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Writing in Kind1
Marilyn Strathern
University of Cambridge

As the climactic moment of revelation . . . approaches, the symbols of the body in mens initiation songs, which up to this moment have been unequivocally masculine, now become bisexual. Trees are phallic projections which not only have heads that feed birds . . . but they also have hollow trunks inside which nest [hairy] female marsupials . . . Headwaters are not only clear streams of male effusions but are also, according to the singers, . . . rivers [of] menstrual blood. G. Gillison (1980, 170)

It is rare to come across a social anthropologist who speculates on the unsocialized aspects of behaviour by contrast with what is taken as socialized, rare, that is, outside preoccupations with childhood or with rhetorical and ideological constructions. But that is exactly how Juillerat (2002) speculates for his part on the proclivities of Yafar, a tiny population in the West Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. Given their attenuated treatment of birth, sickness and death, elsewhere the subject of much social attention, he wonders if Yafar culture regards the main biological processes as not being amenable to socialization (2002, 176). He is able to make the statement insofar as he gives a psychoanalytic inflection to the concept of society, a conventional realm, instigated by the law of the father that mediates between human beings and a cosmogonic world, amenable as he invokes the phrase to Freuds test of reality. The pre-social, a term Juillerat at one point uses as an epithet to designate the mythic figure of a primordial mother, becomes by contrast accessible through symbolic thinking / work. The contrast (socialized / unsocialized)2 is at once a tool for analysis and is presented as corresponding to the motivations behind the way Yafar purportedly act out the myth. In the course of a major ritual sequence (the yangis), the desired and fantasized bounty of the nature-mother (174, 181)3 is redistributed within the community of men, and thereby becomes socialized, just as on other occasions the totalitarian powers of the mythic parents can be displaced by the thoroughly socialized activities of ancestors, or by socialized relationships with forest spirits. Juillerats constructions echo some of the material that Geoffrey Lloyd addresses in his article, and in the fascinating book on which it is based (Lloyd 2007). We can add certain schools of psychoanalytical interpretation4 to the fields in which moderns grapple with questions seemingly posed already by the ancients, those arising from their perceptions, as he says (Lloyd 2010), of the commonalities and specificities of different human
Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2010 Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute DOI 10.1179/030801810X12772143410160

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groups. Nature and law, nature and society: Juillerat even refers at one point to the source of bounty as mother-earth. However, there are other dimensions to bring out here, as we shall see, which relate rather to Lloyds own argument.

An argument for argument?

ISRs multiple reviews of Lloyds work will no doubt be cited as yet another iteration of the multidimensionality of phenomena, here the phenomenon of academic argument. An argument or set of arguments can draw in scholars from all over the place, even though what they may be arguing about appears to bifurcate into discrete and contrasting camps. Of course, in presenting it, Lloyd does not treat his own argument as a phenomenon5: his object of attention is first those contrasting camps, and second the world(s) that the two camps address. The clarity the luminosity with which he writes comes from the steadiness the steadfastness of his attention. Yet I would add that, whether or not we wish to distinguish what is created from the material out of which it is created, the act of writing can as easily conceal from writer and reader, as it can reveal, writings own phenomenal character. Academic writing in particular works overtly as a technique to make (other) phenomena appear. I am at once making an observation about the workings of the mind (I assume that I can talk, without qualification, about the mental activity of attention-holding) and about the effects of specific techniques (writing as an attention-holding and thus descriptive exercise). However, others contributing to this symposium will be far more qualified than myself to comment on what might or might not count as cognition or cognitive behaviour, and I do not propose to pursue the implicit contrast here. I wish rather to attend to one of the phenomena that Lloyd has made visible for us: the multidimensional nature of whatever we take to observe, argue over or write about.6 In approaching an object on which Lloyd focuses, and as some of the reviews of his book have already made evident, we can only write in AL (After-Lloyd), with the object(s) he has presented for our attention. This is a regular feature of academic interchange. What he put forward as a synthesis of numerous arguments and perspectives (his model of multidimensionality) now becomes a concept with which to grapple. Of course one can see if it holds in its original location, that is, with respect to the materials with which he originally grappled, or relate it to other materials that would modify his model; however, he has also created an object that might as equally well travel free of its initial moorings. I am very struck7 by one of the strands of his demonstration, to which he repeatedly returns in his book, and again in the article, to wit the fact that Greek language and culture did not constrain ancient Greeks from idiosyncratic interpretations, nor from holding radically diverse views about the world; more than that, they argued over it. In fact demonstrably contrasting ontologies were proposed, with the difference as between the theories of atomism and divisible continuum measured in (and Lloyd would add, but not determined by) the common language they all used.
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Lines of argument competed (2007, 35). A social anthropologist might say that this is ancient Greek culture then, and what we value to the point of claiming it ancestral to all kinds of ways of thinking is precisely the manner in which they developed a practice of argument. These are, so to speak, ways of doing multidimensionality. So too is the internal pluralism of ancient Chinese medicine, with documented controversies over treatment and diverse views on human health and wellbeing (2007, 99100). These cultural moments have in common the enabling condition of literacy the ability to record argued positions, inconvenient facts, contradictory diagnoses and the demonstrable inconsistency of peoples opinions. It is of course only enabling (not determining), but in an academic mode the activities of writing and argumentation may well reinforce each other. Among other things, they can make multidimensionality appear as a property of any phenomenon, that is, of anything to be described. Yet what about non-literate modes? Lloyd draws from Amazonia, and I am bound to add that he could also have drawn from Melanesia. What we would be looking for there is not just multiple points of view but a local articulation of multidimensionality. The substance of Lloyds article is the diversity of behaviour attributable to cognitive processes that spills over any attempt at a single mode of explanation or indeed analysis. Enquiring how people think often has to take indirect and experimental paths, no less so in the case of conventionally non-literate peoples, and such paths tend to follow particular disciplinary paradigms. Precisely because of the range of disciplines on which Lloyd draws, and his constantly encountering that spillover, multidimensionality emerges as an eminently rational default position for the interdisciplinary scholar. But it is also clear that he regards competing arguments, such as those found in ancient Greek and Chinese discourse, a window into the complexity of phenomena themselves. This prompts a question one could ask of anyone, literate or not: how might they attend to the multidimensionality of phenomena, with what interests perhaps? As he says (Lloyd 2010), apropos folk classifications, we need to know what they are for. Investigating the practices or activities in which peoples attention might be manifest has the virtue of being accessible to the ordinary tools of social anthropological enquiry. An anthropological paradigm is going to be as single-minded as any other, but in this case would be specifically looking for understandings or demonstrations of diversity. Here we come up against the issue of translation Lloyd mentions several times in relation to social anthropological endeavour. Trivially, of course, in Amazonia and Melanesia, the Euro-American academic is not going to find questions phrased in quite the way he / she might pose them (as questions about human nature or cultural relativism, say, or about dichotomies such as a nature-culture divide). Less trivially, where people do not entertain a theory of cognition, that is, discuss perceptions of phenomena they are prepared to attribute to the workings of the mind, why should or how could apprehensions of multidimensionality alone have a bearing on his subject matter? After all, there are countless examples of social complexities Australian Aboriginal marriage systems, for instance, in which relations can be seen from several points of view that show skill in classification,
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attributions of emotions, use of space, chains of cause and effect, practices of reasoning, and so forth, yet that do not in the end amount to reflection upon those as cognitive processes. However, I would pursue the possibility that we might look at social complexities not as weakly social (infinite differentiation of roles and positions is ever present) but as strongly social (life is lived in the company of people and through the conversations they have with one another, tout court). That is, human sociality has to be as much a given in the processing of information about phenomena as in any other activity.8 Only who is going to say it like this? Now, the perception that the world is composed of persons may be as oddly concrete as the cognitivists projection of mind. In an extreme case, Sahlins (2008, 90) reminds us that the Maori live in a universe entirely composed of persons, all descended from the primal parents . . .including trees, birds, insects, fishes, stones, as has been observed for some Melanesian peoples on the Sepik river of Papua New Guinea, such as Avatip (Harrison 1990). More widely, persons are perceived through persons. If it is objected that this is not technically a cognitive activity, the outcomes in terms of a grasp of the multidimensionality of phenomena may still be somewhat similar. And might there be conditions under which such a grasp appears as an object of thought? Let me take a trope, already introduced, from scholarly practice: description. Perhaps we could put literacy to one side; perhaps multidimensionality is an emergent character of any practice of description. If I were to speak from Melanesia, it might emerge in the way people (persons) present and thus describe themselves. In their case, it is worth adding, they would do so with nothing comparable to a notion of humanity, or humanitys artefacts, so that the basic place of humans in the scheme of things is hardly at stake (Lloyd 2007, 35; see Sahlins 2008).

Exegetical and other debate

I return to a people who do not entertain a theory of cognition. Juillerat was encouraged to go to the Yafar by Gell, who had worked with their Sepik neighbours, the Umeda (Gell 1975; 1992). In fact, Yafar claim to have imported the yangis ritual from the Umeda ida.9 If ever one wanted a comparison of the effects of traffic in ritual /artistic life, as it turned out, Gell and Juillerat have between them provided the most exquisitely detailed accounts of what is both the same not the same performative outcome. (Only lack of records makes this less than a history.) They also make evident considerable exegetical controversy, internal and external. Internally, the two anthropologists spell out the way in which they built up their interpretations, both from what people said and from unspoken acts, figurations, and orientations. Juillerat in particular (1992, 23) acknowledges the extent to which he was following the esoteric knowledge of two Yafar experts, who gave separate and not necessarily coinciding accounts to him. At the core of interpretative effort on the part of the anthropologists, and the excitement and attention to detail on the part of Yafar and Umeda, is a sequence of dances over a period of days and nights at which a dozen or so men, often singly or in pairs, take turns in displaying flamboyant masks.
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Masks and bodies are decorated, each figure (mask and man) presenting a distinctly named composition of colours, plants, feathers, fronds, sound and dance movement.10 Differences of meaning are ascribed to the diverse elements through which these persons appear, both between Yafar and Umeda and among Yafar or Umeda commentators themselves. To gloss the ritual in terms of its ostensible aim to renew fertility or growth, or bestow hunting prowess, is to diminish the interplay of themes variously parsed by the anthropologists also concerned with sexuality and incest, reproduction, the alternation of generations, gender relations, parents and children, the waxing and waning of bodies, the life course, the attainment of power, and so forth. At the same time, the ostensible aims speak to very recognizable interests in the success or failure of the enterprise. Gell and Juillerat differ over their understanding of the whole sequence, the one emphasizing the final emergence of figures that indicate the attainment of manhood and the autonomy intrinsic to being a man that comes through time, the other the working out of a primal mythic scenario culminating in the resolution of oedipal tensions and a personification (impersonation) of society. Yet, regardless of the anthropologists, are the Umeda and Yafar of these accounts acting out an apprehension of multidimensionality? The number of elements being brought together seems almost infinite. However, just as Lloyd pinpoints multidimensionality as a feature of some very specific arguments over relations between concepts, we would need to specify what particular (set of) process(es) was being given so many attributes. To be visible as many, there has to be some coherence between the elements. In other words, we would need to choose which abstract overview Gell and Juillerat give us two candidates of the performance is the underlying subject of multidimensional perception. Simply recording the plethora of elements that one could describe as parts of the cult will not do, any more than a plurality of academic disciplines is going to converge on a single summative picture (Lloyd, 2010). One could always find an underlying subject by raising the level of generality as in saying that the cult is simply about processes of bodily regeneration, and introduce an exogenous axis in supposing that the relation at stake was between (say) human and non-human entities. However, I take another route to asking what might be multidimensional in these practices. I referred to external controversy. Gell and Juillerat generated quite a debate about the interpretation of ritual, at the time a focus of much anthropological work not rehearsed here. Leaving aside references to nature and culture, which they both make, the authors are engaged in a controversy over how to delineate society. The controversy arises from an interdisciplinary debate between intellectualist-cum-psychoanalytical considerations and sociological ones, a debate as old as the hills (Gell 1992, 136). It offers a comment on Lloyds observation that it is ideas of society that are universal, rather than ideas of nature, that is, counterparts to society may be found in peoples thoughts even though they would never frame it dichotomously with nature.11 The issue, as Gell (1992, 1367) conceives it, is whether one can or cannot regard the dramatic sequences of ida / yangis as articulating with social processes beyond the ritual, or whether the ritual is an activity outside social
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time. Are we witnessing an opposition of two arenas of social action, in which normative expectations set up in one are denied in another, or a radical disarticulation between ritual practice and society?12 The concept of disarticulation comes from Harrisons (1985) writings on the Avatip, which have already been mentioned. As Gell (1992, 136) puts it, Harrison sharply reproves his colleagues for their unthinking adherence to a Durkheimian prejudice, to the effect that ritual mirrors society. On the Sepik, ritual life (dominated by . . .an ethos of hypermasculinity) contrasts sharply with domestic practices and attitudes . . . [and with] life as it is lived. Gells own view is that ritual action can be (socially) meaningful not because it is modelled on non-ritual behaviour, but precisely because it departs from such behaviour and makes explicit its contours. His debate with Harrison rehearses his debate with Juillerat. While one can see that as perspectives on the ritual, each anthropological position enlarges our understanding in certain ways, as academic arguments the two positions are clearly agonistic, rivals for what is to count as social life. And I would return to the gift that Lloyd has given us: aside from the shrewd way in which he argues himself, he also shows us the role argument has played in descriptive practices. Here we have an argument between anthropologists; metaphorically speaking, is there also something akin to an argument going on among the men of these Sepik societies?13 Men do one thing in the [ritual] mens house and behave quite differently outside it (Gell 1992, 136). A little less than an argument with premise and conclusion and proof and disproof, yet a little bit more than turn-taking in a conversation: an altercation in the sense of taking up a position relative to previous positions, with a dynamic that before returning to it deliberately discards the previous position. Yet, as rendered here, this also seems a familiar oscillation between different domains of social life. Men might describe themselves to one another as multidimensional beings, but does anything else follow? What illumination in relation to the place argument has in Lloyds account could really come from these materials? Let me continue for a bit. There are evident opportunities for manoeuvre (Lloyd 2007, 38). For example, if we take as the unit of study not (individual) persons but the relations between them, it becomes obvious that very few people can build very elaborate systems, and elaboration breeds elaboration. Indeed there is a connection between the two when persons use themselves as resources, that is, when it is their relations with one another that they use to describe, analyse or otherwise deal with other relations. So, for example, Umeda and Yafar mobilize ritual moieties in the course of the rites to take care of the allocation of the actors roles to specific categories of people (they divide themselves in order to divide themselves).14 Then again, in the traffic across the generations or between social entities (such as Yafar and Umeda), there are likely to be constant small innovations in the conduct of events,15 even if the chances are they will not be regarded as innovatory at all, and people may claim that they are replicating what Euro-Americans would call tradition. Following Dascals (2009) emphasis on controversy, however, let me add a more pertinent point.
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What may look like a fixed programme to the observer may appear uncertain and hazardous to the participant (will the ritual work?). A now famous but then startling realization came to Gell in looking at the ida sequence as a whole: one arrives rapidly at the idea that there are not many ritual figures, but basically only one such figure in process of transformation (1975, 296, original italics). It would be going too far to suggest that there is an agonistic tenor to the way these persons replace one another. All the same, in the shifting manner in which changes over the life-cycle are presented, they do in one sense act out competing moments: each episode (of dancing) overcomes or displaces the previous one.16 One figure, one person, with many dimensions. They are of course uttered wordlessly: image displaces image. Such displacements are commonplace in both ritual and myth; in the same volume as Gells commentary, Wagner (1992) puts forward a brief obviation analysis of the yangis. Given exegetical profusion, the only certainty, he says, lies in the images. The images themselves are composed to make their appearance one after another, and thus substitute for one another, indeed a sequence of such images in transformation thus operates by enabling and cancelling whole ranges of analytic possibilities (Wagner 1992, 207). The only viable heuristic for the observer, he says, is one that models self-cancellation or obviation any linear gloss will be rendered arbitrary and selfcontradictory by the paradoxes engendered in the transformational process (1992, 207). In effect, what is made obvious moves from ground to figure, implying the displacement of previous figures in the substitution of others. The transformation of images at once captures and displaces, gets rid of, the situations in which actors (now meaning any social actor) find themselves and the premises (see Weiner 1995, 38) they think govern their actions. What was taken for granted as a conventional framing now appears not so. Whether or not one can speak of one person, what reveals the multidimensionality of the display is precisely the coherence of the sequence through which positions (relations) must pass. Perhaps on this point just as an argument sustains a series of positions, performative sequencing in ida and yangis both keeps elements together and shows they are many.

Writing (again)
These materials suggest one of the limits of academic writing that perhaps makes it as much a drag on argument as a resource for it. For it has to struggle against itself to effect obviation, the eclipse of one premise by another. Writing embodies a characteristic temporality: duration accompanied by retention. It cannot get rid of things. What one wrote at the beginning of an account is still there at the end, despite the intervening journey and the writers hopes to have transformed the readers comprehension in the course of it. For however much they appear to have been argued away (an argument should reach a conclusion rather than repeating its premises), all the opening premises, along with the hesitations or preliminaries, remain, and are thus repeated for the future. Of course, where keeping to ones premises, or examining other peoples, is a virtue, practices of reflection, critique and criticism flourish.
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Nonetheless, academic writing has (as might be expected!) different ways of holding attention. The kind of writing that supports arguments is only one. And sometimes there is so to speak controversy between writing approaches that is a bit more than a matter of style. Jensen (forthcoming) draws attention, for example, to Peter Galisons Image and logic (1997).17 Two ways of knowledge making within modern physics echo what one could attribute to writing in other disciplinary contexts. So let me switch attention from the exegetical mode of approaching ida / yangis to what one of the writers (Gell 1992) to the debate reveals significantly in the course of the debate itself about how he wrote. How he wrote was no more self-generated than argumentative logic is, for it sprang from what one might call the argumentative imagery of the ritual itself. Gell rhapsodizes the attention-holding effect. What I imagine is that when particular Umeda are participating in Ida, their minds are filled with a shining haze of half-glimpsed images drawn from real life and the imaginary life, flashing by . . . as the press of fresh experience dislodges them [the previous images] from the focus of attention (Gell 1992, 138). Attention is thereby, and rapidly, re-focused. At the same time, he describes his own writing.18 I was infused with creative energy that cost me no effort of will whatsoever, so that the elements of the text . . . seemed to join up and form themselves into patterns with dreamlike facility (1992, 128). He is explicit about what is needed to reconstruct the process through which ritual action reorganizes experience. I would maintain that the only possible method is . . . synthesis, that is, by the construction of a text whose formal construction is such that a mapping is established between a series of responses to images evoked in the readers mind as the text flashes by, and a parallel series of images that may one can never know flash through the consciousness of the ritual actor (1992, 142). To be effective, image play has to evoke sedimented experience, and he returns to the debate with Juillerat, and to his point that one has to draw on the whole of social and cultural experience to appreciate what is happening. It is interesting therefore to note that in his self-account, he resurrects the contrast between socialized and unsocialized states that Juillerat also drew on. Here it is to explain the psychic energy that was released both in the participants and in himself; for he saw the culmination of the rituals as a statement about the heady prospect of de-socialization of autonomy, of independence from others. As a young man and novice anthropologist, he was enchanted he said by the images of idealized manhood. I was infused with a collective representation of selfhood dialectically negating the conditions prevailing throughout socialization up to that critical point . . . [and of] the prospect, never fully realized, of desocialization for the developing Umeda male personality; for the anthropologist, likewise unformed, . . . [it] provided a focal symbol for a kind of methodological disinhibition (1992, 127). These were the psychic sources of the mode of ritual interpretation (1992, 127). The point about the limits to obviation in writing makes itself: in Gells demonstration, social processes appear now encompassing, now partial, and if there is a contradiction here, it is evident insofar as the one element is not erased from one part of the text when the other element is presented elsewhere. Written texts can appear multidimensional in unlooked-for ways.
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This commentary has attended to some of the kinds of apparatus through which the multidimensional nature of phenomena can appear. The plasticity of human thought, and the room for manoeuvre that people enjoy in arguments, are both part of it (Lloyd 2007, 35). Whatever cognitive equipment is brought into play, people deploy all kinds of attention-holding devices, and when things go well energize one another thereby. Switching from one image to another can be added to the list. Since I have taken up so much space on one case, let me capitalize on it by adding another image to the many that will no doubt cluster around the figure of Lloyd and his argument. The words are from Gell (1992, 139, original emphasis), they are about the Umeda, and together offer a sympathetic depiction of Lloyds project. Every experience an Umeda has production, reproduction, hunting, social interaction of all kinds, and relationships with, and understanding of, the natural world is continually cycled through images triggered by ritual representations [read, academic argumentation] that evoke and modulate these life experiences. What is important is what these images are and how they interact in different domains of experience, not what some ritual expert is prepared to assert is the explanation of whatever is being presented. Of course, Gell himself produced the point as part of an argument against a rival interpretation.

Acknowledgements
This was written while I was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Epiphany Term 2010; my warm thanks to Ash Amin and the Institutes Directors, as well as co-fellows and colleagues in Durham, for the stimulus. Stefan Helmreich added some pertinent questions. I am also most grateful to Casper Jensen and James Leach, each of whose commentary has added considerable insight. It is a pity their comments could not be reproduced here; as it is, they raise some questions about the process of argumentation in this paper to which I hope to do justice in another context.

Notes
1

This is written as part of a combined endeavour, and assumes the readers familiarity with Lloyds article (Lloyd 2007), and its framing terminology. Juillerat comments, especially on moments of socialization; no particular weight is put on the difference between un- or pre-social. My thanks to James Leach for this clarification. Yafar say that everything (in the world) comes from the mother; Juillerats gloss is that all of nature is or comes from the mothers body [dismembered when the world was made] (2002, 165, my italics substituting for the original). The significance of the mothers goodness, he goes on to say, is characteristic of the pre-oedipal phase in symbolic thinking (2002, 165).

And then perhaps make a special place for the Lacanian insights that Weiner so forcefully (1995) brings to Juillerats material, which leave society and socialization behind. If I were to draw it more fully into this account, it would anticipate the point below about sociality. I realized after I wrote the comment that this is just what Dascal (2009) does in his review (see note 7). Lloyd takes pains to distinguish multidimensionality from stylistic diversity (plurality), where different modes of investigation delineate different objects of enquiry. Influenced no doubt by Dascals (2009) review of Cognitive variations, kindly made available by the Editor, and his concluding depiction of the role

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10

11

12

of debate in mental life and of controversy as essential to the capacity to acquire knowledge. Sociality encompasses the embeddedness of persons in the projects of others. Juillerat specifies that it was a body of esoteric knowledge [from Ida performances] that . . . is part of the exegetical material for Yangis (1992, 21). Yafar say Umeda is the origin place of a single cult that spread over a small cluster of villages across two language groups. (There is no automatic priority given to the autochthonous; obtaining the sources of ones own fertility from elsewhere is a constant theme in Melanesian models of reproduction.) It would not help to list their names, too much context being required to convey any significance; as Juillerat calls them, they start with personifications of the two mothers of the totemic sago palms, proceed with fish of the daughters, sago jelly, firewood . . . Whether or not one finds a counterpart depends on whether one apprehends society as a category or concept that works in relation to further concepts (such as nature or individual), as dichotomizers among others would have it, or as the manifestation of sociability to which Lloyd refers, or as a ubiquitous sociality in the sense of relating and relationship introduced above. (Consonant with Lloyds [2007, 150] paradoxical conclusion that what has been claimed to be the value-neutral concept of nature is highly society-specific, while what is universal is some idea of the social group or collectivity (original emphasis), nature is the marked category in his argument. How social groups perceive themselves, if that is what he means, is not the focus for attention. Indeed in Chapter 7, society appears interchangeable with culture.) In the one paper (1992, 140, 142), Gell simultaneously enacts a multidimensional openmindedness in embracing Juillerats orientation (it is just not the whole story), and retreats from it in describing his critics mode of analysis as narrow-minded.

13

14

15

16

17

18

As it happens, there are societies in the Sepik region notorious for the institutionalization of argument and rhetoric, in which men stage competitive displays of esoteric knowledge. However, my intention is not to understand argumentative styles as such but to follow through the place argument has in Lloyds exposition of multidimensionality. That is, moiety relations are used to describe the relations between those who perform the dances. Prescriptive marriage systems, as mentioned in the Australian Aboriginal case, are a prime example of relations being drawn upon to describe (other) relations, e.g. where consanguineal relatives can (also) be thought of as affinal or conjugal. Each marriage at once acts out pre-existing relations and transforms the relations between those involved, re-describing them in terms of the (newly acquired) ones. Freeman (2002) offers a convincing comparative instance from Ethiopia. The sequence only works because of the precision and detail that goes into differentiating the episodes. The outcome to the whole presentation (health and growth of sago and children or success in hunting) is unknown at the time; success or failure cannot be determined in advance. In the references, but not separately consulted. Image-oriented experimentalists adhere to a mimetic tradition that aims to preserve the form of nature through visually compelling techniques of representation that command acceptance, while theorists work within a logic tradition that aggregates large amounts of data to make statistical arguments for the existence of particle or effect (Jensen forthcoming, after Galison 1997, 19). Experimentalists take it that information about a single event can, in sufficient detail, equal information derived in a partial way from many. Rare in anthropology but not unknown, it should be said, both to talk about writing habits and to write this way.

Bibliography
Dascal, Marcelo. 2009. Mental diversity and unity: A pragmatic approach to the debate. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(2): 40320. Freeman, Dena. 2002. From warrior to wife: Cultural transformation in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institution 8: 2344. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1975. Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda society, language and ritual. London: The Athlone Press. Gell, Alfred. 1992. Under the sign of the Cassowary. In Shooting the sun: Ritual and meaning in West Sepik, ed. B. Juillerat, 12543. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Notes on contributor
Marilyn Strathern, DBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, has recently been made Life President of the (UK and Commonwealth) Association of Social Anthropologists. Her interests have long been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography. Projects over the last 20 years are reflected in publications on reproductive technologies, and intellectual and cultural property rights, while critique of good practice has been the umbrella under which she has written about audit, accountability and interdisciplinarity. Some of these themes are brought together in her last book, Kinship, law and the unexpected. Correspondence to: ms10026@cam.ac.uk

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 34, 2010

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