2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 425439

Forum

Art and anthropology

after relations
Roger Sansi, Universitat de Barcelona
Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

The following text is the result of a conversation between the authors in the context of
the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network. The point of departure for this
conversation was the recent publication of Roger Sansis Art, anthropology and the gift
(Bloomsbury, 2015), a monograph about the relation between art and anthropology. From
that basis, the conversation engages with a number of conceptsfrom the uses of the notion
of the gift in art and anthropology, to the avatars of the relational also in both fields, to
wider questions of detachment and interdisciplinarity.
Keywords: Art, anthropology, gift, relations, detachment

In June 2015, Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern were invited to have a conversa-
tion under the title How art performs society, in the context of the Cambridge In-
terdisciplinary Performance Network. The point of departure for this conversation
was the recent publication of Sansis Art, anthropology and the gift (Bloomsbury,
2015), a monograph about the relation between art and anthropology. In recent
decades, the dialogue between contemporary art and anthropology has been both
intense and controversial. Art, anthropology and the gift proposes a comprehensive
overview of this dialogue, while also exploring the reciprocal nature of the two
subjects through practice, theory, and politics. The central contention of the book
is that art and anthropology dont just share methodologies but also deeper intel-
lectual, theoretical, and even political concerns. One of the central arguments of
the book is that the problem of the gift has been central to both anthropological
and artistic practice.
The event was framed differently from a book symposium, as an open conver-
sation about gifts and relations in art and anthropology. The following text is an

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons

T
| Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern.
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.023
 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern426

extended version of this conversation, starting with Sansis answer to the title of the
event: How art performs society: gifts, relations and exchanges.
Roger Sansi. The theme of the gift has always been central to anthropology but
also to art, if perhaps in less explicit ways. So much has been written about the gift
in anthropology; it is indeed one of its key concepts, one of the hallmarks of eth-
nographic theory. It is hard to imagine what else or what more could be said, what
could be added. Can the concept of the gift in art effectively say something more,
something else, to what anthropology has already proposed?
This question came first to me as a surprise, when I encountered a number of
art practices explicitly based on gift giving in the late nineties. Felix Gonzlez-Tor-
res more emblematic works were piles of candy in geometrical shapes, rectangular
carpets, or pyramids leaning against a wall, all Untitled. They were left in pro-
cess: the intention of Gonzlez-Torres was for the audience to take the candy, and
then the pile has to be filled up again by the gallerythe process by which they are
constantly being deconstructed and reconstructed in an endless act of gift giving.
Rirkrit Tiravanijas work raised similar questions. Tiravanijas first shows basically
consisted of cooking meals for the people who visited the gallery. The aim was to
bring people together, participating in a meal. For Tiravanija, It is not what you see
that is important but what takes place between people.1
What is interesting about Gonzlez-Torres and Tiravanijas work is more than
what they represent, it is what they make happen: a situation of encounter, a social
relation. Both Tiravanija and Gonzlez-Torres were central to Nicolas Bourriauds
arguments in Relational aesthetics (2002). Bourriaud described the relational art
of these artists as taking as its theoretical horizon the whole of human interac-
tions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private
symbolic space (2002: 14). The real object of Gonzlez-Torres or Tiravanijas work
was to invite people to eat and talk to each other, to construct a social relation. For
Bourriaud, art is a situation of encounter: All works of art produce a model of
sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed by it (2002: 18). The
form of the artwork is in the relations it establishes: to produce a form is to create
the conditions for an exchange. In other terms, the form of the artwork is in the
exchange with the audience. Hence, the artist becomes a mediator, a person that
fosters and provides situations of exchange, rather than a creator of objects. For
Bourriaud, relational art practices establish particular social relations for particular
people; the artist tries to keep a personal contact with the public that participates in
the exchange, fostering what he calls a friendship culture (Bourriaud 2002: 32), in
contraposition to the impersonal, mass production of the culture industries.
Relational artworks as gifts would be free, spontaneous, personal, and disin-
terested events, in opposition to commodification and mass consumption. These
kinds of free gifts are deeply engrained in Western philosophical aesthetics: the
very notion of the aesthetic experience in Kantas free of interest and finalityis
described as a gift. More than two centuries after Kant, arguments on the free gift
are still very present, not just in contemporary art but also in a larger sphere of
debates on free culture and the cultural commons that have reemerged in the

1. http://www.artandculture.com/users/5-rirkrit-tiravanija. Last accessed 2/2/2013.

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427 Art and anthropology after relations

last decades with the new digital media and the free software movement (see Hyde
[1983] 2009).
This understanding of the gift is very different from what many anthropolo-
gists have said since Mauss: in opposition to the ideology of freedom, improvisa-
tion, and egalitarianism of the gift in modern art and aesthetics, anthropologists, in
their ethnographies and theories, have often described gifts in terms of obligation,
ritualization, and hierarchy. Mauss first paragraph in The Gift concludes with the
statement: in theory these [gifts] are voluntary, in reality they are given and recip-
rocated obligatorily ([1925] 1990: 3). Many decades later, you [Marilyn] described
gifts that convey no special connotations of intimacy. Nor of altruism as a source
of benign feeling (Strathern 1991: 295).
Does this distinction between theory and reality also apply to the gift in modern
art? Are gifts in art voluntary and egalitarian, in theory, but obligatory and hier-
archical, in truth? This false consciousness or misrecognition would be at the
basis of the rules of art, and of all social life as a matter of fact, for Pierre Bourdieu
(1996). The criticism of many of the different forms of relational and participatory
art that have emerged in the last decades also have been built, directly or indirectly,
on arguments of false consciousness. Claire Bishop has described how community
arts in the United Kingdom have been embraced as a sort of soft social engineer-
ing (Bishop 2012: 5), promoting participation in the arts as a form of preventing
social exclusion. For Bishop, social inclusion policies were deeply rooted in a neo-
liberal agenda, seeking to enable all members of society to be self-administering,
fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who can cope
with a deregulated, privatised world (Bishop 2012: 12). Notions of creativity as
innate talent of the socially excluded, an energy that could be transformed from
a destructive to a constructive impulse, are also quite common in these cultural
policies. Participatory and community art could become, in this context, devices of
neoliberal governmentality (Miessen 2011).
And yet, there is something more to the question of the gift than false con-
sciousness. Mauss did not just describe the gift as a misrecognized form of sym-
bolic capital but he also presented it in direct relation to the notion of the person:
how a gift is an extension of the person who gives, hence blurring the very distinc-
tion between people and things. Mauss opened the door to imagine other ontologi-
cal possibilities to Western individualism, where this division is clearly established
from the onset. The relation between gift and personhood was a central question
for Melanesian anthropology all along, but in particular in the eighties and nine-
ties in the work of Annette Weiner, Nancy Munn, Marilyn Strathern, and Alfred
Gell. Alfred Gell famously extended the discussion of the distributed person to a
general theory of art in Art and agency (1998). In that book Gell proposed to look
at works of art as indexes of agency. Indexes of agency are the result of intentions:
Whenever an event is believed to happen because of an intention lodged in the
person or thing which initiates the causal sequence, that is an instance of agency
(Gell 1998: 17). To have intentions means to have a mind. The life we attribute to
things, and works of art in particular, would be the result of a process of abduction
or indirect inference of a mind in a thing.
Artworks dont just index the agency of the artist, but of all the agents that
have been entrapped by the artwork: they contain their distributed person, or

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 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern428

distributed mind, which for Gell were the same thing. Gell argued that works of
art can be seen as persons because as social persons, we are present not just in
our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to
our existence, our attributes, and our agency (1998: 103). For Gell this is not an
exotic belief but on the contrary, he affirms that works of art are some of the more
accomplished objectifications of human agency. Artworks can contain several dif-
ferent agencies from the artist, to the person represented or the person who com-
missioned it, to the person who bought it, to the curator that displays it. An artwork
can be a trap of agencies sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary
(Gell 1998).
Gell didnt seem to be aware of participatory and relational art practices at the
time he wrote Art and agency, and yet his understanding of the distributed person
can help engage with these practices in particular ways: artists like Gonzlez-Torres
and Tiravanija distribute their personhood through the events of gift giving they
perform. This distributed personhood does not necessarily have to be understood
in terms of the free gift, of egalitarianism, but it can also create hierarchies between
those who distribute their personhood and those who are entrapped by the per-
sonhood of others.
Still, there are limits to Gells approach. For Gell, agency is always originally hu-
man, and often seems to give primacy to the (first) agent, namely the artist, even
if other agencies are entrapped in the process. Art works have power but for Gell
this power is always bestowed on them by people with minds, whose intentions
are distributed in art objects. But the notion of distributed or partible person may
be much wider. For Strathern, partible persons may not start or generate from a
single human person but they may assemble collectives of humans and nonhumans
in multiple ways. In these terms, tracing back the origin of agency is less important
than describing the particular relation, where relations take precedence over enti-
ties: it is at the point of interaction that a singular identity is established (1990:
128). This shift of the question from agency to relations is important also to un-
derstand one central issue in modern and contemporary art, what Grant Kester has
called the disavowal of agency (2011: 4). Allowing chance to guide the process
of production of art, modern and contemporary art have proposed to open up the
space of possibilities of the artistic process by explicitly withdrawing the agency of
the artist, and describing this process as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements,
human and nonhuman, without a preestablished order of agency.
Shifting the discussion toward an ontology of relations also highlights further
the contradictions of the concept of the gift as an object of exchange. We owe to
Jacques Derrida the explicit formulation of the ontological antinomy of the gift:
taken to its logical conclusion, a pure gift cannot be reciprocated because if a
return is expected, the gift always implies its opposite: interest, benefit, utility, ac-
countancy, commodification. The gift, like the event, as event, must remain un-
foreseeable. ... It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear chancy
or in any case lived as such (Derrida 1992: 122). The gift is not in the thing given
but the event of giving: an event that gives itself and that has to be forgotten as such.
In part, this understanding of the gift as an event goes back to the notion of the
spontaneous, free gift that we have described before as key to modern art and aes-
thetics, but brings it to a deeper phenomenological level. Derridas understanding

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429 Art and anthropology after relations

of event and gift are explicitly indebted to Martin Heideggers discussion of the
thing as a gift (1971), as the establishment of a relation, of giving itself as an event.
The gift happens as an event before there is a division between subject and object,
before there is being as substance (Derrida 1992: 24). To put it in your terms [Mari-
lyn], the gift as a relation takes precedence over the entities it constitutes. The gift
is not a given: it is not there before it happens; it cannot be easily naturalized or
reduced to a sociological model (like exchange).
At this point I should stop spinning around the concept of the gift. But that is
precisely the point I wanted to make: we have a number of definitions of the gift as
a concept and practice, from the free gift of art and aesthetics, to the hierarchical
gift of Mauss and the anthropological and sociological tradition, to the distrib-
uted person that has been more recently reclaimed, to the gift as an event. These
definitions are not contradictory or in dialectical opposition but they add upon
each other: the gift is a recursive concept. Martin Holbraad defines the notion of
recursivity as a concept that changes every time it is used to express something
(Holbraad 2012: 76), but the change is built upon the previous uses. The gift is the
core anthropological example of recursion both as an event and as a concept, as it
is constantly changing and adding up. In these terms, rather than what the gift is,
as a given, in art and elsewhere, is perhaps less interesting that what it can be, its
performativity.
If we approach the gift as a recursive concept rather than as a social fact, we
can shift the focus toward its performative potential. This could help us address,
for example, the key role of the gift in the utopian vision of situationism, to come
back to the field of art. Situationists explicitly engaged with theories of the gift, in
particular Georges Batailles reading of the potlatch in his theory of an economy of
expenditure and excess ([1949] 1993). Bataille envisioned a human condition that
was not determined by need and utility, but empowered by pleasure and play. But
still Batailles notions of free play didnt have much to do with the democratic and
libertarian utopias of contemporary art, like in Bourriauds relational aesthetics:
on the opposite, his image of the gift as expense are transgressive and destructive.
After Bataille, for the Situationists the gift, the potlatch, and the economy of
excess prefigured a form of exchange radically different than commodity exchange.
In The revolution of everyday life ([1967] 2009), Raoul Vaneigem made a sharp
distinction between two different kinds of gift, one that would imply hierarchy,
another that would be the gateway to revolution. The first was the feudal gift; the
gift of what Mauss or Bataille would call archaic societies, before capitalism. For
Vaneigem, the feudal mind seemed to conceive of the gift as a sort of haughty re-
fusal to exchangea will to deny exchangeability; hence its competitive, agonistic
character, where one has to be the last to give, to keep their reputation, rank, and
hierarchy (Vaneigem [1967] 2009: 57). Vaneigems vision was not to return to the
feudal gift, but the opposite: moving forward to the pure gift (59). The pure gift
would be the don sans contrepartie, the gift without return, that would character-
ize the future society, in opposition both to bourgeois society based on the market,
and the previous aristocratic society based on the agonistic gift that didnt play for
benefit but for fame and rank. In this sense, the Situationists dismissed the hierar-
chical aspects of the potlatch that were central to Mauss, Bataille, and most of the
anthropological and sociological tradition. In the pure gift, instead, the young

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 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern430

generations would play for the pleasure of playing itself. The gift for the Situation-
ist has the subversive potential of questioning commodification and the property
relations in themselves. Following Bataille, the transgressive, excessive character
of the gift is put forward, very far away from the measured, liberal humanism of
the aesthetic utopia. And yet, this transgression for the Situationists doesnt have
the aristocratic tone of cosmic tragedy of Batailles sacrifice, but on the opposite, it
is a utopian hope. It is interesting to note how Vaneigem had a very clear under-
standing of the ontological aporia of the gift, as we have formulated it before: the
impossibility of thinking the pure gift if not in opposition to the commodity. In
these very terms, situationism describes this pure gift as a revolutionary, utopian
project of subversion of the existing social relations, which comes not just in con-
tradiction but also in direct opposition to commodity exchange. It is also interest-
ing to note that the main example of Vaneigems pure gift is nothing but ... theft:
The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply
for the pleasure of giving them away (2009: 59). ...Can theft be a gift? Vaneigem
clearly elaborates on the connection between the two notions, by emphasizing the
idea that the young generations steal objects out of desire to give them away, not
to hoard them. Perhaps this connection is a bit far-fetched but still, any anthro-
pologist can recognize that giving is always the counterpart of taking; often the an-
thropological literature has made reference to poaching, freeloading, the aggressive
soliciting of gifts by people who feel entitled to have them, or even the simple act of
taking gifts without permission, if they are not given. This poaching may take place
in confrontation to commodity exchange, for example, in colonial situations or
during fieldwork, when the colonists or the anthropologist are asked to share what
they define as their private property (e.g., Sahlins 1993). In this sense, Vaneigems
understanding of the pure gift as theft emerged clearly as an aggressive form of
questioning commodity exchange, after commodity exchange, in response to it, as
a revolutionary act.
To conclude, I would only add that although many contemporary art practices
(like relational art) are inspired by situationism, their transgressive potential is
quite mitigated. The forms and notions of the gift that circulate in the world of cul-
tural production today are not very transgressive but constructive: there is a wide-
spread discourse on the commons, care, participation, co-labor, et ceterathat
is, narratives on the autonomous creation of an utopian alternative, based on the
libertarian ideology of the free gift, rather that on the creative destruction of capi-
talism. Perhaps the sphere where the radical pure gift of the Situationists thrives
more openly is in digital media, not only through active hacking but through the
everyday practices of piracy of many of its users, operating in a gray area between
gift and theft, and forcing the culture industries to constantly reinvent their
business model.
Marilyn Strathern. For me Art, anthropology and the gift (2015) was quite thrill-
ing to read. There are several wonderful moments in this book, from which I pick
two. One just to mention, and one that leads to a question.
At the outset, let me say how much I appreciated the whole handling of the gift.
It is an incredibly slippery topic but you [Roger] at once hold it and extend it with
finesse. You both discriminate the ways in which the concept has been used, and

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431 Art and anthropology after relations

continue using it yourself to great effect. In particular I enjoyed the explication first
of its crucial character in the aesthetic regime that sees it as building communities
of free individuals (101), as against the obligation or coercion of reciprocity as is
so often emphasized in anthropology, and then of just how that second (anthropo-
logical) understanding can also be brought into play when we look at participatory
art and the way value is created for the artist. But this is among many analytical
staging posts in the way you set out the broader argument.
The particular moment that demands mention concerns the isomorphism be-
tween, on the one hand, developments in anthropological thinking about ethnog-
raphy, and the continuing search for a way to be with the people whom one is
with, and, on the other hand, the relentless distribution or dissipation of agency
in artists encounters with the world, as it has evolved through ideas about par-
ticipation, relationality, and living life. Parallel trajectories, keeping pace almost
decade-by-decade! It is comforting in a manner of speaking to realize that as an-
thropologists worry away along what they think are their own grooves, others are
doing it too (and along similar grooves). Given the reflective-critical positioning in
which we might say both artists and ethnographers place themselves, and I shall
return to this, we can see the alliance.
The isomorphism reminds me of the sense of the uncanny I got when read-
ing Donna Haraways Primate visions (1989) and her account of the changes in
primate biologists treatment of their subjects over the twentieth century: one
could track the unfolding paradigms of fieldwork and analysis in primatology,
if not quite decade-by-decade, certainly in concert with what was happening in
anthropology. What Art, anthropology and the gift shows in such a compelling
way is that this being in step with the times isnt simply due to there being some
special relationship between art and anthropology, although there are, as it also
shows, several points of relationship, including self-conscious crossreferencing. It
is significantly due to the unfolding mediationas in mediaof production and
consumption in late capitalism through the de-materialization of products and
processes of production alike (2015: 114), not to speak of the burgeoning of the
participative society.
This leads to my question; but before it is broached the book brings something
else to mind, which requires what may seembut hopefully isnta digression.
I feel a bit like the lady at the art production center in Can Xalant (Barcelona)
who, after a day of intense discussion about experimentation with processes and
methodologies, said she could not see any artworks in the room (Sansi 2015: 113).
Well, Ive brought a bit of artwork into this room [where the conversation took
place]. It is like one of those incidental archives that is all that is left of an occasion.
The object in question is a file with pieces relating to an event in which I partici-
pated ten years ago. It was completely out of context for meand your book, Roger,
has named and explained it: relational art, no less.
A letter came out of the blue from Michael Stevenson: it was about a project he
was making in association with a group of art collectors in Germany. They fund
an artwork each year, under the unusual stipulation that at the conclusion of the
exhibition the piece be apportioned among the collectors relative to their financial
contributions. The artist simply called his exhibit The gift: The form and reason
for exchange in archaic societies. Wishing to draw attention to the social economy

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 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern432

of the art community, and arguing that there has to be more than monetary ex-
change involved, he constructed a series of gifts of various kinds (from himself to
the collectors) handed over both before and after the dismemberment of the art-
work in 2005. (The work had already had quite a journey from other locations in
Australia and the United Kingdom.) He got me over, I suppose, as a kind of gift too,
an anthropologist who would talk about the gift before the dismemberment. As a
footnote, the talk later appeared in a volume on his work, which included diverse
writings intended to draw out Stevensons strategies in relation to the interconnect-
edness of things (Stevenson 2013).
The object for dismemberment was a replica of a craft lashed together from
three wartime fuel tanks by a destitute artist, Ian Fairweather, who had travelled
from Darwin to London in 1952 without spending money. The raft itself got as
far as the island of Roti, off Timor, where local residentsin Stevensons words
(pers. comm.)took the aluminum, this useful metal having currency in the lo-
cal economy, probably divided it as gifts among themselves, and in exchange
nursed Fairweather back to health, whence he was eventually shipped to London.
One of Stevensons plans for the aluminum replica was to take the pieces that the
art collectors cut up and rework them into implements common in Indonesia at
the time, these new artworks (his word) to be gifted back to them. There are many
things one could say about his vision; thus, on the last point, the artist would be
demonstrating the (free) gift of his refashioninghis labor, his energy, his skill, his
insight, his grasp of the worldof the very metal pieces that the art collectors had
paid for as parts of a replica he too had fashioned.

Figure 1: Michael Stevenson, The Gift. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney,
2011. Installation view. Aluminium, wood, rope, bamboo, tar, WWII parachute and Na-
tional Geographic magazines. Photograph by Jenni Carter.

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433 Art and anthropology after relations

Figure 2: Michael Stevenson, Die Abteilung, Saturday, 21st May, 8pm, 2005. Marking the
pieces to be cut. Photograph by Alice Maude-Roxby.

What comes through for an anthropologist is the social criticism that informs the
questions Stevenson is asking. He is not alone, and perhaps I can use the coinci-
dence that Fairweather was aiming for London because he had heard that a work
of his was hanging in the Tate Gallery, to mention the long-running interest of
Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska in the late nineties on possession and
the value of things. Thinking of a project that would take advantage of the siting
of the new Tate Modern across the Thames from the Bank of England, they also
wanted an anthropologist to write about the gift. One of the purposes of Capital
(mounted in 2001; catalogue of same date) specifically looked to the gifts behind
the commodities, beginning with the fact that the bank was founded through pub-
lic subscription, the original Tate Gallery through a donation. The Director of the
Tate Modern described Cummings and Lewandowska as exploring the zone or
fieldeverything in their surroundingsthrough which diverse activities reveal
meanings, power systems and values (introduction to catalogue). But to what ex-
tent is it an anthropological (re-) appropriation to see social criticism in the projects
of such artists? Or rather, what kind of alliance is this?
Being situated within the field of production and consumption in late capital-
ism, not to speak of the participative society, the digression leads us all over again
to the question. The digression has been about the gift located within an earlier,
thoroughly material, critique of commodity forms. One of Sansis questions apro-
pos new models of de-materialized capitalism is about what art then becomes, and
what the gift then becomes. My question looks backward: are we going to have to
reinvent some of the forms of agency that, once their historicity is acknowledged,
otherwise seem inevitably left behind?

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 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern434

The question is for both anthropology and art interested in the roads that Art,
anthropology and the gift lays out. If the end of the road is an assimilation of ar-
tistic and anthropological activity into the rhythms of life, its also follows that
all that seems distinguishable between them is, as the book points out, the label:
this is being done by artists (entries for their portfolios); that is being done by
anthropologists (their dissertations in the library). We can be cynical about the
agency that emerges in the end, but for myself that (self) consciousness about both
artistic and anthropological agency, with its now old-fashioned ring, demarcates
something I wouldnt want to disappear. How do we speak about interests and prej-
udices? It would indeed be turning back the clock if the participatory vocabular-
ies of many contemporary art practices refuse to recognize interest, prejudice, and
other issues that only workplay, interventionwill reveal. And between art and
anthropology, maybe we should indeed start with alliance rather than assimilation;
we do not need to measure how close social criticism is or is not to (say) the Situ-
ationists utopian project of subversion when it is allies we are looking for.
What links them is that being an artist or anthropologist is not performing being
an art collector or an NGO, let alone an entrepreneur or medic or a destitute person
or anyone else with particular interests and standpoints or prejudices. At the mo-
ment, the notion of ordinary people somehow saves the day: you do art or ethnog-
raphy with them. But in truth nobody is an ordinary personeveryone has his or
her interests and prejudices. Taken to its extremes, wouldnt an assimilationist ethos
also mean the artist/ethnographer dropping the labels altogether and performing/
becoming an entrepreneur or medic or destitute personin which case why not
just leave things to the real entrepreneurs, medics, and destitute people. I cant be
the only person who thinks we still want critical observersartists and anthro-
pologistsin the mix. I do not mean that entrepreneurs, medics, and destitute
people cannot also be critical observers; indeed, quite apart from what he did in his
art, Fairweathers audacious journey without money can be constructed from such
a position. But it is not their principal work or focus of communication and effort.
So, otherwise asked, the question is: how to take a view of that agency, of critical
observation?
Roger Sansi. The assimilation to everyday life, the dissolution of art into life,
heteronomy, is a constant utopian drive in modern art. In my book I have tried to
show how there is a parallel between the avant-garde reaction against academicism
and the rejection of armchair anthropology in search for fieldwork as a context
of life. There is a lot in common between participant observation and participatory
art from the onset. Of course everyday life is always a slippery concept: as you say,
ordinary people dont think of themselves as ordinarythat is rather our image
of them. Both art and anthropology have constructed a (perhaps utopian) image
of the everyday. What is interesting about some art practices of heteronomy on the
other hand is that they dont stop at proposing an idealized image of the everyday:
they explicitly intervene in everyday life, they perform it. This is something that
anthropologists have always been more ambiguous about: it has been hard to rec-
ognize that we dont simply make representations of a field that is already there
but that becoming a part of it, we make it happen in particular ways. The anthro-
pological field is a participatory event.

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435 Art and anthropology after relations

So the question is not just how artists and anthropologists have built a utopian
image of everyday life but how they have intervened into it, how they have per-
formed it. And this performance entails a certain politics, as you point out. This was
quite explicit in the case of situationism, where the dissolution of art in everyday
life entailed a criticism of the very division between work and life, the alienation
of labor that capitalism was based upon. Guy Debord famously said: In a classless
society there will no longer be painters, but only Situationists who, among other
things, sometimes paint (Debord [1957] 2006: 41). What this implied was that in
the future classless society, there would be no professional painters, or professional
artists, or professional critical thinkers, but everyone would be, in their own time
(sometimes), an artist or critical thinker. To be consequential with this objective,
Situationists renounced to their career as artists, abandoned the production of art-
works as commodities and dedicated their life to the situationist revolution.
Many decades after, there have been many different contentious readings of the
outcomes of that revolution. Many think it never happened: by the early seventies
there was only one Situationist left: Debord himself! And yet others think it did
happen but it went in the opposite direction than what the Situationists aimed. The
separation between art and life, the alienation of labor was indeed questioned by
the new kind of society that emerged from the seventies. And yet this new society
was still a new form of capitalism, with a new spirit, as Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello have defined it (2006). The new spirit of capitalism reappropriates the
artistic critique and proposes a new form of life in which the worker is creative,
entrepreneurial, identifies with his work, doesnt really make a distinction between
his life inside and outside of his work: his social relations are part of what he does
for a living. This is the new model of management, also a utopian model, because
it does not correspond to reality, of course, but is enforced through performative
mechanisms of bureaucratic enforcement that try to bend reality (everyday life!) to
the model: mechanisms of accountability and auditing, which quantify creativity,
the value produced by everyday life as it becomes a commodity, transforming rela-
tions into objects.
So in the new spirit of capitalism, the division of labor has been cancelled in
particular ways. The autonomy of different fields of practice has been superseded,
to an extent, by the imposition of a model of life and work that is transversal:
management. Nowadays, artists and anthropologists are also managers: they have
to demonstrate they are able to raise money, independently from the quality of
their work in the autonomous terms of their practice as art or anthropology. To
give one specific example: a colleague giving a presentation some weeks ago (No-
vember 2015) commented en passant that in the Netherlands today to become a
full professor, the candidate has to demonstrate the ability to raise 300,000 euros
in the private sector. Regardless of the content or quality of their research and (!)
teaching, which one thinks should be the definition of their job. That is indeed
one of the outcomes of the participative society, in which nobody should expect
to just get from the welfare state but everybody should be able to participate in
raising funds.
There are several possible reactions to this management utopia or dystopia, of
which I could point out three. The first, which in my experience is quite common
both in the art world and academia, is what I would call outsmarting. It is born

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 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern436

from the conviction that we (artists and scholars) are indeed the chosen few. We are
smarter than the managerial-bureaucratic machine that is imposed upon us and we
will be able to use it to our own benefit, getting lots of grants and making whatever
we want with them, because anyways these bureaucrats wont know. Of course it
never works, the managerial machine always ends up imposing its own logics, it
doesnt depend on our individual cunning. I have to say that I have always been
surprised by these discourses, in particular in the mouths of scholars and artists
who know the work of Foucault very well. In the end, perhaps, it reveals a deeply
ingrained belief in individualism and the survival of the fittest that lies deep in the
habitus of many scholars and artists beyond layers of sociological theory. In other
terms, some think that they will do fine because they are brilliant and that bureau-
cracy is only a problem for losers. Of course, this is precisely what the managerial
machine expects them to think: it is their own merit that has taken them to success.
And if they dont succeed, it is their own fault.
The second reaction is the autonomist. This is a conservative reaction, and I
dont mean it in a negative sense but as a statement of fact: of preserving things
as they were, or as they were meant to be; defending the autonomy of intellectual
labor and art, and stating the necessary autonomy of critical thinking. The divi-
sion of labor in modern Western society also had a political sense, as a necessary
complement of the division of powers in the public sphere. Intellectuals should be
separated from the executive power to be able to have a critical perspective. We
could ask if this ever did actually happen, but there certainly is an argument to be
made against the banalization of intellectual life. The ironic fact is that these argu-
ments in defense of the autonomy of art and the university are often accused of
ivory tower elitism by the advocates of management: ironically, the Situationist
and Maoist arguments against elitism in the sixties have become the arguments of
the zealots of the managerial utopia (as in the participative society).
There is indeed a case to be made for autonomy. Or in other terms, there is a
case to be made for detachment: not everything can be reduced to relations, par-
ticipation, commonalities, inter- or transdisciplinarity. For example, in his work on
the relations between anthropology and archaeology, Thomas Yarrow found that it
is precisely the disconnection and difference between the ways in which these dis-
ciplines produce knowledge that sets up the possibility for productive engagement
(Garrow and Yarrow 2010). There is no question that any relation produces a form
of disengagement, just like any detachment is premised on a previously existing re-
lation (Candea et al. 2015: 24), there is always a moment of separation and cut, like
your own work already pointed out (Strathern 1996). In any case, I personally think
that autonomist arguments are very valid and yet inevitably limited if we confront
the extremely powerful and pervasive relational machinery of management that
is ideologically inoculated against them.
The other possible reaction is more proactive, and it would involve taking the
bull by the horns, or in other terms confronting the enemy in its own terms: nei-
ther through cunning and outsmarting, or by detachment but by multiplying the
relations. The fact that the old forms of critique have been reappropriated does not
mean that the potential for critical thought and action that has emanated from art
and anthropology in the last century has been cancelled. The proposal that ev-
erybody is an artist, may still have potential, if we see in direct confrontation to

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437 Art and anthropology after relations

the dominant everybody is a manager. This confrontation may reveal, first of all,
that both are based on utopiathey are not a description of reality but a politi-
cal project. We can also say (why not?) that everybody is an anthropologist. That
does not mean to diminish the value of anthropology as an autonomous form of
knowledge (beware!), but just the opposite: it proposes the necessity of making
anthropology part of public life. What makes anthropology a part of public life,
what makes it political, is radically opposite to the managerial utopia: it proposes
opposed notions of the person, of the world, of the relation between people and
things, et cetera. And hence it implies a certain politics, in contraposition to the
politics of utility, impact, and added value. This different politics entails working
in collaboration with others, and this collaboration, I think, must start from what
we have in common, not from what makes us different; not from our expertise but
from a common political ground. Then, once we start working together, it is quite
clear then the collective political process will make emerge the different forms of
knowledge and skill of all the actors involved, and certain forms of detachment,
and hierarchy, will emerge. But I think that starting from the common ground is
still necessary, in political terms.
Marilyn Strathern. Imagining that we might outsmart the management ma-
chine, or that critical thinking could be autonomous, are beautifully put in their
place by this response [above]. Naming the machinery relational shows us what
we are up against. Perhaps I had in mind something more isomorphic about in-
terests and prejudices (by which I meant to capture a whole range of motivating
issues, at whatever scale, that we do not have to pin on class or other systemic
materialisms/structures). Interest and prejudices can equally divide art from an-
thropology, or separate the alliance between them from their objects of descrip-
tion, depiction, and so forth. And of criticism. What you say earlier about the gift
as a recursive concept rather than a social fact can surely be borrowed for (social)
criticism. Its performative potential, in other words, is literally of incalculable, non-
auditable value.
Naming the machinery relational performs just what I think we have been talk-
ing about. At least in your hands [Roger], it has enlarged a critical vocabulary: if
the problem is the kind of relationality that seemingly gobbles up every critical
countermove, then multiplying the relationalities is surely the answer. To do so is
not being smart or innocentit is being implacable. Or at least it can be when the
multiplication takes place through instigating objects of knowledge (work, play,
intervention, and such) that have their own specificity.

Acknowledgments
Marilyn Strathern wishes to thank Michael Stevenson for the original invitation,
and for allowing her to here draw on personal correspondence. Both authors wish
to thank Jonas Tinius for organizing the seminar that led to this piece, convener of
the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network, a three-year running re-
search group at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humani-
ties (CRASSH) in Cambridge, UK.

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 425439

 Roger Sansi and Marilyn Strathern438

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Lart et lanthropologie mis en rapport

Rsum : Ce texte est le fruit dune conversation entre ses auteurs dans le contexte
du Rseau Interdisciplinaire de Cambridge. Le point de dpart de cette conver-
sation est la publication rcente de louvrage Art, anthropology and the gift par
Roger Sansi (Bloomsbury, 2015), une monographie sur les rapports de lart et de
lanthropologie. Cette conversation engage certains de ses concepts, tels que lemploi
de la notion de don en art et en anthropologie, les avatars du relationnels dans les
deux champs, et les questions plus vastes de dtachement et dinterdisciplinarit.

Roger Sansi is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and Senior

Lecturer and Senior Researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He has
worked on Afro-Brazilian art, culture, and religion; the concept of the fetish in
the Black Atlantic; and contemporary art in Spain. He is the author of Fetishes and
monuments (2007), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (2011), and Art, anthropology and
the gift (2015), among other publications.
 Roger Sansi
 C. Sardenya 48-54 C 5 1
 Barcelona CP08005
Spain
rogersansi@gmail.com

Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology in the Division

of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests have
been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. She has worked on
gender relations, reproductive technologies, knowledge practices, and intellectual
and cultural property rights, as well as interdisciplinarity. In 2013, Hau published
the book Learning to see in Melanesia, four lectures on aesthetics and sociality.
 Marilyn Strathern
 Girton College
 Cambridge CB3 0JG
UK
ms10026@cam.ak.uk

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 425439