marylin strathern anthropological reasoning

2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 2337

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.003

SPECIAL SECTION

Anthropological reasoningSome threads of thought

Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

The interventionist properties of description are considered in relation to two strands of thinking, each as evidently outside anthropology as inside. In terms of concept formation, the natureculture dyad seems forever to be subject to critique, reformulation, and re-critique; examples from current debate over clinical practices in South America make the point. In terms of engagement with human subjects, anthropology has been as much heir to regimes of audit and self-scrutiny as it has shown their limits; the reflexivity now routine in ethnographic inquiry is shown up in approaches to present-day health policies for Aboriginal people in Australia. Both arenas (natureculture/self-scrutiny) have contributed at once to anthropologys self-formation and to the kind of knowledge it makes more widely visible. Both were also topics of huge interest to the European Enlightenment. A suggestion is proffered about the outlines of a newly apparent object of knowledge then, which could have been something of a driver, and seems to have been a driver of anthropological reasoning ever since.

Keywords: health interventions, relations, natureculture, self-scrutiny, the Enlightenment

PrologueGiven the ambition of this collection to think about anthropologys world, its con-ditions of possibility, and the clues to that contained in what counts as interventions in it, we may wonder about the disciplines relational practices. What, for instance, might be learned from colleagues? Anthropologists descriptions of professionals whose very job it is to make interventions in peoples lives reflect back on their an-thropology in interesting ways. Indeed, an ethnographer who worked with a com-munity of health professionals in Australias Northern Territory puts into words something akin to the position I wish to take here. Where knowing interventions

Como se traduz? Razes, racionalidade?

As propriedades intervencionistas da descrio so consideradas em relao a duas linhas de pensamento, cada uma como antropologia "de fora" como "de dentro". Nos termos do conceito de formao, a dade natureza-cultura parece sempre ser tema de crtica, reformulao, e re-critica. Exemplos oriundos do debate corrente sobre prticas mdicas na Amrica do Sul, marcam o ponto;em termos de engajamento com indivduos humanos, tem sido tanto herdeira de regimes de reviso e auto-escrutnio quanto mostrado seus limites; a reflexividade agora rotina na investigao etnogrfica mostrada nessas abordagens das polticas atuais de sade para povos Aborgenes da Austrlia. Ambas arenas (natureza-cultura e auto-escrutnio) tem contribudo de uma s vez para a auto-formao da antropologia e o tipo de conhecimento que a faz mais amplamente conhecida. Ambos tambm so tpicos de grande interesse ao iluminismo europeu. Uma sugesto oferecida sobre os contornos de um objeto recm aparente de conhecimento, ento, o que poderia ter sido algo de condutor, e parece ter sido o motor de raciocnio antropolgico desde


Marilyn Strathern 24

in the world of affairs rest on describing what is happening, then description itself is an intervention.1

Medicine has always been an arena in which interventions are deliberate, aimed to be effective and to have benign outcomes. Given the endemic ill health of the lo-cal Aboriginal population, Territory Health Services address an ever-deteriorating situation with ever more effort at intervening. They apply a huge organizational apparatus, the need to coordinate services proliferating in schemes for collabo-ration, cooperation, networking, team-building, [and] information sharing (Lea 2008: 63). Yet the more the administration tries, the more apparatus is needed: the greater coordination to which the administration aspires, the greater fragmenta-tion it sees.2 This underwrites a bureaucratic project. People wanting to deliver care do their best by the systems of organization that also organize them: intervention through organizational means implies making the organization work.3

One means is through self-description. The organization keeps detailed track of itself, and we should not be surprised to find auditing procedures addressed not only to the outcomes for the health of the population but also to the officials orga-nizational effectiveness as service-providers. Implementation plans are rolled out with performance indicators, and targets are given numerical thresholds, alongside annual reports, data summaries, program reviews, workshop recommendations, and so on. An inordinate amount of time, many complain, is taken up with pa-perwork: that is, with describing what is happening. Yet describing bureaucratic performance itself is seen as a precondition to changing things.4 At the end of every day of their exhausting induction in the field, new recruits are presented with evaluation sheets (Lea 2008: 87). Regardless of any external monitoring, and al-ways working to improve the program, the organizers themselves beg for feedback

1. The status of the activity of description is key here, and would be central to any com-parison with (say) Holbraads (2008, 2009) work on the inventive definitions or infini-tions that characterize Cuban diviners pronouncements; these are imagined not as claims about the world but as ontological interferences in it.

2. Lea describes how coordination takes on a social life of its own, producing organiza-tional complexes that succeed in the unintended consequence of pinpointing the need for more effective coordination (2008: 63). I do not do justice here to Leas sympathetic rendering of bureaucratic lives (see further Strathern 2014a).

3. All the workshops, fact-finding missions, and health instruction programs which the health officers try to bring to the local population rest on the conviction that better quality and more accurate information will eventually become better self-understand-ing for the Aborigines (Lea 2008: 121). By the same token, the better the data are col-lected and analyzed, the nearer the bureaucrats will be to implementing the helping state. Welfare bureaucracies attempt to change the world by orienting the bureau-cratic inhabitant so that she or he conceptualizes the world in terms of reform and intervention (ibid.: 225). Is this in part the academization of bureaucracy?

4. In which the reviewers and reviewed concur. Added to anxiety about the health work-ers own efforts to improve things for the local population was a quite different set of anxieties about the ethics of intervention: in this particular context, health workers expressed anxiety about causing collateral damage to indigenous culture.

DanielliNotaTer resultados benignos


25 Anthropological reasoning

from those they have been inducting on the way they have carried out their job (of induction).

This is the world in which the anthropologist also lives. Lea minces no words about the liberal rationalism that brings bureaucrats and anthropologists into proximity; rather than simply chiding bureaucratized perceptions for their limi-tations, anthropologists might also want to comprehend the cultural habits we share with their formulators (ibid.: 234). What is interesting in Leas rehearsal of this stance, which has been the subject of much debate in the discipline at large (trying to make sense of people whose job it is to produce sense, as she puts it [ibid.]), is her emphasis on the task of description. We anthropologists are en-snared by the same belief in the power of representation to bring the misconcep-tions of others to correcting light (ibid.). Her monograph concludes that, for all the problems there are,

it can be liberating to gain some sense of the lived-in, externally driven and consensual limits on our own agency. Or at least that is my hope, a hope which is the ultimate honouring of bureaucratic magic and the faith it sustains in the power of description to amend conceptualizations of how the world really is, and with that improved perception to somehow yield a better outcome. (Lea 2008: 237)

To begin with this thoroughly conflicted situation dispenses with the thought that interventions are conflict-free. Yet I have to share the hope that Lea expresses. For someone whose tools of work include making descriptions, it is close to the hope that anthropologists responding to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have powerfully expressed as a matter of retooling (Riles, Miyazaki, and Genda 2012). You dont abandon your tools: you go back to the tools you already have and reconstruct them according to the current situation. But in the case of those anthropologists dealing with the aftermath of the natural disasters in Japan, you do it with the professionals.5 In a commentary on the Australian material, and with Graebers (this volume) contribution in mind, Salmond (pers. comm.)6 poses a similar relational question, this time with respect to anthropologists/bureaucrats and the subjects of their inquiries. There are other ways of interacting, other forms of attentiveness, that might make of the latter something more than a means for im-proving the internal processes of the former. Of course. Nonetheless, just how rela-tions themselves come into focus as an object of knowledge is of moment in itself.

5. The authors disciplines cover anthropology, law, and labor economics. I am very grate-ful to them for permission to cite this work, intended for Japanese professionalsfrom one set of professionals to anotheras yet unpublished in English. Retooling is not to be taken lightly, and in evoking a collaborative endpoint Riles (2013) lays out some of the interpersonal and epistemic complexities of this instance.

6. She trenchantly turns the critique of bureaucrats concerns with their own self-elab-oration back on anthropology itself, a stance with which Lea would sympathize. I am grateful for permission to cite her thoughtful and illuminating comments, which come from a review for Hau that she de-anonymized. Let me add here that I am at the same time grateful to the several anonymous reviewers of the draft, some of whose words I have also borrowed.



Inside and outside the disciplineIn the invitation to pursue threads of thought across material that lies as much out-side anthropology as within it, what strength might a thread have? Rather than as a road to go down or rope to hang onto, and without the regular patterning of warp and weft, I take a thread to be something that can be caught, both caught hold of and getting itself caught onto what is in its vicinity. Although going somewhere be-cause it is coming from somewhere, a thread gains what striated substance it has in becoming entangled with other threads just as (at the moment when) the entangle-ments (knots) seem to make further tracing impossible. Any particular thread of thought might appear as a singular twist, might seemingly take the form of a gene-alogy or archaeology, but in truth it was never unknotted from innumerable others.

Inside and outside are altogether more ambiguous, for there is nothing un-usual about anthropology as a knowledge system to observe of it that anything it touches becomes anthropology.7 We have to be wary, though, of assuming that we already know the anthropology we are within: postulating an outside is to postulate another perspective. I catch the threads of two apparently distinct, certainly ongo-ing, discussions to elucidate the point, and which will compose my subject matter. First, in terms of concept formation, the natureculture or naturesociety dyad seems forever subject to fresh criticism and reformulation, and forever to regain its influence. Secondly, in terms of engagement with human subjects, anthropology has been as much heir to regimes of audit and self-scrutiny as it has shown their limits. Both arenas have contributed to anthropologys self-formation and to the kinds of knowledge it makes more widely visible. Both were also topics of huge interest to the English/Scottish versions of the European Enlightenment.8 This leap is a little more artful than clutching at a straw (hardly a thread at all): I am drawn (by stronger threads) in that direction by what I already know, to places in which I have already been entangled. Seemingly separate threads may indeed at one stage have been knotted together.

Thinkers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment cultivated the secular hu-manism from which a self-acknowledged economics was to emerge, a precondition to the divergences that Gregory (this volume) identifies. Its [the periods] interest to the present argument is for what it suggests about certain preconditions within anthropological reasoning that have made the two arenas (self-scrutiny, nature-society) so enduringly salient. Familiar to anthropological debates, they are equally familiar to the humanities and social sciences, and beyond academia altogether. To keep discussion brief, I refer to some ethnographic situations where ideas springing from these arenas seem to have been the carriers of interventions, by

7. I am thinking of Luhmanns (1990) system, whose environment is already system-atized; reflections on the insides and outsides of knowledge as such would need to take into account Corsn Jimnezs (2013) recent excursus.

8. English to reflect the language; Scottish to reflect its seats of learning. I am not here defending the idea of the Enlightenment, any more than I intend an informed/old-fashioned periodization by the references to different centurieseach should be taken as deploying the same deliberate clumsiness as Euro-American; the clumsiness signals ffd(d), for further definition (should definition be desirable).



anthropologists and by others. One such situation has already appeared. The re-flexivity that has become routine in both anthropological and ethnographic enqui-ry in some senses mirrors the self-conscious auditing of present-day health policies for Aboriginal people in Australia. As for nature and society, to keep a parity of sorts examples will come from current discussions of clinical practices in South America, although they will be treated at somewhat greater length.

A short thread: Self-scrutiny Description seems such a mundane activity for the text-based scholar that it is inter-esting to come across it as a focus of attention in other fields. Corsn Jimnezs (2013) account of the strabismic double vision of anthropological knowledge making con-tains an extended discussion of Alpers work on realism in seventeenth- century Dutch painting. The art historian called her book The art of describing (1983).9 We quickly learn it was description in a special sensethe technique of making the observer disappear by dislocating the eye from a single viewpoint. The mobile eye [of Dutch composition] cuts the world two ways: it multiplies with one eye what it divides with the other, and in doing so opens up a space for a third form of vision: a seeing double that is more than one and less than many (Corsn Jimnez 2013: 54). Among several scopic regimes of modernity (after Jay 1988), it is oneand Corsn Jimnez draws attention to the connectionthat might have been shared with mi-croscopists and optical experimenters of the time. The world seen microscopically both multiplies the innumerable small elements within a larger body and in en-largement divides a small part from the whole (my paraphrasing of Alpers). Painter and microscopist alike treated the eye as taking in the world. A split eye signals the birth of ... an aesthetic which consisted in making something visible, in being a pure apparition that made appearance appear, from a position just on its edges ... (Buci-Glucksmann [1984] 1994: 60) (Corsn Jimnez 2013: 5556, my emphasis).

This is not the place to start undoing the many knots these writers have so skillfully tied. But conceivably we have here some of the conditions of possibil-ity for what was to be reconceived as a splitting of the self.10 In his discussion of the Enlightenment formulation of the self as a rational entity through being di-vided into two, a management theorist, Keith Hoskin (1996: 270), picks up another thread. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume proposed that the self becomes ethical by considering how ones actions are viewed by an impartial spec-tator (ibid.: 271). Let me give Hoskins argument in full, the line he draws running through Hume from Thomas Hobbes, a century before, to Humes contemporary, Adam Smith.

9. Which is what perspective entails. The interest of Alpers work for Corsn Jimnez (e.g. as he quotes her at 2013: 53) is that, by contrast with the Italian solution, Dutch com-position presumed an aggregate of views made possible by a mobile eye, so an optical capacity was added to a perspectival one.

10. I say reconceived, since Hoskin (1995and Hoskin is discussed by Corsn Jimnez on this point [2013: 5758]) argues for earlier, preperspectival, models of a split self (through double-entry bookkeeping).



Where Hobbes had looked out, through his perspectival window, onto the foolish and selfish selves in the thought-world beyond, Hume had attempted to construct a sort of reverse viewing, from the thought-world beyond, back on to the self who views. Humes formulation of the impartial spectator paints a picture wherein I become ethical by looking through my window on the world and seeing there some moral Other, the impartial spectator, whose surveillance of me ensures that I develop moral sentiments. On this reading, what Smith achieves is a step beyond this, by discovering on the far side of the window a mirror self, the self that examines, which stands in for and replaces the Other as judge of self. (Hoskin 1996: 271)

Hoskin articulated a historical trajectory that set the conditions of possibility for new forms of description. This was the description of performance to which mea-surements could be given, applicable to university examinations and financial audit-ing alike. The ethical double self was the self-examining self.11 Other (nonpictorial) conventions of description were to develop, and at various times anthropologists have rehearsed all three positions (Hobbes, Hume, Smith), whether following no-tions of the privileged observer, of the relativity of the familiar and unfamiliar, or of discovering the self in the other. Where philosophers were concerned with ethical formation, for anthropologists these positions point to diverse concerns with the accuracy or appropriateness of the social knowledge so gainedsocial insofar as such knowledge rests on the kinds of relations the writer has with his or her subjects of study and fellow academics. The gap between the Australian ethnographer and the Northern Territory health bureaucrats, as Lea describes it, is also their proxim-ity: the relation lay in the nature of their descriptive endeavors. To see this rapport is itself something of a descriptive intervention on the anthropologists part.

Longer threads: Nature and society Suppose you are in a place where it is far from clear what the ontological status of peoples descriptions of themselves might be. Suppose, for example, that people think it is possible to change ones race or body, as we know is true in parts of South America. Euro-Americans would not be surprised if the anthropological description of those particular descriptions become entangled in the language of nature and society, or nature and culture. In the interventions I am thinking of, such a language pulls at two kinds of threads. On the one hand, ideas about a natural world and its progressive modernization appear to underlie the efforts of some of the health practitioners who treat these people; on the other hand, the anthropologist finds disciplinary theorizing on the topic a crucial analytical tool.

Take the bodily change implied by the process of becoming white. Becoming white is becoming criollo or creole, to take as reference points Venezuelan whites in Amazonia (Kelly 2011) or Ecuadorian whites in the Andes (Roberts 2012, 2013). In

11. Hoskin (1995: 156), who also draws on Alpers, says that by his introducing the Self into the epistemological space where only the Other has been before ... I see Smith as doing for epistemological space what the art of describing had done for pictorial space.



various ways these whites would describe themselves as moderns. All those activi-ties requiring organizational effort that characterize bureaucracies are equally proj-ects of a global modernity. In the Venezuelan Amazon, they are found in the travails of young doctors on field assignments, undergoing training in a state- provided health service. (Kelly [2011: 13] refers to the doctors ideologies as Western or Euro-American.) In the Ecuadorian Andes, however, the modernization associ-ated with technological interventions sits a bit differently, as we shall see; here the ethnographic context is that of private fertility clinics. The anthropologists describ-ing these moderns either link their efforts to ideas about nature and society, or make a contrast with those who hold such ideas. For both ethnographic situations, the kind of medical care being offered is taken by the recipients or clients as signs of their own increasing ability to enact whiteness. Through receiving this care, they become white people. This in turn looks like a case of indigenous redescription.

In their civilizing mission, Venezuelan doctorscriollosworking among Yanomami Indians make bodies, in the sense of changing what they would see as indigenous lifestyles, and make society thereby. [One] component of the civiliz-ing project is about making society . . . because for criollos, society was missing and needed to be made (Kelly 2011: 97). Again, doctors see Yanomami as part of nature: [above all] disorganized and the more disorganized Yanomami appear, the more doctors strive to organize (ibid.: 137, sentences transposed). It is the criollo naturesociety axis that leads Kelly to distinguish what Yanomami and crio-llo each take for granted, that is, between what is assumed as a given and what is regarded as subject to human intervention. In this respect, criollos participate in the general Euro-American understanding of society as a developmental project in relation to nature. Social conventions that are innate for Yanomami are fabricated for the criollo. However, Kelly (ibid.: 98, 2223) is at pains to point out the knots here; neither the understandings nor the misunderstandings each has of the other match up.12 Neither should we jump to any easy conclusion about what is involved in Yanomami redescribing themselves.

Now the kind of care that Yanomami would like to elicit from the doctorsa wish that is often frustrated because staff are stationed for such brief periodsis the care of kinship. In the comment about what criollos thought was missing, I missed out a phrase: the full phrasing reads: [One] component of the [doctors] civilizing project is about making society, not kin (ibid.: 97, my emphasis), for making kin is a Yanomami aspiration. Like race (whiteness), kinship is to be made. In the case of criollos, outsiders must at least be domesticated into the status of potential in-laws (affines) who will mediate between Yanomami and the outside world (bringing its knowledge and goods, not restricted to medical care). So as much as criollos would change them, Yanomami are trying to change criollosnot to go all the way and make them Yanomami, but to turn them into potential in-laws (there is no intermarriage; the potentiality remains), thus keeping up the flow of the distinctive services, knowledge, and goods that only criollos can bring. At this point in the argument, the descriptive intervention of the anthropologist becomes apparent. In Kellys view, if there were an indigenous analogue of nature it would

12. Yanomami are not becoming the criollos we conceive of, nor are the Indians the state wants to reinstate the ones Yanomami take themselves to be (ibid.: 194).

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be affinity. He writes, doctors and Yanomami enter each others worlds as forms of the innate, innate being subsequently glossed, potential affinity and nature, respectively (ibid: 137, 225). The expository consequences of this intervention, the analogy, are evident. We come to understand that affinity is an innate condition of the world, a world of social convention, which Yanomami take for granted.13

It is the quality of affinal relations that makes sense of the apparent continuum in becoming white. Yanomami describe one another in terms of those who are more and those who are less white; crucially, however, any specific point along this continuum juxtaposes positions that are radically other to each other. Otherness is not diminished by the continuum; rather, people assume positions that are now white, now Yanomami.14 This is not seen by the medical staff, who would them-selves understand becoming criollo as an evolutionary or developmental process. In this sense, the becoming/being white that might have a transcendent value for criollo medical staff (the inevitability of the modernization that they at once rep-resent and that goes beyond their efforts to assist it) holds a very different place in Yanomami thinking. What for Yanomami is prior to and beyond human agency is the social condition of alterity: there will and must always be others. Yanomami are not so much redescribing themselves as distributing themselves at different mo-ments in time and place between already-existing descriptions.

Roberts account shifts the axis of analysis. She sustains a running contrast with attitudes derived from the European Enlightenment, such as those found in twenti-eth- and twenty-first century Euro-American accounts of assisted conception (e.g. Roberts 2012: 945, 114). Among them is the kind of agency entailed in a once firmly held naturesociety (she talks of natureculture) paradigm whose starting point was that nature, to which the body belongs, is a more or less immutable given. Now whereas the effect of Kellys recourse to this topic (naturesociety) is to illuminate the way ideas held by the Venezuelan doctors are entwined with those of anthropological discourse, Roberts separates out the threads. What might be true for anthropological accounts of assisted conception in North America (say) is not a truth that holds across all of the Ecuadorian clinics.

Roberts argues that many (and, conversely, not all) Ecuadorian clinicians share with their clientele approaches likely to have their roots in religious categories based on prebiological determinations15 of lineage, which were precursors to the present-day concept of race (ibid.: 117). The continuing assumption is that in Ecuador, people can change their race (ibid.: 114). Here is another descriptive intervention

13. Against (from) which background consanguines have to be purposively carved out (ibid.: 95, quoting Viveiros de Castro 2001: 26).

14. In becoming nap [Yanomami term for criollo] or civilazado, then, Yanomami are not becoming or seeking to become mestizo or to be assimilated with whites; on the contrary, the relation between Yanomami and nap must remain, for in the nap trans-formational context, people must be able to alternate from one meaningful position to another (ibid.: 221, also 137). Nap are non-Yanomami whites, that is, whites in rela-tion to Yanomami.

15. To this day [race] is enacted through profession, language, and level of education (ibid.: 9). Children of the same family can be of different race (ibid.: 121).



on the anthropologists part.16 Its consequence is the weight to be put on the mul-tiplicity and plasticity of the ontological world (ibid.). The phrasing (people can change their race) is intended to describe neither logical confusion nor social construction but the ever-present possibility of ontological transformation. These people are participating in Ecuadors nation making through what Roberts calls a national whitening project, the continuation of earlier whitening interventions (2013: 568). Especially in the case of the poor or clients of Indian background, simply to be the object of such attention is transformative. Under the care of whites (as doctors and clinical staff categorically are), the client becomes white. Through IVF, Roberts says (2012: 75), women can become whiter reproducers ... [that is,] through being cared for the way whiter women are cared for.17 This is based on a grounding assumption about the malleability of bodies, and produces redescrip-tions very different from those the ethnographer can accomplish.

There is something to be said about the kinds of social relations at issue too. The epithet assisted before assisted reproduction takes on unexpected resonances. In this Catholic country, whose church frowns on fertility procedures, God is ev-erywhere, and an immediate not distant presence. Gods giving of life is constantly brought home. But rather than it halting their activities, this presence is harnessed by the clinics. The scientific techniques that assist the procedure are also the means through which clinical personnel assist God: in deliberately evoking common Euro-American notions, Roberts observes that they do not perceive themselves to be playing God but rather as being Gods helpers. Hierarchically speaking, patients are in turn assisted. The focus of assistance for many patients is less about the modification of the materials of fertility (IVF, egg or sperm donation, embryo freezing) than about the patronage bestowed upon them. There is regional varia-tion, but, generally speaking, private medical clinics are similar to haciendas18 in that the relations are paternalistic (not consumer oriented) (ibid.: 57). Patronage is acted out in the clinic through all the social activity that is entailed in attending to the patients health and comfort. This relationship of dependence is actively sought by many Ecuadorian women with fertility problems: Assistance, not autonomy, is the very basis of existence (ibid.: 212). The clinic demonstrates that the patient is worthy of care and of the patrons notice.

16. Roberts quotes several ethnographers who have said the same. In neither this nor the Amazonian case am I suggesting that the intervention is authorially novel; rather, the point is that these descriptions are examples of anthropological interventions, and bril-liantly so.

17. In a chapter on Assisted whiteness, Roberts observes that when IVF patients with limited material resources go about financing and gathering assistance for their re-productive projects, they become whiter. Both reproductive dysfunction [i.e., having the ailment itself] and attempts to alleviate that dysfunction are physiological and eco-nomic markers of whiteness (ibid.: 76).

18. Landed estates allotted to Creoles, which for a long time controlled the labor of Indians; said to have been more widespread in Ecuador than in any other Andean nation, they implemented labor policies to justify hierarchical structures, including programs for whitening the national racial stock through mestizaje (mixture) (ibid.: 59).



Is this the kind of pre-Enlightenment modernity that some Europeans of that mo-ment would have recognized? Roberts (ibid.: 11618) gives her own history of various Creole concepts that eventually became the basis of race, and it is a complex one. However, a significant axis, which she clearly sees as a departure from Enlightenment ideas (and she refers to them as such), concerns the character of Gods intervention in everyday life, as in enabling people to have children, and thus concerns understand-ings of nature. A noninterventionist God is another proposition altogether. Roberts quotes Hume to the effect that a miracle would be a violation of the laws of nature. Catching that thread, I elongate it. Rather than marking a section break here, this turn to the (English-speaking19) eighteenth century simply makes this section longer.

The same Enlightenment philosopher who was caught up in ideas about self-scrutiny was of his time in also being committed to elucidating human nature. Hume argued against the political theorist Hobbes on this score too: natural lean-ings are not to be reviled but to be cultivated.20 We may note that one means of culti-vation in the (social) world at large was the cultivation of connections. Connections referred to persons also known as kin, familial or otherwise, or more generally ones associates. Arguably such connecting first stood alongside and then displaced ear-lier perceptions of patronage; the new sense of connection could well have brought a new sense of choice in laying claim to those one knew. The very concept itself was different. Patronageas between Ecuadorian clinical staff and clientsdescribed the quality of a specific tie between persons known to one another; connection, by contrast, was a generic term (Tadmor 2001: 13132) of unspecified possibility, out of which one chose to emphasize this or that associate or refuse others. For the propertied and aspiring middle classes of the English-speaking eighteenth century, one could almost say that acquiring good connections was like becoming white.

Nonetheless, there was a crucial difference: Enlightenment notions of refine-ment and cultivation were constantly tethered back to a view that one should not move too far from nature (ones own nature or the workings of nature in general). A relation existed here,21 quite as much as the relation between the two selves, in that cultivation (society) and nature also entailed each other. In this context, Humes project of putting human understanding itself (understanding understanding) on a scientific basis was to align description more accurately with what was now being understood, redescribed, by many writers as an autonomous natural world. Further, and specifically, the eighteenth-century idea of desirable connections mo-bilized the concept of affinity through connotations of similarity. Similarity held in a double sense, both in terms of one of the dominant usages of connection to refer to alliances between families through marriage, and in terms of the like-ness found among same-status kin or associates. By contrast, patron and client

19. And specifically to the kind of language community of readers, letter writers, and di-arists that Tadmor (2001: 13) evokes, and of the authors on whom Perry (2004) draws.

20. The phrase comes from Porters (2000: 179) placing of Humes Treatise of human nature (173940), which was to be followed by An enquiry concerning human understanding (1748), in the context of extensive philosophical interest in the anatomy of the mind.

21. Porter (2000: 156) quotes Hume to the effect that it is evident that all the sciences have a relation to human nature. It was a short step from here to the science of man.



were differentiated not just by social standing but also by a hierarchical relation-ship. We might recall that Yanomami affines made others other to themselves. In Yanomami, affines evoke alterity, not likeness, and the transactions that made one more white, apparent interventions along a continuum, in fact enacted at every juncture a radical break. If, in what was taken for granted in relation to criollos, the Yanomami analogue of nature was indeed affinity, then affinity had a quite differ-ent location in the kinship universe from that imagined by English-speakers.22 In English, affinity, by derivation connoting on the borders or bordering on, and thus neighboring or near to others, gives the viewpoint of the speaker as an ego in a center looking outward. Indeed there is, in this respect, no ontological difference in the radiating spheres of affinity and of consanguinity.23

These generic English-language concepts for interpersonal ties all invited cal-culations as to nearness to and distance from the speaker. Perhaps we could say that they made such calculations into interventions in a social world. To solicit or deny a (social, kinship) connection was not to evoke a preexisting alterity, but to produce or create difference or sameness anew (either up or down). Every assertion of or denial of recognition was a social intervention. The same might be said, epis-temologically speaking, of every interpretation or choice of descriptive language, or scientific investigation. Producing such a specific effect (the named, discovered, invented) mirrors back the producers viewpoint. Whatever presented conditions of possibility for discussion about society and nature, then, we might want them to account for interpersonal relations quite as much as for ideas about civilization and the physicality of the body.

The knot The kind of description at which anthropology excels is expository, making an interpretive relationship with its world explicit. However lyrical or empirical the

22. This comes out of a well-rehearsed theoretical position that Kelly at once makes ex-plicit and further illuminates. Consider, for example, the contrast between Amazonian consanguinity (constructed) and affinity (given). Affinity at once points to relations based on difference, not identity, and is the given because it is the ontological condi-tion underlying all social relations ... [belonging] as such to the fabric of the universe (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 259).

23. What appeared a single viewpoint from one angle could be divided between two, ac-cording to whether one took a view from nature or from society, and brought together again in a simple contrast, as in the later-eighteenth-century contrast between ties that were given (family) and ties by choice (one of the uses of the term connection). There were earlier contrasts too. Perrys (2004: 23031) account of the privatization of marriage, as she calls it, notes a complicated triangular relationship between the law and the different marriage strategies of the English landed classes and wealthier middle classes. (In her terms, following Randolph Trumbach, the latter are between marriage-of-incorporation, which conserved the consanguineal family by incorpo-rating affines, and marriage by alliance, which cemented relations between families while making upward mobility possible and putting the interests of the new conjugal unit above those of their parents.)



form, or however knowing the doubt (Carrithers, this volume), a view about un-derstanding is being expounded. In other words, the view implies something about to be understood. Yet because different moments or aspects of elucidation come into view at different times, there is nothing new in saying that exposition is also an entanglement of descriptions from many hands. In other words, anything avail-able to description is of course already described, a kind of strabismic precondition of anthropological knowledge making.24 That does not mean one has to put ones tools aside. It has been helpful to consider as interventions two clusters of con-cepts (self-scrutiny, naturesociety) that animate anthropological debate within as well as flourishing on its outside, germane to the kind of knowledge anthropology makes visible. I have threaded them through three ethnographic loci to make vis-ible another facet of anthropological knowledge making: the descriptive endeavor does not get very far without the invocation of social as well as conceptual relations.

It is a truism that specific times and places yield specific descriptive genres. Yet perhaps there is something particularly interesting for social anthropology in some of the descriptions of the English-speaking world prevalent at about the time of the scientific revolution, and subsequently sedimented in Enlightenment sensibility. Present-day anthropologists are thoroughly aware that much of their social knowl-edge consists in relating relations. That stance, relating relations, finds echoes in certain kinds (not all) of painterly and experimental optics whose descriptive effect can be explained more generally as making appearance itself appearas I flagged in the quotation from Buci-Glucksmann above. It seems to be repeated in certain (not all) philosophical musings on human nature that made explicit the notion of understanding understanding. Appearance as an object of viewing, understanding as an object of reflection: through specific ideas of eye and mind they become ob-jects of description. But we have already slipped through the knots by which these two areas of discussion are tied togetherthere is no need to tie them more tightly. Rather, we might ask if that other thread can be threaded in as well. Should we be asking about other conditions of possibility? Should the anthropologist be ponder-ing on how relations became an object of description, and thus of knowledge, too?

One answer surely has to be through acts of relating, including relating between persons. I do not mean here the social networking that in Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries informed the verification of experiments or gave writers their audiences, but rather a particular kind of objectification (as in object of knowl-edge) of the concept of relations. It was one that outlined the contours of the notion simultaneously in reference to and distinct from its enactment among persons. Con-ceivably, for English-speakers, it is there in their usages of affinity and connection.

At this time there was a kind of two-way passage in the connotations of these terms. They acquired, one could say, at once a strength and a striation of sorts. On

24. Corsn Jimnezs concern is with how we grant epistemic status to objects, and, as he says at the outset (2013: 2), thus with exploring the conditions of description as we understand it, when what appears to be a description of an object is, on closer inspec-tion, turned inside out into a description of epistemic awareness. He offers conceptual interventions of his own, as an effort at trapping the descriptive forms of late liber-alism within their own culture of description, and an attempt to place description at perpendicular angles vis--vis emerging forms of global public knowledge (ibid.: 28).



the one hand, the concept of affinity moved from its delineation of kinship rela-tions by marriage and alliance to include epistemically understood resemblances or rapports, perhaps thereby endorsing25 an abstract stress on empathy or likeness. On the other hand, in the opposite direction, there was an expansion of connection, from an epistemological or conceptual usage in the seventeenth century to, in the eighteenth, embracing kin as well, although by no means exclusively.26 In fact the introduction of this specific abstraction (connection)27 into the kinship universe mirrored an earlier change in the way relations itself was usedfrom a term for epistemic relations to, in the seventeenth century, a term also used for related per-sons (in this case restricted to kinsfolk, consanguineal and affinal alike). Might we see here diverse outlines of a newly visible attention to knowledge about persons and their interactions? If so, they would come with injunctions (albeit of etiquette and politicking) about the social and thus interventionistconsequences of acknowledging peoples relatedness. Variously termed, a relation was already a con-cept that pointed to (the act of) relating as itself an object that could be described.

Anthropologists might think it banal in the extreme to say that the threads of self-scrutiny and the naturesociety debate are tied together in relations, that is, in a presupposed ability to perceive relations at once internal to these concepts and external with respect to others. That this is true of countless occurrences would seem to deflate the interest of any single set. Yet following these particular strands of thought catches, and momentarily catches on, some taken-for-granted banalities that intervene all the time in their/our descriptions.

AcknowledgmentsJeanette Edwards characteristically illuminating comments have since taken me in other directions, but that is not reflected here: this is basically the text on which she commented. My appreciation of Sarah Greens open invitation should be evident; my gratitude to Haus reviewers is expressed in situ (note 6). And I extend warm thanks to Jos Kelly and Elizabeth Roberts for their helpful elucidations of my ear-lier use of their material.

ReferencesAlpers, Svetlana. 1983. The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

25. The possibility was always there in early usages of the term for (positive) alliance or companionship.

26. As I have noted elsewhere (most recently Strathern 2014b).

27. As Hume and Smith used connection in referring (for example) to principles of connectionraising of course the further question (doubt) as to what counted as principles.



Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. (1984) 1994. Baroque reason: The aesthetics of modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Sage.

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. 2013. Assisted existence: An ethnography of being in Ecuador. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19 (3): 56280.

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Tadmor, Naomi. 2001. Family and friends in eighteenth-century England: Household, kin-ship, and patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2001. GUT feelings about Amazonia: Potential affinity. In Beyond the visible and the material: The Amerindianization of society in the work of Peter Rivire, edited by Laura Rival and Neil Whitehead, 1943. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

. 2009. The gift and the given: Three nano-essays on kinship and magic. In Kinship and beyond: The genealogical model reconsidered, edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach, 23268. New York: Berghahn.

Le raisonnement anthropologique: quelques fils de penseRsum : Les proprits interventionnistes de la description sont considres la lumire de deux modes de pense, tout deux videmment interne et externe lanthropologie. Du point de vue de la formation des concepts, la dyade nature-culture semble faire lobjet de critiques et de reformulations toujours renouveles, comme en tmoigne le dbat actuel sur les pratiques cliniques en Amrique du Sud. En ce qui concerne lengagement avec des sujets humains, lanthropologie a hrit des rgimes de contrle et dauto-analyse mais en a galement dmontr les limites; on peut voir cette mme rflexivit, qui fait maintenant partie de la routine de lenqute ethnographique, luvre dans lapproche adopte par les politiques de sant conues pour la population Aborigne en Australie. Ces deux thmes (nature-culture/auto-analyse) ont contribu autant lauto-formation de lanthropologie quau type de savoir quelle rend visible. Tous deux passionnrent galement les Lumires Europennes. Cet article esquisse ainsi les contours possibles dun objet de savoir devenu apparent depuis peu, qui pourrait avoir t une sorte de moteur, et qui semble avoir conduit le raisonnement anthropologique depuis son apparition.

Marilyn Strathern had the good fortune to receive initialand indelibletrain-ing in Papua New Guinea, which led to work, among other things, on kinship and gender relations. In the United Kingdom she subsequently became involved with anthropological approaches to the new reproductive technologies, intellectual property, audit cultures, and interdisciplinarity. Now retired from the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, she is (honorary) life president of the Asso-ciation of Social Anthropologists. Strathern is currently working on issues in the conceptualization of relations, some of which were sketched out in her 2005 book, Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are often a surprise.

Marilyn Strathern Girton College Cambridge CB3 0JG UK [email protected]

marylin strathern anthropological reasoning

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