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' Property, Substance
and Effect
Anthropological Essays on Persons
and Things
MARILYN STRATHERN
THE ATHLONE PRESS
LONDON & NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ
First published 1999 by
y
THE ATHLONE PRESS
1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG '
and New Brunswick, New Jersey
© Marilyn Strathern 1999
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 0 485 11534 4 HB
0 485 12149 2 PB
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Strathern, Marilyn.
Property, substance, and effect : anthropological essays on
persons and things / Marilyn Strathern.
p. cm.
• Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-485-11534-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-485-12i49-2.(pbk. : alk. paper)
1, Ethnology - Papua New Guinea. 2. Property - Cross-cultural... .
studies. 3. Body, Human - Social aspects - Gross-cultural studies.
4. Papua New Guinea - Social life and customs. 5. United States -
Social life and customs, 6. Europe - Social life and customs. I. Title.
GN671.N5 S83 1999
306'.09953-dc21
99-14804
CIP
Distributed in The United States, Canada and-South America .by- .
Transaction-Publishers
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior'
permision in writing from the publisher. *
Typeset by Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, Wilts. .
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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For R., E., and
Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1 The Ethnographic Efect I 1
Parti EFFECTS
Chapter 2 Pre-figured Features ' 29
Chapter 3 The Aesthetics of Substance 45
Chapter 4 Refusing Information 64
Part II PROPERTIES
Chapter 5 New Economic Forms: a Report 89
Chapter:6 The New Modernities .17
Chapter 7 Divisions of Interest and Languages of
Ownership 138
Part III SUBSTANCES
Chapter 8 Potential Poperty: Intellectual Rights and
Property in Persons 161
Chapter 9 What is Intelectual Property after? 179
Chapter 10 Puzles of Scale 204
Chapter 1
Concluded The Ethnographic Efect I 29
Writing societies, writing persons 23
Notes 262
Bibliography 307
Index 3
Preface
The National Research Institute (NRI) in Port Moresby facili-
tated two months research in Papua New Guinea.in 1995. I am
most grateful to the people ;who took care of me so generously,
and to the Department of Western Highlands, Western Highlands
Province. My hosts will know what I owe them. Special apprecia-
tion must go to Reya, Henry, Mberem and Pale, as well as to
Mande and her daughter Lucy,;-._and to Snow. John Kenny
(Puklum El) provided much.wise guidance.;On this occasion, :as
many times previously, Ru Kundil has contributed far more than
acknowledgement of an ongoing.intellectual debt can indicate.
Fieldwork was funded by the British Academy and Cambridge
University, while a brief visit to Port Moresby in 1997 was at the
invitation of the NRI and Conservation Melanesia. Cyndi Banks
and James Baker, and Claudia Gross and Mark Busse, were
unstinting in their hospitality on both occasions, as were Mx and
Mrs .Oiee. My particular thanks to- Kupi Kundil (Mrs, Oiee) for
the photograph, of her. as a girl.
A Papua New Guinea kina-was approximately 50p in. 1995.
Recent Melanesian anthropology has engaged in much more
sophisticated, commentary.than I do justice to here. Over the last
decade, along with James Weiner at Manchester University and
then with Gilbert .Lewis at Cambridge, I have had the privilege of
quite exceptional company from several social theorists, and
ethnographers who have-also at some stage been apprentice Mela-
nesianists. They have included, in Papua New Guinea, Tony
Crook, Melissa Demian, Claudia Gross, Andrew Holding, James
Leach, Patricia Peach, Adam Reed and Helena Regius, as well as
Lissant Bolton (Vanuatu), Annelise Riles (Fiji), Jude Philp
(Torres Strait) and Gerhard Schneider (Solomons).
The essay format is derived from the original impetus for
several of these pieces being contributions to conference topics:
Portraiture and. the Problematics of Representation^ University of
X Preface
Manchester, 1993, convened by Marcia Pointon and Joanna
Woodall (Chapter 2); Cultural Poetics, University of Southamp-
ton, 1996, convened by Peter Middleton and Julian Thomas
(Chapter 3); The Culture of Biomedicine, Cambridge, 1996,
convened by Alberto Cambrosio, Margaret Lock and Allan
Young for the Social Science Research Council, New York
(Chapter 4); the European Society for Oceanists biennial confer-
ence, Basel, 1994 (Chapter 6); Actor Network Theory and After,
Keele University, 1997, convened by John Law (Chapter 9).
Chapter 10 was originally given in 1997, under the title of 'Scale,
culture and the imagination: an anthropological puzzle from
Papua New Guinea*, as a lecture to the British Psycho-Analytical
Society, at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London.
The following chapters are also published elsewhere. Many
thanks are due to volume editors for their willingness in the
matter, while permission to draw directly on the material is grate-
fully acknowledged to the publishers in each case. For the
purposes of this edition, some minor changes have been made.
Chapter 2 (1997) in The Australian Journal of Anthropology,
special issue ed. by Diane Losche, 8: 89-103. Abridged version
published in J. Woodall (ed.) (1997) Portraiture: Facing the
Subject, Manchester: Manchester: University Press. These include
the photographs in the frontispiece.
Chapter 5 (1998) in Mana, Estudos de Antropologia Social, 4:
109-39). (Translated as 'Novas formas economicas: um relato das
?
Terras Altas de Papua Nova-Guine .)
Chapter 6 (1998) in V. Keck (ed.) Common Worlds and Single
Lives: Constituting Knowledge in Pacific Societies, Oxford: Berg
Publishers.
Chapter 7 (1998) in Chris Hann (ed.) Property Relations:
Sharing, Exclusion, Legitimacy, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Chapter 8 (1996) in Social Anthropology, 4: 17-32).
Chapter 1 includes a paper, 'Writing societies, writing persons'
(1992), published in History of Human Sciences, 5: 5-16.
Conserving these, and other pieces written on separate occa-
sions, as discrete essays means that the reader will find some
overlap in the materials which they treat. Certain of the essays
were also written in tandem with further papers with which they.
xi
Preface
share material. To avoid the tedium of repeated reference, I note
them here. 'The New Modernities' (Chapter 6) is a companion
paper to 'Cutting the network' (1996), Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, (NS) 2: 517-35. Chapter 3 (The
Aesthetics of Substance') and Chapter 5 ('New Economic Forms')
form a trio along with 'Same-sex and cross-sex relations: some
internal comparisons', presented at the 1996 Wenner-Gren sympo-
sium on Amazonia and Melanesia: Gender and Comparison,
convened by Don Tuzin and Tom Gregor. Finally, the last two
chapters (9, "What is Intellectual Property After?' and 10, 'Puzzles
of Scale', with its photographs that appear as the endpiece) go
together with a lecture, 'Environments within: an ethnographic
commentary on scale', given in the 1996-7 Linacre Lecture series,
Oxford (to be published in Culture, Landscape and Environment,
Oxford: Oxford University Press).
" • \
The principal reason for bringing thesie' essays together is at once
very personal and very typical for an anthropologist. I have been
affected more than I can express by my time with people in Mt
Hagen in Papua New Guinea, starting in 1964-5, and including
the much longer periods I have spent not there and on other
things. I wanted to record that in a direct way and in a way
which would make evident their influence. So these essays are in
that sense retrospective. That personalises a professional^c-Ohvic-
tion that social anthropology does not always do enough with its
past. It has contributed uniquely to human knowledge by its
studies of human knowledge. In doing so, it draws attention to
one consistent characteristic of social life, namely the complex
kinds of reflections upon themselves that people afford one
another through their relations with one another. The material
which results, rich with the distillation of many minds, becomes
in the past even as it is written down, but continuing to write
about it also continues to make it present.
Of course there are many ways of demonstrating this. And it is
just as well that we have different projects! In this connection, I
wish to note where I stand in the division of labour between
myself and colleagues. These essays document, among other
things, a continuing struggle with the language of description.
Description presupposes analysis, and analysis presupposes
theory, and they all presuppose imagination. The issue is how we
may best describe knowing the effect which descriptions have on
