If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon.

This piece answers responses by Bruce Kapferer, Annemarie Mol, and Morten Pedersen to the author's article “Binary License,” appearing in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” She emphasizes that, whatever contributions to theory may be attributed to her (for example, the concept of the “partible person”), her work is mainly descriptive and centered on Melanesia. She makes no objection to discussing generally applicable principles, or to finding unity in diversity—saying only that she is somewhat wary of them and, instead, (...) mainly reports her findings about particular cultures in detail. Her conclusion is that, when theoretical expectations are in tension with observed particulars, though a “bifurcation” may well come to light, “bifurcation is nothing to be ashamed of.”. (shrink)

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics' recent report on the ethics of the donation of bodily material for treatment and research (Human Bodies: Donation for Medicine and Research. www.nuffieldbioethics.org/human-bodies) brings to the fore the much-debated question of how far society should go in trying to encourage people to donate their bodily material. Based on conclusions reached by the Working Party with respect to the duties of the stewardship state, the role of altruism and of solidarity, public interest in health-related research, the (...) welfare of the donor and the importance of ‘professional values’ such as trust and respect, the report presents an ‘Intervention Ladder’ that sets out the ethical acceptability of various ways of encouraging people to donate. Policy recommendations are made in a number of areas including organ donation, gamete donation, volunteering for clinical trials and the use of donated tissue in research. (shrink)

Abstract:In this forum, Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway's edited volume Making Kin, Not Population: Reconceiving Generations (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018). Responses from multiple authors featured in the book follow.

This article exploits the “binary license” offered by the title of the symposium in which it appears (“Comparative Relativism”) as a kind of promise of connection. The author suggests, however tentatively, that in the challenge of heterogeneity, fractality, perspective/-alism, and multiplicities lies the power of the forking pathway: the moment a relation is created through divergence. If we are invited—in the same breath—to consider forms of comparison and forms of relativism (dropping difference and similarity), we are also offered two paths, (...) one based on a world of singularities and multiplicities, and the other on a world of not-quite repetitions. The article asks if the binary is not essential to the epistemic work that Western (Euro-American) scholars might want to do, since we forever reinvent the divide between the modern and the post-/pre-modern. Strathern assumes the anthropologist's license to talk about concepts through persons, and begins by asking how Papua New Guineans who come together in a city compare themselves, and in contrast to ethnic comparisons elsewhere (e.g., contra Sarah Green's Balkan interactions). In talking about persons through concepts, it is worth asking what is entailed in relativizing one scholar's work through that of another. The author says that her “hunch” is that in both cases the analyst might wish to have the liberty of discerning—in the same breath—the multiplicities of what John Law and Annemarie Mol call perspectivalism (their very general alternative to comparison) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's radically divergent perspectivism (a self-contained, recursive and above all socially specific relativism). (shrink)

How do we inhabit technology? This theme for a conference on the way in which technology (apparently mobile, rootless, individualistic) at once surrounds us and becomes part of our very bodies (becomes `inhabited', with connotations of identity, community, locality) prompts reflections from Melanesia. If the concept of technology inhabits anything, it most emphatically inhabits our ways of speaking about ourselves, reifying many different projects as the extensions of one - an enchantment with creativity. The same language imagines `nature' existing apart (...) from human creations. It is clear that the life of these old Euro-American divisions is not over yet. Intellectual property protocols, notably patenting, foster the divide between `technology' and `nature' while presaging its collapse. This article points to some alternatives, incidentally offering a candidate for `habitation' that has nothing to do with community or locality. (shrink)

The authors of Re-Thinking Science argue theneed for a socially robust science. In this essay, an anthropologist asks what it takes to render a description of `society' robust. Two empirical cases – concerning bioethics in the field of reproductive technology, and compensation claims for environmental pollution – show society in different guises.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

It is tempting to interpret Marilyn Strathern as saying that the concept of nature is a social construction, because in her essay “No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case” she tells us that the Hagen people do not describe the world using this concept. However, I point out an obstacle to interpreting her in this way, an obstacle which leads me to reject this interpretation. Interpreting her in this way makes her inconsistent. The inconsistency is owing to a (...) commitment that she shares with previous British anthropologists, a commitment which points to an incompatibility between two intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Marilyn Strathern has produced a remarkable body of work that not only demonstrates range and tenacity but also has produced a host of inspirations that have made their way into the world. This Afterword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ dwells on the subject of the modesty of what Strathern is proposing and how it relates to space, noting that her work enables us to forge new practico-theoretical combinations and works of diplomacy between incompatibles (...) which show up the limitations of each party even as they forge new understandings – an approach that chimes with a move towards a more spatial view of knowledge. Theory, to echo Strathern’s gardening metaphor, needs to leave room not just to prune but to grow, the two being inter-related, as she points out. This Afterword also proposes that the extraordinary ability of anthropology to be inside and outside at once might serve as a model for what the social sciences need to become if they are to stay relevant in a world which cannot be reduced to a cipher for theory but still needs to learn from theory – theory which is precarious but spreadable, theory which establishes a rapport, but a rapport with friction built into it. (shrink)

The interview was conducted in September 1996 in Cambridge. Marilyn Strathern (MS) and Janet Carsten (JC) had been colleagues at the University of Manchester’s Department of Social Anthropology until September 1993, when Marilyn Strathern left to take up the William Wyse Professorship at the University of Cambridge, where she remained until retirement in 2008. Janet Carsten joined Edinburgh in October of the same year, where she is presently Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology. (Supplementary questions, reflecting (...) back on the earlier interview, were put to Marilyn Strathern by the editors of the special issue in 2013.). (shrink)

Economics uses rational actor models, but what about anthropology? I present an interpretation of the influential anthropologist Marilyn Strathern according to which she engages in a kind of rational actor modelling, but a kind that is different from economic modelling.

This piece addresses Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” and the important contribution she makes to the development of an anthropology that is truly comparative and that aims to escape some important disadvantages of an earlier relativism. This comment places her in the context of the related effort of Louis Dumont, which involved a sustained critique of Eurocentricism, in which he saw anthropological comparativism as hitherto being bound. A question is raised concerning the extent to which Strathern has (...) escaped the kind of criticism that Dumont developed. Additionally, Strathern's Hagen materials are considered in relation to the earlier Zambian studies of the “Manchester school” of anthropology and which addressed similar ethnographic materials. Strathern's work is regarded in this comment as bearing some similarity with current directions in actor-network theory, although sustaining an ontological approach that is seen by some as contributing to the risks of anthropological relativism. The comment attempts to work within the spirit of Strathern's original contribution and is concerned with how anthropological comparativism may avoid some of the pitfalls that are commonly associated with it. (shrink)

Patricia Uberoi extracts an argument from Marilyn Strathern: that feminist research cannot bring about a paradigm shift in social anthropology, because any feminist framework can be easily contained. I contrast Uberoi’s interpretation of Strathern with my own, and then draw attention to two possibilities that this containment argument overlooks.

This article takes up Marilyn Strathern’s formulation of a law/culture ‘duplex’ – her term for the complementarity of anthropology and law as means to each other’s ends. She draws attention to the limitations of the duplex, and urges us to consider ethnography as (in part) a project of unwinding its entwinement. As a step toward that end, the article returns to classic texts by Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski – texts that were foundational to the emergence of anthropology, (...) and to the establishment of law as an object of study for the social sciences. Re-read in light of Strathern’s insight, what has been widely taken as their relativism emerges instead as their defense of political community as a subject for ethnography, and (accordingly) the basis for a theoretical check on law conceived globally – within states or as colonial overrule. The article concludes with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of that position. (shrink)

I respond to the charge that one of my objections to Marilyn Strathern’s rejection of feminist anthropology is the same as an objection made by Kamala Visweswaran. They may seem very similar to begin with, but I argue that there is both a difference in focus - in which premises we are concentrating on - and in method.

This paper presents an attempted pastiche of the writing and thinking style of the distinguished anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. The claim about the consequence of avoiding the charge of exoticism resembles the paradox of analysis.

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism, Strathern’s about relatives and kinship – (...) both of which concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke’s own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern. (shrink)

Today, somewhat counter-intuitively, we no longer have an obvious venue for thinking-in-the world about our actuality. Despite, or because of, the endless conferences, seminars, mobility, publication outlets, new media and the like in which it is easier and easier to be connected, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the diagnostic that it is harder and harder to relate. This Foreword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ considers the contemporary problem of the inversion of connectedness and relatedness in (...) the light of Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre. Proceeding from a discussion of the three kinds of friendship distinguished by Aristotle, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual persona is invoked as a way of thinking through conceptual friendship and the forms of relationality that an engagement with Strathern’s work requires and sustains. (shrink)

BROOKS J and RAFFERTY AM. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 142–150Education and role conflict in the health visitor profession, 1918–39Health visiting was the public health profession in the UK, which arose during the Victorian period to support and supervise the mothers of the nation. The health visitor was expected to teach the new mothers hygiene, infant feeding and diet, help them in the home when necessary and then report back to the Medical Officer for Health. Her role therefore was multifaceted and (...) required education and training from a number of differing bodies. She needed nursing skills to help with the practicalities of observation and home care, sanitary knowledge to ensure that the buildings were safe and training in law and epidemiology. In order to fulfil these professional requirements, by the middle of the twentieth century the health visitor was expected to be a nurse by background, be educated for health visiting in a university and understand community medicine. These differing and sometimes opposing requirements meant that the health visitor was often caught in-between conflicting ideologies. It is this idea of ‘in-betweenness’ from the work of the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and its relation to the work and education of the health visitor that this article will focus. (shrink)

In her paper ‘An Awkward Relationship: the Case of Feminism and Anthropology’, Marilyn Strathern argues that feminist research cannot produce a paradigm shift in social anthropology. I reconstruct her arguments and evaluate them, revealing that they are insufficient for ruling out this possibility.

This paper evaluates a definition of anthropology at home formulated by Marilyn Strathern in her book contribution 'The Limits of Auto-Anthropology'. According to the definition, anthropology at home is anthropology carried out in the social context that produced this discipline. I argue that this is not an adequate definition of anthropology at home.

This paper responds to an argument against a kind of anthropology. According to the argument, if the aim of anthropology is to describe the different worldviews of different groups, then anthropologists should only refer to material artefacts in order to illustrate a worldview; but the interest of artefacts to anthropology goes beyond mere illustration. This argument has been endorsed by key members of the ontological movement in anthropology, who found at least one of its premises in Marilyn Strathern’s (...) writing. (shrink)

Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in-dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all of (...) our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create. (shrink)

Corporate gifts – from philanthropic donations to individual reward schemes – attract considerable attention from scholars for the kinds of moral, economic and political logics that motivate them. This article considers the gifts that transnational corporations give to producers and draws from Marilyn Strathern’s writings on exchange and personhood in order to reverse dominant analyses. Focused on the gifting of gold coins to industrial workers at a global manufacturing unit in India, it brings together field-based observations with a (...) diverse field of literature on the gift in anthropology. Against an analysis that sees the corporate gift harnessed directly to a corporate bottom line, this article proposes an alternative accounting that uses Strathern’s notions of ‘elicitation’, ‘revelation’ and ‘detachment’ to explore the contours of knowledge, personhood and relationality in the transaction. If corporate gifts have powerful effects, the article argues, it is because they establish difference between the person of the giver and the person of the recipient and because they materialize actions, desires and capacities that accrue to and transform the recipients rather than simply because they are vessels for the interests of global capital. As social theory confronts the political economy of corporate giving, Strathern’s writings prompt provocative questions about agency and power that challenge the hegemonic status of the modern corporation. (shrink)

This commentary on Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” discusses certain implications of her assertion that intertribal relationships among urban migrants in Papua New Guinea are not “ethnic.” For if such social encounters do not involve a conventional politics of identity, what then might its politics be? By comparing Strathern's Melanesian case with ethnographic examples in Corsica and Mongolia, a novel relational modality of “intensive ethnicity” may be identified, one that differs qualitatively from the “extensive ethnicity” with which (...) anthropologists have usually been concerned. The two forms of ethnicity are equally relative, in that a given group's self-understanding and self-designation are in both cases the result of its relations with other groups. However, ethnically extensive relations of the standard anthropological variety involve symbolic processes of boundary making and boundary maintenance whereby contrasting cultural traits or contents are arbitrarily assigned to and distributed among preexisting social forms and social scales (whether individuals, communities, or nations). Conversely, the more intensive intertribal engagements described by Strathern and certain other anthropologists are relational all the way down, given that everything about the terms of these relations (including their form, scale, and dimensioning) is defined by the particular quality in question. Thus a contrast may be established between the politics of identity and what might be called non-identity politics. If the former amounts to an ethnic economy in which subjectivities are exchanged in a commodity-like, alienable way, then, in the latter, stereotypical naming and other seeming “ethnic” practices amount to gift-like, non-alienable insertions of selves into others. (shrink)

Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of ‘law and society’, or ‘law in context’. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on ‘law itself’, on what Annelise Riles calls the ‘technicalities’ of law. How might the legal scholar be inspired by this approach? In this article, (...) I explore one possible way of approaching law after anthropology, which is to find within law’s own archive a set of resources for an analogous representation of law itself. Drawing on the historical scholarship of Yan Thomas, I suggest that the Roman conception of law as object offers an engaging counterpart to the anthropological take on law as a specific set of tools or, technicalities, or as a particular art of making relations. (shrink)

Marilyn Strathern’s arguments against the possibility of feminist research bringing about a paradigm shift in social anthropology have led to a number of responses. Regarding one argument she presents, her own writings suggest a response: the argument that feminist research cannot bring about such a shift, because it is only concerned with part of society. A foray into the history of British social anthropology is of value for appreciating this argument and the response.

In conversation with Marilyn Strathern’s work on kinship and especially on metaphors of intellectual and reproductive creativity, this paper provides an analysis of plagiarism not as a violation of intellectual property but of the kinship relationships between author, work, and readers. It also analyzes the role of figures of kidnapped slaves and children in the genealogy of the modern concept of plagiarism.

The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its “ontological turn,” offers a vision of anthropology as “the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.” After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” metaphysical (...) schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage. (shrink)