A conversation with Marilyn Strathern

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2013 47: 423Contributions to Indian SociologyJanaki Abraham and Yasmeen Arif

A conversation with Marilyn Strathern

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A conversation with Marilyn Strathern

Janaki Abraham and Yasmeen Arif

Dame Marilyn Strathern, Emeritus Pro-fessor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, is Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists (UK and Commonwealth). Known as a pioneering feminist anthropologist, her work began in Papua New Guinea and covers an extensive range that includes reproductive technologies, organ do-nor practises, intellectual and cultural property rights, innovative exercises in comparative work, as well as critical appraisals of audit and accountability cultures. In her illustrious career, she has held positions in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. She has

been the prestigious William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and also the Mistress of Girton College. Some of her well-known books are The Gender of the Gift (1988), Partial Connections (1991), After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (1992), Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (1999), and an edited volume, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (2000).

Professor Strathern visited the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, for a week in September–October 2011. Her visit was part of a

Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 3 (2013): 423–438SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/0069966713496307

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Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 3 (2013): 423–438

424 / Janaki abraham and Yasmeen arif

two-year (2010–12) ‘European Studies Programme’ organised by a few faculty members at the Department of Sociology. She is here in conver-sation with Yasmeen Arif (YA) and Janaki Abraham (JA), both Reviews Editors of the Contributions to Indian Sociology and Associate Professors at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. The conversation took place at the Department of Sociology on 4 October 2011.

YA: You have an enormous range of work and writing—your earlier work on kinship and then reproductive technologies, issues of method, audit cultures and knowledge management. We wanted to start our conversation by asking you how you think all these have been inter-connected—did one lead to another, is there something that you would consider a dominant concern?

MS: That is a very nice question. But, I think to be truthful, the logic of connection is the accident of career and where one finds oneself. The initial fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG) began in 1964 and then really continued with work I did on migrants in Port Moresby, along with research at Australian National University (ANU), and continued until PNG’s independence in 1975–76 when we returned to the UK. (I have to say ‘we’ till 1986 and after that I have to say ‘I’.)

There was a small development within that early period. It had begun with the study of gender relations and ran across the significance of dispute settlement as a sign of people’s willingness to listen to the government (in Hagen, PNG). So, the people set up their own courts in imitation of the Australian administration courts—both to tap the power of the administra-tion so that the dispute-settlers could say to everybody else that they were like the administration. But also, I think, genuinely it was an attempt to understand what the Australian administration was about and holding these small dispute settlement courts was one way of doing it. And what was very striking is that women were very much at the centre of these—disputes were usually between men but the cause of the trouble was very often a woman. And this was the beginning of my glimmering notion of what was later known as gender relations. But ‘gender’ was not in the vocabulary at that point. It was the 1960s and gender did not appear till 1972. It seemed to me (in 1964–65) that clearly women were being put into a particular position. The principal protagonists were men but the men were proclaiming their innocence to each other and dumping their problems on women, because of women’s structural position in between the clans.



A conversation with Marilyn Strathern / 425


Anyway, we returned to Cambridge and I wrote up my PhD and then my husband took a research fellowship at the ANU and that was the point at which I joined the New Guinea Research Unit (NGRU). The first piece of work I did for them was on the wider arena of dispute settlement. So I was looking not just at these village courts, if you wanted to call them that but also looking at what was happening at the district court and the other agencies too, which people could go to for help, like the welfare office. And, that work was done largely out of my own interest. At the time when it was more or less completed, it was clear that independence was on the horizon and the (PNG) Law Reform Commission became interested in it and the research became a contribution to legislative reform for the setting up of village courts. So, the connection there is an original interest of mine.

I began the second piece of work at the NGRU with research on mi-grants from the area that I knew who at the time were in Port Moresby. I really enjoyed that because we were living in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and Port Moresby can be a difficult place to be. But because I had a network among the migrants, I had a map of the city that was mine and I felt somehow that I knew it in a particular way and therefore, I was connected and rooted. And I was very grateful to be in that position. That was all really built out of the first fieldwork.

Then we returned to the UK in 1976 and my husband held a position at University College London. I had an affiliation with Girton College at that point and we actually lived in Cambridge. By that stage, I had three little children, a girl and twin boys, and, of course, I couldn’t contemplate going back and doing fieldwork, although my husband went frequently.

And this is what I mean by circumstances of career or life. At the end of the road where we lived in Cambridge were some recently built flats and one of the occupants of the flats was the social anthropologist Audrey Richards. Now, Audrey Richards had lived for a long time in a village called Elmdon, about 15 miles outside of Cambridge, and had intermittently done a sort of local study. It so happened that in 1962, before I graduated and before I went off to the field (we left the UK in late 1963), we were among a team of undergraduates that would go out to the village to practice fieldwork methods on the villagers! I have to say that it was the most terrifying piece of fieldwork I ever did and far more terrifying than the New Guinea stuff because I was susceptible to every turn of voice or scorn, and knocking on people’s doors was a nightmare. Anyway, we were there a couple of weeks and so here at the end of our





road was Audrey Richards who was no longer in that village. She had left the village and was now in Cambridge, struggling to write up parts of her book and I offered to write a chapter. In the end, that became a book on Elmdon. There were two other colleagues also working on the material, but I authored one of the two books that came out of her work. And I was quite pleased to have done so because that gave me an interest in, how do I put it, anthropology at home, which I don’t think I would otherwise have had. And I don’t think I would have written After Nature really, if I hadn’t had that very early work in which I was fascinated by the role of class in this small little village.

Not so long after that, I was invited back to ANU for a year-long col-loquium on gender relations and this was in 1983–84. Most of the reading I was doing at that time was really following on from my original fieldwork, but by that time, we were, of course, in the second wave of feminism. Feminist anthropology was well and truly established. I was very much caught up by and quite fascinated with what was going on and was be-ginning to develop some theoretical thoughts about gender relations, and was quite happy to join this group. I took six weeks out to go to Berkeley, California (I couldn’t take more than that time because of the children), and that’s where The Gender of the Gift was begun and wasn’t actually finished till I got back to the UK. There’s a little bit of coherence, a frag-ment of coherence, between that gender work and my earlier interest in women’s issues. Because we are talking about feminist history, let me just add one thing: my mother who read English as an undergraduate ran adult education courses that catered mainly to women, and in the 1950s, she ran classes on women and art, women and literature, women and politics. So I grew up assuming that studying what women did was a perfectly respect-able thing to do and then when the glimmerings of gender scholarship came along, it seemed to me that I was just part of the stream already. And I was quite taken aback, therefore, to be criticised for writing about women, but writing about them from a male point of view. Yet, I really have to be very grateful for that criticism because it meant that I couldn’t just take this whole area as somehow a domain that I already understood. I realised I did not understand it, that there were things to understand and that one needed a theoretical framework to understand.

Coming back to the UK and realising that I was going to be on my own, I clearly needed some kind of position. I stayed for a year in Cambridge and then went to Manchester as Head of Department. And it was while





I was in Manchester, in fact, I remember this very clearly, you must imagine a room not unlike this, really about as long as that wall, I was by the window looking out and there was a phone call. This was a phone call from somebody who was involved in discussions about egg donation between sisters. This was about 1987. I didn’t know her. She was phoning me because she knew that I was an anthropologist and I was interested in gender relations, and her question arose from the fact that she was on a committee at the charitable London foundation—The King’s Fund. They were discussing egg donation between sisters and she wanted to know what had been written by anthropologists about egg donation amongst sisters. And I said, ‘Nothing!’ And that really was the start of my becom-ing interested because it seemed to me that it was rather scandalous that I couldn’t point to anything that anthropologists had done. I then became very friendly with her and she became a member of the research team I got together around about 1989. I don’t know if you know that the UK Human Embryology and Fertilisation Act 1990 had its antecedent in a report by Mary Warnock, and that had been in 1984.

It was about that time, then, when the report was being discussed in Parliament and there was a prospect of legislation. It didn’t lead to legisla-tion for some years but the late 1980s was when the report was presented and there was a lot of discussion. I had a little research group looking specifically at the effect of kinship in the context of new reproductive technologies and for a while—and this is one of the problems of doing many things—I was quite well read in this arena, but it was really located to that particular period when I was quite heavily involved; although I kept up some reading since, I no longer claim to have much expertise. Doing that was very interesting for me.

It was during the course of that research that I came across a case from the United States involving a dispute between a surrogate mother and the commissioning parents. The judges compared the thoughts of the parents, that they wished to have a child, with the act of conception. Now, in English, ‘conceive’ means both mental conception and physical conception, and a dissenting judge on the case pointed out that the judges were actually probing intellectual property notions in talking about the fact that it was an originating idea or a mental conception at stake—not ownership rights but possession of some kind of interest in something. My ears pricked up at that. And I thought, intellectual property, what’s this? And that’s where those interests began.





As soon as I got into it, I realised there was a lot of activity happening across the Third World, because the World Trade Organization (WTO) was very anxious that Third World countries should implement intel-lectual property law and patent law in particular, in order to protect inventions that rich countries were exporting to those poorer countries. So, they were encouraging legislators and enforcing legislation across the world, including PNG. So, here was PNG, brought to enact both Patent Law and Copyright Law, and at that time, there were a small number of students of mine who had worked in PNG and were begin-ning to get their first jobs. It seemed to me that this was an opportunity to capitalise on their skill and expertise and I ran a three-year project on intellectual property issues in PNG. The very idea that you might be able to imagine cultural issues and cultural forms as a form of property really gripped people’s imagination. That ran for three years and again was very enjoyable; we involved a lawyer from PNG and a resident Papua New Guinean anthropologist who both became very interested. We were about nine of us at one point, working on this project in dif-ferent fields. I did this in collaboration with Eric Hirsch who is also a Melanesianist. But I think in PNG, the few intellectuals who got to know about it, what they appreciated was that we weren’t development people, we didn’t have an agenda, we weren’t trying to prove things or tell people what to do. We were simply providing a piece of vocabulary, doing a bit of conceptual work, a bit of clarification, and really, you know, if what we were doing was useful, then it would find itself being used and if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t. In the end, the whole agenda of what to do with intellectual and cultural property took another route. In the meanwhile I think they really found that the work was worthwhile. But of course, it leaves no trace … if somebody thinks your ideas are useful, he or she will take them off, will transform them, will work on them and they will become his or her ideas, and they won’t look like what they may have been originally.

I felt rather pleased about that, that the usefulness could not be demonstrated. (I know and am convinced that it was useful.) I say that because this was the era of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of the UK government, deciding how to allocate funds by constructing a ranked order of universities. And that rank order was composed of diverse measures including teaching, except the teaching exercises were cumber-some, whereas the research assessment exercise continued throughout





the period from when I was first Head of Department in Manchester, to when I was Head of Department at Cambridge and then up until the year of my retirement in 2008, which was the last exercise in its RAE form. So my whole professorial life was bookended by these exercises. Basically, the government was taking it all very seriously. They needed evidence of research output and this was really the beginning of measur-ing the usefulness of output, which is why I mention this PNG work. And what RAE meant in practice? It applied to all universities, it applied to all departments of all universities and it therefore applied to every individual within the department, and every individual had to produce four pieces of work, which would be assessed. The intervals between exercises varied, sometimes it was four years, sometimes six. And you had to present these four pieces of work, your best four pieces of work. So panels were set up in the different subjects, and panel members spent the entire summer reading everyone’s work, and of course, adjudicating on them. I was a member of a panel in one round and chair of a panel in another round. And I reckon it took years off my life. I mean it was the most stressful thing I’ve ever done. One was adjudicating, knowing that there would be consequences, and not knowing how the consequences would work out for one’s colleagues.

And the whole project was to make visible the excellence of universi-ties, not looking at the relations between universities, not thinking about the fact that what’s the point in Cambridge producing brilliant work if there isn’t anyone in Southampton to read it or vice versa. You know, we depend on our colleagues elsewhere. We’re part of a project, a community. So, it’s very discouraging. However, because at the outset in Manchester I was Head of Department, I couldn’t just turn my back when I was re-sponsible. Because the stakes were so high, I am afraid, there was actu-ally no rebellion across the universities. And we had to encourage staff to get on with it, produce their four pieces of work. But, what I did was and I told them this, I split myself in half and half of me was the Head of Department that was telling them to get on with it. The other half was when I began doing a bit of study and reading and writing, and basically a critique of what had by then been dubbed the audit culture. And that’s where my interest in audit and accountability came in. It emerged directly from my experiences as an administrator.

JA: What about your work on human organs?





MS: I had been on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics for some time pre-viously, so my name was known to them. And I think they thought that on this particular project, an anthropologist would be a good person to chair it (i.e., a working party on use of the human body in medicine and research). But I haven’t before—and I shall not now—claim any particular expertise in this area. And the odd couple of papers I have written and what I talked about yesterday have really risen from reading around the issue in the literature. But yes, when I was asked, I said ‘yes’.

JA: In one of your interviews, you talked about how you are very comfort-able in institutions. (MS: True) To the extent that you say that you are very comfortable in a hospital! (MS: That’s Right!) During your academic career in institutions starting as a Professor at Manchester and as Head of Depart-ment there, and at Cambridge, did you consciously work on not only building up these institutions, but on directing the discipline? Your work has been on the frontier of the discipline in many ways, but in terms of an institutional practice, did you have specific ideas about moulding a discipline—whether through the teaching programme or your PhD students?

MS: I’ll answer in two parts then. Because the first response is what you’ve already more or less said. This work has had an effect, an effect that was there from the outset, a link between new reproductive technologies and kinship studies, which then swept right through the teaching curricula in social anthropology, although I’m obviously not claiming sole responsi-bility! Certainly, in relation to the audit and accountability studies, I have been staggered at the interest that they created, which suggests they filled a niche. People needed a mouthpiece and from disciplines all over. It’s the one piece of my work that has really travelled outside of anthropology. (JA: A lot of people here in India are reading that as they are concerned with what is happening in higher education. MS: Actually, I’d like to learn about that.) OK, so there’s that. But, if you are asking, did I have a vision, either in terms of the discipline or in terms of how to mould the department or an institution or the university, I’m not a vision builder. Life to me is not a road, there isn’t a goal. Life is a room and there are things happening around. When I get low, I castigate myself for not hav-ing that capacity for projection. I think this is where at times I was a less than effective Head of Department. I would have actually been more ef-fective if I had my own view of things and people could latch on to it, do things with it, even criticise it. But I didn’t. I didn’t run things like that.





On the contrary, I got other people to have views we could then discuss. And then there was a bit of strategy that was born in Manchester, when I went into a department full of men, and very nice men, but I knew that in confrontation with them, I would have lost the moment. So, I had to exercise power in other ways.

So, I’m afraid no, I didn’t have a particular goal for either institutions or the discipline. It was much more bricolage—what can you do to keep the system going, because it actually takes huge energy and input of personal effort (that is, effort from one’s person) to simply keep the institution turn-ing around, and bettering and improving things where one can.

JA: Can we go back then and ask you about the intellectual influences on you over these several decades? You were an undergraduate at Cam-bridge, your teachers were all the big names—Meyer Fortes, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards—these are people we studied here in our MA and we teach now. But your work really moved away from theirs—for a start, you did not work on Africa, you went to PNG. Could you tell us about the kinds of influences on your work from both within the academy and outside?

MS: You are actually right pointing to the huge influence of both Edmund Leach and Meyer Fortes. Audrey Richards was my third year undergradu-ate supervisor. Esther Goody was my PhD supervisor and I originally went to PNG with a very African question, which was to do with the effect of sibling order on success in cash crops. There was a cash crop, coffee, but it was only just getting off the ground and in the area we went to, sibling order simply wasn’t an issue. It was a very un-African situation. And instead, I came across these disputes where the women were involved. I hadn’t gone out to ‘study’ women at all. These disputes had not been in my research proposal. But my supervisor was very tolerant and there was no problem about my changing direction.

If I were to point to particular individuals who had an influence on me, I’d have to say David Schneider, because when I was writing about Elmdon (in England), I found his approach from American cultural anthropology actually really quite sympathetic for what I was trying to do. And that was a very deliberate anti-Cambridge stance for me to take, because I think his credit was not very high in the UK at that point. But I found him persuasive. A second influential person was Roy Wagner, from Virginia, who wrote The Invention of Culture and I remember reading a lot of his





work on a summer holiday, understanding about 10 per cent I suppose, but what I understood was breathtaking, really interesting. And he became really very influential in the whole period that led up to the writing of The Gender of the Gift. As much for his way of thinking, the liberties that he felt he could take with language, the subtlety and dovetailing of concepts and so forth. So, he was really quite a profound influence.

More recently, I have become acquainted with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and found his cogitations on Amazonian perspectivism completely fascinating from a Melanesian point of view. But I also very much ap-preciated the clarity of his exposition and the depth of his knowledge in relation to his theoretical antecedents.

What is missing from my own account is just such an intellectual genealogy. I am not quite sure why I don’t have one. In other words, I don’t see myself as particularly the heir to any particular lineage of think-ers. Now, I don’t know quite whether it is because I have never had time, because I have always done other things alongside writing. Probably, it has a more profound origin due to the fact that my dear father, whom I loved very deeply, was a polymath, which meant he knew everything about everything. It was enormously stimulating, of course, but it also raised the question of where would one find a place to put oneself, so to speak. And I think I have a profound anxiety about linking myself to theoreticians or people who have grand theories. I’ve never had a single vision. I’m not a grand scheme person. By the same token, I don’t have a set of models, or paradigms or theories that I want other people to follow either. And then I’m exceedingly happy when people say they read a bit and got something from what I’ve done. That’s it for me, that’s it, that’s enough. It doesn’t have to look like what I’ve done.

JA: You have been doing fieldwork in PNG since you first went there in 1964 and you have been back over the years, regularly. How has your fieldwork changed since the initial years? You have now clearly built up stronger relationships. And then you were asked to represent PNG at a recent function in the UK. The anthropologist then comes to this posi-tion where she is considered a representative of the culture. It is quite an incredible journey in a way.

MS: It is. Though curiously, I think they are connected. Because I think that the kind of work that I, and indeed my husband, did in those early years, it had a substance to it. And I think Papua New Guinean academics, or





people who read, actually appreciate the fact that the record was made back in the 1960s. In other words, they have given it a kind of an intel-lectual credit, so the two things are not completely disconnected. It’s quite true though, of course, that when we began work, the local administrators were Australian. While they were very happy to assist us to find our field site, they did not want to hear from us. In other words, whatever local issue arose, it was: ‘I don’t want to know the ramifications of what you’re doing. Don’t bring me problems.’ So, we were in fact told to get on with the work and just keep quiet, which we did.

I am fairly unusual, I think, among my colleagues for not having done a second piece of really lengthy fieldwork elsewhere. Having gone ini-tially to Mount Hagen, I then accompanied my husband briefly to a place called Pangia (Wiru), which is in the Southern Highlands, not the Western Highlands. But I was there only for a short time and it was really his field site, not mine, so to speak. And I never again spent a really lengthy period anywhere, whereas many ethnographers do develop a whole second field area. When I was looking at your questions this morning and thinking about it, I was quite struck by the fact that when I talk about fieldwork, it’s that first period that I am really thinking about. I mean, my field has had several fields, but I have not repeated that immersion. What has hap-pened has taken the form of subsequent visits to Hagen, with quite long gaps between, and especially when the children were growing up. But what happened in subsequent visits is that I found myself wishing that I was back in a situation where I had all the time in the world, as it were, and I could get to know people in the way I once knew them.

YA: It is very clear that all the work that you have done has a sense of a method that runs alongside it and you have written about this. You do talk about European–American knowledge as a kind of circumscribed thing and the Melanesian work that you have done, as also a form of knowledge. You talk about the relationship between them either as binaries that are connected in a sense by dyads which communicate with each other. What I wanted to suggest is that in the post-colonial moment, we talk about anthropological knowledge through a certain idea of politics of location and history. How does the knowledge produced by anthropologists like us based in India, interact with the so-called dominant knowledge prac-tices of what we call the West from here? So I was wondering if, in this dyad you work with, we were to introduce a sense of a continuum rather than a polarity? How do we even try and place all the rest of us, how do





you think about the politics of knowledge production when there is the European–American sort of a whole out there and then there are these peripheral knowledges that we have worked with. Would you think about this as some sort of a knowledge economy which also works itself into a politics of knowledge production? I find glimmerings of something like that in the method that you talk about rather than just the content to which you have applied your method.

MS: Well, I think you have put the finger on a really significant set of issues and I’m embarrassed in a way by this dyad. The way I usually defend it, since I’ve used it and one is responsible for what one does, is first of all to say, of course these aren’t geographical terms. Melanesia is a construct. Euro-American I use to refer to a discourse and it is the discourse of the heirs of the Enlightenment, and it permeates the culture of North America and Europe so that Enlightenment traditions are there in folk culture as well. And it surely also informs the pedagogic practices of academics, wherever they are. So I would put the Delhi School of Economics and its practitioners in my category of Euro-American, from that particular point of view, that is. The kind of university we have and the kind of discourse we now have is to my mind all part of that knowledge economy. I hope you will respond and criticise me but the issue is that there is a dyad and not a continuum, and there is a reason for that. And that is something I constantly come back to.

A social scientist is inevitably using a particular discourse to describe and write about arenas, some of which fall within the discourse and some of which don’t. My Melanesian work falls outside of that discourse. I would include the academics at the University of Papua New Guinea and the doctors and all the rest of it, their practices are all Euro-American. But nonetheless, there is a lot more going on in PNG that falls outside of this. I am using language to describe things that it is usually never meant to describe. And I’m studying things that cannot find its location in the language I am using. That’s why there is actually a dichotomy—it’s the difference between description, the practices of representation and what is being represented. It’s that kind of difference.

YA: I have been reading the symposium that took place earlier this year where you and others were talking about comparative relativism. It is very interesting that you say—we are talking across, we are doing a kind of translation if you like, using one kind of language to speak of another.





This has always been the problem in anthropology. But at the same time, the question seems to be: how much do anthropologists and their knowl-edges along with, as you say, specialists from outside the discipline like doctors or from any of the professions involving say, organ donation, really contribute to conceptual innovation in the discourse itself? Or are we caught in our own translation exercise?

MS: So, this is where India comes back in again. Having constructed this dichotomy, and I defend it for myself, I don’t require other people to use it. If you look at what I do, I am constantly making connections, which I call analogies. So I am trying to say OK, where would we find, if A is here, over there what is its counterpart? Is it little A or is it little B or little C or what is it? So, I am actually constantly moving back and forth, and the effect of that movement is to create a sense, not that one can shift the divide but that one can travel and cumulatively, presumably, that travel will actually have an effect on what is on either side. And also I should say, if pressed into it, what I am calling Euro-American comes down to a handful of practices of scholarship and knowledge, which doesn’t have much content to it.

YA: It is almost a technique. Works like a technique.

MS: Or more a tool. So, I would imagine that being Euro-American in different contexts is going to have an effect too. Your Euro-Americanism is not going to be quite the same as mine. In fact, that’s a lousy term. And it is a very ugly term but I use it just because it does irritate. And it irritates because it doesn’t really do its job.

YA: That is the startling thing about it, that it does provoke and at the same time, it is used. It’s good to know that it troubles you in using it quite like that because that is the discomfort, to give it that name now and to also start thinking about how to place all the differences it implies.

MS: I think the important thing is to realise that language isn’t neutral and when you use it, however you describe things, there is a baggage to what you describe and it needs a label, has to be labelled, yet the label itself doesn’t work.

JA: How would you relate this idea of moving back and forth, so charac-teristic of your work, to the old British school of the comparative method. How would you say this concept has travelled?





MS: You are absolutely right. The notion of comparison has altered beyond recognition. I had a problem with the old style comparison, which was spelled out in Partial Connections, which is that the old style compari-son relied on setting up parameters of similarity. So, if you know you’re going to look at particular descent group structures, you’d have a model of what a descent group is, its recruitment processes and if it was a cor-porate group and all the rest of it. Or, you look at marriage customs and you look at bridewealth and dowry or various forms of transmission at time of marriage and so forth. You then find in another society something else that you also decide to call marriage or bridewealth, so you used the same terms for both, and I really wanted to question what is it that, for example, marriage is doing. If you look at what marriage is doing in one context, then what institutions do that job in another context? It might not be marriage. Very striking in the PNG case is that the initiation practices very often do the work that marriage does in other societies. So you then want to look at marriage and initiation practices together. You always have to make a decision, so even my very question in this example … I have to decide what I think marriage is doing and then see if I can find it elsewhere. I have not escaped from that trap. But at least it opens things up a bit.

JA: Your work on kinship has in so many ways pushed the terms of kinship. In relation to New Reproductive Technologies (NRT), one of the questions you ask is about what is happening to culture amidst all these dramatic changes. Given the kind of transformation we’ve seen in the last two to three decades in the field of kinship, what would you say is the future of kinship studies?

MS: NRT is interesting because it actually reinstates a very ancient Euro-American view of kinship as being all about conception and birth. And I suspect a lot of interesting studies are going to be in other areas—they are going to be in the study of migration and diaspora and dispersal for example, or social networking and Facebook, and the relation between intimacy and kinship, or changing resources and climate change, and the effects of flooded islands and melted glaciers. I think there is a huge area of interest in knowing how, in particular locations, kinship becomes an object of governmental and NGO concern. So, for example, in PNG, in the context of land registration, there is a legal entity called the Incorporated Land Group (ILG), which is imagined as a clan in possession of a territory





and yet there are many, many societies in PNG that don’t have clans with territories. So, what’s happening is that clans and territories are springing up everywhere because this is the route to land registration. So, I think there’s a very interesting dialectic going on between the imposition of government and NGO visions of what kinship is and what is happen-ing on the ground, which is an area of interest for anthropology. I think there’s still scope for rewriting a lot of the older stuff. I don’t know if you’ve seen Sahlins’ essay on what is kinship in the JRAI in two parts in 2011. I was very heartened actually. He’s gone back to a lot of the old ethnographies but he is refashioning them. In fact, if you look at some of the ethnographies that youngsters have produced these days, they’ve actually got some very interesting re-workings of kinship. Now, this is all absolutely meat and drink to the discipline and this is where the discipline does really well. In just re-visioning how we might think of kinship issues—actually there’s no reason why that would cease at all; I hope it would continue because that’s the way in which we keep the old material alive, by re-working it. And we are at an extraordinary point, with a century of superb ethnographic accounts behind us. A century ago, it didn’t exist.

JA: We want to ask you about your relationship to the activity of writing. You have written so much—does it come easily to you?

MS: I have great nostalgia for the time when I was a research student and I thought before I wrote and I’ve long ceased to do that and I think as I write. And that’s partly a function of the computer. Although I’ve done a lot over the last 20 years, when you’re administering, another activity is not easy to do. In other words, thinking is not compatible with keeping everything in your head as an administrator.

You have to make mental space. Just before the writing, I very often feel I have nothing to say and everything I’ve done is worthless and what’s the point, why did I agree to do this, my head is empty. And that, in a sense, is like a dissolving stage of the chrysalis (or pupa) inside a cocoon, everything dissolves into nothing as it were. And then you get yourself out of it, you have to get yourself out of it because there’s a deadline coming or whatever. But actually the piece you’ve been writing is the solving of the existential problem. You know you have to overcome that depression. (What’s interesting about it is that you can’t fake it—you can’t say, Oh I’ve got to write an article, I must get depressed.) Then what happens is,





I usually write in a rush, which is always very exhilarating and then the work begins. And the work is going over what I’ve done and realising this doesn’t fit, there’s a hole there and the argument splits and I’ve got my facts wrong, Oh lord, I didn’t even know the proper date—the work is actually then producing something decent out of the rush. But I think it’s like being nervous before a lecture. It’s part of a performance.

YA: If we could just end with what you will take back from your visit to Delhi…

MS: I felt at home. I felt very comfortable here, right from the outset and impressed with what your students are doing. And one thing I would say is they are all very articulate and you’ve obviously created a context in which everybody feels confident about speaking. Because if I compare it with student bodies I’ve known, yes, of course, you’ll find the articulate ones, but there will always be quite a body of students who are a bit shy and don’t talk, whereas in the few encounters I’ve had here, I’ve watched and pretty well everyone had something to say and I had not been aware of that kind of advanced shuffling that people do when they are actually trying to control a great deal of nervousness. So I think you’ve done a terrific job in providing an intellectual environment in which students can grow. It’s really quite impressive.



Documents

A conversation with Marilyn Strathern