Philosophy Partners and Consumers Making Relations Visible Response Develop response that demonstrates your understanding of the text and prompt at hand, m

Philosophy Partners and Consumers Making Relations Visible Response Develop response that demonstrates your understanding of the text and prompt at hand, making clear your interpretation of the question while also attending to key details of the arguments, questions and meanings expressed and conveyed by the text and its author,In her “Partners and Consumers, Making Relations Visible” Strathern introduces some culturally situated considerations about identity while attending to questions of the gift and economies of exchange. As she places her effort to take a lesson from anthropological study of difference into dialogue with her own cultural frame-of-view (late 20th century consumer culture), what stands to be learned about the other and about ourselves? Partnersand Consumers:
Making Relations Visible*
MarilynStrathern
AT
THE 1990 MEETINGS for the BritishAssociation for the Ad-
vancement of Science, an experimental embryologist expounded an expert’s view to a lay audience.’ MartinJohnson
was concerned to demonstratethe continuityof biological process.
A person’s birthbegins withprimitivegametes laid down when one’s
parents were embryos in the grandparental womb. Subsequent development depends not only on genetic coding but on extragenetic
influencesthatoperate on chromosomesfromthe start;these include
stimulationfrom material enveloping the egg,2 as well as nutritive
and othereffectsderived fromplacenta and uterus. It was a powerful
origin story,3especiallyin the contextof currentlegislativedecisions
withrespect to the Human Fertilisationand EmbryologyAct (1990).
Here, however, the problem has been to formulatediscontinuities
between developmental phases. The House of Commons decided
that research on human embryosis permissibleup to fourteendays,
by which time, among other things,the pre-embryonicmaterial is
now discernablydivided into those cells that will form the future
embryo-fetusand those that will form the placenta. The Secretary
for Health was reported as saying that status as an individual could
begin only at the stage where cells could be differentiated.4Yet
while biology appeared to provide an index,5 the furtherproblem
of personhood raised the same notionof continuousprocess. Another
member of the Commons pointed out: “It is a very difficultmatter
to say at what stage do you have a citizen, a human being. At
various stages freshrightsare acquired.”‘ Rightscan onlybe acquired
of course, in thisview,if there is an individual person to bear them.7
Here are experts informinglay persons (the BAAS talk), experts
*This was initiallypresented to the conference on The Giftand Its Transformations,
organized by Natalie Davis, Rena Lederman, and Ronald Sharp, National Humanities
Center,N.C., November 1990. I am mostgratefulforcommentsfromthe participants.
I should add that I have retained the original mode of address, since the paper
was writtenfor a multidisciplinaryaudience.
New Literary
History,1991, 22: 581-601
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NEW LITERARY
HISTORY
informingexperts (the Secretaryfor Health is briefed on what the
fourteen-daystage means), and lay persons (Members of Parliament)
turning expert in making legislative decisions. An anthropologist
might wish to bracket all of them lay insofar as they promote a
common view of the person that, in his/hereyes, must have the
status of a folk model. For the anthropologicalexpert, “person” is
an analyticconstructwhose utilityis evinced through cross-cultural
comparison. One draws, as always,fromone’s culture of origin,but
to be an expert in anthropologyis to demonstrate simultaneously
the cultural origins of one’s analytic constructs and their crosscultural applicability.
A person cannot in this sense be seen withoutthe mediation of
analysis. Yet those who discuss the potential personhood of the
embryo implicitlycontest such an appropriation of the concept.
Visual representationsof firstthe division of cells and then the
human form as it takes shape regularly accompany not just talks
designed to popularize the findingsof science but attemptsto make
vivid the political issues at stake.8 Indeed, a flurryof fascination/
repulsion was created by the Societyforthe Protectionof the Unborn
Children which in April (while the Act was still in debate) sent all
fetus.This parody
650 MPs a life-sizedmodel of a twenty-week-old
of the ubiquitous freegiftwas intended to mobilizea parallel concern
over the limit for legal abortions. The plastic fetus liftedout from
a sectional womb,’ and its message was clear. One can “see” a
(potential) person, and a person is known by its individuality.Individualityin turn means a naturallyentireand free-standingentity:
the claim was that at twentyweeks a fetus is a viable whole.
Between the anthropologistas expert and the layperson with his
or her folk model lies more than an epistemologicalissue over what
is usefullydesignated a “person”; there is an ontological issue over
the nature of the category. The anthropologistis dealing with a
categorythatrefersto certainanalyticalconstructions.The laitymay
argue over what they see and what theycall it but take for granted
that the categoryrefersto persons existingas visibleand substantial
entities.So while it may be hard to tell when a person begins, and
while the law may have to define the stages at which rightsaccrue,
it seems self-evidentthat the subject of these debates is a concrete
human being. The anthropologistis not, of course, untouched by
this cultural certitude.
Now for “person” one could write”gift.”That concept was drawn
into anthropologyfromvarious domains of Westernor Euro-American discourse (economy, theology, and so forth) though its most
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PARTNERS
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583
notable proponents made out of the indigenous connotation of
presentationsvoluntarilymade an analytical category that also included the social fact of obligation. The point is that the concept
of giftseemed readily applicable to self-evidentand concrete “gifts.”
The term trailed a reassuring visualism. One could “see” gift exchange because one could see the gifts, the things that people
exchanged with one another. It also trailed a concern, as Panoff,
Parry, and others have noted, with individual autonomy (voluntarism) and interpersonalrelations measured by degrees of interestedness (altruism).1o
As an anthropologistI am crippled, so to speak, by expertiseby the desire to appropriate the category “gift” in a special way,
insofaras those negotiationsof relationshipsknown as giftexchange
in Melanesia have a characterwhose uniqueness I would be reluctant
to relinquish. I say crippled to the extent that this position appears
to set up barriers. Blind: I do not believe the evidence of my eyes,
that one will recognize a giftwhen one sees it. Constricted:I cannot
strideacross the world map looking for giftsat all times and places.
The wrong color: monochrome rather than polychrome, for exhilarating as the company of other disciplines can be, I lose appropriativecapability,feel verylay in the presence of other expertise.
Other knowledge does not necessarilyrepair deficienciesin one’s
own. Not something that concerns Melanesians, one should add,
for they borrow from foreignersall the time, including the most
intimatepowers of reproduction.
Melanesians borrow origin stories,wealth, and-as in the area I
know best (Mount Hagen)-the expertiseby which to organize their
religion and their future. One clan takes from another its means
of life. Indeed, exchanges surroundingthe transferof reproductive
potential are intrinsicto the constitutionof identity.From a clan’s
point of view, foreign wives are drawn to them by virtue of bridewealth,and such items of wealth are themselvesconsidered to have
reproductive potential. Pigs create pigs and money creates money,
as shell valuables also reproduce themselves,an idea given visible
formin the iconographythatdeveloped withthe influxof pearlshells
into the Hagen area at the time of contact. Shells for circulation
in giftexchange were mounted on resin boards vividlycolored with
red ochre. The whole appeared a free-standingentity.But it was
not an image of one. Rather than plastic molding a visible homunculus, the child/embryoin its netbag/wombwas indicated in the
abstractby the curvatureof the shell crescent,and the resin molded
a container around it.”
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Personalized Commodities?
In taking off from some of the expert discourse of Melanesian
anthropology,I confinemyselfto certainissues in the understanding
of gifts,namely those concerned with reproduction and the life
cycle. It is arguable that all Melanesian giftexchanges are “reproductive,” but I make a more restricted point. The reason is to
provide an approximation of the indigenous Euro-American understandingof giftsas “transactionswithina moral economy,which
[make] possible the extended reproductionof social relations.””12This
account ignoresthose aspects of the Melanesian giftthathave seemed
most strange to the twentieth-century
Westerner(competitionand
the politicalstrivingforprestige),in order to focus on the apparently
familiar (the celebration of kinship).
From the perspective of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, of
the kind that Lederman has described for Mendi,’ I thus appear
to privilegeone nexus of gifting(kinship-based)over another (clanbased). Or, more accurately,to evoke one type of sociality,for it is
also arguable that each set of relations transformsthe moral base
of the other. But my interest is not in the relative moralities of
exchanges.’4 It is in whether Melanesian giftingcan illuminatethe
very idea of there being part-societies(“moral economies”) that
“typicallyconsist of small worlds of personal relationshipsthat are
the emotional core of everyindividual’s social experiences” (GE 15).
Whatever parallels might be useful for earlier European materials,15in the late twentiethcentury any understandings of such
part-societiesmust in turn be put into their specificEuro-American
context: consumer culture. Cheal himself goes on to give a consumeristdefinitionof sociality.Everywhere(he says) people live out
theirlivesin small worlds; the primitive(he says) because the societies
were small, the modern because people “prefer to inhabit intimate
life worlds” (GE 15)[!].16 Now recent anthropological discussion of
the gifthas turned, among other things,on the analyticadvantage
of distinguishinggift-basedeconomies fromcommodity-basedones.
Gregoryhas been notable here,17 and while his argumentsexplicated
the contrastbetween giftsand commoditiesin termsof production,
they have also opened up the question of consumption. In the
formula he adopts, it is throughconsumptionthat thingsare drawn
into the reproduction of persons, and reproduction can be understood as a process of personification.But consumptionas a universal
analyticis one thing. I take my own cue from the furtherfact that
we live in a self-advertised”consumer” culture.
A consumer culture is a culture,one mightsay, of personalization.
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PARTNERS
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And to Euro-Americans, gift-givingseems a highly personalized
form of transaction. After all, it was the person in the gift that
attractedanthropologicalattentionto the concept in the firstplace.
But whether useful parallels can be drawn between the personalizations of consumerismand the personificationsof Melanesian gift
exchange remains to be seen.
Free-standingEntities
The notoriousindividualismof Westernculturehas alwaysseemed
an abstractionof the stateor of the marketeconomy thatlies athwart
those concrete persons we recognize in interactionswithothers. No
one is really an isolate. This was a point the embryologistwanted
to get across, and for which he offered biological reasoning.
Johnson was concerned to demonstrate the influence of the environment in all stages of fetal development. Its significancefor
him lies in itscontributionto the identityof the emergentindividual:
personal identityis the outcome not just of a unique genetic combination but of a unique historyof continuous development which
affectsthe way genetic factorsthemselvestake effect.The organism
is a finiteand discrete entity;the process is continuous. Thus, he
opined, an individual is always in interactionwith its environment.
This provoked a comment from the gynecologistModell who observed that, as far as the embryo is concerned, the environmentis
immediatelythe mother and the mother is anotherperson.Among
other things, the embryo undergoes the effects of the parents’
changing perceptions of it.
The point slid by without much comment. What I see in that
interchange is more than a dispute among experts, for it barely
registered as a dispute. It epitomized the simultaneous delineation
of a hegemonic model (of personhood) and the possibilityof contestingit, somewhat parallel to the manner in which anthropologists
have extricatedthe idea of giftfrom hegemonic understandingsin
Western culture in order to contest either the application of these
understandings to non-Westerncultures or the dominance of the
model in people’s lives.'” Modell’s mild interventionsounded, in
fact, almost like a version of critiques well rehearsed through the
contested notion of rights in abortion debates. The right of the
mother against the right of the child presents a contest of alternatives.’9However I wish to make a differentkind of contestappear.
Johnson’s idea of the individual person doubly defined by genetic
programmingand by environmentalfactorsseems a solution to the
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old nature/nurturedebate: we have, so to speak, put the individual
back into its “environment,”in much the same way as social scientists
are perpetually putting individuals back into “society.”This is an
individualism that gives full recognition to the context in which
persons flourish,and we may read offfromthe image of the embryo
an image of the individual person in a responsive,interactive,and
creativemode withthe externalworld. Indeed, it is colloquial English
to speak of an individual’s “relationship”to its environmentas we
do of an individual’s “relationship”to society.
But what a bizarre coupling! The whole person is held to be a
substantialand visible entity.The environment,on the other hand,
like society,is regularlyconstrued as existingin the abstract,for it
cannot be seen as a whole.2” We may concretize the environment
through examples of its parts, as uterus or as trees and mountains,
as we may concretize society through referring to groups and
institutions.But there was more to Johnson’s purpose. He wished
to conveyhow it is potentiallyeverything
beyond the individualperson
that may influencethat unique person and help make it what it is.
The forces that continuouslyshape us are always,as he comments
elsewhere, both genetic and epigenetic, and “epigenetic” is the
biologist’scatchall “for everythingelse besides the genes.”21I would
add that this makes the latterof a differentorder from the former
precisely insofar as they are imagined, hypotheticallyand thus
abstractly,as infinite.”Myriad” is his word; the environmentconsists
in this view of the sum of all the factorsthat mighthave an effect.
The view against whichJohnson argues would hold thatthe whole
and finiteindividual is determined largely by its genetic programming. But rather than contest, perhaps we should see analogy
between the conceptualizations here. Suppose the concept of the
genetic program were analogous to that of the individual, then the
concept of epigenetic forces would appear analogous to that of
In turn, the relationshipbetween genetic and
environment/society.
forces
that
epigenetic
Johnson postulates would be seen to miniaturize or replicate commonsense understandings of that between
individual organism and enveloping world. And the interest of
Modell’s remark would be in the way it cut across the analogies.
For she displaced the image of a (finite,concrete) person contexwith another
tualized by an (infinite,abstract) society/environment
image: the exterior world imagined as another (finite,concrete)
person.
She thus gave voice to a capabilitythat also rests in English: of
imagininga world that does not imagine such abstractionsfor itself,
where socialityimpinges in the presence of other persons. English
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PARTNERS
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speakers readily enough personifythe agency of “society”or even
“environment,”though they would be hard put to think of these
entitiesas persons. Yet that is exactly the way in which they might
imagine that Melanesians imagine the world beyond themselves.22
What contains the child is indeed “another person,” whether that
other person is the mother,or the clan that nurtures its progeny,
or the land that nurtures the clan and receives a fertilizingcounterpart in the burial of the placenta. This other person may be
regarded as the cause or origin of the effectiveagency of those it
contains.23
When Euro-Americans think of more than one person, they are
faced with the disjunction of unique individuals and overcome this
in the notion that individuals “relate” to one another. What lies
between them are relationships,so that societymay be thought of
as the totalityof made relationships.That relationshipsare made
further supposes that what are linked are persons as individual
subjects or agents who engage in their making: “[i]nterpersonal
dependence is everywhere[!] the result of socially constructedties
between human agents” (GE 11). The idea of persons in the plural
evokes, then, the image of the interactionsbetween them, in turn
the immediate social environmentfor any one of them.
It is because societyis likened to an environmentthat it is possible
for Euro-Americans to think of individual persons as relating not
to other persons but to society as such, and to think of relations
as afterthe fact of the individual’s personhood rather than integral
to it. Or so the folk model goes. Anthropologists,for their part,
have captured the categoryof person to stand forsubjectsunderstood
analyticallyin the context of social relations with others. In the
particular way she/he looks to making “society” visible,24the anthropologist would be scandalized at the idea of a nonrelational
definitionof persons.
The analyticalnecessityappears to have been given by just such
societies as are found in Melanesia. Indeed, the anthropological
experience may be that in such societies everythingis relational.
Certainly Melanesians constantlyrefer to the acts and thoughtsof
other persons. But if they seeminglysituate themselvesin a world
full of what we call “social relationships,”such relationshipsdo not
link individuals. Rather, the fact of relating forms a background
socialityto people’s existence, out of which people work to make
specific relationships appear.25 Relations are thus integral to the
person or, in Wagner’s formulation,26persons may be understood
fractally:theirdimensionalitycannot be expressed in whole numbers.
The fractalperson is an entitywithrelationshipsintegrallyimplied.
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588
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
mobilizes
the same dimensionality
of
Anyscale of socialactivity
person/relation.
Thereis no axiomatic
of intimacy
or closenesshere.
evaluation
On thecontrary,
themselves.
between
peopleworktocreatedivisions
Forin theactivation
of relations
whatdifferpeoplemakeexplicit
them.27
entiates
One mayputit thatit is therelationship
between
themthatseparatesdonorfromrecipient
or motherfromchild.
Personsare detached,notas individuals
fromthebackground
of
or
from
but
other
detachsociety environment,
persons.However,
mentisneverfinal,
isconstantly
inpeople’s
andtheprocess
recreated
in
with
one
To
thus
be
a
state
of
division
with
another.
dealings
to
others
renders
the
Melanesian
dividual.
respect
person
as free-standing.
A
Personsare not conceptualized,
therefore,
clan
is
of
its
and
those
detached
Hagen
composed
agnates
foreigners
a womancontains
fromotherclanswho…
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