Partial Connections and Kinship, Law and the Unexpected (Chloe Nahum-Claudel)

De Abaete

Partial Connections and Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: A brief look at the way relationship is potentialised analytically in Marilyn Strathern’s work from Partial Connections in 1991 (references from 2004ed) to Kinship, Law and the Unexpected in 2005

Chloe Nahum-Claudel University of Cambridge

(Prepared as a presentation for an MPhil reading group with Marilyn Strathern on 23/01/2007 and revised subsequent to discussions.)

Partial Connections (PC) was a response to the problematisation of anthropological representation/poetics of the 1980s. In the first three pages the words ‘scepticism’ and ‘despair’ both appear regarding questions of complexity – anthropological analysis is struck by its own arbitrariness and in this atmosphere, the possibility for an enterprise like cross-cultural comparison appears to dissolve. How does one bound anything?

‘…at every level complexity replicates itself…each idea can also seem a complete universe with its own dimensions…We are dealing with a self-perpetuating image of complexity’ (PC xvi)

This movement is the problem explored and also the form that the text itself takes. A fractal analytic creates the momentum of the text through ‘the remaindering effect’ (PC xxiii) that makes an analytical virtue of deferral. As in this picture ‘magnification reveals analysis to be infinite,’ so that all we have is a reopening prior to closure rather than as an outcome of it.

There is no ‘satisfaction’ to be gained from reading PC (reading it is like falling off a cliff top, onto a ledge, falling off and onto another ledge and so on,) rather there is a jouissance that fits with the mood of its (postmodern-)day; sparks emerge from unlikely connections.

The fractal is a fairly orderly one that describes the way the text explicitly refuses lineal progression:

Another image invoked is more unsettling, “nothing seems to hold the configuration at the centre - there is no map, only endless kaleidoscopic permutations.” (PC Xvii) My feeling is that although Kinship, Law and the Unexpected (KLU) owes its analytical movement to the permutation inherent to relational thinking, the kaleidoscope there is one that limits its own movement within certain domains; that here Strathern’s task has been precisely to provide a map or a set of prisms that delimit. That is not to say there is not still a remainder, indeed her analysis is perhaps more excessive to itself in KLU than in PC since both the range of concepts and contexts deployed is greater however the movement tends towards closure.

In the 2004 preface to PC a similar claim is made for that book: “Behind the play was a purpose” but that purpose was a concern to highlight a problem, one that was primarily poetic. PC was written to expurgate the concern with limiting excess information but it did so by giving in to this excess and allowing it to be excessive to itself. It was also an experiment with reflexivity, an attempt to talk about Melanesia and Western knowledge practices in one breath, a doubling that was palpable in ‘1987,’ when anthropologists were “adding layers of description about themselves” (xxvii) to their work. Everyone was doing epistemology².

PC was about writing, anthropology and reflexivity and was written in response to demands around 1987 to intervene in the contemporary deconstructive mood in anthropology; as part of an exercise of self-scrutiny. KLU on the other hand begins with reflections on kinship in the information age; anthropology’s historical dependence on the way that science construed its relations as ones of invention and discovery is historically charted signalling the book’s concern to give some historical substance to the black-box of Euro-American knowledge practices of earlier work. Science, Law and Society are subjects in this story too (they exist); truth appears too as do categories. Chapters come from such symposia as those on ‘theory, culture and society,’ or are derived from deeply important collisions of law and custom in Melanesia (KLU ix). There is also the ‘real reflexivity’ provided by the “new medical technologies [that] have posed [real, interpersonal and not conceptual] questions for families and relatives” (vii). This ‘New Kinship’ is a match for anthropological reflexivity – the way it mediates conceptual and interpersonal relations - a central analogy in the book.

There is, I think, an explicit concern with value in KLU that is absent from PC. Relationality emerges as not only analytic but as “an abstract value placed on relationships” (KLU viii). If “the essays are intended to convey the embededness of relational thinking in the way Euro-Americans come to know the world” (viii) then they also perform an embedding of relational thinking in substantive, territorial categories and domains – each situated around, but not quite ‘inside’ a debate but in its underskirts or outskirts (I come back to this point).

The task of PC can also be viewed relative to the rather dialectical and synthesising movement of the Gender of the Gift (GOG 1988). In PC instead of the opposition between Melanesian dividuals and Euro-American moderns found in GOG, Melanesian cyborgs and Euro-American human-machines “are conceptually cut from the same material” (118); that of postmodern discourse. Problems are made to appear as at once Melanesian and epistemological, the two speak through one another. This is explicit at the end of PC (118-119).

PC makes its ‘figure’ that which is revealed (i.e. becomes a stated figure for attention) only at the end of GOG but which is the (under-)‘ground’ of that book. Thus the epilogue to GOG appears to undercut the whole edifice of the comparative attempt made in that book: “using one language as the medium with which to reveal the form that another, were it comparable, might take…makes comparability disappear”. What GOG did was to work within this constraint and expand the metaphorical possibilities of the specific language of Western analysis, whilst allowing its readers perhaps to imagine that these were the very constraints they were being shown a way to escape. When it was all over, that this was still an epistemological operation that took place within and was the concern of that language and its commoditised underpinnings, suddenly became the figure for attention (see GOG 343). What PC does is delve into this preoccupation explicitly: making it its figure from the start.

KLU is styled in its preface as a footnote to that preoccupation – the presentation of everything as all too related – that is played out in PC. If PC was deliberately undelimited, more ‘about’ form (writing) and movement (analysis) than about what those yielded beyond themselves; then KLU breaks into this epistemological squaring itself and attempts to move through it, by limitation and construction (KLU vii).

Therefore I do not think that Strathern’s preface to KLU in which she styles it as an epilogue – “an exhortation to shut up, recognise an end, and acknowledge a finish” (KLU x) is entirely fair to the newness of the book as it appears collected in a volume (although several of the chapters are taken from other collections). The book is an ethnography of knowledge itself rather than as the background to an account of something else (an ethnography of Melanesia – GOG, Anthropological description – PC, new kinship – After Nature (1992), IP – Transactions and Creations (2004), Audit Cultures (2000) ).

I think it is useful to make a parallel here with Levi-Strauss’s work: Mythologiques as the science of myths appears as nothing other than a new translation of those myths – it is a myth itself. In the same way that a variant of a myth is an interpretation of another variant, interpretation itself can be considered as a transformation of the myth itself, as a new actualisation of the structure. Mythologiques transforms a particular mode of thought - Amerindian mythology - into another, anthropological rationality. Thus it is the same to say, as L-S does in Mythologiques(1964:21 ed. Plon), that the thought of South American Indians forms under the operation of L-Ss own, as to say that his thought forms under the operation of theirs: Amerindian mythology is a Levi-Straussiology (Maniglier 2004). The point in Strathern’s words is that:

“It is impossible with this tool [the relation] to comprehend different worlds other than in relation to one another [but] The edge [i.e. limitation] of this tool is simultaneously its power…it will forever translate diverse and multiple worlds into versions of – perspectives on – the same world. We just need to know that.” (PC 91)

Now the “just” above is slightly misleading, compare to Levi-Strauss’s provocative “qu’importe?” (What does it matter) in response to the same question. Levi-Strauss responds to predicted criticisms that he has oversimplified or over interpreted his ethnographic material- here myths – dismissively. That is because the process through which knowledge is created relationally is back grounded as a means to approximating a greater unity: human spirit or mind which is ‘transpersonal’ anyway (we and they are mere ‘occasional messengers’). For Strathern this “just” is no mere but an ‘everything,’ for the relational nature of knowledge is the problem that her work explores, breaks into and refuses to background.

This is an irreducible difference but it does not efface an equally fundamental fraternity between the two thinkers in terms of the awareness of anthropology’s epistemological constraint, in the Strathernian sense of power of limitation. Thus in Levi-Strauss’s words anthropology exists in

“The double reflexivity of two minds/kinds of thought acting on one another and thus, here one, here the other, can be the match or spark in a rapprochement from which flares their common illumination.” (1964:21)

Strathern’s horizon is probably knowledge to L-S’s human mind, but both share an awareness that this is a horizon, something that will never be defined, but that to which all their work speaks. Hence why Patrice Maniglier (2004) from whose article much of the above is taken, describes L-S’s humanism as ‘interminable,’ ‘all’ it does is open new possibilities. To come back to my comparison of PC and KLU now, whilst PC revels in this ‘all’ (and nothing) KLU makes this potentially an ‘everything’ (and something).

'Critique?

KLU is not only the continuation of a momentum in Strathern’s own work as I have demonstrated, but is also of course engaged with specific interlocutors within anthropology. It is on the one hand explicitly a response to those writings on anonymity or secrecy - that ‘new radicalism’ which Strathern’s students (e.g. Moutu 2003, Crook 2003, Konrad 2005 and others (notably J. Weiner 1993) exemplify - which points to what a relational approach hides. On the other hand - and this is implicit (though there are many acknowledgements to the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and a few references to Latour) - I think it is possible to read parts of KLU as a provocation to those who seek to make of anthropology something other than epistemology. One of them (KLU 46) is a response to Viveiros de Castro’s attempts to bring the language of ontology into anthropology against our longstanding obsession with epistemology which has led us to see people making things known to themselves: they classify their world (cognitively) and we discover their classifications and organise our accounts accordingly (see KLU 42 citing Viveiros de Castro 1999).

One of the many things that Strathern might be read as saying with this book and the kinds of connections it seeks to forge, is that it is very important to look at epistemology itself ethnographically as something that exists and is operative in the world. However the point is that polemic is inimical to the analytical discipline of the book which is based on multiplying the terms in operation and not battling against existent ones. The rejection of epistemology is based in a single duplex ‘ontology: epistemology’ with its echoes of nature: culture, and the argument proceeds by transfiguring that duplex by showing how others distribute relations between the given and the made in different and - from a certain perspective - opposed ways; Strathern’s strategy is rather to multiply the terms under consideration – epistemology itself contains at least 3 duplexes, none of which can be reduced to a nature: culture dichotomy and which are indeed posed partly to avoid this trap. Strathern’s duplexes deliberately disengage in a sense; that’s what I meant when I said that Strathern not quite ‘in’ a debate but just on its outskirts.