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Tit* "\q:rrsix\ tr$ thu s\*r*sir.t* Nth*r.i\tr.ri*:.st S*Ii*tr. A m er ic an Eth n o l o g i s t Vo l u m e 3 3 N u m b er I N ovember2005 postedFeb 2006 Book Reviervs On-line Commons and Borderlands:Working Paperson Interdisciplinarity,Accountabilityand the Flow of Knowledge. Marilyn Strathern.Oxford: SeanKingstonPublishing,2004.xi + 102pp., references. GeorgeE. Marcus Universityof California,Irvine Marilyn Strathern collectsfour working papers that reflecther ongoinginvolvementin multidisciplinarityprojectsand collaborations that arereshaping her own ancientuniversity and, by implication,research universities everywhere. Shefocuses on the Cambridge Genetics KnowledgePark,but her fascination is with "recentmoveswithin and beyond universities to value collaboration as a specialsourceof creativity,to forge alliances between cognate disciplines, to experiment across the boundaries of academic disciplines and the performingarts,and to address (p. vii). diversepublicsand non-academic interests" At stakeis an epochalresponse political economies of state-based to global regimesof competition.In this response, the transformation of science, technology, and knowledgemaking institutions hasbecomecrucialto the remakingof competitiveeconomies. At the heartof this transformation havebeenthe intensive reflexiveself-management of universities in formal terms (the proliferation of "audit" culture,benchmarking,and performance measures) and the penetration of socialpolicy issues of ethics,accountability, and the interests of stakeholders into the heartof doing science. No humanisticfield of scholarship or humanscience, in its agreeable backwaters, is left untouched by thesedevelopments. In her penetrating observations on changes in the universitylandscape aroundher, Strathern alsohasthe prospects for socialanthropological research in mind. For anthropology, in particular,many pitfalls and many opportunities exist in this redrawingof the boundaries of science and societyin the roving, interdisciplinary fervor of the contemporary university becomingmore dynamicallya core institutionof political economy. Thesepapersarethe latestphasein the evolutionof a remarkable careerthat hasmoved from the era of Melanesian ethnography in its historicalclimax (but with her sustained bifocal perspective on home as well) to reproductive technologies as the new arenaof kinshiptheory to the emergence of audit culture(issues moving her into the expanded role for certain academics in the United States and Britain as public-interest intellectuals) to the broader horizon of far-reaching changein her own universitysetting. Anthropologynow beginsnot only at home but also in the quite exotic local entanglements of new forms of knowledge makingof globalizing scale. In making this new genericcontextof research itself an objectof inquiry, Strathern is steady in her own style of doing anthropology. The classic termsof socialanthropologypersonhood, properfy,exchange, and comparison-remain legibleand foundational throughoutStrathern's projects.Yet her personal success in agilely sustaining this tradition tendsto divert attentionfrom challenges to anthropology's signature methodsand forms of (and opportunities) reporting.Still, thesechallenges do not go unacknowledged by Strathern. Following is a selection of four quotations from Strathern's papers that stimulatenew thinking aboutchallenges to the function and form of ethnographic inquiry castamid the

currentfervor for wide-ranginginterdisciplinarity in knowledgemaking. I follow each quotationby a commentto encourage dialogue.

l. "Social anthropology hasone trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attemptto generate more datathan the investigator is awareof at the time of collection. . . a participatory exercise which yields materialsfor which analyticalprotocolsare often devisedafterthe fact ..." (pp. 5-6). This sentiment celebrates the serendipitous virtue of a loosemethod,perhaps too much, as an aesthetic of its tacticalgenius.But it doespoint to the realization that the valuable surplusdimensions of "data" in the processes of fieldwork emergeonly later in the way that ethnography is processed in reception, amongthe communityof anthropologists and others who respondto its textual forms. Norms for incorporatingreceptionas an integral part of ethnographic knowledgemaking seemcalledfor.

2. "[Ethnographyallows] one to recoverthe antecedents of future crisesfrom materialnot collectedfor the purpose... to anticipate a futureneedto know something that cannotbe definedin the present"(p. 7). This is an appealing temporalrefunctioning of ethnography toward emergent phenomena-ethnography that can documentand articulate possibility. Anticipationof future crises, however,is like soothsaying, and the capacityto practicethis function within ethnography needsexamination.

3. "Anthropologists onceregarded it theirjob to elicit reflexivity from their research subjects, but nowadays they are often presented with a high degreeof alreadycultivatedselfawareness and self-consciousness ... presented with what one might call indigenous social analysis..." (p. l0). This is a statement of the key challenge to contemporary ethnography. Anthropologists encounter, not Other,but Counterpart, partners, or epistemic requiringa rethinkingof all of the availabletropesby which we constitute subjects, difference, and collaboration in ethnography as well as the genresof knowledgethat might come from it. "Writing Culture" returnsin a very differentera!

4. "That conflictedsubjectis one which the dystopicconditionsof accountability regimes havethemselves created. The realisation of the impossibilityof the programmatic ideal ... is a realisation of its absurdity. And that meansthat otherapprehensions of socialreality are being createdat the sametime ... [so] why not 'anthropologise our evaluative practices'?"(p. 78). Here,in what shecalls "the creativityof the repressed," Strathern locates where epistemicpartnership in the refunctioned collaboration of fieldwork might be found for ethnographers intervening within the new formally reflexive,sociallyawareregimesof knowledge.

Finally, I commenton the genreof working papers, so skillfully employedby Strathern, and what it suggests about the future of ethnographyin the kind of critical inquiry that her project exemplifies. This genrecreates an appealing work-in-progress environment that licenses the always-revisable, always-speculative character of ethnographic argumentamid the morphing of the forms of knowledgemaking that are both its milieu and object.Could it be that the authoritative ethnographic text or articleno longerhasa secure placeamid theseanticipatory reports,working papers, memoranda, and talks on the moving groundof the contemporary?