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INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 34, 2010, 291301

Writing in Kind1

Marilyn Strathern

University of Cambridge

As the climactic moment of revelation . . . approaches, the symbols of the body in

mens initiation songs, which up to this moment have been unequivocally

masculine, now become bisexual.

Trees are phallic projections which not only have heads that feed birds . . .

but they also have hollow trunks inside which nest [hairy] female marsupials . . .Headwaters are not only clear streams of male effusions but are also,

according to the singers, . . . rivers [of] menstrual blood.

G. Gillison (1980, 170)

It is rare to come across a social anthropologist who speculates on theunsocialized aspects of behaviour by contrast with what is taken associalized, rare, that is, outside preoccupations with childhood or withrhetorical and ideological constructions. But that is exactly how Juillerat(2002) speculates for his part on the proclivities of Yafar, a tiny populationin the West Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. Given their attenuated

treatment of birth, sickness and death, elsewhere the subject of much socialattention, he wonders if Yafar culture regards the main biological processesas not being amenable to socialization (2002, 176). He is able to make thestatement insofar as he gives a psychoanalytic inflection to the concept ofsociety, a conventional realm, instigated by the law of the father thatmediates between human beings and a cosmogonic world, amenable as heinvokes the phrase to Freuds test of reality. The pre-social, a term

Juillerat at one point uses as an epithet to designate the mythic figure of aprimordial mother, becomes by contrast accessible through symbolicthinking / work. The contrast (socialized / unsocialized)2 is at once a tool for

analysis and is presented as corresponding to the motivations behind the wayYafar purportedly act out the myth. In the course of a major ritual sequence(the yangis), the desired and fantasized bounty of the nature-mother(174, 181)3 is redistributed within the community of men, and thereby

becomes socialized, just as on other occasions the totalitarian powers of themythic parents can be displaced by the thoroughly socialized activities ofancestors, or by socialized relationships with forest spirits.

Juillerats constructions echo some of the material that Geoffrey Lloydaddresses in his article, and in the fascinating book on which it is based(Lloyd 2007). We can add certain schools of psychoanalytical interpretation4to the fields in which moderns grapple with questions seemingly posed

already by the ancients, those arising from their perceptions, as he says(Lloyd 2010), of the commonalities and specificities of different human

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groups. Nature and law, nature and society: Juillerat even refers at one pointto the source of bounty as mother-earth. However, there are otherdimensions to bring out here, as we shall see, which relate rather to Lloydsown argument.

An argument for argument?

ISRs multiple reviews of Lloyds work will no doubt be cited as yet anotheriteration of the multidimensionality of phenomena, here the phenomenon ofacademic argument. An argument or set of arguments can draw in scholarsfrom all over the place, even though what they may be arguing aboutappears to bifurcate into discrete and contrasting camps. Of course, inpresenting it, Lloyd does not treat his own argument as a phenomenon5: hisobject of attention is first those contrasting camps, and second the world(s)that the two camps address. The clarity the luminosity with which he

writes comes from the steadiness the steadfastness of his attention. Yet Iwould add that, whether or not we wish to distinguish what is created fromthe material out of which it is created, the act of writing can as easily concealfrom writer and reader, as it can reveal, writings own phenomenal character.Academic writing in particular works overtly as a technique to make (other)phenomena appear.

I am at once making an observation about the workings of the mind(I assume that I can talk, without qualification, about the mental activity ofattention-holding) and about the effects of specific techniques (writing as anattention-holding and thus descriptive exercise). However, others contributing

to this symposium will be far more qualified than myself to comment onwhat might or might not count as cognition or cognitive behaviour, and I donot propose to pursue the implicit contrast here. I wish rather to attend toone of the phenomena that Lloyd has made visible for us: the multidimen-sional nature of whatever we take to observe, argue over or write about.6 Inapproaching an object on which Lloyd focuses, and as some of the reviews ofhis book have already made evident, we can only write in AL (After-Lloyd),with the object(s) he has presented for our attention. This is a regular featureof academic interchange. What he put forward as a synthesis of numerousarguments and perspectives (his model of multidimensionality) now

becomes a concept with which to grapple. Of course one can see if it holdsin its original location, that is, with respect to the materials with which heoriginally grappled, or relate it to other materials that would modify hismodel; however, he has also created an object that might as equally welltravel free of its initial moorings.

I am very struck7 by one of the strands of his demonstration, to which herepeatedly returns in his book, and again in the article, to wit the factthat Greek language and culture did not constrain ancient Greeks fromidiosyncratic interpretations, nor from holding radically diverse viewsabout the world; more than that, they argued over it. In fact demonstrablycontrasting ontologies were proposed, with the difference as between the

theories of atomism and divisible continuum measured in (and Lloydwould add, but not determined by) the common language they all used.

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Lines of argument competed (2007, 35). A social anthropologist might say thatthis is ancient Greek culture then, and what we value to the point ofclaiming it ancestral to all kinds of ways of thinking is precisely the mannerin which they developed a practice of argument. These are, so to speak,ways of doing multidimensionality. So too is the internal pluralism of

ancient Chinese medicine, with documented controversies over treatment anddiverse views on human health and wellbeing (2007, 99100).

These cultural moments have in common the enabling condition ofliteracy the ability to record argued positions, inconvenient facts,contradictory diagnoses and the demonstrable inconsistency of peoplesopinions. It is of course only enabling (not determining), but in an academicmode the activities of writing and argumentation may well reinforce eachother. Among other things, they can make multidimensionality appear as aproperty of any phenomenon, that is, of anything to be described. Yet whatabout non-literate modes? Lloyd draws from Amazonia, and I am bound to

add that he could also have drawn from Melanesia. What we would belooking for there is not just multiple points of view but a local articulation ofmultidimensionality.

The substance of Lloyds article is the diversity of behaviour attributableto cognitive processes that spills over any attempt at a single mode ofexplanation or indeed analysis. Enquiring how people think often has totake indirect and experimental paths, no less so in the case of conventionallynon-literate peoples, and such paths tend to follow particular disciplinaryparadigms. Precisely because of the range of disciplines on which Lloyddraws, and his constantly encountering that spillover, multidimensionalityemerges as an eminently rational default position for the interdisciplinary

scholar. But it is also clear that he regards competing arguments, such asthose found in ancient Greek and Chinese discourse, a window into thecomplexity of phenomena themselves. This prompts a question onecould ask of anyone, literate or not: how might they attend to themultidimensionality of phenomena, with what interests perhaps? As he says(Lloyd 2010), apropos folk classifications, we need to know what they are for.Investigating the practices or activities in which peoples attention might bemanifest has the virtue of being accessible to the ordinary tools of socialanthropological enquiry. An anthropological paradigm is going to be assingle-minded as any other, but in this case would be specifically looking

for understandings or demonstrations of diversity.Here we come up against the issue of translation Lloyd mentions severaltimes in relation to social anthropological endeavour. Trivially, of course, inAmazonia and Melanesia, the Euro-American academic is not going to findquestions phrased in quite the way he / she might pose them (as questionsabout human nature or cultural relativism, say, or about dichotomies such asa nature-culture divide). Less trivially, where people do not entertain a theoryof cognition, that is, discuss perceptions of phenomena they are preparedto attribute to the workings of the mind, why should or how couldapprehensions of multidimensionality alone have a bearing on his subjectmatter? After all, there are countless examples of social complexities

Australian Aboriginal marriage systems, for instance, in which relations canbe seen from several points of view that show skill in classification,

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attributions of emotions, use of space, chains of cause and effect, practices ofreasoning, and so forth, yet that do not in the end amount to reflection uponthose as cognitive processes.

However, I would pursue the possibility that we might look at socialcomplexities not as weakly social (infinite differentiation of roles and posi-

tions is ever present) but as strongly social (life is lived in the company ofpeople and through the conversations they have with one another, tout court).That is, human sociality has to be as much a given in the processing ofinformation about phenomena as in any other activity.8 Only who is going tosay it like this?

Now, the perception that the world is composed of persons may be asoddly concrete as the cognitivists projection of mind. In an extreme case,Sahlins (2008, 90) reminds us that the Maori live in a universe entirelycomposed of persons, all descended from the primal parents . . .includingtrees, birds, insects, fishes, stones, as has been observed for some Melanesian

peoples on the Sepik river of Papua New Guinea, such as Avatip (Harrison1990). More widely, persons are perceived through persons. If it is objectedthat this is not technically a cognitive activity, the outcomes in terms of agrasp of the multidimensionality of phenomena may still be somewhatsimilar. And might there be conditions under which such a grasp appears asan object of thought? Let me take a trope, already introduced, from scholarlypractice: description. Perhaps we could put literacy to one side; perhapsmultidimensionality is an emergent character of any practice of description. IfI were to speak from Melanesia, it might emerge in the way people (persons)present and thus describe themselves. In their case, it is worth adding, theywould do so with nothing comparable to a notion of humanity, or

humanitys artefacts, so that the basic place of humans in the scheme ofthings is hardly at stake (Lloyd 2007, 35; see Sahlins 2008).

Exegetical and other debate

I return to a people who do not entertain a theory of cognition. Juilleratwas encouraged to go to the Yafar by Gell, who had worked with their Sepikneighbours, the Umeda (Gell 1975; 1992). In fact, Yafar claim to haveimported the yangis ritual from the Umeda ida.9 If ever one wanted acomparison of the effects of traffic in ritual /artistic life, as it turned out,

Gell and Juillerat have between them provided the most exquisitely detailedaccounts of what is both the same not the same performative outcome.(Only lack of records makes this less than a history.) They also make evidentconsiderable exegetical controversy, internal and external.

Internally, the two anthropologists spell out the way in which they built uptheir interpretations, both from what people said and from unspoken acts,figurations, and orientations. Juillerat in particular (1992, 23) acknowledgesthe extent to which he was following the esoteric knowledge of two Yafarexperts, who gave separate and not necessarily coinciding accounts to him.At the core of interpretative effort on the part of the anthropologists, andthe excitement and attention to detail on the part of Yafar and Umeda, is a

sequence of dances over a period of days and nights at which a dozen or somen, often singly or in pairs, take turns in displaying flamboyant masks.

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Masks and bodies are decorated, each figure (mask and man) presenting adistinctly named composition of colours, plants, feathers, fronds, sound anddance movement.10 Differences of meaning are ascribed to the diverseelements through which these persons appear, both between Yafar andUmeda and among Yafar or Umeda commentators themselves. To gloss the

ritual in terms of its ostensible aim to renew fertility or growth, or bestowhunting prowess, is to diminish the interplay of themes variously parsed bythe anthropologists also concerned with sexuality and incest, reproduction,the alternation of generations, gender relations, parents and children, thewaxing and waning of bodies, the life course, the attainment of power, and soforth. At the same time, the ostensible aims speak to very recognizableinterests in the success or failure of the enterprise.

Gell and Juillerat differ over their understanding of the whole sequence, theone emphasizing the final emergence of figures that indicate the attainmentof manhood and the autonomy intrinsic to being a man that comes through

time, the other the working out of a primal mythic scenario culminating inthe resolution of oedipal tensions and a personification (impersonation) ofsociety. Yet, regardless of the anthropologists, are the Umeda and Yafar ofthese accounts acting out an apprehension of multidimensionality? Thenumber of elements being brought together seems almost infinite. However,

just as Lloyd pinpoints multidimensionality as a feature of some very specificarguments over relations between concepts, we would need to specify whatparticular (set of) process(es) was being given so many attributes. To bevisible as many, there has to be some coherence between the elements. Inother words, we would need to choose which abstract overview Gell and

Juillerat give us two candidates of the performance is the underlyingsubject of multidimensional perception. Simply recording the plethora ofelements that one could describe as parts of the cult will not do, any morethan a plurality of academic disciplines is going to converge on a singlesummative picture (Lloyd, 2010).

One could always find an underlying subject by raising the level ofgenerality as in saying that the cult is simply about processes of bodilyregeneration, and introduce an exogenous axis in supposing that the relationat stake was between (say) human and non-human entities. However, I takeanother route to asking what might be multidimensional in these practices.

I referred to external controversy. Gell and Juillerat generated quite adebate about the interpretation of ritual, at the time a focus of muchanthropological work not rehearsed here. Leaving aside references to natureand culture, which they both make, the authors are engaged in a controversyover how to delineate society. The controversy arises from an interdisciplinarydebate between intellectualist-cum-psychoanalytical considerations andsociological ones, a debate as old as the hills (Gell 1992, 136). It offers acomment on Lloyds observation that it is ideas of society that are universal,rather than ideas of nature, that is, counterparts to society may be found inpeoples thoughts even though they would never frame it dichotomously withnature.11 The issue, as Gell (1992, 1367) conceives it, is whether one can or

cannot regard the dramatic sequences of ida /yangis as articulating with socialprocesses beyond the ritual, or whether the ritual is an activity outside social

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time. Are we witnessing an opposition of two arenas of social action, inwhich normative expectations set up in one are denied in another, or aradical disarticulation between ritual practice and society?12

The concept of disarticulation comes from Harrisons (1985) writings onthe Avatip, which have already been mentioned. As Gell (1992, 136) puts it,

Harrison sharply reproves his colleagues for their unthinking adherence to aDurkheimian prejudice, to the effect that ritual mirrors society. On the Sepik,ritual life (dominated by . . .an ethos of hypermasculinity) contrasts sharplywith domestic practices and attitudes . . . [and with] life as it is lived. Gellsown view is that ritual action can be (socially) meaningful not because it ismodelled on non-ritual behaviour, but precisely because it departs from such

behaviour and makes explicit its contours. His debate with Harrison rehearseshis debate with Juillerat.

While one can see that as perspectives on the ritual, each anthropologicalposition enlarges our understanding in certain ways, as academic arguments

the two positions are clearly agonistic, rivals for what is to count as sociallife. And I would return to the gift that Lloyd has given us: aside from theshrewd way in which he argues himself, he also shows us the role argumenthas played in descriptive practices. Here we have an argument betweenanthropologists; metaphorically speaking, is there also something akin to anargument going on among the men of these Sepik societies?13 Men do onething in the [ritual] mens house and behave quite differently outside it (Gell1992, 136). A little less than an argument with premise and conclusion andproof and disproof, yet a little bit more than turn-taking in a conversation: analtercation in the sense of taking up a position relative to previous positions,

with a dynamic that before returning to it deliberately discards theprevious position. Yet, as rendered here, this also seems a familiar oscillation

between different domains of social life. Men might describe themselves toone another as multidimensional beings, but does anything else follow? Whatillumination in relation to the place argument has in Lloyds account couldreally come from these materials? Let me continue for a bit.

There are evident opportunities for manoeuvre (Lloyd 2007, 38). Forexample, if we take as the unit of study not (individual) persons but therelations between them, it becomes obvious that very few people can buildvery elaborate systems, and elaboration breeds elaboration. Indeed there is

a connection between the two when persons use themselves as resources,that is, when it is their relations with one another that they use to describe,analyse or otherwise deal with other relations. So, for example, Umeda andYafar mobilize ritual moieties in the course of the rites to take care of theallocation of the actors roles to specific categories of people (they dividethemselves in order to divide themselves).14 Then again, in the traffic acrossthe generations or between social entities (such as Yafar and Umeda), thereare likely to be constant small innovations in the conduct of events, 15 evenif the chances are they will not be regarded as innovatory at all, andpeople may claim that they are replicating what Euro-Americans would call

tradition. Following Dascals (2009) emphasis on controversy, however,let me add a more pertinent point.

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What may look like a fixed programme to the observer may appearuncertain and hazardous to the participant (will the ritual work?). A nowfamous but then startling realization came to Gell in looking at the idasequence as a whole: one arrives rapidly at the idea that there are not manyritual figures, but basically only one such figure in process of transformation

(1975, 296, original italics). It would be going too far to suggest that there isan agonistic tenor to the way these persons replace one another. All the same,in the shifting manner in which changes over the life-cycle are presented,they do in one sense act out competing moments: each episode (of dancing)overcomes or displaces the previous one.16 One figure, one person, with manydimensions. They are of course uttered wordlessly: image displaces image.

Such displacements are commonplace in both ritual and myth; in the samevolume as Gells commentary, Wagner (1992) puts forward a brief obviationanalysis of the yangis. Given exegetical profusion, the only certainty, he says,lies in the images. The images themselves are composed to make their

appearance one after another, and thus substitute for one another, indeed asequence of such images in transformation thus operates by enabling andcancelling whole ranges of analytic possibilities (Wagner 1992, 207). The onlyviable heuristic for the observer, he says, is one that models self-cancellationor obviation any linear gloss will be rendered arbitrary and self-contradictory by the paradoxes engendered in the transformational process(1992, 207). In effect, what is made obvious moves from ground to figure,implying the displacement of previous figures in the substitution of others.The transformation of images at once captures and displaces, gets rid of, thesituations in which actors (now meaning any social actor) find themselvesand the premises (see Weiner 1995, 38) they think govern their actions.What was taken for granted as a conventional framing now appears not so.Whether or not one can speak of one person, what reveals the multidimen-sionality of the display is precisely the coherence of the sequence throughwhich positions (relations) must pass. Perhaps on this point just as anargument sustains a series of positions, performative sequencing in ida and

yangis both keeps elements together and shows they are many.

Writing (again)

These materials suggest one of the limits of academic writing that perhapsmakes it as much a drag on argument as a resource for it. For it has tostruggle against itself to effect obviation, the eclipse of one premise byanother. Writing embodies a characteristic temporality: duration accompanied

by retention. It cannot get rid of things. What one wrote at the beginning ofan account is still there at the end, despite the intervening journey and thewriters hopes to have transformed the readers comprehension in the courseof it. For however much they appear to have been argued away (an argumentshould reach a conclusion rather than repeating its premises), all the openingpremises, along with the hesitations or preliminaries, remain, and are thusrepeated for the future. Of course, where keeping to ones premises, or

examining other peoples, is a virtue, practices of reflection, critique andcriticism flourish.

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Nonetheless, academic writing has (as might be expected!) different waysof holding attention. The kind of writing that supports arguments is only one.And sometimes there is so to speak controversy between writing approachesthat is a bit more than a matter of style. Jensen (forthcoming) draws attention,for example, to Peter Galisons Image and logic (1997).17 Two ways of

knowledge making within modern physics echo what one could attribute towriting in other disciplinary contexts. So let me switch attention from theexegetical mode of approaching ida / yangis to what one of the writers(Gell 1992) to the debate reveals significantly in the course of the debateitself about how he wrote.

How he wrote was no more self-generated than argumentative logic is, forit sprang from what one might call the argumentative imagery of the ritualitself. Gell rhapsodizes the attention-holding effect. What I imagine is thatwhen particular Umeda are participating in Ida, their minds are filled with ashining haze of half-glimpsed images drawn from real life and the imaginarylife, flashing by . . . as the press of fresh experience dislodges them [the

previous images] from the focus of attention (Gell 1992, 138). Attention isthereby, and rapidly, re-focused. At the same time, he describes his ownwriting.18 I was infused with creative energy that cost me no effort of willwhatsoever, so that the elements of the text . . . seemed to join up and formthemselves into patterns with dreamlike facility (1992, 128). He is explicitabout what is needed to reconstruct the process through which ritual actionreorganizes experience. I would maintain that the only possible method is . . .synthesis, that is, by the construction of a text whose formal construction issuch that a mapping is established between a series of responses to imagesevoked in the readers mind as the text flashes by, and a parallel series of

images that may one can never know flash through the consciousnessof the ritual actor (1992, 142). To be effective, image play has to evokesedimented experience, and he returns to the debate with Juillerat, and to hispoint that one has to draw on the whole of social and cultural experienceto appreciate what is happening.

It is interesting therefore to note that in his self-account, he resurrects thecontrast between socialized and unsocialized states that Juillerat also drew on.Here it is to explain the psychic energy that was released both in theparticipants and in himself; for he saw the culmination of the rituals as astatement about the heady prospect of de-socialization of autonomy, ofindependence from others. As a young man and novice anthropologist, he

was enchanted he said by the images of idealized manhood. I was infusedwith a collective representation of selfhood dialectically negating theconditions prevailing throughout socialization up to that critical point . . .[and of] the prospect, never fully realized, of desocialization for thedeveloping Umeda male personality; for the anthropologist, likewiseunformed, . . . [it] provided a focal symbol for a kind of methodologicaldisinhibition (1992, 127). These were the psychic sources of the mode ofritual interpretation (1992, 127).

The point about the limits to obviation in writing makes itself: in Gellsdemonstration, social processes appear now encompassing, now partial, andif there is a contradiction here, it is evident insofar as the one element is not

erased from one part of the text when the other element is presentedelsewhere. Written texts can appear multidimensional in unlooked-for ways.

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* * *

This commentary has attended to some of the kinds of apparatus throughwhich the multidimensional nature of phenomena can appear. The plasticityof human thought, and the room for manoeuvre that people enjoy in

arguments, are both part of it (Lloyd 2007, 35). Whatever cognitiveequipment is brought into play, people deploy all kinds of attention-holdingdevices, and when things go well energize one another thereby. Switchingfrom one image to another can be added to the list.

Since I have taken up so much space on one case, let me capitalize on itby adding another image to the many that will no doubt cluster aroundthe figure of Lloyd and his argument. The words are from Gell (1992, 139,original emphasis), they are about the Umeda, and together offer asympathetic depiction of Lloyds project. Every experience an Umeda has production, reproduction, hunting, social interaction of all kinds, andrelationships with, and understanding of, the natural world is continually

cycled through images triggered by ritual representations [read, academicargumentation] that evoke and modulate these life experiences. What isimportant is what these images are and how they interact in differentdomains of experience, not what some ritual expert is prepared to assert is theexplanation of whatever is being presented. Of course, Gell himself producedthe point as part of an argument against a rival interpretation.

Acknowledgements

This was written while I was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study,

Durham University, Epiphany Term 2010; my warm thanks to Ash Amin andthe Institutes Directors, as well as co-fellows and colleagues in Durham, forthe stimulus. Stefan Helmreich added some pertinent questions. I am alsomost grateful to Casper Jensen and James Leach, each of whose commentaryhas added considerable insight. It is a pity their comments could not bereproduced here; as it is, they raise some questions about the process ofargumentation in this paper to which I hope to do justice in another context.

Notes1 This is written as part of a combined endeavour,

and assumes the readers familiarity withLloyds article (Lloyd 2007), and its framing

terminology.2 Juillerat comments, especially on moments of

socialization; no particular weight is put on the

difference between un- or pre-social. My thanks

to James Leach for this clarification.3 Yafar say that everything (in the world) comes

from the mother; Juillerats gloss is that all of

nature is or comes from the mothers body [dis-

membered when the world was made] (2002,

165, my italics substituting for the original). The

significance of the mothers goodness, he goes

on to say, is characteristic of the pre-oedipal

phase in symbolic thinking (2002, 165).

4 And then perhaps make a special place for the

Lacanian insights that Weiner so forcefully(1995) brings to Juillerats material, which leave

society and socialization behind. If I were to

draw it more fully into this account, it would

anticipate the point below about sociality.5 I realized after I wrote the comment that this is

just what Dascal (2009) does in his review (see

note 7).6 Lloyd takes pains to distinguish multidimen-

sionality from stylistic diversity (plurality),

where different modes of investigation delineate

different objects of enquiry.7 Influenced no doubt by Dascals (2009) review of

Cognitive variations, kindly made available by the

Editor, and his concluding depiction of the role

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of debate in mental life and of controversy as

essential to the capacity to acquire knowledge.8 Sociality encompasses the embeddedness of

persons in the projects of others.9 Juillerat specifies that it was a body of esoteric

knowledge [from Ida performances] that . . . is

part of the exegetical material for Yangis (1992,21). Yafar say Umeda is the origin place of a

single cult that spread over a small cluster of vil-

lages across two language groups. (There is no

automatic priority given to the autochthonous;

obtaining the sources of ones own fertility from

elsewhere is a constant theme in Melanesian

models of reproduction.)10 It would not help to list their names, too much

context being required to convey any signifi-

cance; as Juillerat calls them, they start with per-

sonifications of the two mothers of the totemic

sago palms, proceed with fish of the daughters,sago jelly, firewood . . .11 Whether or not one finds a counterpart depends

on whether one apprehends society as a cate-

gory or concept that works in relation to further

concepts (such as nature or individual), as

dichotomizers among others would have it, or as

the manifestation of sociability to which Lloyd

refers, or as a ubiquitous sociality in the sense

of relating and relationship introduced above.

(Consonant with Lloyds [2007, 150] paradoxi-

cal conclusion that what has been claimed to

be the value-neutral concept of nature is highly

society-specific, while what is universal is some

idea of the social group or collectivity (original

emphasis), nature is the marked category in

his argument. How social groups perceive

themselves, if that is what he means, is not the

focus for attention. Indeed in Chapter 7, society

appears interchangeable with culture.)12 In the one paper (1992, 140, 142), Gell simul-

taneously enacts a multidimensional open-

mindedness in embracing Juillerats orientation

(it is just not the whole story), and retreats

from it in describing his critics mode of analysis

as narrow-minded.

13 As it happens, there are societies in the Sepik

region notorious for the institutionalization of

argument and rhetoric, in which men stage

competitive displays of esoteric knowledge.

However, my intention is not to understand

argumentative styles as such but to follow

through the place argument has in Lloydsexposition of multidimensionality.

14 That is, moiety relations are used to describe

the relations between those who perform the

dances. Prescriptive marriage systems, as men-

tioned in the Australian Aboriginal case, are a

prime example of relations being drawn upon

to describe (other) relations, e.g. where con-

sanguineal relatives can (also) be thought of as

affinal or conjugal. Each marriage at once acts

out pre-existing relations and transforms the

relations between those involved, re-describing

them in terms of the (newly acquired) ones.15 Freeman (2002) offers a convincing comparative

instance from Ethiopia.16 The sequence only works because of the pre-

cision and detail that goes into differentiating

the episodes. The outcome to the whole presen-

tation (health and growth of sago and children

or success in hunting) is unknown at the time;

success or failure cannot be determined in

advance.17 In the references, but not separately consulted.

Image-oriented experimentalists adhere to a

mimetic tradition that aims to preserve the

form of nature through visually compelling

techniques of representation that command

acceptance, while theorists work within a logic

tradition that aggregates large amounts of data

to make statistical arguments for the existence

of particle or effect (Jensen forthcoming, after

Galison 1997, 19). Experimentalists take it that

information about a single event can, in suffi-

cient detail, equal information derived in a

partial way from many.18 Rare in anthropology but not unknown, it

should be said, both to talk about writing habits

and to write this way.

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Notes on contributor

Marilyn Strathern, DBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology,Cambridge University, has recently been made Life President of the (UKand Commonwealth) Association of Social Anthropologists. Her interestshave long been divided between Melanesian and British ethnography.Projects over the last 20 years are reflected in publications on reproductivetechnologies, and intellectual and cultural property rights, while critique ofgood practice has been the umbrella under which she has written aboutaudit, accountability and interdisciplinarity. Some of these themes are brought

together in her last book, Kinship, law and the unexpected.Correspondence to: ms10026@cam.ac.uk

8/3/2019 stratherrn

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