Property, Substance, and Effect

This title draws on Strathern‚Äôs interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations come into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge brought together here. Twenty years have not diminished interest in the book‚Äôs opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist‚Äôs ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Wherever one lives, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for the lateral reflection afforded through the ‚Äúethnographic effect.‚Ä

Artifacts of history: events and the interpretation of images

Amongst other things, this paper argues that a kind of anthropology, referred to by Strathern as modernist anthropology, has no reason to refer to artifacts except as illustrations. They are merely useful examples to illustrate information the anthropologist has provided about a given social/cultural context, e.g. to illustrate a worldview

Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes

A return to Deleuze and Guattari’s famous figure of the rhizome, this paper turns the philosophical idea around by asking what we might learn, from their openended exposition of it, about plants. The account at once reduces the rhizome to its cultivated varieties and enlarges the notion of a plant by the people joined to it. A stimulus comes from the recent World Heritage designation of a site in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, for its evidence of the prehistoric cultivation of plants preferentially propagated by vegetative means. Following Haudricourt’s early exposition of the yam and the implications of cloning as a way of life (as well as a way of thought), the paper elaborates on what is indissolubly tied to the rhizome as a cultivated plant, people’s actions. Rhizomic plants are well described as multiplicities. Some questions are asked about the nature of diverse contrasts that are or are not implied. The burden of ethnographic demonstration is with the Papua New Guinean material; the provisional nature of the rest will be apparent.Riprendendo la celebre figura del rizoma elaborata da Deleuze e Guattari, questo articolo capovolge l’idea filosofica per chiedersi cosa si possa imparare da questa riflessione aperta riguardo alle piante. Allo stesso tempo, il resoconto riduce il rizoma alle sue varietà coltivate e allarga la nozione di pianta alle persone ad essa associate. Uno stimolo proviene dalla recente designazione di Patrimonio dell’umanità di un sito del Monte Hagen, Papua Nuova Guinea, per aver fornito la prova della coltivazione preistorica di piante riprodotte principalmente attraverso modalità vegetative. Seguendo la precorritrice descrizione di Haudricourt sull’igname, e le implicazioni sulla clonazione come stile di vita (oltre che come modo di pensare), l’articolo riflette su un tema che è indissolubilmente legato al rizoma inteso come pianta coltivata: le azioni della gente. Le piante rizomatiche sono descritte accuratamente come molteplicità. Alcuni interrogativi posti riguardano la natura dei diversi contrasti che sono o non sono implicati. L’onere della dimostrazione etnografica riposa su materiale proveniente da Papua Nuova Guinea, mentre la natura provvisoria del resto risulterà evidente

Comparing Concerns—Some issues in organ and other donations: Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lecture:

In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of organ and tissue donation, and the debates to which current practices give rise. Donation is only one of several modes of procurement, organs only one kind of body part that can be donated, and people offer comparisons just as commentators do. Perhaps here is an answer to the question of how to make a reasonable account out of a fraught and infinitely expandable nexus of public concerns. Is it possible to conserve the complexity of the issues while not letting the sheer quantity of information run away with  itself? Would following through the comparisons do the trick

Property, Substance, and Effect

This title draws on Strathern‚Äôs interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations come into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge brought together here. Twenty years have not diminished interest in the book‚Äôs opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist‚Äôs ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Wherever one lives, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for the lateral reflection afforded through the ‚Äúethnographic effect.‚Ä

Entre uma melanesianista e uma feminista

RESUMONeste artigo, práticas acadêmicas dos anos 80 em torno da desconstrução são postas sob a perspectiva das teorias construcionistas e da cultura que caracterizam as concepções ocidentais. Ambas - construcionismo e desconstrução - são colocadas sob a perspectiva das concepções melanésias. Estas, sem as premissas construcionistas, exemplificam certos modos duais, mas não binários, de simbolizações e relações. AbstractAcademic deconstructive pratices are here considered through the perspective of theories that consider society and culture as construction, characteristic of occidental conceptions. Then construction and decontruction are here considered from the vantage point ofmelanesian conceptions. Without premisses of construction these conceptions are examples of dual – not binary - ways of symbols and relations

Revolvendo as raízes da antropologia: algumas reflexões sobre “relações"

Há cerca de sessenta anos, Raymond Firth pensava ser necessário afirmar que as relações sociais não podem ser observadas pelo etnógrafo; elas podem ser inferidas apenas a partir das interações entre as pessoas. Era preciso abstração. Outros pensavam que o problema era de concretização,  e recorriam, por sua vez, à personificação. Ao mesmo tempo, Firth referia-se, sem qualquer problematização, a relações em abstrato ao comparar, por exemplo, padrões econômicos e morais. Essas questões não teriam sido estranhas a Hume e outros expoentes do Iluminismo escocês, que se debruçaram sobre o poder das relações no entendimento (humano) e na narrativa (acadêmica), assim como na empatia interpessoal. Neste artigo, evoca-se um período anterior no Iluminismo europeu em geral, entre outras coisas, por conta de seu interesse em narrativas sobre o “desconhecido”. Nessa época, encontramos também algumas peculiaridades da língua inglesa, que estava sendo apropriada por muitos escoceses. No que diz respeito às “relações” no século XVIII, esses usos adensam o enredo, com implicações ainda provocadoras.Some sixty years ago Raymond Firth thought it was necessary to point out that social relations could not be seen by the ethnographer, they could only be inferred from people’s interactions. Abstraction was necessary. – Others have thought making concrete was the problem, and resorted instead to personification. – At the same time Firth unproblematically talked of relations in the abstract when he was comparing (for example) economic and moral standards. The issues would not have been unfamiliar to Hume, and other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, who dwelt on the power of relations in (human) understanding and (scholarly) narrative, as well as interpersonal empathy. At this early stage of the article, it seems appropriate to evoke an antecedent period in the European Enlightenment at large, among other things for its interest in narratives of the ‘unknown’. We also find in this epoch some peculiarities in the English language that many Scots were making their own. These usages thicken the plot as far as ‘relations’ in the eighteenth century go, with implications that still tease u