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349 Pages·1999·16.2 MB·English
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1W c ' Property, Substance and Effect Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things MARILYN STRATHERN THE ATHLONE PRESS LONDON & NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ First published 1999 by y THE ATHLONE PRESS 1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG ' and New Brunswick, New Jersey © Marilyn Strathern 1999 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 485 11534 4 HB 0 485 12149 2 PB Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Strathern, Marilyn. Property, substance, and effect : anthropological essays on persons and things / Marilyn Strathern. p. cm. • Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-485-11534-4 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-485-12i49-2.(pbk. : alk. paper) 1, Ethnology - Papua New Guinea. 2. Property - Cross-cultural... . studies. 3. Body, Human - Social aspects - Gross-cultural studies. 4. Papua New Guinea - Social life and customs. 5. United States - Social life and customs, 6. Europe - Social life and customs. I. Title. GN671.N5 S83 1999 306'.09953-dc21 99-14804 CIP Distributed in The United States, Canada and-South America .by- . Transaction-Publishers 390 Campus Drive Somerset, New Jersey 08873 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form of by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior' permision in writing from the publisher. * Typeset by Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, Wilts. . Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd For R., E., and Contents Preface ix Chapter 1 The Ethnographic Efect I 1 Parti EFFECTS Chapter 2 Pre-figured Features ' 29 Chapter 3 The Aesthetics of Substance 45 Chapter 4 Refusing Information 64 Part II PROPERTIES Chapter 5 New Economic Forms: a Report 89 Chapter:6 The New Modernities .17 Chapter 7 Divisions of Interest and Languages of Ownership 138 Part III SUBSTANCES Chapter 8 Potential Poperty: Intellectual Rights and Property in Persons 161 Chapter 9 What is Intelectual Property after? 179 Chapter 10 Puzles of Scale 204 Chapter 1 Concluded The Ethnographic Efect I 29 Writing societies, writing persons 23 Notes 262 Bibliography 307 Index 3 Preface The National Research Institute (NRI) in Port Moresby facili- tated two months research in Papua New Guinea.in 1995. I am most grateful to the people ;who took care of me so generously, and to the Department of Western Highlands, Western Highlands Province. My hosts will know what I owe them. Special apprecia- tion must go to Reya, Henry, Mberem and Pale, as well as to Mande and her daughter Lucy,;-._and to Snow. John Kenny (Puklum El) provided much.wise guidance.;On this occasion, :as many times previously, Ru Kundil has contributed far more than acknowledgement of an ongoing.intellectual debt can indicate. Fieldwork was funded by the British Academy and Cambridge University, while a brief visit to Port Moresby in 1997 was at the invitation of the NRI and Conservation Melanesia. Cyndi Banks and James Baker, and Claudia Gross and Mark Busse, were unstinting in their hospitality on both occasions, as were Mx and Mrs .Oiee. My particular thanks to- Kupi Kundil (Mrs, Oiee) for the photograph, of her. as a girl. A Papua New Guinea kina-was approximately 50p in. 1995. Recent Melanesian anthropology has engaged in much more sophisticated, commentary.than I do justice to here. Over the last decade, along with James Weiner at Manchester University and then with Gilbert .Lewis at Cambridge, I have had the privilege of quite exceptional company from several social theorists, and ethnographers who have-also at some stage been apprentice Mela- nesianists. They have included, in Papua New Guinea, Tony Crook, Melissa Demian, Claudia Gross, Andrew Holding, James Leach, Patricia Peach, Adam Reed and Helena Regius, as well as Lissant Bolton (Vanuatu), Annelise Riles (Fiji), Jude Philp (Torres Strait) and Gerhard Schneider (Solomons). The essay format is derived from the original impetus for several of these pieces being contributions to conference topics: Portraiture and. the Problematics of Representation^ University of X Preface Manchester, 1993, convened by Marcia Pointon and Joanna Woodall (Chapter 2); Cultural Poetics, University of Southamp- ton, 1996, convened by Peter Middleton and Julian Thomas (Chapter 3); The Culture of Biomedicine, Cambridge, 1996, convened by Alberto Cambrosio, Margaret Lock and Allan Young for the Social Science Research Council, New York (Chapter 4); the European Society for Oceanists biennial confer- ence, Basel, 1994 (Chapter 6); Actor Network Theory and After, Keele University, 1997, convened by John Law (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 was originally given in 1997, under the title of 'Scale, culture and the imagination: an anthropological puzzle from Papua New Guinea*, as a lecture to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London. The following chapters are also published elsewhere. Many thanks are due to volume editors for their willingness in the matter, while permission to draw directly on the material is grate- fully acknowledged to the publishers in each case. For the purposes of this edition, some minor changes have been made. Chapter 2 (1997) in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, special issue ed. by Diane Losche, 8: 89-103. Abridged version published in J. Woodall (ed.) (1997) Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester: Manchester: University Press. These include the photographs in the frontispiece. Chapter 5 (1998) in Mana, Estudos de Antropologia Social, 4: 109-39). (Translated as 'Novas formas economicas: um relato das ? Terras Altas de Papua Nova-Guine .) Chapter 6 (1998) in V. Keck (ed.) Common Worlds and Single Lives: Constituting Knowledge in Pacific Societies, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Chapter 7 (1998) in Chris Hann (ed.) Property Relations: Sharing, Exclusion, Legitimacy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 8 (1996) in Social Anthropology, 4: 17-32). Chapter 1 includes a paper, 'Writing societies, writing persons' (1992), published in History of Human Sciences, 5: 5-16. Conserving these, and other pieces written on separate occa- sions, as discrete essays means that the reader will find some overlap in the materials which they treat. Certain of the essays were also written in tandem with further papers with which they. xi Preface share material. To avoid the tedium of repeated reference, I note them here. 'The New Modernities' (Chapter 6) is a companion paper to 'Cutting the network' (1996), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (NS) 2: 517-35. Chapter 3 (The Aesthetics of Substance') and Chapter 5 ('New Economic Forms') form a trio along with 'Same-sex and cross-sex relations: some internal comparisons', presented at the 1996 Wenner-Gren sympo- sium on Amazonia and Melanesia: Gender and Comparison, convened by Don Tuzin and Tom Gregor. Finally, the last two chapters (9, "What is Intellectual Property After?' and 10, 'Puzzles of Scale', with its photographs that appear as the endpiece) go together with a lecture, 'Environments within: an ethnographic commentary on scale', given in the 1996-7 Linacre Lecture series, Oxford (to be published in Culture, Landscape and Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press). " • \ The principal reason for bringing thesie' essays together is at once very personal and very typical for an anthropologist. I have been affected more than I can express by my time with people in Mt Hagen in Papua New Guinea, starting in 1964-5, and including the much longer periods I have spent not there and on other things. I wanted to record that in a direct way and in a way which would make evident their influence. So these essays are in that sense retrospective. That personalises a professional^c-Ohvic- tion that social anthropology does not always do enough with its past. It has contributed uniquely to human knowledge by its studies of human knowledge. In doing so, it draws attention to one consistent characteristic of social life, namely the complex kinds of reflections upon themselves that people afford one another through their relations with one another. The material which results, rich with the distillation of many minds, becomes in the past even as it is written down, but continuing to write about it also continues to make it present. Of course there are many ways of demonstrating this. And it is just as well that we have different projects! In this connection, I wish to note where I stand in the division of labour between myself and colleagues. These essays document, among other things, a continuing struggle with the language of description. Description presupposes analysis, and analysis presupposes theory, and they all presuppose imagination. The issue is how we may best describe knowing the effect which descriptions have on

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