major step has to be, if we take up this issue of the idea of the body, to ask, what constellation of relations, issues, events, and so forth in respect to it, do we want to uncover or discuss? DB: It has been emphasized by some authors that we should perhaps focus much more on the idea of embodiment. Could you comment on this differentiation of concepts? MS: It was an attempt to introduce a sense of indeterminacy, but more than that to describe social life through this icon, thereby dismantling it as a sign of the individual. By social life I mean to include everything that is apprehended experientially. Perhaps I can add that embodiment comes from an approach to subjectivity that is quite fascinating, but I am fascinated more by relationality less by the notion that everythings connected, of course it is, than by what people make of their relations with one another and the way they join and combine relate their ideas in doing so. DB: The question of embodiment could be contrasted with the term that Tim Ingold insists should replace it: enworlded rather than embodied human agency. MS: Ingold is using a very particular sense of the world, that is, a phenomenological world, and I think it really reects what he has always argued about and been interested in which is the extent to which living organisms are at once adaptive and creative, and he sees social beings, human beings, in exactly the same way. And, of course, they inhabit the world that they are inhabiting, while other entities inhabit different worlds, so enworlding means that you exist within the capabilities that you can make available to yourself, so in fact people create their world, something like that. That seems to me a very neat and brilliant way of preceding things. What I dont see is how its in opposition to anything else: why does it have to be put in an oppositional frame? DB: I am interested then very much in the direction that your work has taken after, you said the 1990s? MS: Yes, the new reproductive technologies were very interesting at that particular moment. This was the time when the UK was formulating the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (enacted 1990), which eventually set up an authority to license clinics, and so forth. There was a lot of interest, a lot of concern then about the morality of what was being discussed. And, I was interested in putting all that in the context of kinship. I have retained my interest in that, but it is one of those arenas where it seems to me most of the interesting questions come all at once, they all come at the beginning, rather like the bicycle once the bicycle was invented there was not much more to do with it. It came already made as it were, with a few adjustments to the size of the wheel, but basically it was there, as were, in a way, a lot of the ethical issues and problems that came

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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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Melanesia (Strathern, 2001), I try to come to grips with the notion of substance, and of course there has been a lot written on substance and materiality since then. And this is an area that I would go back to and think about. There is something very interesting about eating. Here a propos the Melanesian data I committed myself to using the concept of the body in the context of an entity that is nourished. Because that seems to me the nearest counterpart to what we (Euroamericans) mean by the physical body. This entails contributions from both parents, the body made up of bone and esh, and blood, and this is the body that is nurtured until it ceases. And that nurturing by semen, food, and so forth, happens within a very specic set of relations. There is an unnished section in The Gender of the Gift that deals with domesticity. It is to do with the effects of eating and what it actually means to take in substance in order to create substance, and this is completely unnished in my mind. And something I really would quite like to go back to and think through properly, particularly in the light of recent theoretical interventions. DB: When you went back to Papua New Guinea after a number of years, did you feel that questions you could be asking are now different or similar to questions that interested you when you did your original research? In other words, have the objective circumstances changed in the meantime prompting you to ask a different set of questions? MS: Yes, yes, I felt that change of circumstances very, very acutely. And, I think the roots of my hesitation about going back is what was already apparent in 1995, ten years earlier when I went back. I felt really acutely that I wasnt t to do eldwork. And by that I meant that theres something about anthropologists being on the whole young and on the whole going quite raw into the eld. Because they take it as it is. I could not take it as it was. I could not summon up interest in Nike shoes and football and things. Had I been young I would have. This is the world we all live in. And I just found that very difcult. This is an inadequacy on my part. Alas, I sat around with old people grumbling about youth. Another thing I felt overwhelmingly was that if I were to go back I would want to go for a quite a lengthy period, I cannot go back again for two or three weeks, thats just not on the cards, you cease to be a serious person. So, this coming year is a short visit, I wont go to my eld site, I shall stay in Port Moresby. What I felt very strongly [in both 1995 and 2006] was that I wanted to start over again. I wanted to start afresh, become attached again, getting to know people. Despite having xeroxed generations of genealogies, I just wanted to leave my data on one side and start all over again. And that feeling of wanting to start all over again is of course a fantasy. And it is a fantasy that moves in at the moment when you feel something has slipped, from ones grasp perhaps. Certainly it comes out of feeling inadequate to the moment. From which I take odd comfort. Because I think probably there was a time when I was adequate. And I should be pleased about that and I should not have to constantly try to recreate that situation. But of course the way I am in the eld now is through students. Or through other people. To mention one former student in particular,

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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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change they do so in concert with everything else, they alter in their congurations but nonetheless in those congurations are still present, and that gives a certain sense of the way things endure. Whereas this work on assemblages is all about things being held together just for certain moments in time. And I just thought that there might be some interesting mileage there for archaeologists in thinking about the past. A very different scale of course, but it is literally what you are dealing with, you are literally dealing with people sitting around the re for ten winters and then . . . you are dealing with assemblages. Maybe there is something to be learned from archaeology about how we anthropologists describe whats going on.

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]

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