Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore the nature of intellectual debt and influence; specifically my own debt to the work and person of Marilyn Strathern. This is achieved through an exploration of the literary idea of inspiration and an engagement with my ethnography of English fiction readers.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I aim to explore the nature of intellectual debt and influence; specifically my own debt to the work and person of Marilyn Strathern. But rather than assess this relationship through a reflection upon ideas of intellectual property, kinship and knowledge transmission [typical domains of Strathernian deployment], I wish to use the literary concept of 'inspiration'. This will involve an engagement with local theories of creativity from my ethnography of English fiction readers and webloggers. Part of the task of the paper will be to explore the dynamics and attributions of agency around this interaction. What does it mean for Strathern to inspire? What does it mean to claim to be inspired by Strathern? Finally, I reflect on what a Melanesian counterpart to the notion of inspiration might be.

Paper short abstract:

In south Vanuatu knowledge was passed along controlled ritual roads; now indigenous researchers are working to retrieve knowledge about that system. Strathern identifies description as the end point of anthropological analysis: these indigenous researchers use anthropological tools to obtain knowledge as a resource for further action. This paper investigates these intersections.

Paper long abstract:

On Tanna, Vanuatu, some knowledge was literally routed: it passed along controlled ritual roads, some of which are still in operation. These roads loop around the island, linking a number of places and hence, a number of men. Individual men inherit the right to control and transmit information along a certain section of these roads. The adjacent island of Erromango, which suffered massive population loss between 1840 and 1945, also operated at least one ritual road, which linked the whole island in a single competitive system. Knowledge about this road is being retrieved by Erromangan researchers, trained through the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. It is being retrieved both through a combination of ethnographic, archaeological and historical research. But while they are using the tools of social science, ni-Vanuatu researchers have quite a different objective for their research. From Marilyn Strathern I learnt that description is the end point of anthropological analysis, 'Description,' she says, 'presupposes analysis, and analysis presupposes theory, and they all presuppose imagination' (1999:xi). Ni-Vanuatu researchers are not setting out to describe analytically, but to use knowledge as a resource for further action: my capacity to describe their use of knowledge as resource is informed by Marilyn's theoretical innovations, but their use of social science methodologies has far more to do with the model of knowledge as passing along controlled routes, from person to person. .This paper will tease out some of the complexities of these intersections.

Strathern, M. 1999. Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things.

Paper short abstract:

What would anthropological engagement look like without a distinct category of knowledge about 'the social'?

Paper long abstract:

Viewing knowledge as a kind of object which can be transferred from one mind, context, discipline, or sector into another suits a particular contemporary version of political economy and its attendant rules governing circulation, reputation and ownership. As Riles and Miyazaki have recently addressed, faced with complex enterprises, it appears that certain projects require the 'addition' of one kind of knowledge to another, thereby making 'gaps' disappear. Social scientific engagement is pre-specified in its form and utility in these instances. Starting from a Strathernian notion of knowledge as the kind of thing which does not have 'gaps', this paper will develop an argument for writing an anthropology which obviates 'the social' as a distinct category of knowledge, focussing instead on ethnographic engagement as collaboration, and utile understandings as those embedded in persons and relations.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the paradox of persistence of heteronormative values in same-sex partner families. Prevalence of heteronormativity does not allow re-conceptualising the family relationships in gender neutral terms and solve the inner tension created by conforming to norms and structural inability to do so.

Paper long abstract:

The paper addresses the paradox of the sudden Latvian societal revolt against homosexual community resulting in hostile talk and action throwing human excrements at homosexuals. At the same time the Constitution was amended with a norm of a family as a heterosexual union. However, the statistics show that almost half of children are born out of wedlock and at least one third of families is single parent headed. The paper is based on research on same-sex adult families with children, involving homosexual partnerships and mother-daughter tandems. All families involved declared themselves families and raised children. These families allow examining the real and declared relationships, strategies of positioning themselves within heteronormativity. Heteronormativity makes both kinds of families structurally invisible. While homosexual couples utilise traditional family roles and kinship networks through sexuality relations, mother-daughter relations tend to negate the actual parental role structuring their daily routine and duties "normalising" their family through symbolic and temporal absence of the father-husband figure. Both families live in a "closet" and tend to conceal their relationships in public. Prevalence of heteronormativity does not allow re-conceptualising the family relationships in gender neutral terms and solve the inner tension created by conforming to norms. Their relations embody the paradox of simultaneous approve and negation showing the depth of gendered perception of person and his or her position in family.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the linked concepts of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ acted as a prism through which the ideas of a diverse and previously disparate group of people became mutually intelligible in the context of a large-scale resettlement project in Ghana

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how the linked concepts of 'development' and 'modernity' acted as a prism through which the ideas of a diverse and previously disparate group of people became mutually intelligible in the context of a large-scale resettlement project in Ghana. During the 1960s the Akosombo Dam flooded 700 villages, leading to the resettlement of 80,000 people in centrally planned towns that were imagined as props to the modernizing ambitions of the Nkrumah government. Drawing on Strathern's theorization of artefacts, I explore how the material embodiments of these past development ideologies continue to manifest themselves in the present. In particular my account focuses on how those who were re-settled literally extend the visions of planners and architects both through 'practices of everyday life' and the modification of resettlement houses. In this context I argue that resettlement acted to objectify the visions of planners and bureaucrats in ways that re-routed existing forms of knowledge and relationship in new and largely un-anticipated ways.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is an ethnographic exploration of the Mission Eternity Project and it illuminates contemporary conceptualisations of human remains in informational economies. It considers the question of what kind of knowledge can be routed through a digitised deceased.

Paper long abstract:

In her 2005 "Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected" Marilyn Strathern analyses Euro-American conceptualisation of human material in the context of ever increasing sophistication of biomedical technology, and its crossing with heightened notions of ownership. Revisiting this material, I observe that many Euro-American practices of recovering, retrieving or repiecing corpses tacitly rest on a conception of the dead body's integrity. The proposed paper aims to develop an anthropological understanding of the equation between the person and individual body (or collection of body parts) through an ethnographic consideration of the 'Mission Eternity Project', an artistic endeavour exploring intimations of immortality.

Launched by the Swiss art group etoy in 2005, the Mission Eternity Project was conferred with the VIDA Award 2007 for "on the one hand foregrounding the human longing somehow to survive after death, and on the other cultivating a sense of irony about the dated sci-fi fantasies people entertain in seeking to satisfy that desire" (excerpt from the VIDA jury statement). This paper specifically examines one of the artefacts created by the project - the Sarcophagus, a mobile sepulchre displaying composite portraits of those who consented to have their 'informational remnants' cross over into a digital afterlife. By enquiring into the compositional or repiecing effect of the objects and practices deployed by Mission Eternity Project practitioners, this reading illuminates contemporary conceptualisations of human remains in informational economies and considers the question of what kind of knowledge can be routed through a digitised deceased.

Paper short abstract:

In After Nature, Marilyn Strathern reflects that ‘For one who perceives the world relationally, it is always the eleventh hour, the implosion of the evolutionary clock, the moment of terminal realisation’. This is an apposite moment in which to reflect on the changes upon us?climate crisis, obviation and retirement.

Paper long abstract:

In After Nature, Marilyn Strathern reflects that 'For one who perceives the world relationally, it is always the eleventh hour, the implosion of the evolutionary clock, the moment of terminal realisation'. Depictions of climate change increasingly dominate contemporary contexts and sustain the sensation of life itself at the eleventh hour?on the very threshold of momentous evolutionary change. After Nature suggested that the heat generating the 'greenhouse effect' derives from the claustrophobia felt when new bio-technologies enabled the conceptual collapse of nature and culture, from the anxiety of self-consumption through resource usage, and even dated the literalization of this 'outlandish metaphor' to 1989. Climate change thus appears as a contemporary, and man-made, phenomena and as the moral cause of our age?as if the greenhouse effect of cultural conceptual transformation can now literally be seen and scientifically verified by analysing ice-core records. An anthropological analyst may see the relation between the figurative and the literal, and yet an effect of symbolic obviation is to now conceal, and now reveal, the ground of relations for cultural practitioners. Similarly perhaps, Strathern's work in obviating the ethnocentric origins of social constructionism, in theorising symbolic form and in emphasising the method of the relation, might have brought anthropology to the threshold of momentous change. This eleventh hour is perhaps an apposite moment in which to reflect on the changes upon us, and on what it means for an anthropologist to perceive the world relationally.