RElATION

. Marilyn Strathern

189175405-X 11

12.50 ~

The prickly pear is a humble fruitwhich grows abundantly in aridplaces. It may be spiky, but it isrefreshing too.

The inspiration foeighteenth centpamphleteer.passionate amacirculated wawidho

ant

The pamphlets will be provocativeand entertaining, cheap and pocket­sized. Like the prickly pear, they willcome in several colours-red, yellow,green and more besides.

ISBN

~-------------------~PRICKLY PEAR PAMPHLETS

The text of an inaugural lecture given

before the University of Cambridge,

14th October 1994, by the William lfjJse

Professor of Social Anthropology.

The RelationIssues in Complexity

and Seale

6 THE RElATlON:

There was a moment at a meeting in 1914 when Sir JamesFrazer raised not one but two gusts of laughter. His listenercould not have been more distinguished. From Cambridge theyincluded the Disney Professor of Archaeology (ProfessorRidgeway), Dr Duckworth whose name is familiar to BiologicalAnthropology, and Drs Haddon and Rivers who can be claimedfor the Museum (of Archaeology & Anthropology) and forSocial Anthropology.

Following a Royal Commission on university education, thegathering had come to deliberate practical measures "for theorgaoisation of anthropological teaching".' Ooe speaker notedthat what Oxford needed "is more system".2 The indispensabilityof the subject to the intelligence and enlightenment ofadministrators was not in doubt. It would put colonial officersinto touch with the real world - accurate knowledge of thecustoms and ideas of non-Europeans throwing light on their ownpainfully acquired empirical understandings? Well, as we know,the European war interrupted many plans, though Oxford did iothe end get its 'system'. Indeed Meyer Fortes braught some of itwith him when he carne fram there to Cambridge in 1950.

People present then, preparing to make representations to thePrime Minister, Asquith, must have thought they were at anepoch-making moment. As far as the advancement of knowledgeis concemed, though, epochs probably get made in other ways.One was, conceivably, foreshadowed in Frazer's joke. (I shouldwarn you that is both a bad joke and frequently retold.)

I Conceptions, Abstract and Concrete

Prazer's joke was about the difference between 'savagecustoms' and 'civilised law'. An administrator investigatinglhe customs in his district "found that they were extremelyodious and disagreeable to his mind, and he abolished them ali

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 7

at one stroke. (Laughter.) The natives carne to him shortlyafterwards and said, 'Amongst the mIes that you have abolishedis lhe rule that we may not marry our sisters; does theGovernment wish us to marry our sisters?' (Great laughter.)".

Remark the conjunction between rules of conduct in the abstractand a rule made concrete through reference to kin. It suggests to

me a potent if concealed connection between the connecting ofdisparate customs and laws and a rule about connecuon~ -­befWeen persons" Possibly the laughter responded to thatcÍinching concretivity. But before 1 say why there might be anyinlerest in this, let alooe epoch-making qualities, let me summonanother situation altogether.

Imagine yourself set down in an actual court of civilised law, theyear 1993 and the venue the Supreme Court of Justice inCalifornia.5 A woman had contracted with a couple to carry their

genetic child for them,6 with the aid of in vitro fertilisation andembryo transfer. However, relations deteriorated to the point ofthe couple seeking a pre-birth declaration that they were thelegal parents, to which the pregnaot woman responded by acounter-claim. The Supreme Court found in favour of the

couple, and laid stress 00 procreative intent.' The judge argued:"But for [the couple'sí acted-on intention, the child would notexist ...", quoting the view of a commentator.8

The mental concept of the child is a controlling factor ofits creation, and the originators of that concept merit fullcredit as conceivers (my emphasis).

He means the conceivers of the mental concept, valuable in

itself as fixing in "the initiating parents of a child", a sense oftheir obligations. But this was also a quite dreadful pun. Whatare we to do with the unspoken conjunction between the

(abstract) conception of an idea and the (concrete) conception ofa child?

1/lli HI.:I.JITlON:

11lh ' two senses of 'conception' re embedded in the EnglishInn 'uage, there are sim] ar terms of double resonance ­'l'nl:ral~. reprodllce, create.. Another set c1usters round the idea

(li <:Olllleclion - affinity, kinship, relative. I mean no more ofl'lllll se t lan that the idiomatic possibilities of resonance areIhell:. The cultural potential may invite one to imagine, as I havclusl !Ionc, connections people have not necessarily spelled out.Illll wc elo have to hand a well-documented example of an\'xpl i 'it transfer of meanings from this same field. Think how

It' Tntly 'geneler' has solidified in its current feminist usage. Wc\ IUIdalc that creative moment precisely. Before the early 1970s,111I,'owlcr's stem words,9 it was a grammatical term on1y, other't'ns 'S heing either a jocularity 01' a blunder; these days we do1101think twice when gender refers to the social c1assification or1111i1' anel remale persons.'O Sexual difference in tum hasnt'qllir 'U some of the connotations of grammatical inflection: th', onlll anu cultural properties of one sex appearing as a\ Ol!''Iative or lhe other.

Wt· I1light be content to take these as metaphorical extensions 01'

I1llilogi 's." Metaphors give some shape 01' sense of materialitylo 11 lhollght, 01' intellectualise an experience 01' bodily condition.An llnthropologist would ask why this 01' that particular\ Olllunction of terms.

Whal intrigues me is the consistent parallel, the repeated echo,ht'lwcell intellectual propagation and procreative acts, between"nowlc~e and kinship. These metaphors and analogies arelollowing a particular path. Gillian Beer '2 points to one suchp Ilh whcn she notes Herschel's astronomer's vision of the

plnn 'Iary system: what was formerly mere resemblance between110dlcsin space became perceived as "a true family likeness;1IH' ar' bound up in one chain ... in one web of mutual

11'IHlon". Oarwin goes further: he gives the idea of family aI \'I1'lir a '(lIality when descent becomes "the hidden bond ofI 11I1IH'XiOI1which naturalists have sought under the term of the

fSSUES fN COMPLEXfTY AND SCALE

N Ihlllll System".13 I would only add that in this culture the act of'011 'ptualisation is seemingly caught up in a similar matrix.

'J'hOll hts are conceived as children are; kinsfolk are bound

10 \'Iht'r by the idea of their relationship. Qne may even be the01ISpIlllg or a thought - as in the Califomian case, where intentI \'t0111eSrelational: "intent joins people" .'4 If these are puns andtOlI11l11<:lionsin the first instance allowed by the EnglishIlll1l'llll).:C,and the way it creates verbal connections, then they11111,1111sobe allowed by English kinship in the way it sets upt'OI\llt'<:tions between persons.

I l\'Il'l to 'English' - that is, English language-speak.ing 01'

nUlo American - kinship as a modem phenomenon. Allhoughhoth s 'nses of conceive seem to have been there from the

I \OOs," other connections appear much later. Affinity seems tohnvl' h 'en a relationship by marriage 01' an alliance between'onsociates before it became in the sixteenth century a term for

stlll 'lural resemblance 01' causal connection. Conversely,'onn ·ction itself, which appears in the seventeenth century,

s 'l'II1Sto have referred to the joining of words and ideas by logich ·Iore it referred to the joining of persons through marriage 01'

(111Orcrarely) consanguinity.'6 The same holds for the term',eiation' .

R 'Ialion, already in English a combination of Latin roots,variously a narrative, reference back to something, 01'

'ol1lparison, became in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesapplied to connections via kinship.17 The burst of knowledge thatwc associate with the new sciences was presumably alsorcrashioning the way people represented their relations to oneanother. From the example of gender, one can only guess at thecrcative appropriations there may have been. And I say that inoreler to comment on knowledge-making in the twentiethcentury.

10 THE REUTION:

I am going to suppose that it was a creative appropriation of Thl'Relation, at once the abstract construct and the concrete person,that lay behind some of the dramatic development ofanthropology in the middle years of this century. But let meintroduce that sideways.

11 Kinds of Connections

Df course it is a disconcerting fact that one can find relationsanywhere. Example: St James's Park and the cassowaries.Cassowaries are large, flightless birds from Papua New Guineaand South East Asia. In his essay of 1690 John Locke refers totwo on display in St James' Park.\8 The philosopher wanted toillustrate the logical circumstance where a relation could be.perceived clearly though the precise nature of the entities soconnected might be in doubt. His concrete example was thisstrange bird, its enigmatic identity contrasting with the clearlypercei ved relationship between the pair: they were dam andchick.\9 These birds can be somewhat of an enigma in theirhome country too.>"The Karam people of Papua New Guinea donol classify it with other birds at all. Here, too, a relation iscvident. For the cassowary must be treated with the respect due10 kin (they are like, men say, their sisters 01' cross cousins)'>\The Karam omithologist, Saem Maenjep, introduced a furtherdimension. Saem insisted on specifying the source of hisknowledge in particular forest places, for that carne to himthrough a relationship. His father had died when he small; heknew things because he had walked round with his mother whohad shown him.22

So out of these connections I could weave a story aboutt'ollllcctions: the seventeenth century Englishman seizing on theI '1IIIionship between casssowary parent and child as a concrete\' 1I111pl'01'an abstract problem in human understanding,dllnl sid' lhe twentieth century Papua New Guinean thinking of

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE IJ

111kllowl 'dge of cassowaries in the abstract as an outcome of a11111I 1011'rcle relation with his own parents. I could add\ OII1Il'lllllllS.The Karam ethnographer was Ralph Bulmer, one of

IIIIIIIY( 'lIlllhridge students who have worked in Melanesia,11111111111I'Papua New Guinea, an undergraduate when FortesIIlIVl'l1and supervised by Jack Goody at the much rnissed Bun'llllP ,

'I hl "primarily a narrational connection, to introduce the way IPllllllN' 10 refer to the work of the [Cambridge] Department of,'111t 11Anthropology and the wider community ofIllItllIllpologists in this university. Many are present here. I shallI '1lll'IIisc their presence by sparing their names. - ThoughI'VI'IIII01'you, and notjust anthropologists, will recognise your

lti 'IIS 111what I say, as wilI my Manchester colIeagues. - The

111111'S you will hear fram now on are ali of formeI'1Il1l11opologists at Cambridge, some staff, some research, tlltil'nls. That way, I can claim a goodly portion of theplll!l'ssion! And if I restrict ilIustration to Melanesia, it will be10 IIlvilCyou to scale it up to almost any part of the world. Butwllll' anyone can weave ingenious narratives, anthropologists dolIot pursue connections simply in order to be ingenious. They10ut' thcm in specific ways.

SIl 'Ial anthropologists raute 24connections thraugh persons.'1''' 'Y attend to the relations of logic, of cause and effect, of class1Il11category, that people make between things; it also meansIhal they attend to the relations of social !ife, to the roles andh 'haviour, through which people connect themselves to oneIlIlother. And habitualIy they bring these two domains ofknowledge together, as when they talk about the relation

h 'tween culture and society.25 --./ r {

This is the legacy of the 'organisation' of anthropologicalknowledge 26for which the meeting in 1914 wished but couldnot see. It rested on new techniques for analysing relationships,

/2 THE RElATION:

and distinguished British Social Anthroplogy from its Americalland continental counterparts.

Routing relations through persQns became the substance ofanthropological empiricism. Whether the relations wereintellectual or social, made in fantasy or acted out in daily lifc,their source in people's interactions was made significant.Anthropologists stopped talking about savages and theircustoms. W.H.R. Rivers at St 10hns, and his Trinity pupil ARRadcliffe-Brown,27 had set the agenda for another praject: howto understand the totality of sociallife in terms of its owninternal ordering, namely as 'social organisation' .28And theenunciation of rules was understood as the moment at which

people became articulate about relationships. Rules about whalllto marry, to whom to show respect, about rights over resourcescomprised a virtual model of society. For the anthropologistcould make connections between the rules, build up a picture(say) about how residence, c1aims to land, and respect for chiefsfitted together.29 •System' did not just mean the methodicalcollation of facts, but something closer to Darwin's imagery ofdescent: a system was a working model demonstrating how part~af sociallife fitted together and had an effect on one another.And with their penchant for the cancrete, anthropologistsidentified their systematic descriptions of social organisationwith the regulatory functions of the rules to which peopleadhered; 'social order' became simultaneously the descriptian afsociety and the perceived means of its cohesion.30

There was a double emphasis, then, on relations known to theobserver as principies of social organisation and relationsobscrved as interactions between persons. The islanders ofM "Ianesia did not just specify who was marriageable but wherl'ollplcs should reside, the most punctilious conjugal contracts1Il'IIlgon lhe island of Dobu where couples annually altematedlI'sid 'li ·C. Social structure inhered in relationships relevant toIwopl 's a ·ts and intentions. This concrete location of structure

/SSUES /N COMPLEX/TY AND SCALE 13

1111""1'11'\ actions puzzled continental observers of the BritishI I III 1l1I'II gave British Social Anthropology one significant

I "1'1 IIIl' IlIodel could be enacted over and again in fieldwork.li •• ",lIlillon of fieldwork meant that anthropologists learnt

,,1111111y'tl'ms by entering into relations with those whose social1III 1111Y w 're sludying. Like Saem, the apprentice gained11111Irdl'l" 111lhe course of interaction. This disposition was111111'11IlI'd where kinship was at issue.

111111 1'1'1' inaugural lecture, Meyer Fortes 31argues that11111111" 'ystems exist only as a part of man's sociallife; a

1111I 11'I 'ai and material a part of nature as his body and1111,Illakes it reasonable to suppose that human society

I 1I1111h 1 'gularities consistent with those found in the rest11,1111"".Ile validates the point: "lf we consider only the

di ,IlWl Y and elucidation of c1assificatory kinship systemsI 111111111'o prove this". Fortes thus moves fram moral syste111111111"to kinship, and to these shifts in scale adds the eluci111IlIl' Illisational principIes as evidence that anthropology I ,'11111'11111\"itself. In his view, anthropology was not yet a disl1i Ih," Iimc of the first world war. There was a field of enquiry

111111111IlIcory: "a definite organization of anthropologicalIlIdln" " had indeed been required. But he did not mean quite

wll II 111' 1914 meeting had in mind. The discipline could not11IVI' b 'cn organised until its theories were, and these wereIIH'OI i 'S about the foundations of human organisation. "[O]ne of

0111prillcipal aims," he declares, "is to discover how moraIs, Ili 'li "fs and values are shaped by social relations and in tum1l'l'lIlate social relations".33

11111why should evidence for regularity come fram kinship'y,l "ms? Fortes evokes an anthropological ancestor 3-lwho had,\l' 'n principIes of social ordering in people's c1assification of1"Ialions (that is, kin relations). The field of kinship emerged as

\ system in its own right, the recognition 01'a network oflclalionships which presupposed people's perception 01'relations

,. 1'11I,/lmATION:

b 'lween relations, - The father of a father 01'the daughter 01'IIsisler. - Yet kin taxonomies initially led to an obsession with<:al'gories 01'classes. There was a time when 'marriages class :.'w 're seen as the key to everything, a move that failed through100 literal an attempt to read laws and regulations into kin term:.,as though there were a direct congruence between them.35Whalhlrtl.:s and his colleagues did was to make a change of scalel'xplieil.

()"I 01' lhe idea that in the c1assification of relatives one could

IlIld widcr social principIes carne a more general, and utterly,"lIlpll.:, proposition: persons are ciassifiable by their relations 11I(/1/1' (/I/o/her. And one could study these with a view toI'xlraeling diverse knowledge - political, economic, religious 01whall.:ver.1Ó Taking up kin relations as a system was an impetus101'd 'seribing social systems of ali kinds. 1n short, socialIl'lillions had bec an object of knowledge.37 Social relations11111b' abslractions, wr o es, ut morder to be at the,ltsposul 01'those who engage in them, [they] must beco me

dl:'l' 'rnible, objectified ... bodied forth in material objects andpllll' 'S, in words, acts, ideas [and] rules".38 British Social

Illhlopology remained c10sely tied to the conviction that at th11l'1I1101'syslems were persons' dealings witb one another, the

tl'll1Slhey created for themselves being second-order111Illi' stalions of their primary human ability to makeI IlIllOnships.39

'1'111:-'illlroduces the idea that ways of reckoning kin connections11\knowledge relations already in a sense existing.40 The kind of'I\',ogllilion' implied in the elucidation ofkinship led some to111':':'Ils ideological role in relation to other enduring social

11'111111's. This was the brunt of Edmund Leach's quarrel with11 1111'killship toa seriously. A kinship diagram does notII JI' Illt a whole society! Kinship, he argued, cannot "be1011 1(1,,1''(I without reference to its political, demographic 01'

111II1Illllk'implications".41 To focus on explicit norrns of kinship

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 15

I" 11I 11111111111overlook the realities of political 01'economic

1111I I 1111Wllldl lhe rhetoric of kinship is a gloss.42WhatI 11111111Idlllt issue is the assumption that anthropological

11111li dl'I' IItlL:ndsto relations between relations; but kinship11111I ItI I,'lill<:d to other areas of sociallife.

111111IIPOIO).\I:.lShardly invented the idea of second-order1111111,111111'(11(lI' ideology. Nonetheless, kinship studies gavetlll 111111011'1 ,[, tool for conceiving the complexity of social

"'1'111111I11l1l1In lhese terms. They were dealing with a double11111111111'01 r 'Ialions: indigenous models of kinship as a second­11011I I 1"",fi 'ation of ties established through blood and

111111111'/'(',IIl1dlheir own models of social relations that enabled111111110dehate the structuring role of kinship systems in society11111111'1'

{I I (I \hlld devised what he called a genealogical ~ethod forIlllli I' 111'kin lerms because he supposed that pre-hterate people11111I' M 'Ianesians apprehended abstract ideas via concrete

1111I, \':.Iablish lhe (concrete) personal relationship and then ask

111,(1Ih,tr<lel)kin term .43fõfteSiransforme~ t~e scale .of this111111'1'. 1"1)1'him, in evk--the-s{mplest socletles, relatlons ofI 111IlIp are at once a concrete vehicle for conceiving of a social11Iti 1'1 IIId an abstract articulation of the relational quality of alI\11IId exislence.44 Pe.ople demarcate the differences in scale

tlll !lli.l diverse distinctions. Distinctions between kinds of kinIIIIY IlIus distingUlsh different orderings of sociallife.45 Scale isIIIY1'1111, not Fortes's.

III With and Without Seale

'lll has been a headache for anthropology. If anthropologyroutes its knowledge through persons, the individual person

IIpp 'ars to have its own scale, a 'small' entity by comparisonwilh everything we know about society. Anthropological interest

/6 THE RELATlON:

in interpersonaI reIations seems side-tracked to deaIing with'smaIl scale' societies. We think we know by contrast whatcompIex ones are Iike - indirect communication via

technoIogies of information transfer; persons dealing with otherson anonymous, transient bases; open-ended in alI directions. Sofor anthropoIogists to focus on kinship onIy seems to underlinethe point. For in compIex societies, so understood, kinshipoccupies a domain in social Iife regarded as smalIer in scaIe thanthe whoIe.

To make matters worse, many nonliterate peopIes appear to seepersons even where the anthropoIogist wouId noto And kinshipmay be claimed for relations between entities that English­speakers conceive as frankly improbable. Papua New Guineaprovides notorious exampIes, as Gregory Bateson 46 found inlatmul in the 1930s where human beings are simply onemanifestation of clan persons also manifested as everyconceivable entity in the environment. The tuber, yam, forinstance. Reo Fortune reported the same from Dobu.47 Yams

have personal names, give birth, respond to speech, walk aboutat night. As Stephen Gudeman 48commented fifty years Iater,this makes agriculture an activity carried out not in reIation to'nature' but in relation to other human-like beings. Now thisshould make us think again about scale, and about complexityfor that matter.

Dobuans locate their own agency in a world of agents, humanand unhuman; indeed, in the same way as persons have to bespurred into action, so does the growth and generation of pIants,ol'tcn through magic, for growth is not an autonomous process.49ÁIIU their conceptions of time, Gudeman says, are not linear. In111\' h 'ginning everything was reIated to everything else, and it is1111~ past which has to be brought back again. "Far fromplovuling a foundation or base for the social order, 'theI I 0110111 ' ••• is an enactment which refers to other social acts" ,50

111 \' \'llIplllry recurrence,51 replaying what already exists in order

/SSUES /N COMPLEX/TY AND SCALE /7

10 IIlllk ' it appear again - the kinship-based Iineage and itsP\" M)I\~, human and yam. Forms must be repeated. Husbands111(1 WIV 'S keep their yam seed apart in order to conserve its

\\'Pllt:lt' lineage identities.

I)ohllans take the person as a measure of alI things.I'l'l.'onifi ations have, we might say, a holographic effect, that is,011' 'an encounter 'persons' in alI forms of Iife.52As a'ons 'quence, there is nothing either Iarge-scaIe or smaIl-scale

ahollt the person. Qne can have smaII or large yams or importantand unimportant events, but the person as such has no scale.Rather, Dobu personifications can take any scale, appear as anyorder of phenomena. Dobuans are not confused about thediffercnce between yams and humans; the point is that lineage

pcrsons can take the body 53of either kind of being.

Something not dissimilar is there in English ideas aboutknowledge. Like the person in Dobu, The ReIation, itself neitherlarge 01' smalI, can cross scales. It does so by virtlle of twoproperties. They are found in both the abstract concept and theconcrete kinsperson .

IV Holographic and Complex Phenomena

!wantto understand the creat.ive ~nergy 54.released by the :vayknowIedge was being orgamsed m the mJddIe years of thlscentury - how with hindsight we might see the burst ofanthropoIogicaI activity from the Cambridge SchooI. Perhaps in

~ providing a counterpart to the organisation of knowledge inpeopIe's organisation of reIations among themseIves, the

~ lconstruct reIation aIso introduced scaIe to special effect.~. The concept of relation can be applied to any order of:.

y, 'u I connection; this is its first property. It is holographic in the\' V sense of being an exampIe of the fieId it occupies, every part

~

í,

/SSUES IN COMPLEX/TY AND SCAI..E /9

The English relation as kinsperson also has holographic andcomplex features. And here we see how knowledge enters theloIery definitions of kinship.

First, one may cut off kin by saying they are not relatives. Thenagain, anyone who counts may be included, immediate family,in-Iaws, distant cousins. But what is holographic is that each

TIIl' 1 lation as a model of com lex henomena then, has the

JlIW 'r to bring dissimilar orders or levels of knowledge togeth~rwhil onserving their difference. ln Fortes's analysis, thedisl illct identity of the domestk and politico-jural domains was'rll 'ial to their relationship. Moreover, the político-jural

r 'Ial ions of kinship were on a different scale from familialkillship. A homely parallel is the way English-speakerscornmonly talk of 'a relation' between individual and society:lhe relation brings together phenomena of quite different scales.

61 fi .A counter-example makes the point. Mary Bouquet, re ectmgon Portuguese perplexities over British anthropologicaltheorising on kinship, notes that there is in Portuguese "noseparation, such as the Englísh might make, between the[private] person and [public] ... conventions". One cannot inPortuguese, it would seem, contrast persons and system, andtherefore cannot relate them, or derive one from the otheI. As a

consequence, the personal geneaology could not be used tocollect abstract information.

11" WII n on do s not on1y see relations between things but

llilll I I ·Ialions.toll - This is formally evident in the very \1" 1\ l'plll)1I 01 relationships as a matter of n:~king connec.tionsI pll I1 W' may call the relation an orgamsmg figure wlth the,\'Ioud udcr ca acit to organise either the similar or dissimilar.1'1\1\'111illld <.:hildare similar insofar as they are e me .

1I'IIJlIOl.'alrelation, dissimilar insofar as they are defined by11111\'1'111<.:riteria.(English-speakers can look at anyone and see a

1111111;Ihcy cannot look at anyone and see a parent.)

containjng infonnation about the whole and information about

the whole being enfolded in each part.55 It is a holographic eff l'lto imagine one can make connections anywhere. For the relatiOIlmodels phenomena in such a way as to produce instances ofitself. We could call it a self-simjlar construct, a figure whoseorganising power is not affected by scale. At whatever levei ororder, the demonstration of a relationship, whether throughresemblance, cause and effect or contiguity, reinforces the factthat through relational practices - c1assification, analysis,comparison - relations can be demonstrated. It works above ali

as a model for the kind of secular knowledge ushered in with thseventeenth or eighteenth century conviction that the world(nature) is open to scrutiny. For relations are produced throughthe very activity of understanding when that understanding hasto be produced from within,56 that is, when things in the worldcan only be compared with other things on the same earthlyplane.

Iff one's heuristic world is society, relations are demonstrableacross any order of event or mIe, domain, institution, behaviour,

You could look 'within' society and find economic and politicalstructures or relations 'between' religious and legal values.Based on his own fieldwork in West Africa, Fortes pursued theinsight within the domain of kinship, uncovering people'sdistinctions between the polítical and domestic aspects of kinrclations .57The effect was to show that kinship is not just afamilial phenomenon, but contains within itself the kinds ofdcmarcations English-speakers make between (say) public andprivate spheres.

I Til . rclation has a second property: i~_o_th_e_r_e_l_em_e_n_ts_t_o-"",.,~ 1'0111llcle it - relations between what? This makes its

\ 01111 ling functions complex, for the relation always summons111111i , olher than itselU8 Again, this is true whether thesei'lIl11I\'S arc pre-existing (the relation is 'between' them) or areIlIillll'lIl illlo existence by the relationship and thus exist 'within'

/8 TUE REUTION:

ISSUES IN COMPI.EXITY AND SCALE 2/

If systems - ecological, social 01' whatever - can appear self- \

organising, so toa may our cognitive tools. 1suggest TheRelation is already there in anthropology as an epistemologicaldevice that can work in the same way.

'I'llIs is beyond my expertise. It is not beyond my interest,lIow ·v 'r. If the concept of self-organisation proved of any use to1II11llropology,we would find that the very notion of'01' 'unisation' had taken off on a new path. Consider one of the

II'W idioms ofpropagation; the subject matter is knowledge, theI ,orl to bioJogical idiom specificalIy a procreative one, theimtl c a kind of stem, a rhizome. This growth "assumes (I am

quoting) diverse forms, branches in alI directions, and formsbulbs and tubers. It has different principIes of connection and

h tcrogeneity; [the rhizome] is multiple, giving rise to its ownstruclure but also breaking down that structure according to the

'I ines of flight' it contains" .69So listen to this: it is a question of

relying "on clumped networks of signi~cation which re~~ire that .\Ar'""they be organized in ways that are not bneal [as proposltlOnal ~f'vlanguage is !ineal] but multi-stranded". Here the subject is oJveveryday thought, and Maurice Bloch's culling from cognitivescience a new model for how people are likely to convey their

thought processes.?O

111 IIl1hIIl1ll'Srunning simultaneously along several quite different

" 111J1I111I1IIl1dspatial scales. You have to account for the outcome01 11'\\'111,IIlillennial and geological change alI at once. But

1I111110Jllllogycould also borrow the concept from the sociology01 li 'n .. wher 'com lexity' has acquired quasi-disciplinary111111'.whose own precedents are claimed to lie in

111'11111)Iynamics and mathematics, as well as in ecology andhmlo' .

What happens when we bring these two properties (holographyand complexity) together, when we consider the facility of TheRelation both to slip across scales and keep theirdistinctiveness? In late twentieth-century parlance, our littleconstruct starts looking like a selj-organising device.

Second,relations are always people related through some othercriterion. To hear an English-speaker calI someone a 'relation'tells you there is some other reason for the connection than

simply calling them that: he is a relative by marriage or she a

relative through an aunt. lf knowledge consists in makingexplicit a field of connections that already exist, so is connectingkin an open-ended and complex matter. Certain social relations(marriage, tracing ties through consanguines) forro thefoundation for others and, beneath it ali, ideas about the role of

biology ('nature') in procreation is taken to be the reason forthere being kin relationships at all.64

usage summons the field; to cal! someone a relation impliesdiscrimination between alI those possibly connected and thos 'whom one chooses to recognise. - "I would hardly call themrelatives!" 62- Repeated each time is the distinction betweenwhat is given and what is open to choice,63 imparting ambiguityto the very term relation itself. People may even say they areuncertain how to apply the term in alI cases.

Self-organisin has been used to describe certain non-lineare ects - a holistic 01' functional interpretation of'organisation' but a model that accounts both for the persistence01'patterns and the capacity of systems, organic, social,intellectual, to take off into quite new paths. Evolutionarypathways are of course of great interest to our colleagues in11io!ogical Anthropology,65 though I have actualIy culled thephms' self-organisation from the arehaeologists.66 Their concernI willl lhe irreversible outcomes of factors that could have taken

111111I'OlIles - like so many ~ounterfactuals 6?- in their case

20 THE RElATlON:

22 THE RELATlON:

For Fortes, anthropologists codified abstract social relations as 11knowledge of systems whereas preliterate peoples had to bodyforth such abstractions in material objects as well as in wordsand rules. From Melanesia one could add that personsthemselves take both concrete and abstract form, whether as

human beings and yams with their evident bodies 01' aspersonified sources of power Iying beyond them. To accesspower one has to enter into relations with persons, visible andinvisible, of which the concrete effects are also the objects andwords that flow between them. Dobuan yams will only listen topeople if they are addressed in the appropriate speech.

V Retaining Detail and Avoiding Overload 71

Why should this be of any current interest? I could giveseveral answers. The one I have chosen for this occasion

is of course exactly that.

We could certainly note that while The Relation as anintellectual construct could possibly be c1aimed as a self­organising device in the new sense, it aIso served the old regimeof systematisation just as weIl. Clearly the concept has stayingpower. But is there any forward durability 72to those ratherparticular mid-century kinship studies that were so important foranthropology in this country and so central to the work beingdone at Cambridge? There is, but it does not necessarily lookIike them.

Take the reIationship between the abstract and the concrete,whose modem formulations Stanley Tambiah rerrunds us carnein the seventeenth century.73Those kinship systems fromMelanesia 01' West Africa invite us to ask what English-speakersmake into abstractions, into objects of contemplation. For theyI 1I of elsewhere, where it is persons 01' relations which arealI' ady in the world, there in the abstract, which have to be

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 23

"'"". '''"1 /I'(/',Ihal is, have to be given body, made to appear.

11111I 111'11h '\l 'ak rs imagine a world of knowledge-makingh'll 1111lOlIl'1 'I is already given in nature, so when scientific

1'111 11111'1I llladc concrete it is embodied in technology which11\ til 1111,111111'works' in the natural world. It tends to be system1Il1lll1l'llIi"III,on that are contemplated in the abstract. To make1111'li II!'P '111 IlIlChas to make them explicit. This kind of second­111111'11111'I 'lIds lo certain excesses. It also overlooks certain"'"1""1" k ·d features of the 'English' world, namely the concrett'lIlllodllll 'nl of organisation in social relations.

Now lhos' earlier studies were carried forward in a challenging

w I hy Jack Goody.74 I refer to his works on codifications ofkllowi 'dg lhat can be transrrutted independently of persons, andlln Il'cllllological innovations some of which affect thedisposil ion of kin, others the disposition of knowledge. He may1101have wanted to make that connection, but we might wish to

1I0W.11is not only in the search for clinching idioms that kinshipIlnd knowledge seem to body each other forth. Think againaholll lhe Californian surrogacy case.

Th ' means by which we know a child's parents traditional1ydirTerentiated mother from father. The mother was known

Ihrough birth, the father by his relation with the mother.R productive technology rearranges these relations and createsncw criteria. Here, genetic connection might estabIish thefalher's parenthood but it did not solve the question of whichwoman was the mother; the decision was based on a mental

concept: who intended to be parent,75 If technology was aSSisti~n

conception (the processes of rep:od~ction and procreation), thenlhe law was assisting conceptuahsatlOn (what was to count askinship and relationship). It does not matter that this is a case infar-off Califomia; the consequences for kinship come from a

more general application of new knowledges. Statements such aslhe following are beginning to sound familiar. "While computeI'and information technologies are bringing about a regime of

24 THE RELATlON:

technosociality ... biotechnologies are giving rise to biosociality,a new order for the production of Iife, nature and the bodythrough biologically based technological interventions" .76Notthat biotechnology requires that the relational bases ofparenthood be made explicit in ways once never necessary.

Technology, along with material culture, always had a presenin the Faculty Museum at Cambridge. Now, no-one surveyingthe teaching of Social Anthropology in British universities todaycould fail to be struck by the extent to which it has reappearedon the agenda. Indeed, with diffusion being given renewedvigour in discussions about globalisation, it sometimes feels thatwe are closer to the beginning of the century than to the middleof it.77Current interest in technology, however, has come out ofits relational potential. The person is seen to have technologicalas well as organic or social accoutrements or propS.78

For this is not the beginning of the century but the end, andthese interests are routed through those middle years. Present­day concerns with material culture/technology revive questionsabout social relations. Indeed it is intriguing to see colleaguesfrom sister disciplines - and I include sociology here ­inserting artefacts into social relations with the status of actors.79These are more than metaphorical borrowings: they are ways ofrecasting relations to include the unhuman with the human.80 Theproblem of excess comes when technology is regarded asenabling, as a prosthesis that enhances personal performance,and when persons become obliged to demonstrate they havebeen enhanced.

The very term enhancement implies we are bound to want it,and this is where things begin to get out of hand. Thinking onceIlIore of the meeting in 1914, one wonders if anthropologists andlIdministrators would recognise themselves now. They rnight1111<1 11 cOl11l11onenemy less in ignorance than in what I eall, post­l'IIII'rprise, the culture of enhancement.

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 25

The late twentieth-century culture of enhancement is devoted to

making eve t . g..~licj1: We are all implicated, for it imitatesest scholarly practice. But it promotes the illusion that effects

should be aims. There is a good case for saying that aims shouldbe explicit. That is what they are: overt goals for organisation.But what gets identified as an aim? Scholars do not imagine thatone can have methods and protocols for producing intellectual

epochs. Such epochs are effects, outcomes; indeed, effects canbecome silly when tumed into aims. The story can be toldagainst anthropology. My distinguished predecessor, ErnestGellner, scorns the pretensions of cultural relativisim.81 Dfcourse he is right. A sense of relativism may emerge from theanthropologist's investment in relations, and from taking thoserelations across cultures. And the effect can be stunning: one

becomes aware of the positioning of knowledges in relation toone another. But that revelation works best as the outcome ofsubstantive interests focussed elsewhere - on understanding

data by content not just by context.82 To try to enhance the effectof comparison, to make relativism an aim, produces some of theexcesses to which Gellner has so eloquently objected.83 Byanalogy, the effect of work carried out in Cambridge may bestunning, may make it "one of the world's leading universities",but how can that be presented, as the format of strategic plansinsists,84 as its rnission?

A second illusion of the culture of enhancement is to imagine

that organisations w~better when they are explicit. I borrowfrom the Vice-Chancellor's comments to Regent House on the

1993 Audit report on Cambridge, a point where, had suchmoments been recorded, it is conceivable that the congregation

would have laughed in sympathy. This was the point at which heobserved that the only thing the University was faulted uponwas failure to be explicit about procedures. "The highlyeffective implicit way in which Cambridge is organized does notfit wel1 with many current philosophies, and it is sadly the casethat much money, and much time, has now to be expended on

• 1//1 HII II/f1N:

1lllkllll' Illore explicit its sense of purpose".85 The auditors could11111, .. how it worked! The problem is that what might have1I'lIlUlIl'd a passing perplexity becomes the basis of policy11'('11111111'ndations: organisation must be there in the abstract ­Ihr IIllivcrsity simply has to make it visible. But of course it( ,1111101lIlakc explicit what works by being implicit.86 It has11I\Il'lId10 double the abstractions - enhance the systematisation

IIlld what is made visible or concrete tends to be what can be

lI'rhllologically embodied in memoranda ar put on disk. Far"0111 'Ilcrgising, such enhancement may divert energy from('I\rwhcrc. And it may fatally undervalue the organisation that isIIhelldy concretely embodied in people's relations with oneIIl10thcr.

'J'his is Lhepoint at which to capitalise on my observations about111' holographic and complex properties of The Relation.lt hash 'cn argued that "[t]he driving dynamic at the forefront of news·j 'nLiric knowledge today is what could be described at a'Illulti-type complexity' ... not only is more than one scientific'discipline' involved in problem solutions but so too aredifTerent kinds of knowledge, both explicit and tacit, for example... 101'the tacit] knowing how to laterally connect ideas from .oLher fields and discourses" .87This comes from a talk, beyond( ambridge and anthropology altogether, given in Korea by aI irector of a Centre for Research Policy in Australia. He pointsto research being published across disciplinary boundaries. Qnesei 01'Australian figures suggest that 65% of research fromphysics and earth sciences departments were published 'outside'Ihcse fields; psychology publications were spread across 49disciplines. Some 880 research centres have mushroomed acrosstil' Australian university system.

What drives such creativity are new relations of knowledgeproduction increasingly dependent on actor-to-actor exchanges."P 'rsonal networks and immediate personal relations", I quote,"lIPP 'ar to be of crucial importance at the leading edge of new

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 27

, 11'1(1\ which ... emerge and dissolve through network1('llll(lllS ralhcr as do 'self-organising systems' ".88And what,h IVI', Ih ' personal immediacy of such networking is uncodified

'Iowlrdge - including knowledge about how to conduct1('IIIIOIlShips."What matters in the 1990s", he said," is the1111I"kr01'both the embodied technological knowledge - in111IdIlIlCS, artefacts, and so on,plus the transfer ofuncodified(1lPllhility - in people's tacit knowledge both about the11'1hllologics and the social means by which they can be1'1Iplllrcd".""

11111 onc does not have to be talking about research centres andklldillg edge innovations. The hugely proliferated systems ofIlllormation-production in which university scholars are caughtth 'S ' days is only made workable by interactions between socialh 'illgs who maintain multiple connections between themselvesIllIough what they independently value as their relations. ByvlllUCof these relations, people sustain a f10w of knowledge,Ihat is, select appropriate information, far greater than can everg 'LsysLematised. (The argument from commerce is that, in theta 'C of toa much information, it becomes more efficient to go tok 'y persons.) 90

'fI/i.l' is the real world ofthe late twentieth-century scholar. So,Iike organisation, know ledge has a second locus. lt is not justmade concrete in technology. It is also embedded in people'srelations with one another, and may link persons just as kinshipsubstance does, although one would not want to call themkinship networks. They may appear kinship-sized.91

There is a chance that the present prestige of communicationstechnology might make visible what was concealed by thoseconventions of scale that regarded the interpersonal as 'sma1l­scale'. The conventions could not have been more wrong.Networks can take any scale - have the power to crossdifferent organisationallevels - precisely because each relation--

28 THE RELATlON:

invokes a field of embodied [social] knowledge aboutrelationships. So perhaps such social relations will surviveânyhow. After ali, similar networks always existed alongside thedisembodied apparatus found in libraries and in paradigms. And,as I remember Audrey Richards talking about the telephonewhich enabled Elmdon 'villagers' to keep up contact withdistant kin,92they would seem onIy facilitated by thoseelectronic devices such as fax, xerox machine and personaIcomputer. At the same time these artefacts are the veryinstruments of the speeding up 93of information acquisition andtransfer that makes short-circuiting through interpersonallinks adesperate necessity. But more than that, they are alsoinstruments of the counter-productive activity of enhancedsystematisation. And this is the juncture at which I have a littletrouble with them.

Intellectual procreation, relations of creativity, introduces thequestion of where our energies go. Qne does wonder how asuniversity scholars and adrninistrators we have connived in an

extemally imposed ethos of management that is not just old­fashioned 94but at times antithetical to creativity.95 I do not meanthat we should overtum the need to be accountable nor that we

cannot improve the way we impart information to students. And,

absolutely, I do not see any retum to departmental styles as theywere forty years ago. My question is, simply, from which kindsof activities should we draw our criteria of good practice, and bythe same token invest in?

The systematisation of knowledge is one thing. Without thedisembodied abstraction of information in books or papers, thereould not be the same accumulation of insight or data.

Morcover, cum ersome as institutlOna co I lcation is, it has

always been important as a democratic safeguard against elitism;those in power tend to cling to implicit practices, a goodr 'Illinist point, to follow Henrietta Moore.96 It is an aid to

Irnnsparency and open govemment, and my scepticism should

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 29

11,,1I" III~1'1111'dislllissal. Yet we understand toa Iittle of the

1 ,11 , II"H l"S 'S Ihat go into the production of knowledge.I, 111111kllowlcugc is an end-result, the effect of creative work,I" 111.I 11IlIok place in a laboratory or in the Lake District, the

"1I1i111111111 pIO!:'sses going on elsewhere and in other modes. AI,,,,,~ ""'Y ll'plllcJuce some of the creativity that went into its11111111"Wlil'lI II generates ideas in the reader. That is the point:" 111.I I"'lIl'l ale lheir own responses by everything brought toli" 11Idlll you don't (ordinarily) read a book by writing it11 I I lI' 1111.111short, output cannot be measured against input,'''1 IIII'Y 1I1volvcactivities of different scale.

t .,,11,11W' seis systematisation gone mad.91And it has goneli' 111111111' name of enhancing the system. A despairing chair of1111111,11'mic board wrote to the Secretary of State for Educationli' 1'11)\ Ihat the director of his institution 98had had in the course

"I , IlIgle year to provide information under the following1'litltl'S: lhe Research Assessment Exercise (UFC), ResearchI'," fOllllance Indicators for the Annual Survey of Publications( 'V{ '1'), Academic Audit (CVCP), Quality Assessment(111 ''Jo'CE) , Guideline for good practice in respect of quality" 111allce systems procedures (HEQC), Review of the Academie'r"111(i ,'Iowers Report) (CVCP), and so forth, over and above'lllllcgic plans, operating statements and financial forecasts, not10 111'Illion Higher Education Funding Council circulars ofwlil(.:hno fewer than 20 had been received by the May of thatycar. Think of the human activity at the xerox machine alone.Wllal has been observed of chaos graphics could as well be said(lI such exercises - disembodied but prosthetically enhanced by'I 'ctronic technology.99

I can summarise these points in an observation about scale.1'('f,l'On-to-person networks that succeed by replicating thecondi/íons under whích persons relate to one another, work, as

rela/íons do, holographícally. Their power is that ínterpersonalrela/íons can take any scale, be productive at any arder of

30 THE REf..ATION:

encounter, whether in a small university department or acrossthe globe. It is a mistake to think they can be measured by size.But they do demand time, energy and cultivation, and that iswhat is at stake. It would be an equal error to fail to

acknowledge scale elsewhere. I would point to the significanceof reco gnising different scales of endeavour in fundamentalcreativity. The reproduction of knowledge is a complex,heterogeneous and non-linear process that involves concrete as

well as abstract relations. And there can be no procedures forsuccess; or rather, the procedures are not the success. This is

where stated aims some times look silly. In human reproductionno-one ever reproduces themselves: they always see themselvesin another form.lOo

There is some future profit, I think, in theorising The Relationthat was such a key device, and key figure, in anthropology'sinterest in kinship. But those mid-century kinship studies cannotbe turned into present aims: they are (in turn) for studying, notimitating. If they have produced concepts applicable to otherareas of enquiry, we do not enhance their effect by striving towrite the books over again.

Of eight articles in the most recent issue of the RoyalAnthropological Institute's journal,lo, three - the authors fromLondon, Israel, the States - caught my attention. Theyrecapitulate some of my own themes. Adam Kuper voices a pleafor generating debates that will have resonance beyond ourimmediate fields.102Nurit Bird-David discusses social relations

among a tiny forest-dwelling population in India, challenginghow we might think of 'face-to-face' connections.IOJ DebboraBattaglia comments on jokes told by migrant Trobriand

Islanders in Papua New Guinea's capital Port Moresby, thoughth y were not comic like Frazer's and do not bear re-telling.'04Th 'sc were, however, jokes about the inappropriateness of\'llhllll 'cl1lcnt - people were planning a yam competition but1111'qll:ll1lily of the urban harvest would not of itself be an index

fSSUES fN COMPLEXfTY AND SCALE 3f

""" 111~lly(heI' Icrm is generativity) for the appropriate social,.11111111\ \'Il' 1101 in place.

11111111111\', l':lught my attention for another reason: they are ali1,\ "111111'1I\"l'arch students at Cambridge. And there is a fourth,,,\ 1 IlIdl'lIl of ~uch a student,105but I shall avoid any puns aboutI 111 I \'1 111 ' just borrow from the idioms I have been making, 1'1111I 'I'h' point of course is to ask how else one might, , I, 1111111'Ih ' generative power of a Department but in theI" 1IIIIIII(II1Sofscholars itproduces?

The text can be read with or without the

notes. I have included these notes and

references in recognition of the obvious

fact that the connections one makes are

at once one's own and not

one's own at ali.

Cl!t'S

li", " " ' was presented by a Joint Committee of the Royal1I11i'opological Institute and the British Association ('Report of

t '(llIkrclll;C on anthropological teaching in lhe universities', printed inM'II/, \~, 1914, pp.l-16) to some 60 university representatives, MPs and

(I"'llIhcl\ Df the civil service. The proposed petition was one in a long line(lI p<:I'llons to the government from the British Association (and later the

I(AI), 1I1itially to set up a bureau of ethnology (see Henrika Kuklick, The\"""N" Willrin: Tire Social HislOry of British Social Anlhropology, 1885­11)./,\ ,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ch. 2).

llie Prcsident of Magdalen College, Oxford, who also claimed that

Illllhropology was a legitimate expansion of classics, for, he opined, one of11i"r 'asnns why classicists had been so successful as overseas

Ild,"inslrators was that classical studies already contained so much'"'1 hropology. He pointed to a classics pupil of his (Sir Hubert Murray)wli" had been appointed Governor of Papua.

Th' words of Sir Henry Craik, MP, civil servant and educationalist.

1:III1.cr'sjoke was meant to illustrate an argument about difference. He,"!(ucd that, given the "profound difference which separates the savage'IICCS of man from the civilised", it was futile extending the role of laww,thout modification. His example was the concrete thinking of the

p ,titioning "natives". lt is Frazer's usage which interests me. His example,,"osl concretely, serves to embed the idea of roles and customs in relations

hclwccn persons. (I wonder if he was also insinuating that civilised and,avagc are like brother and sister in being at once both close and distant,h"th similar to and dissimilar from one another; naturally, brother and,islcr do not marry.)

Thc case was widely publicised at the time and has been the source ofIlluch commentary since. My account draws from analyses pravided by thelawycr and anthropologist Janet Dolgin ('The "intent" of reproduction:rcproductive technology and the parent-child bond', Univ. Connecliclll1.(/11' RcvielV [forthcoming]) and by Derek Morgan whose interests are inhcalth care law ('A surrogacy issue: who is the other mother?l"lcmational JOllrnal of LaIV and lhe Family vol. 8, pp. 386-412, 1994). Iam most gratetul to both of lhem for allowing me access to then

unpublished material, and to Derek Morgan for sending me a copy of lhedrart transcript fram the Supreme Court of California's hearing of Johnson"Cal"erl May 1993 (851, P. 2d 776 (1993».

(o I use the colloquial phrase as a shorthand. For a critique of the view oforganic development implied, see Susan Oyama, The Olllogeny of

34 THE RELATION:

Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985.

7 - The presiding judge opened with a general observation about legalquestions raised by developments in reproduetive teehnology beforecoming on to the particular case. When one woman gives birth to thegenetic child 01' another, in his phrasing, who is the child's natural mother?In Califomia law there can only be one natural mother, following earlierlegislation which abolished lhe distinction between legitimate and

illegitimate ehildren.

8 - At 783, see n. 5. The phrases 'mentally conceiving' and 'initiating' parentwere already in eireulation (e.g. in George P. Smith, 'The case 01' Baby M:love's labor lost', in L. Gostin (ed), Surrogate Mofherhood: Polities andPrivaey, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, to which FrancesPrice earlier drew my attention). The judge cited three commentators inalI. Another had observed that the intending parents are "the first cause" or

"prime movers" 01' the procreative relationship; the third had argued thatreproductiuve technology extends "affirmative intentionality" so that"intentions that are voluntarily chosen ... ought presumptively to determinelegal parenthood" (at 783, see n. 5). However, a dissenting opinion fromthe bench challenged the first cause argument for its misleading evocation01' intellectual property rights, and challenged the focus on the geneticmother for excluding the carrying mother who was every bit as much "aconscious agent 01' creation" .

9 - H.W. Fowler, A Dietionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1927 edition). His objection in full is as follows. "To talk 01' personsor creatures ofthe maseuline andfeminine g[ender}, meaning ofrhe male

and female sex, is either a jocularity or a blunder" (p. 211, original italics).The grammatical term referred to kinds or classes sorted according towhether they were masculine, feminine, common or neuter. In reference to

persons, gender had the connotation 01' a kind or sort, as in 'the generalgender', a common sort 01' people.

10 - Ann Oakley (Sex, Gender and Soeiety, London: Temple Smith, 1972, p.16), crystallised the distinction between 'sex' and 'gender' as a distinctionbetween biological difference and social c1assification. Much was beingwritten at the time on the biological and behaviourallsocial aspects aI' 'sexdifferences' without recourse to the term 'gender' (e.g. The Developmenfof Sex Differenees edited by Eleanor Macoby (London: Tavistock 1967] orMales and Females by Corinne Hutt (Penguin 1972]). But 'gender' thenmoved into place so rapidly that Gilbert Herdt can write in 1994(Introduction to his edited volume, Third Sex, Third Gender: BeyondSI' lia/ Dilllophism in Culfure and History, New York: Zune Books) thatth - ideu tha! sex was to nature as gender was to culture has been a

lSSUES lN COMPLEX1TY AND SCALE 35

1''''''''1'111 V";W for "more than fifty years" (p. 51). His exploratory interestI" 11 'Ihllti g<:lIdcr' (grammar gave four) only makes sense in reference to11" I"""it', "'g 01' persons.

1I \111111'1 "Ih<:r Iypes 01' Iinkages, e.g. as Anthony Giddens (Modernity andIi /I ""'''Iily: Self and Soeiety in the Late Modern Age, Oxford: PolityI'" N, I')') I, p. 219) reminds us 01' the modem eonnotations 01'

11 1'""Ii, 'Ii"n' as both biological and social continuity. James Boon's

\/lI,J/III',V fll/d /:.xrremes (Chicago: University 01' Chicago Press, 1990).I, pl"y' lhe double entendre 01' 'affinity' as both marriage alliance and lhevIIIIIl'~"I' allraclion and repulsion.

I I (111111111 Iker, Danvin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George/,/r"r ",/(/ Ninereenrh-Cenfury Fietion (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul,I')X 1i p. 169.

11 """. p. 170.

I I I'hc phrasc is Janet Dolgin's (see n. 5). She points out how intent, aIh""ghl about what one would like to do or be, becomes connective:

"'"1 'nl joins people more strongly than any contract can". Biological1'''1 ·"lial may also be likened to a thought (to an idea or concept). When111· Ilrilish Parliament was debating the 1990 Human Fertilisation andI\l1lhryology Bill prior to its enactment, lhe then Master 01' Pembroke,I,ord Adrian, introduced the term 'conceptus'. A designation was needed101' lhe early precursor ofthe embryo. (This was part 01' a definitionald -hale: sce Pat Spallone 'The salutory tale 01' the pre-embryo' ,lorlh<:oming in Between Monsters, Mother Goddesses and Cyborgs:FI'lIIillisr Perspeetives on Seienee, Teehnology and Health Care, ed. N.I.ykkc.) He added: "lhe point about using lhe word 'conceptus' is that in

Ihal slage lhe fertilised egg is a concept 01' a new individual and not theilldividual. It is only when lhe blueprint has been achieved ... that one cansay the embryo starts". In other words, the conceptus is seen aschromosomal material in the process 01' being formed into an individual,which at that stage is purely notional (a eoncept). The remark is quoted bySarah Franklin in Teehnologies of Procreafion: Kinship in the Age ofAvsisred Coneeprion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) p.110; she and the other authors 01' the book, Jeanetle Edwards, Eric Hirschand Frances Price, have provided much 01' the stimulus to my interest inIhis field.

I ~ 111 the dual senses 01' receiving seed (becoming pregnant) and takingsomething into the mind (grasping an ideal; only later is 'conceive' usedmore loosely to cover both conception (01' a woman) and begetting (01' aman).

'" I IlIkl' 11 liberty here: the meeting was primarily concerned with theIlll\lllllSlllion of anthropological teaching.

, / ( 111," . wnnection, see Ian Langham, The Building of British Social

IIIt/mlllll/ogy: W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples in the11,'\'('/OfJllleJIIof Kinship Studies, 1898-1931, Dordrecht, Holland: D.HI'IIIcI Pub. Co., 1981, pp. 27 I ff.

36 THE RELATlON:

16 - A usage that seems to have become prevalent, in certain circles at least, inJane Austen 's time (see Richard Handler & Daniel Segal, Jane Austen and

the Fiction of Culture: an Essay on the Narration of Social Realities,Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990, p.33). They suggest that'connection' stressed the socially constructed and mutable (lheir phrasing)dimension of the kinship tie as opposed to its natural basis in blood. I notethat like the Anglo-Saxon 'kin' before it, 'family' seems to have referredto the household before it became in lhe seventeenth century a term for an

assemblage of items.

17 - To the extent that, when the substantive 'relation' is personalised, itdenotes a kinsperson and nothing else (see e.g. Raymond Firth, JaneHubert and Anthony Forge, Families and their Relatives: Kinship in aMiddle Class Sector of London: an Anthroplogical Study, 1969, pp 93-4).

18 - John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London, 1690.The OED indicates that there were cassowaries in St James' Park in 1611,

19 - Locke Ibid. p. 237 (New Edition, London: Ward, Lock & Co, no date).The illustration of avian connection had been preceded by a reference tohuman kinship. In talking about the way that the very act of comparison

(bringing items into relationship) is a clarifying exerci se, he argued that"in comparing two men, in reference to one common parent, it is very easyto frame the idea of brothers, without yet having lhe perfect idea of aman" (p. 236). Indeed, throughout chapter XXV ('Of Relation'), he takeskin relationships as immediately accessible exemplars of logical relations.Thus he gives as examples of correlative terms obvious to everyone"falher and son, husband and wife" (p 234).

20 - See Ralph Bulmer, 'Why is the cassowary not a bird? A problem ofzoological taxonomy among lhe Karam of the New Guinea Highlands',Man (NS) 2, 1967, pp. 5-25.

21 - Bulmer approaches lhe 'anomalous' taxonomic position of lhe flightlesscassowary by several routes. His suggestion about sislers and cross­cousins (mother's brolhers' or father's sisters' daughters, terminologically'sisters' from a man's point of view) is that these figures offer a centralmetaphor for ambivalent relationships of closeness and distance. Men areboth close to and distant from wild cassowaries; one cannot marry close

human sisters, but one can marry distant [wild'] ones. (See 'The KalamCassowary revisited', by Jan Pouwer in Man and a Half' Essays in PacificAnthropology and Ethnobi%gy in Honour of Ralph Bulmer, edited byAndrew Pawley, Auckland: The Polynesian Society, 1991). Saem [ see n.221 offered a further analogy, saying that the cassowary is also like across-cousin to the domestic pig (pigs and men together belong to theS 'I tI 'll1enl by contrast with the forest).

'K

"I

111

1i

ISSUES lN COMPLEXlTY AND SCALE 37

I 1111111"I IVIlllldI 'li me where she had accompanied my father, and1"0111111111'111""I",· ," (in Saem Majnep and Ralph Bulmer, Birds ofmy

"1,,," /11""""1 ((IlIlIlry, Aukland: Auckland University Press, 1977, p'" I1

I 11,"" M"lIhllll rc/ers to this as lhe 'department pub' of the time ('HansI', 1111111111I',k ,I harty', in Man and a Half (ibidJ). Ralph Bulmer was1111''1"1 1111 IlIulldation Professor of Anthropology at the University of

I' 'I'u" N. w (lulllca, Port Moresby.

I "~I "'"1<,' lrom Gillian Gillison, BellVeen Culture and Fantasy: a New

f '111I"'" "'l/h/tIIlll.l' Mythology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1'1'1\) I' '), lllld her cxegesis of Gimi myth as routed through Gimi ritual1''''''11' ,I""l is, practices at once articulating and in counterpoint to myth,

111li' 1I111111\Urallecture published in 1953, for example, (SocialIlIliI"'tlll/IlI1Y (It Cambridge since 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge

11'I'VI'''I'y Press, p. 38) Meyer Fortes refers to culture and socialI" f 11l11~1I1ion as two complementary frames of reference within which1lIllllIO"ology works.

"lll'IC discussion may be found in Marilyn Strathern, After Nature: English/\/II,hip in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University

1', 'ss, 1992, pp. 121-23; cf. n. 56 below.

W.II.R. Rivers opens his lectures on Kinship and Social Organisation,I.ondon: Constable, 1914, p.I, wilh the words: "The aim of lhese lectures" 10 demonstrate lhe close connection which exists between methods of

dcnoting relationship or kinship and forms of social organisation" (my·mphasis). (The connection in question is one of causal determinism.)

In the same way as, for example, lhe notion of a 'corporate group' at onceolTers a formal description and indicates unity in action (see Meyer Fortes,KiJl.l'hip and the Social Order: the Legacy of LelVis Henry Morgan,Chicago: Aldine 1969, p. 304).

Porles 1953, pp. 34-5 (see n.25).

38 THE REl..ATION:

32 - Fortes ibid. p.l5.

33 - Fortes, ibid p.40.

34 - The American, Lewis Henry Morgan, This point became the subject 01'

Fortes's later Morgan Lectures (1969, see n.30); the reference is primarilyto Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems ofConsanguinity and Affinity oftheHuman Family, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1871.

35 - I retum to the question 01' congruence in a quite different context below(see n. 95).

36 - Given that people were related to one another, by whatever mode, the

question became how they organised those relations. What followed fromthis was the productive moment Fortes was celebrating.

37 - See M. Carrithers Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropologyand Social Diversity, Oxford: Oxford U .P., 1992.

38 - Fortes 1969, p. 60, see n. 30.

39 - Maurice Godelier puts it powerfully. "Kins'hip is not just recognition 01'

father, mother ... But it is equally and just as much knowledge 01' father'sfather, ... mother's mother ... and so on. This then entails recognition 01' anetwork 01' transitive relationships which in tum presupposes the ability to

perceive relations between these relationships", from his Generation andComprehension of Human Relationships and lhe Evolulion of Society,Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 1986 (mimeo).

40 - Fortes (1969 p. 80, see n. 30) refers to the social mechanisms andprocesses by which "the elementary principies 01' kinship structure ... areput to work - and thus 'recognized' -in a society".

41 - Edmund Leach, 'The structural implications 01' matrilateral cross-cousinmarriage' [1951], reprinted in Rethinking Anthropology, London: Athlone,1961,p.89.

42 - A point developed at length in his monograph, Pul Eliya. A Village in

Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1961.

41 Adumbrated in a lecture to the Royal Anthropological Institute, publishedin the Journal ofthe RAJ 1900, vol 30 ('A genealogical method 01'

collecting social and vital statistics').

1111 I b 'lieve this is an accurate summary 01' some 01' Fortes's thinking,111r rred ror instance from his treatment 01' the distinction between

lSSUES lN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 39

,ltllIII IIi 11,,,1 "01111 'o-jural domains (see below, p. 21). Writers sometimesI", • 1'","1("11" kc 'ping lhe two terms, concrete and abstract, under control.I , ,', " 1\", ,"II1I1/IIropology: A Na/ural Science of Society, the British

• ,,,I, '"Y' RlIllcliffc-Brown Lecture for 1976, published in the Academy/"'" , , "/lI~1I vol LXII 01' the same year) makes hay 01'Radclife-Brown 's'tlllllllllh IIHY ti'" 'es.

11,I"" WI" 11 phrase that haunted my undergraduate leaming years (1960­" \, ,I WI" "'.el us distinguish between ..." In considering indigenous011I"" I""", inslilulional orconceptual (Fortes 1969 pp.110, 118 etc, see n.\111 011" WI" considering the way people made different domains, realms,

,11, 1\ "I 11i' for themselves. Not ali distinctions mobilised different scales

ti' 01 d,'" "I' cvcnls, but the capacity to make such distinctions was key, "''''li\<' fOI'when lhey did.

I" «1,,'1'.'" Ilalcson, Naven: A Survey oflhe Problems Suggesled by a( ""'/"},I;ft' I'icture of lhe Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawnfrom

11",,/, 1'0;,,1.1 of View, Stanford: Califomia UP, second ed.1958, e.g. p. 1271i"'ledition 1936].

II R,'"1,'l11'IUnC, Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology oflhe Dobu1,II/I"It'r,\' of lhe Weslern Pacific, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,,',,,"d cd. 1963, e.g. pp. 107-9 [first edition 1932].

IH S'l,,,lIcn Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Models and Melaphors

(Roullcdge & Kegan Paul, 1986) p. 141.

1'1 (:"dcman ib;d, p. 132. He then proceeds to compare the ideas 01' the PapuaNcw Guinean Dobu with those 01' the central African Bemba studied byAudrcy Richards, where hierarchical values instead lead to figures (such

,111 animal spirits) being interposed between human persons and the naturalworld.

'I' Gudcman ibid p. 141 He calls gardening a reflexive construction, in that'1, actions are modelled on other actions. (For an echo compare my AfterNlIlllre, p, 87, see n, 28,)

'I Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: CUP, 1989) p. 65;also p. 69: everyday life envisaged thus is persuasively wrought through

"a rhetoric 01' re-enactment". I take this opportunity to thank PaulConnerton for his several observations on my arguments,

And so, too, may persons may appear 'within' persons; see Gillian

Gillison, 'The f1ute myth and the law 01' equivalence: origins 01' a principie(lI' exchange', in Big Men and Greal Men: Personifieations of Power inMc/anesia (eds. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge:

40 THE RELATION:

CUP, 1991), and Roy Wagner's comments in lhe chapter preceding ('Thefractal person') which develops the concept of holography in this context.

53 - On the significance of 'body' in this sense, as a 'support' for the person,see Maurice Leenhardt's Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Me/anesianWor/d, trans. by B,M. Gulati, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979, chs 2 & 3; also

Debbora Battaglia, 'Projecting personhood in Melanesia: lhe dialectics ofartefact symbolism on Sabarl Island', Man (NS), vol. 18, pp, 289-304.

54 - For a relationaI and connective exposition of energy see Teresa Brennan,History afier Locan, London: Routledge, 1993.

55 - The paraphrase is after David Bohm; my use of holography in theelucidation of cultural materiaIs derives from Wagner, e,g. Symbo/s thatStandfor Themse/ves, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986.

56 - In the last chapter of The Order ofThings (trans. 1970, London:Routledge), Michel Foucault addresses the delimiting effects of knowledgethat knows itself as finite. We may see relations (in the sense used here) asan effect of just such a limitation that conceives of things as "contain[ing]

the principies oftheir existence within themselves" (p. 317). For a critiqueof twentieth-century examples from biology, see Evelyn Fox Keller, 'Thelanguage of reproductive autonomy' (1987, reprinted in Secrets of Life,Secrets of Death.· Essays on Longuage, Gender, and Science, New York:Routledge 1992).

57 - E.g. Fortes, 1969, pp. 23, 72, 80, see n.30.

58 - Complexity in this sense denotes systems not just heterogeneous in

composition but open-ended in extent (as in Lévi-Strauss's complexstructures of kinship). "The Darwinian world is always capable of furtherdescription" (Beer 1983, p, 55, emphasis omitted, see n.l2).

59 - Connections 'within' may be seen as another example of connections

'between'; see Bertell Ollman's discussion of 'The philosophy of internalrelations' (Alienation.· Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society,Cambridge: CUP, 1971). He quotes Leibniz: "there is no term so absolute

or so detached that it doesn't enclose relations and the perfect analysis ofwhich doesn 't lead to other things and even to everything else, so that onecould say that reiative terms mark expressly the configuration which theyconlain" (Ollman, p. 31).

60 Ollman, ibid, p. 27 on Marx's attempt to distinguish two types of relations;in lhis usage 'things' and 'relalions' correspond to what some symbolic

lInthropologists (after Wagner, see n. 55) might wish to call figurative andlileral constructions or macrocosm and microcosm.

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 41

1'11 \ ""'"1""1, H/'daiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of11"",11 "",,1111' n,eory, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1993,I' 1I'

"" 11"1 1I1l'IIltervicwed by Raymond Firth and his team in North London11,1"I h('l 1II0lhcr's father's sister's daughter's son's wife's kin (and

111"11,,I "I h 'r sister's husband) (R Firth, J Hubert and A Forge, Families

"',{ 111"" Hl'illlll'es: Kinship in a Midd/e-class Sector of London, London:I ""Iit'''V,'' &. Kcgan Paul 1969, p. 97).

,I" "'" 01 lhe material [ wrote up for Audrey Richards (Kinship at thef •• " "" Alltllmp%gy of Elmdon, a vil/age in north-west Essex in the11'''''//'11 .I'i"ie.l', Cambridge: CUP, 1981). A quite different argument is put"" WII"I hy C.c. Harris (Kinship, Milton Keynes: Open University Press,1')110), 1I11111elyIhal what might be read as ambiguity is a function of the

llll' ,h I1 'kinship' simply does not work as a domaining termo

/,1 Ih '"'' lhe OED definition of a relation as a 'connexion between persons'"/1'"1<0111 ,,(lhe natural lies of blood or marriage' [my emphasis](l )~1,,1''': OUP 1971). Cf. David Schneider, American Kinship: a Cu/lural

I" '"1111, Ilnglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968.

10 I', Roherl Foley & Phyllis Lee, 'Finite social space, evolutionaryp"lhways, and reconstructing hominid behavior', Science 243, pp. 901-06.

10', I' I SlInder van der Leeuw, 'Social and natural aspects ofdegradation',P"P"I prcpared for' Desertification in a European conlext', a summer

" hOlllllrganised by DG XII of the Commission of European('ollllllunilies, Alicante, Spain, 1993, where society is referred to as a self­'")\lIllising system of communications. I am grateful for permission to citeIIIIS "npublished paper. (For a biological anthropologist's comment on the

'l'Xlraordinary range of scales' - from hundreds of millions of years to"IIYs and months - across which accounts of human evolution may haveI" Iravcrse, see Robert Foley, 'Causes and consequences in human,'v"llIlion', IRA! [formerly Man] (NS) 30: 1-20, 1995, pp 17-18.)

" I ( icolTrcy Hawthom, P/ausib/e Wor/ds: Possibi/ity and Understanding in1I,.vtory and the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1li') I.

IIK i\rtllro Escobar ('Welcome to Cyberia': Notes on lhe Anlhropology ofCybcrcullllre', Current Anthmp%gy, 35, pp 211-31, 1994) has broughl

this home, no doubt rather late in the day, to anthropology.

(,'I The reference is to GilIes Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand P/ateaus:

('''(lita/islII and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: Minnesota University

42 THE RElATION:

Press,1987, as cited in Escobar 1994, ibid p.222, who refers to their work

as offering a most thorough review to date of the pervasive character ofself-organising processes. David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity:an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell,I989,p. 42) reproduces a 1985 tabulation of features ascribed to 'modernism'

and 'postmodernism', counterposing 'rhizome' to 'roo!'. The fluidity withwhich lhe newly illuminating distinction between rhizome and root has

flowed across cultural analysis is a phenomenon in itself. One interestingtreatement is Liisa Malkki, 'National geographic: the rooting of peoplesand the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees',Cultural Anthropology, 7,1992, pp 24-44.

70 - 'What goes without saying', in Adam Kuper (ed), ConceptualizingSociety, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 128 (emphasis removed). Bloch is

addressing connectivism in cognitive theory; the core idea, he says, is that"most knowledge. especially the knowledge involved in everyday practice,does not take a linear, logic-sequential form but rather is organized intohighly complex and integrated networks or mental models most elements

of which are connected to each other in a great variety of ways" (p. 130)

71 - From Richard Thom, 'Interactive multimedia - yet another revolution foranthropology', Anthropology in Action, I, 1994 (special issue onOrganisational Culture], p. 21.

72 - On the notion of durability as a relational effect, that is, an outcome of the

devices, props and processes which sustain the character of things, see10hn Law, Organizing Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p.l02.

73 - I take this from his discussion of Lucien Febvre's The Problem of Unbeliefin the Sixteenth Century (trans, 1982, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP); see

S. 1. Tambiah, Magic, Scicence, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality,Cambridge: CUP, 1990, p.89.

74 - 1.R. Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa, London: Oxford

University Press for the Inl. African Insl., 1971 ;The Domestication of theSavage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; Productionand Reproduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; as well

as his writings on literacy.

75 Both of the intending parents were 'genetically' related to the child but thecriterion was not sufficient in the 'mother's' case. As a result of lhe

hearing, the 'father' (already proven) was so to speak proven again as aninitiating parent like the mother.

7() Es·obar,1994,ibidp.214 .••

'"

/I,

11

HI

n'

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 43

111I I"", 1'''v.l'ir·.I· 10 Anthropology - and Back Again ,Prick.ly Pear

"'10'1'''1''1 No. 3, Cambridge, 1994, p. 48, Simon Schaffer calls for a101"" 11,I 'd rclum lo/from the spirit of fieldwork at the beginning of theI I 111111V I1 Illight inspire, in tum, "the retum of field techniques to our own11141l1Iltltm,," ,

1'10'1" I.nw, 1994, p. 3, see n. 72 ("We are ali artful arrangements of bits'101111"1'c' ... without our props we would not be people-agents, but onlyI" ,dlt·,", cmphasis removed).

I 101('110 Ihc works of Bruno Latour, 10hn Law and colleagues. Though'''10'"11\ lrum a very different position, in British anthropology Tim Ingold10" 11Il"kIcJidcas about sociality beyond the human agent in quite originalWllV'"

1"t' "llIase human and unhuman comes from Donna Haraway (see, for""1 IIIl'C,hcr eollected essays, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The11,'/II"I'''lion of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 1991) whose

I11li'"',I in and critique of actor-network theory and the sociology of" 11'111'. draws on a field of feminist scholarship that remains mindful of~'l( "ti r 'llItiol1s.

As 'li !lis scrmol1 on The Uniqueness ofTruth (1992) before the

11,"v 'rsily; see both Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality,,,"1 /(olionalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, and Postmodernism, Reason

'''',/ /(l'!i/lioll, London: Routledge, also 1992.

('olllcxl rcmains one of anthropology's essential heuristic devices, but,W"CII il is the focus of explicit cultural attention (as dramatically evil1ced111I"c universal exhibition in Seville, Expo 92 (Penny Harvey, 'CultureIIml col1text: the effects of visibility' in R. Dilley ed. Context and"II,'rprelalion, Oxford: Oxford U.P., forthcoming]), it becomes1111'reslingly problematic. (See also chapter 8 in Marilyn Strathem ed.,\'/I'(lill/l COlltexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge,I olldon: Routledge, in press.)

Ilowcver, I would say that trying to create a programme out of relativist

lIl\ighlS can beco me the absurdity where Gellner instead finds absurdity in',clalivism' for - among other things - not having any programme(I'o.v/lllodernism, Reason and Religion, p. 70, see n. 81). For a comment011objectivist views of relativism that imagine relativists as trying toti 'seribe the objectivists' world with their principies taken out, see BarbaraII 'ITl1stein-Smith, Conlingencies of Value: Allernative Perspectives forCritical Theory, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1988, ch 7.

44 THE RELATlON:

84 - 1quote from the University of Cambridge's Strategic Plan, 1993-4 to1997-8.

85 - From the address of the Viee-Chancellor, Professor Sir David Williams, to

Regent House (The Reporter, 13 October 1993, p. 47, original emphasis).(The audit in question was undertaken by the Aeademic Audit Unit of the

former Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principais, now the QualityAudit Division of the Higher Education Quality Council.) "One of theironies of the present situation is that we have to present the work andsuccesses of the University to the outside world in terms which

satisfactorily explain how we meet the value system underlying th!: presentmanageriaJ philosophy and linguistic shibboleths, yet wilhout underminingor denying the highly productive way in which the University is actuallyorganized"; he adds that aJthough the Higher Education Funding Councilhas been at pains to stress that it is not a planning council, "we are

increasingly called upon to codify and publish our planning strategies"(pp.47-8).

86 - Apropos what he calls incorporating (as opposed to inscribing) practices,Connerton (1989, p. 101, see n. 51) points out that their baekgrounded, andthus implicit, effect is a defining feature of the practices themselves, which"cannot be well accomplished without a diminution of the consciousattention that it paid to them".

87 - Stephen Hill, 'The new globalism: implications for ASEAN technologicalpolicies', address to ASEAN-Republic of Korea Workshop on 'Korean­ASEAN S & T Cooperation and Establishment of S & T Policy in theASEAN Nations", Seoul, 1994, p. 7; my thanks for permission to cite this.

88 - Hill, ibid, p. 7. An example of such an operation on a commerciaJ scale isa group based in Sydney with a staff of 200, tumover A $43m, divided

into 24 companies lhat work together as a c1uster. Hill's point about theimportance of personal relations, including people's subjective styles, isexpanded in 'Cultures in collison: the emergence of a new localism inacademic research', in Strathem ed., in press, see n. 82.

89 - Hill, ibid, p. 9, original emphasis. On the significance of the difference

between proprietary knowledge, codified and public, and tacit knowledge"implicit in the professional and institutional culture of a firm" see

Michael Gibbons el ai, The Mw Producton of Knowledge: the Dynamicsof Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage , 1994,

p. 25. The authors suggest that the "prevalence of tacit over proprietaryknowledge brings the culture of technologically advcanced firms much

closer to academic cultures than is usually assumed" (p. 26). Among theaUlhors, I-Ielga Nowotny has a dual interest in knowledge systems and inlhe phenomenon of self-organisation.

TSSUES TN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 45

I 111. 11 '" ~ '" 'Y wcll be related to keeping the interactions informal. A,." ., 'li"" w,lh Slephen Hill was very illuminating in this context.

, ,li, 'I'"'' '" Iliological Anthropology draw my attention to Robin1'11,,1, li Plll 'r, 'Co-evolution of neo-cortex size, group size and language'" I",,,,,,,, '. /ld/llvioral anil Brain Sciences preprint, 1992.

I h, 11 I, ph"t1 ' network here works as a substitute for and enhancer of"" ,,, 111,,:l:onlact, by contrast with the Amish view lhat only face toI ", " 111111'I l:lln be constitutive of community - their leaders have1'lI11'nllllllllc lelephones since 1909 (Diane Zimmerman Umble, 'The

'li' h IIml lhe lelephone: resistance and reconstmction', In ConsumingI" ',,,,,1"1111'.1': Media and biformation in Domestic Spaces, edited by11"1" , Silvcrstone and Erie Hirsch, London: Routledge, 1992).

1111i1ll' ,pced of aequisition in lhe context of capital's eonstant need to"11" 11'" prol"it (the self enhancement of capital), 1 note 8rennan, 1993, ch.I "" li ~4. I-Iarvey (1989, p. 291, see n. 69) complains that Baudrillard

'tllI N,dedly exaggerates the effects of speed and technological fixes in his111'111\""I" II society in a erisis of explanatory logic (the triumph of effect"V,'' l"IIlIse), and points to countervailing tendencies towards greater'li 11111. But il"people react to perceptions of flux and speed by trying to, t1hlltlee conservatism, as - Harvey's example - by insuring to an everI''''"ler exlent against the future, Baudrillard's point about effect is made. 1

hllVt' IIrgued elsewhere, in connection with late twentieth-century Euro-lllel 'C:1I1 ideas about the family, that sometimes there seems more of both

'"11lilion' and 'change' around.

'li I,klllg us back to older understandings of 'organisation' as a regulatatoryllllThllnism that can be codified in mies, protocols or procedures. Of\ "lorse 'old' and 'new' forms co-exist side by side (Susan Wright, ed. TheIIl/1ltropology ofOrganizations, London: Routledge, 1994, p.2Ill1lroductionJ). The contrast she draws between a 'strengthened Fordism',",d li .nexible' company culture echoes that of the two modes ofkllowlcdge organisation in commercial enterprises identified in The New"mducl;on of Knowledge, see n. 89. Mission statements, alas, would seem10 belong to both.

'/ I 11m thinking particularly of quality control mechanisms in higher'ducation and the kinds of representations of 'quality output' they require.

They often presume the demonstrability of a direct, iconic relationship orl:Ongruence between quality and what can be 'seen' as output. Yet think oflhe rcverse case: interpreting evidence often presumes an indirect

rclationship between the visible data and what produced it. The DisneyProfessor of Archaeology's inauguralleeture was on just this topic (ColinRenl"rew, Towards an Archaeology of Mind, Cambridge: CUP, 1982). For

46 THE REUTlON:

an anthropological example of misplaced congruence, see n. 9. In anycase, the iconic 'matching' of performance and productivity is bypassed inthose management practices that recognise the obliqueness of creativity. Iwas struck by the description one senior manager gave me of the prevalentethos which influenced his own office organisalion: small working groups[and see n. 88], with people on f1exi-time, egaJilarian in manner, followinglargely uncodified convenlions and cullivating interpersonal relations in

non-specific ways that need have no direct bearing on the job in hand.This could have described a small academic department of a couple ofdecades ago! The (re)discovery of the efficiency of the whole, relalional

person goes against lhe de-skilling and de-professionalising tendencies inthose qualily control mechanisms that work by isolating separatelymeasurable components of productivity. For one, well established,

rendering of 'networkers [my term) versus bureaucrats [term used by lhenelworkers]', see Jeanette Edwards' account of Housing Aid workers inAnthropology ofOrganisations, p. 199 (see n. 94)

96 - Exposing and unmasking the power relations embedded in Iraditionalstructures is one of feminism's projecls (but also see Henrietta Moore's

critique in Feminism and Anthropology, Oxford: Polity Press, 1988).

97 - 'A thunderclap gone mad' was how Ongka, a former big man oftheKawelka people in lhe Mt Hagen area, Papua New Guinea, describedsome people's first hearing an overhead plane (see Ongka: A Self-Accountbya New Guinea Big Man, edited by Andrew Strathem, Duckworth,1979).

98 - I am very grateful to Professor Michael Kauffmann, Director of lheCourtauld Institute of Art, for this informalion.

99 - Quoted by Kathleen Biddick, 'Stranded hislories: feminist allegories ofartificial life', Research in Philosophy & Technology, 13: 165-82. Thanks

to Sarah Franldin for drawing this to my att""tion.

100 - I needed Ihis idea in order to comprehend various Melanesian practices(see The Gender of the Gift; Problems with Women and Problems with

Society in Melanesia, Los Angeles & Berkeley: Califomia UniversityPress, 1988). The insistence on matching, on congruence betweenperformance and OUlput, on being able to 'see' quality [see n. 95],emphasises immediate effect in ways that may truncate people's

orientations towards the fulure. Imagine an education system whichencouraged teachers and researchers 10 emphasise Iheir own performanceaI lhe expense of what can be handed on to others. For the problem islhat, in real life, the former does not necessarily match (reflecl, express,give evidence for) lhe latter. While there are, for instance, contexts inwhich it is crucial that students replicate information in lhe mode in

ISSUES IN COMPLEXITY AND SCALE 47

1'10 li 11I II'll'lvcd, the reproducibility of knowledge requires lhe sludentI" "'"'' IlIlor ,"alion in ways Ihat work, concretely, for his or her times",.1 , 11,11I1"tIlII(CS.What is beslleamt may not necessarily 'look Iike'

'''11 I 111·,1 IIIIIglil.

"'1 1/,,,, \,,1 "I, Scplernber 1994.

111 I "1"' ('IIllurc, identity and the projecl of cosmopolitan anthropology',li"" VIII "I, pp. 537-54.

1111 ,. 111,11I) ,vld 'Socialily and immediacy: or, pasl and present conversations"11 ,,,,,"t-', MI/II Vol. 29, pp. 583-603.

1111 II IIIIlIlIgIII' 'Relaining reality:some practical problems with objecls as1""I",ly', Mil" Vol. 29,1'1'.631-644. Jokes were constantly told against11" 1I1l1',",clllbers of lhe lowest of the Trobriand ranked sub-clans (IheyI "1' 'V,'d li rcputalion for powerful sorcery). The sponsor of this particularV'"'' I '''"P 'lition was a Bau man; the size of the harvest yield was to be"II'l""l'd llnd prizes awarded. Bau were claiming typical Trobriand

'" llllv'ly (productivity), bul they could not in the end instantiate it. TheyIV, li' 1I0t in lhe right relationship with members of olher Trobriand subo,lllII~ "lIau patlerns of conduct, combined with their reputation for

'" 11'1 y, cancelled in advance any cultural aetivily of Bau as a model only"I VI,IIIC... IT)he threal of the opposite of generalive collective action wasIlIWllY' invisibly foregrounded by the Bau presence on [any) sceneli p"'scllling ... generativily" (I' 3) .

111 I 'li' Ilirsch, formeI' pupil of Alfred Gell at the London School ofh Illl0lllics, 'Between mission and market: evenls and images in aMl'llIlIcsian society', Man Vol. 29, pp. 689-691.