Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered 9781845458966

Citation preview

KINSHIP

AND

BEYOND

Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality GENERAL EDITORS: David Parkin, Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Soraya Tremayne, Co-ordinating Director of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and a Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute Volume 1 Managing Reproductive Life: Cross-Cultural Themes in Fertility and Sexuality Edited by Soraya Tremayne Volume 2 Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand Heather Montgomery Volume 3 Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformations in Childbearing Edited by Maya Unnithan-Kumar Volume 4 A New Look at Thai AIDS: Perspectives from the Margin Graham Fordham Volume 5 Breast Feeding and Sexuality: Behaviour, Beliefs and Taboos among the Gogo Mothers in Tanzania Mara Mabilia Volume 6 Ageing without Children: European and Asian Perspectives on Elderly Access to Support Networks Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill Volume 7 Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients Monica Konrad Volume 8 Population, Reproduction and Fertility in Melanesia Edited by Stanley J. Ulijaszek Volume 9 Procreation, Family and Assisted Conception in South Europe Monica Bonaccorso Volume 10 Where There is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India Sarah Pinto Volume 11 Reproductive Disruptions: Gender, Technology, and Biopolitics in the New Millennium Marcia Inhorn Volume 12 Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Helene Goldberg, and Maruska la Cour Mosegaard Volume 13 Transgressive Sex, Transforming Bodies Edited by Donnan and Macgowan Volume 14 European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology Edited by Edwards and Salazar Volume 15 Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered Edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach

KINSHIP AND BEYOND THE GENEALOGICAL MODEL RECONSIDERED

Edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2009 Sandra Bamford and James Leach All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kinship and beyond : the genealogical model reconsidered / edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach. p. cm. — (Fertility, reproduction and sexuality ; v. 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-422-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kinship. 2. Genealogy. 3. Human population genetics. I. Bamford, Sandra C., 1962–. II. Leach, James, 1969– GN486.5.K56 2009 306.83—dc22 2008032691

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-422-7 Hardback

CONTENTS

List of Figures Introduction: Pedigrees of Knowledge: Anthropology and the Genealogical Method Sandra Bamford and James Leach 1. Arborescent Culture: Writing and Not Writing Racehorse Pedigrees Rebecca Cassidy

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2. When Blood Matters: Making Kinship in Colonial Kenya J. Teresa Holmes

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3. The Web of Kin: An Online Genealogical Machine Gísli Pálsson

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4. Genes, Mobilities and the Enclosures of Capital: Contesting Ancestry and Its Applications in Iceland Hilary Cunningham 5. Skipping a Generation and Assisting Conception Jeanette Edwards 6. ‘Family Trees’ among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea: A Non-Genealogical Approach to Imagining Relatedness Sandra Bamford 7. Knowledge as Kinship: Mutable Essence and the Significance of Transmission on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea James Leach 8. Stories against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge Tim Ingold

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Contents

9. Revealing and Obscuring Rivers’s Pedigrees: Biological Inheritance and Kinship in Madagascar Rita Astuti

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10. The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-essays on Kinship and Magic Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

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List of Contributors

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Index

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LIST

OF

FIGURES

Figure I.1: Javanese tree image.

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Figure 1.1: Catalogue page.

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Figure 1.2: Royal Family and Ascot.

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Figure 1.3: Simplified Tree of the Jarvis, Butters, Leader and Hall Families.

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Figure 1.4: The Day, Cannon, Piggott, Rickaby and Armstrong Families.

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Figure 1.5: The Royal Ascot winners in the male line from Stockwell.

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Figure 2.1: The standard model of the segmentary lineage system.

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Figure 2.2: An explanation of how various groupings of kin can be related in Luo society.

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Figure 2.3: Depiction of a Nuer lineage system.

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Figure 3.1: La Lignée de Sainte Anne. Source: Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon, © Studio Basset.

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Figure 3.2: Operating the genealogical machine: number of visits (log-ins per day). Source: deCODE genetics.

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Figure 4.1: Cover of Nature. Reprinted with permission.

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Figure 4.2: Cover of Science. Reprinted with permission.

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Figure 6.1: The ‘One-Blood’ relationship.

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Figure 7.1: Palem constructed in Ririnbung Hamlet, September 2006. Photograph by James Leach.

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List of Figures

Figure 8.1: Dual inheritance model of genetic and cultural transmission.

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Figure 8.2: Story and life.

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Figure 8.3: Wayfaring and transport.

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Figure 8.4: Meshwork and network.

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Figure 8.5: Lines of transmission and transport.

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Figure 8.6: Five generations.

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Introduction

PEDIGREES ANTHROPOLOGY

OF

AND THE

KNOWLEDGE GENEALOGICAL METHOD

Sandra Bamford and James Leach

‘I

t will lead to an understanding of who we are as a species and how we came to be.’ These bold words were uttered by Dr. MarieClaire King, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, to refer to the plan to create a global map of human genetic diversity (quoted in Lewin 1993: 25). Known as the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), the aim of this venture has been to ‘create a data base of human genetic variation’ (Hayden 1998: 174) before this diversity disappears from the planet. The plan entails collecting blood and tissue samples from literally hundreds of indigenous groups worldwide. Targeted groups were selected on the basis of their geographic isolation – with priority going to those who are ‘most endangered’ (Hayden 1998: 179), and their presumed ability to answer questions of compelling scientific interest. As described by the major parties involved, the ultimate goal of the HGDP was to create a microphylogeny of the human species – a master genealogy of the human race – which could then be used to study patterns of human migration and disease susceptibility (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1991; Gillis 1994; Hayden 1998; Lewin 1993). The project was also seen to be of value to those groups from whose bodies tissue samples are being drawn. In the words of one proponent who appeared before an audience of bioethicists at the International Congress of Bioethics in 1996: ‘We are going to tell these peo-

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ple who they really are’ (quoted in Marks 2001: 355, italics added). As they strive to create an authoritative account of human identity and history, proponents of the HGDP cast into stark relief several themes that have been of central concern to anthropological researchers for decades. These include how social groups are constituted through time and what role heredity plays in establishing various kinds of social identities (Marks 2001: 377). In this collection we explore the seemingly natural place that a genealogical paradigm occupies in Euro-American thought. More specifically, we are concerned with the ways in which assumptions that lie behind a genealogical model – in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission – structure other modes of practice and knowledge making in domains that lie well beyond what we normally label ‘kinship’. In the diverse set of essays that follow, the contributors to this volume examine the role that genealogical thinking has played in structuring the development of social science thought, including, among other things, how anthropologists have approached the social lives of non-Western peoples. Genealogical modelling became a standardized implement in the anthropological toolkit with the publication in 1910 of W.H.R. Rivers’s essay The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry. Armed with a technique that was intended to facilitate ethnographic comparison, scholars have undertaken a great deal of anthropological work following his procedure, thereby implicitly drawing upon the assumptions that are inherent in this model. Schneider’s (1968, 1984) critique of ‘kinship’ was intended to debunk the premises upon which genealogical thinking rested. Yet despite the critical acclaim with which his work was received in anthropology, the genealogical model has proven to have a remarkable tenacity in the discipline and continues to underpin a great deal of work in the social and natural sciences (see Ingold 1990, 2000). This volume addresses the persistence of genealogical thinking. In addition to examining the role that it has played in framing orthodox anthropological understandings of ‘kinship’, the chapters in this collection broaden the scope of inquiry to include a consideration of how the concept of genealogy has influenced Euro-American understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman species. We also consider how recent developments in the fields of science and technology are providing scholars with new avenues through which to view many assumptions that inform genealogical thinking. The contributions make clear that a genealogical paradigm

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not only figures centrally in organizing knowledge about the world alone but is also implicit in structuring those social institutions and relations that give our social world its form and meaning. The chapters draw upon ethnographically based analyses to address a series of important questions. We began by asking contributors to consider exactly what the genealogical model is – either theoretically or historically – and to what extent anthropological theory relies (both implicitly and explicitly) upon the assumptions inherent in this framework. Secondly, we were interested in understanding the degree to which genealogical thinking has been constituted through a set of metaphorical borrowings between the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ sciences. In tracing this, we are concerned with highlighting any additional domains of thought into which the genealogical model has penetrated. Given these overlaps and borrowings, what does the adoption of a genealogical model occlude, if anything, in terms of our ability to understand human / environmental relations? Such questions in turn prompt enquiry into our notions of ownership and of creativity, and how these too are structured by elements of the genealogical model of reckoning connection and relatedness. Given recent shifts in science and medicine, we also examine how the rise of biotechnology has both challenged and reaffirmed the assumptions upon which a genealogical framework is based. And finally, we were concerned with investigating how anthropologists might go about developing alternative models of understanding that move beyond the assumptions that undergird a genealogical framework. In addressing these issues, the chapters in this book contribute to several ongoing debates in anthropology. By returning to the founding premises of our discipline, the authors reconsider anthropology’s ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the social and natural sciences. Secondly, we bring new perspectives to bear upon contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effects on social life. Thirdly, the chapters engage with the recent revival of interest in kinship as ‘modes of relating’. The focus on genealogical thinking, we believe, is a shift that can tell us new things about our own epistemology and help us to separate out elements that inform and in some cases hinder our theorizing.

Conceptual Beginnings and Ethnographic Emplacements Although a genealogical model formally entered anthropology through the work of W.H.R. Rivers, the concept has far greater his-

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torical depth in Euro-American thought. As Mary Bouquet has argued, genealogical thinking draws upon the diffuse currency of tree imagery as a taxonomic device for organizing religious, secular and scientific purposes in the West (1996: 43). As we shall see, the broad range of contexts within which this concept has figured in the popular imagination – not to mention its seemingly natural acceptance as a founding principle of anthropological thinking –helps to elucidate its appeal to Rivers as a methodological device.1 Early uses of the family tree as a representational device are to be found in Christian religious texts. As Bouquet relates, from the eleventh century on, various Christian scholars sought to represent the ancestry of Jesus from Jesse, who is said to have been the father of David, following the information in the Old Testament. Known as the Tree of Jesse (radix Jesse in Latin), these visual illustrations are often found in medieval manuscripts, wall paintings, woodcarvings, stained glass windows, floor tiles and embroidery. In renderings of the Tree, it is usual for Jesse to be portrayed reclining on a couch with a tree rising from his body and the ancestors of Christ depicted in its branches along with prophets and evangelists. Moving up the trunk, one encounters four kings, the Virgin and the Trinity. Jesus Christ is enthroned at the summit of the Tree. Given its use in sacred literature and imagery, it is not surprising that genealogical reckoning came to serve as a model of distinction in early European society, nor that aspects of its visual representation appear in fascinating diffraction in many places (see Figure I.1).2 By the end of the twelfth century, genealogy had become the surest means of preserving the memory of one’s ancestors and of enhancing the prestige of an elite family. Demonstrated birth and membership in an aristocratic family became the legitimizing criteria for anyone who wanted to take advantage of the automatic inheritance system for fiefs. By 1500, a ‘well born’ man thought of his ancestors and descendants as a group of people through whose veins flowed the same noble blood (Klapisch-Zuber 1991: 107–9). The presumed transmittal of noble qualities between parents and offspring was legitimized by keeping detailed records of one’s family tree – a written pedigree – which documented that the purity of the noble line had not been sullied by interbreeding with outsiders of an inferior class. As Bouquet notes: ‘[The] nobility, who seem to exercise control over their marriages (and hence the intermingling of blood in their offspring) are distinguished from the common ranks where chance appears to govern convergence of partners. Breeding emphasizes the behavioural outcome of controlled procreation: being

Introduction: Pedigrees of Knowledge

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FIGURE I.1: Javanese tree image.

well bred implies having natural good manners and gentility’ (1993: 190). Biblical imagery in the form of genealogy furnished a metaphor for imagining class-based distinctions during certain periods of European history, but its influence did not end there. A genealogical framework came to provide an organizing trope for nineteenth-century evolutionary biology, a discipline with huge and ongoing influence,

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as the HGDP attests. As Marilyn Strathern (1992) outlines, Darwin’s intent in writing The Origin of Species (1859) was to develop a master genealogy of the ‘natural world’. He endeavoured to show that human beings are connected ‘through the great trunk of life’ (Bouquet 1996: 56) to apes, salamanders, dogs and single-celled organisms, to name but a few. Toward this end, Darwin drew upon relationships in the social world (i.e., existing kinship configurations) in order to describe relationships between natural species. Throughout The Origin of Species, terms such as ‘descent’, ‘affinity’ and ‘ancestry’ are used to express ideas about the evolution of life forms for which there existed no ready-made vocabulary (Strathern 1992: 90). Yet as Strathern notes, in drawing upon existing notions of pedigree for inspiration, Darwin also transformed them in important ways. In particular, he divested pedigree of its aristocratic underpinnings and replaced it with a democratized vision of genealogy as organizing various organic processes. As Strathern explains: ‘Contained within [The Origin of Species] is a double move: in undoing the connotations of rank and status attached to the very fact of knowing one’s pedigree, he puts in place the assumption that a genealogy is a recorder of natural relations. It displays physical kinship in the chain of being. If there were once a sense in which only the aspiring had “connections,” now we all have connections and, as he put it, probably all the organic beings which have lived on this earth appear descended from one primordial type’ (1992: 91). In one and the same move, Darwin both broadened the scope of genealogy and recast it as being grounded in ‘nature’ and thus as having an unchanging and primordial essence. It was the newly attributed scientific qualities associated with the genealogical framework that prompted Rivers to adopt it as a tool for ethnographic research. Indeed, according to Bouquet, Rivers intended nothing less than to establish ethnography as a science ‘as exact as physics or chemistry’ (1993: 114). Toward this end, he enjoined fieldworkers to obtain ‘basic information’ on relatedness by collecting genealogical data as a standard component of ethnographic research. As envisioned by Rivers, the genealogical method involved two distinct tasks: first, a pedigree consisting of the proper names of relatives of a particular individual was assembled; next, the terms for addressing these persons were collected (Rivers 1910; Bouquet 1993: 32). It was felt that this procedure allowed the fieldworker to capture the thought processes through which the population being studied classified kinspersons within their social universe. It also allowed ethnographers to discover laws concerning local patterns of

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social organization. Rivers extols the virtues of this method in his 1910 essay: ‘By means of the genealogical method, it is possible, with no knowledge of the language and with very inferior interpreters, to work out with the utmost accuracy, systems of kinship so complicated that Europeans who have spent their whole lives among the people have never been able to grasp them’ (1910: 107). In addition to its utility in revealing indigenous forms of sociality, the genealogical method was scientifically sound for other reasons as well. It provided the researcher with a means of double-checking the veracity of informants’ statements, thereby bolstering the empirical reliability of the investigation as a whole: Among savages, just as among ourselves, there are the greatest differences between persons in the accuracy with which they can give an account of a ceremony or describe the history of a person or course of events. The genealogical method gives one a ready means of testing this accuracy. I do not mean merely that a person who remembers pedigrees accurately will probably have an accurate memory on other subjects, but that the concrete method of inquiry which the genealogical method renders possible enables one to detect carelessness and inaccuracy so much more readily than is possible by the more ordinary methods of inquiry. It is not an unimportant point that the knowledge that the facts are accurate gives one a sense of comfort in one’s work which is no small asset in the trying conditions, climatic and otherwise, in which most anthropological work has to be done. (Rivers 1910: 107–8)

From the perspective of contemporary anthropological kinship theory it is ironic (see Astuti and Viveiros de Castro, this volume) that Rivers believed that one of the greatest advantages of his method was that it would ‘preserve’ indigenous culture against the onslaught of European influences. In his essay, he writes: It is almost impossible at the present time to find a people whose culture, beliefs and practices are not suffering from the effects of European influence, an influence which as been especially active during the last fifty years. To my mind, the greatest merit of the genealogical method is that it often takes us back to a time before this influence has reached people. It may give us records of marriages and descent and other features of social organization one hundred and fifty years ago, while events a century old may be obtained in abundance in all of the communities with whom I myself have worked, and I believe that with proper care they could be obtained from nearly every people. (Rivers 1910: 109, italics added)

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The development of the ‘genealogical method’ was to have a profound impact on the intellectual history of anthropology. Holding out the promise of scientific objectivity, it was enthusiastically adopted by field researchers for many decades, and continues to be advocated as a methodological instrument in many standard introductory texts. Significantly, Rivers’s focus on pedigree as the pre-eminent tool of cross-cultural research ‘paved the way for kinship to become the centrepiece of British social anthropology during the first half of the 20th century’ (Bouquet 1993: 208). Whatever else an ethnographer might seek to document, a description of the ‘kinship system’ was a required component of his or her research. As a common denominator in anthropological accounts of ‘primitive people’, kinship allowed each society to be analysed separately and then compared according to a standard global idiom. Even as late as 1967, J.A. Barnes referred to the collection of genealogical diagrams as ‘part of the ethnographer’s minimum obligation for making fieldwork intelligible to others’ (quoted in Bouquet 1994: 43). An understanding of kinship, viewed through the lens of a genealogical framework, was (and often continues to be) an incontrovertible component of ethnographic research. It was, of course, David Schneider who came to question the foundation upon which over half a century of anthropological research had been based. In his first major work, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968), Schneider set out to expose the assumptions that structured North American kinship configurations. He argued that North American kinship logic rested on a distinction between two orders: the order of nature and the order of law. He demonstrated that in the worldview of many North Americans, one can be related ‘by blood’ (i.e., in ‘nature’), or one can be related ‘in law’ (by marriage). Sexual intercourse served as a core symbol in this conceptual framework inasmuch as it provided a bridge between these two domains: ‘This figure [coitus] provides all of the cultural symbols of American kinship. The figure is formulated in American culture as a biological entity and a natural act. Yet throughout, each element which is culturally defined as natural is at the same time augmented and elaborated, built upon and informed by the rule of human reason, embodied in law and in morality’ (Schneider 1968: 40). Sexual intercourse between two people who are biologically unrelated (but married, that is, related in law) results in children who are connected to their parents through shared biogenetic substance (nature), but who will relate to one another on the basis of love (i.e., through social conventions). Kinship is biology with cul-

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ture put on top. It has to do with the social regulation of biological givens. To the extent that Schneider demonstrated that our taken-forgranted understandings of kinship were the product of our own cultural assumptions, the implications of his study were far-reaching.3 Schneider suggested that insofar as the categories of culture and nature (‘social’ vs. ‘biological’ kinship) had informed the bulk of our ethnographic research abroad, we had failed as a discipline to understand much of anything about the world. For several decades, cultural anthropology had staked out a seemingly unique place in the social sciences by virtue of its seemingly ‘obsessive’ (Franklin 1998: 102) interest in matters pertaining to kinship and succession. Any particular kinship system was seen as a cultural elaboration on the ‘basic facts of life’ (Fox 1967: 27). It was the task of sociocultural anthropology to document the different interpretative spins that each society placed on procreative arrangements. But if the distinction between ‘social’ versus ‘biological’ kinship was culturally specific, what exactly had anthropologists been studying? In his second major work, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Schneider 1984) tackled this question in detail. He argued that what anthropologists had been studying (or thought they had been studying) for well over a century was nothing more than a reflection of EuroAmerican cultural categories taken abroad. The taken-for-granted assumption that people everywhere assigned conceptual significance to the ‘facts’ of human sexual reproduction and classified relatives in accordance with these principles revealed more about the internal fabric of dominant Western worldviews than it did about the societies that anthropologists purported to be studying. In the course of deconstructing the universal basis of kinship, Schneider also deconstructed kinship as an independently existing analytical domain (Weston 1995: 89). The publication of Critique challenged the idea that the study of kinship was front and central to anthropology. Having ‘dismantled the subfield’s procreative underpinnings’ (Weston 1995: 89), Schneider undermined the foundations upon which kinship as a domain of scholarly theorizing rested. If kinship was not the ‘same thing’ in all cultures, then the comparative mission of anthropology seemed doomed to fail (Carsten 2000: 25). Like was not being compared with like. Having lost its genealogical underpinnings, the study of kinship appeared to lose its status as an independent object of analytical inquiry. Not surprisingly, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, studies of kinship came to be subsumed by studies of gender. In a like man-

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ner, analyses highlighting the play of politics and power replaced an earlier interest in elucidating the presumed ‘jural’ properties of kinship relationships. In the wake of Schneider’s critique, anthropologists were left with something of a conundrum: they could either abandon the concept of kinship altogether (see Leach 2003: 85–86), or they could adopt a far wider definition of the concept than had been used in previous discussions. Since the early 1990s at least, an attempt has been made in the latter direction. This effort has drawn upon a notion of ‘relatedness’ to define kinship as a ‘process’ rather than a state of being. Proponents of this model have given much attention to optative and adoptive relations, to postnatal modes of creating substance-based links through purposeful acts of feeding, caring, loving and sharing (see Viveiros de Castro, this volume). To redefine kinship in this manner, it is argued, offers redemption for the topic by understanding it to be a varied and locally constituted process, not dependent upon Western notions of procreation as the defining element relating persons to one another. Janet Carsten’s (1995, 1997) work with Malays in Southeast Asia is representative of this theoretical move. In an article that discusses social relations on the island of Langkawi, she writes: ‘Here, I focus strictly on notions about substance and the way it is acquired through feeding. My intent is to show how bodily substance is not something with which Malays are simply born and remains forever unchanged, [but] to show how it gradually accrues and changes throughout life as persons participate in relationships’ (Carsten 1995: 225). Mary Weismantel (1995) adopts a similar stance in her analysis of Zumbagua adoptions. More specifically, she states: ‘The physical acts of intercourse, pregnancy, and birth can establish a strong bond between two adults and a child. But other adults, by taking a child into their family and nurturing its physical needs through the same substances as those eaten by the rest of the social group can make that child a son or daughter who is physically as well as jurally their own’ (Weismantel 1995: 695). This model appears, at first glance, to represent a new point of departure in our understanding of social relations. Analyses that treat kinship as a fluid process rather than a “state” suggest the emergence of a new kind of anthropology, in which scholars have finally succeeded in moving beyond the assumptions of a genealogical framework. One aim of this collection is to suggest that the situation is not quite so simple. As the chapters here illustrate, genealogical thinking permeates more than Euro-American conceptualizations

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of kinship. It follows that any thoroughgoing critique of the concept must extend beyond an investigation of kin connections. The logic of genealogy has become entrenched in medical practices, innovations in technology, corporate boardrooms, the organization of colleges and universities, Western conceptions of self and personhood, and the organization of the organic world. Consider the following short vignettes: • In the fall of 2002, a London hospital became the source of a media frenzy when it was revealed that two women had been implanted with the ‘wrong’ embryos while undergoing IVF procedures (Marsh 2002). Because identification labels were not properly checked, one patient’s healthiest embryos were implanted in a second woman whose embryos, in turn, went to a third woman. The first patient received her own embryos, but they were of a poorer quality and failed to develop into a pregnancy. When the ‘mistake’ was detected, the two women were ordered to report back to the hospital where an emergency technique was carried out to ‘flush’ the embryos from their wombs. The women were also given drugs to ensure that there was no risk of pregnancy (Allen 2002; Pook and Martin 2002). • In California’s Silicone Valley, computer scientists have been hard at work developing artificial life systems that are intended to replicate processes of biological evolution. The goal is to recreate biological phenomena from first principles by putting together digital systems that behave like living organisms insofar as they can reproduce, mutate, compete and ultimately evolve into new digital forms (Helmreich 1998: 207). In many artificial life simulations, computer organisms ‘mate’ through a process in which they mutually exchange computer codes or bit streams. The terms ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are routinely used to refer to the ‘generational’ relationship between digital organisms. In a recent gathering of international scientists at MIT, Tom Ray – the creator of one such simulation – made an impassioned plea for a portion of internet space to be given over to these digital organisms so they could ‘roam freely in a cyberspace reserve, “evolving” into new unexpected, and potentially useful software forms’ (Helmreich 1998: 222). • In March of 2004, interior designer and business entrepreneur Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale. Within hours of the

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verdict, whereupon she would face prison time, stock in her company, Martha Stewart Living, dropped 22.6 points on the New York Stock Exchange (‘Stewart Convicted on All Charges’ 2004). The incident brings to mind Franklin, Lury and Stacey’s (2002: 68–70) perceptive insight that the reproduction of commodities and markets is grounded in a genealogical framework. In the case of Martha Stewart Living, so close was the connection between the life of the person and the life of the brand (i.e., brand : product :: genetrix : progeny) that when Stewart’s ‘good name’ (pedigree) came under attack, so too did the reputation of the products she represented. • In many colleges within Cambridge University, new students are initiated into the ‘culture’ of the institution by being assigned mentors who facilitate their transition to college life. Drawing upon kinship metaphors – in particular, the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – knowledge is ‘passed on’ to new recruits in a way that is intended to mimic the care giving role between parents and children. Firstyears have the opportunity to mix with ‘another generation’ and are drawn into groups and invited to events that have an established history. Transmission of norms and values is expected. Being assigned a mother and father, rather than ‘mentors’, emphasizes the corporate familial context of these institutions and reportedly makes a great deal of difference in how seriously the mentors take their responsibilities to their ‘children’. Versions of this kinship-like relationship are to be found in other, particularly prestigious, educational institutions in Europe and the United States. • In 2003, the Book of Icelanders – an online genealogical data base – was made available as a public resource to residents of that country. Since that time, thousands of Icelanders have gone online to explore their ‘family tree’. Pálsson (this volume) recounts the considerable disquiet experienced by some citizens when they discover that they have no digital relations. In one incident, an individual wrote to the company responsible for updating and maintaining the website, claiming that according to his online search he has no connection to a single human being. He asks the company ‘to fix the error so that I can convince myself that I do exist’. These examples (both more and less serious) are highly suggestive. What they help to illustrate is that a genealogical framework underpins domains of thought and institutional arrangements far removed from what typically falls under the rubric of family life. To

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expose genealogical thinking through an investigation of kinship alone leaves many elements of the framework tellingly intact in a host of other arenas. As a consequence, genealogical assumptions are often woven back into anthropological accounts, even when every effort has been made to avoid their uncritical application. It is here that the chapters in the present volume hold out promise. They show in various ways how genealogical thinking permeates a range of social institutions such as property inheritance, pedagogy, ethnicity, class and politics, not to mention how we conceptualize human ecology.

New Directions In the introduction to their edited volume, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon quote Ladislav Holy. He wrote that ‘new insights into kinship have been gained, as they are always gained, through shift[s] in contextualization’ (Holy, in Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 20). The chapters in this volume engage in a parallel enterprise. The focus on the genealogical model is a shift that we believe can tell us new things about our own epistemology and help us isolate certain elements that organize social scientific investigation and knowledge making. Some of the chapters in this collection explore the idea that genealogical modelling of kinship relations has, in fact, done a disservice to the discipline. The fact that connections and relations have been modelled on pedigree and the representational image of the family tree detracts from recognizing the possibilities of other forms of organization and of the different assumptions (and indeed asymmetries) these might bring with them. It is because we can apparently map relations so easily onto genealogy that the model has such salience. Other essays herein address the genealogical model as an ethnographic reality (see, in particular, Astuti). This helps to highlight a point that Schneider made several decades ago: namely, that a genealogical framework is a socially particular rendering of relatedness that must be analysed anew within any given ethnographic context. Certain themes run through the collection as a whole. First, it becomes clear that however far studies of kinship may have come in the last few years, the discipline of anthropology has yet to truly shed the trappings of a genealogical paradigm. Several essays in this collection take up this point with respect to the ‘new processual kinship’ and its claim to reinvent kinship after David Schneider’s in-

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sightful critique. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that a familiar universalism – the distinction between ‘social’ versus ‘biological’ kinship – has crept back into the way kinship is now discussed in anthropology. In an analysis that explores the history of kinship studies in anthropology, he suggests that one outcome of focusing on kinship as a ‘constructed process’ is a reinscription of the notion that human beings are everywhere biological beings with the capacity for culture. In contrast with this view, he presents us with a portrait of Amazonian peoples who have, in his terms, a ‘nonbiological theory of life’. Bamford takes up a related critique in her discussion of the Kamea of Papua New Guinea. She argues that while the new processual view of kinship claims to perceive social relationships in a radically new light, the model continues to rest on the underlying idea that kinship is an embodied connection that unites two or more people in a ‘physical’ relation. Her analysis of Kamea sociality raises the following question: need kinship always be conceptualized as entailing a material bond between people? Drawing upon data collected during fieldwork with Kamea, she describes a world in which cross-generational ties are conceptualized as inherently non-embodied ones. The essay by James Leach highlights an additional problem with respect to recent theorizing on kinship. Focusing on Reite conceptions of sociality, he suggests that despite the fact that the new processual model claims to treat kinship as a flexible process, it has the effect of reinventing fixity as the background against which flexibility is judged. Leach’s chapter thus highlights the extent to which anthropological theorizing must change if it is to seriously incorporate the understanding of nongenealogical social realities. His suggestion is to develop the Reite understanding of an alternative essence that connects persons who are kin, an essence that is both mutable and yet definitional. A second theme to emerge in many of the following chapters concerns our inability to divorce human sociality from the nonhuman world, a finding that runs counter to the assumptions of a genealogical framework (see also Leach 2003; Bamford 1998, 2007). Genealogical thinking relies heavily upon a subject/object distinction. This model assumes that physical elements of a person are fixed and given at birth. One can interact with components of the organic world, but such interactions play no role in shaping one’s being in a constitutive sense. This idea has figured significantly in the development of anthropological theory. Uniting several schools

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of thought, including Marxist (Marx 1976; Marx and Engels 1970), functionalist (Damas 1969; Hardesty 1977; Lee and Devore 1968; Vayda 1969), structuralist (Levi-Strauss 1966) and symbolic interpretations (Bird-David 1993; Descola 1992; Durkheim and Mauss 1903), is the view that the organic world is somehow ‘external’ to human social life. One can adapt to the environment, pass it on as a form of heritable property, model interpretative schemes after it, or impress a prefigured model of society upon it, but it is always ‘other’ in relation to human beings and their activities (Bamford 2007). Several essays in this collection present a radically different vision of the world in which human sociality emerges in tandem with the kinds of relationships that people form with nonhuman resources. This point figures centrally in the chapters by Tim Ingold, Teresa Holmes, James Leach and Sandra Bamford. By questioning the utility of a subject/object distinction, these chapters reveal important processes that have traditionally been obscured by a genealogical paradigm. In a related vein, Rebecca Cassidy shows the extent to which Euro-American perceptions of human beings and nonhuman animals are constituted through a set of metaphorical borrowings between what are assumed to be radically different domains. She thus uncovers foundational elements of the background to pedigree and class in Europe and America, which plays an important role in situating and making explicit the political implications of the arguments by Pálsson, Holmes and Cunningham that are introduced later in the collection. A third theme that links together the following chapters concerns the implications of recent developments in science and technology. While the advent of the ‘bio-age’ appears, at first glance, to upset many of the assumptions upon which genealogical thinking is based, several essays in this collection suggest that the situation is not quite so straightforward. Jeanette Edwards’s chapter on new reproductive technologies highlights the extent to which recent innovations in reproductive medicine help to affirm – not just challenge – the guiding tenets of a genealogical framework. The essay by Hilary Cunningham brings our attention to bear on the practice of transgenic species crossing, which involves the lateral transfer of genetic material between different forms of life. Despite the fact that this practice involves a ‘re-temporalization and re-spacialization’ (Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000) of reproduction, Cunningham demonstrates that a genealogical framework remains surprisingly intact in terms of how these innovations are re-presented to the general public. Gisli Pálsson also deals with subject of new technolo-

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gies. Drawing upon ethnographic material collected from deCODE – a biotechnology company based in Iceland – Pálsson likens the emerging technologies to a machine for reinscribing genealogy and its assumptions in novel contexts. Both Pálsson and Cassidy end their chapters with more or less impassioned pleas for a replacement of the tree imagery, and the descent, transmission, exclusivity and hierarchy it embodies, with a rhizomatic or fungal imagery when we discuss life (also see Ingold 2000: 13). Finally, several chapters take up the question of what it means to do anthropology as a comparative endeavour. Rita Astuti tackles this issue in her analysis of the Vezo of Madagascar. She argues that anthropologists have drawn an over determined distinction between Western and non-Western societies, and have recently assumed that only Western societies rely on the conceptual assumptions of a genealogical framework. So entrenched has this perspective become in the canon of our discipline that when we encounter points of similarity between our own conceptual system and those of other people, we are apt to dismiss them out of hand as being the blind imposition of our own cultural logic. In the process, we may fail to grasp important social realities. Holmes’s essay demonstrates that whether or not people in certain African societies really have an underlying perception of the reality of biological kinship connection, there are political consequences for choosing to describe, and thus set policy, on the basis of that description of connection rather than another. Tim Ingold examines the problem of how social scientists understand knowledge. He argues that scholars have implicitly drawn upon a genealogical framework in their efforts to understand how making sense of the world takes place. Ingold proposes a nongenealogical approach to knowledge in which learning is generated through practice and engagement with the world. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro also highlights the need for anthropologists to exercise caution in their analyses. He sets out four competing models of kinship and demonstrates that they share in common a reliance on a distinction between the innate and the artificial. Hence, what often strikes us as being a ‘new approach’ to social phenomena turns out to be grounded in the same assumptions that we have sought to move beyond.

Chapter Outlines In addressing these themes, this volume unfolds as follows. In chapter one, Rebecca Cassidy describes how models of human pedigree

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have developed alongside models of animal pedigree. She charts some significant borrowing and reciprocal influence between these domains, and thus provides us with insights into how notions of sequence, essence and the transmission of value/quality are integral to ideological constructions of superiority between social classes and with respect to gender. The chapter shows some of the effects of the extension of reasoning about human relations to animal worlds, and vice versa, and how selective and interested reasoning is easily served by the principles of the model. In chapter two, Teresa Holmes extends the theme of social differentiation by examining genealogical thinking in colonial Kenya. She shows how knowledge about others has been rendered coherent to Western audiences by being structured through a genealogical paradigm. Luo people actively resisted being defined in this way, despite being subject to several decades of colonial rule. Holmes’s essay suggests, as do the contributions by Cassidy and Pálsson, that there is nothing innocent about ordering knowledge through the assumptions of a genealogical framework. Chapter three focuses on the objectification of a genealogical framework through the intersection of traditional understandings of pedigree and of financial capital. Gisli Pálsson examines how the Book of Icelanders (a detailed compendium of Icelandic genealogical history) has been put to use by a biotechnology company for commercial purposes. Pálsson documents the importance of genealogical data in fabricating Western notions of self and personhood. He also explores the political implications of this situation by considering how social relationships that are coming to be recast as genealogy are simultaneously being imbued with monetary value. In chapter four, Cunningham documents how a genealogical framework is increasingly drawn upon to the benefit of certain actors in a global world. She documents the political implications of exporting a genealogical framework to non-Western societies – an occurrence that is increasingly taking place through such initiatives as the mapping of the human genome and the manufacture and sale of genetically modified organisms. This chapter suggests that it is no longer enough for anthropologists to worry that we are ‘misrepresenting’ the people with whom we work. A genealogical framework is coming to take on a life of its own and is shaping social realities at a transnational level. In chapter five, Jeanette Edwards examines the extent to which new reproductive technologies are shaping existing understandings of pedigree. Here, we are provided with the opportunity to view

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several assumptions of genealogical thinking refracted and made specific through contemporary Northern English views on what is and is not appropriate between kin. She describes how semen donations between fathers and sons both problematise and support the way the people she worked with think about intergenerational ties. If Edwards’s essay shows the centrality of bodily substance in a particular vision of kinship logic, chapter six, by Sandra Bamford, explores a world in which such types of connection are not made. More specifically, she details an ethnographic case in which parents are not understood to share any type of embodied connection with their offspring. How is relatedness imagined between persons under such a logic? What elements of people’s lives become significant as points of connection if bodily substance does not serve as a link between generations? The salience of substance is also taken up as a theme in chapter seven. Here, James Leach presents a case in which substance does appear as a central element in people’s understanding of relatedness. Yet significantly, substance is something that is passed on not through procreation but as ‘knowledge’, which is transmitted through proximity, sharing, purchase, exchange and so forth. Within this context, substance maintains the quality of an essence that differentiates people from one another, one that they embody in their growth, appearance, effectiveness and identity. Differences in knowledge relate to differences in places, and being part of a place makes people what they are. The transmission of knowledge is crucial to reproduction of the human world, yet knowledge is not transmitted in the biological sequencing of procreation. The link between this chapter and the preceding one is land, and how nonhuman resources furnish a point of attachment between people. For Bamford, land does not create substance, but knowledge of its use is a connecting element. For Leach, by contrast, knowledge is also a connection, but in keeping with Reite understandings, knowledge is itself a kind of substance drawn from the land. In chapter eight, Tim Ingold discusses Euro-American assumptions concerning genealogy and how they relate to assumptions about the process of acquiring knowledge. He emphasizes both process and intersubjectivity as crucial to how learning takes place. By stressing how social scientists have typically misunderstood what it means to acquire new skills, he undermines the view of knowledge as entailing both the transmission of an object, and the separation of knowledge from the people who supposedly hold and act

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upon it. In this sense, his chapter complements that by Leach, suggesting that Reite people’s understanding of both kinship and knowledge may not be so far-fetched, once the assumptions of the genealogical model are taken as one option among many. In chapter nine, Rita Astuti presents a challenge to the critique of the use of the genealogical model in contemporary anthropological writing. She sets out the potential continuing utility of a method of collecting information that reveals genealogical understandings, addressing head-on the critiques that have been levelled at this approach. In contrast to Ingold and others represented here, she asserts that the blanket rejection of this model may obscure our understanding of non-Western social worlds. Whereas Ingold’s paper examines the status of knowledge as an objectified entity, the volume’s concluding essay, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, interrogates the making of anthropological knowledge about kinship itself. He sets forth a typology of kinship modelling that can be grouped on the basis of sharing (or rejecting) various elements of a genealogical paradigm. In the process, he reveals the very real difficulty of using our own epistemology to consider other ‘ontologies’. The essays collected here establish the range and depth of the genealogical model’s influence in ordering thinking about transmission, sequences and essences. Different ideas about the utility of the model and its purchase allow us to consider afresh how it has come to structure debate on matters such as knowledge transmission, the implications of scientific investigation, human ecology and social hierarchy. The chapters thus highlight a need, both theoretical and political, to develop new understandings of humans’ ways of relating to one another, and to their worlds, that are conscious of the models we use. The suggestion of this volume, then, is to think backwards, as it were, and to see again how and why this framework gained ascendancy and why it now appears as a ‘natural’ way of interpreting the world. We also hope the essays in this volume offer a glimpse, however partial, of how the world might look if it were to be viewed through a sophisticated understanding of the place that genealogy occupies in our thinking, and thus also a hint of the potential for viewing the world through ‘nongenealogical’ eyes. The essays ask us to consider the taken-for-granted ordering of knowledge and authority of information created and organized through genealogical thinking. In other words, they propose that we question the formula whereby things happen in sequence, there is a ‘development’, and thus it is natural for nature to be overtaken by (a

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particular) technology, one that most potently builds its own foundation of authority by discovering ever more complex genealogical determinants of the human and nonhuman world.

Acknowledgements A few select portions of the material presented in this introduction previously appeared in S. Bamford, Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology, 2007 (The Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press).

Notes 1. The Biblical precedents for reckoning kinship, group formation, identity and indeed, special relation to the deity, are all well known (Delaney 1986; Mimica 1991; Pocock 1992). 2. The picture is an example of depictions of family trees hung in the Royal Palace of Jogjakarta in Central Java. While imagery from nature is clearly a feature of Islamic art much more widely and such representations may have developed independently of Western genealogical depiction, it is also the case that Dutch colonial power in Java was exercised through conditional support for certain royal families, and thus depictions such as this served ideological purposes for both rulers and colonial powers. This painting is early twentieth-century, and depicts the king as the trunk of the tree, wives as the branches, male children as fruit and female children as leaves. 3. At the very least, his work made clear the problematic juncture at which kinship lies in Western thought. It might be argued that from the very beginning of kinship studies (Morgan 1870), the problems of using our own kinship reckoning as the natural basis against which to view others’ constructions (artifice) was implicitly apparent if unarticulated. Revealing the link between these two major organizing concepts – kinship and its relation to humanity itself – was the focus of several major social theorists of the last century, from Freud to Levi-Strauss.

References Allen, R. 2002. ‘Scandal of Mix-Ups at IVF Clinic: Anguish for Women Given Wrong Embryos’, Evening Standard, 28 October. Bamford, S. 1998. ‘Humanized Landscapes, Embodied Worlds: Land and the Construction of Intergenerational Continuity among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, Social Analysis 42(3): 28–54.

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——— . 2007. Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Kinship and Biotechnology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnes, J.A. 1967. ‘Genealogies’, in A.L. Epstein (ed.), The Craft of Social Anthropology. London: Social Sciences Paperbacks in association with Tavistock Publication, pp. 101–27. Bird-David, N. 1993. ‘Tribal Metaphorization of Human-Nature Relatedness: A Comparative Analysis’, in K. Milton (ed.), Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 112–25. Bouquet, M. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of British Kinship Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——— . 1996. ‘Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Method’, Man (n.s.) 2(1): 43–66. Carsten, J. 1995. ‘The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau-Langkawi’, American Ethnologist 22(2): 223–41. ———. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2000. ‘Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. London: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Cavalli-Sforza. L, A. Wilson, C. Cantor, R. Cook-Deegan and M. King. 1991. ‘Call for a Worldwide Survey of Human Genetic Diversity: A Vanishing Opportunity for the Human Genome Project’, Genomics 11(2): 490–91. Damas, D. 1969. ‘Contributions to Anthropology: Ecological Essays’, Proceedings of the Conference on Cultural Ecology, Ottawa, August 3–6, 1966. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada. Darwin, C. 1979 [1859]. The Origin of Species. New York: Gramercy Books. Delaney, C. 1986. ‘The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate’, Man (n.s.) 21(3): 494–513. Descola, P. 1992. ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society. London: Routledge, pp. 107–26. Durkheim, E. and M. Mauss. 1963 [1903]. Primitive Classification, trans. R. Needham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fox, R. 1967. Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franklin, S. 1998. ‘Making Miracles: Scientific Progress and the Facts of Life’, in S. Franklin and H. Ragoné (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp.102–17. Franklin, S., C. Lury and J. Stacey. 2000. Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage. Franklin, S. and S. McKinnon. 2001. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press Gillis, A. 1994. ‘Getting a Picture of Human Diversity’, BioScience 44(1): 8–11. Hardesty, D. 1977. Ecological Anthropology. New York: Wiley.

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Hayden, C. 1998. ‘A Biodiversity Sampler for the Millennium’, in S. Franklin and H. Ragoné (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 173–206. Helmreich, S. 1998. ‘Replicating Reproduction in Artificial Life: Or, the Essence of Life in the Age of Virtual Electronic Reproduction’, in S. Franklin and H. Ragone (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 207–34. Holy, L. 1996. Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto Press. Ingold, T. 1990. ‘An Anthropologist Looks at Biology’, Man (n.s.) 25: 208– 229. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Klapisch-Zuber, C. 1991. ‘The Genesis of the Family Tree’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4(1): 105–29. Leach, J. 2003. Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lee, R. and I. Devore. 1968. Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewin, R. 1993. ‘Genes from a Disappearing World’, New Scientist, 29 May, 25–30. Marks, J. 1995. ‘The Human Genome Diversity Project: Good for If Not Good as Anthropology’, Anthropology Newsletter, April. Marsh, B. 2002. ‘Three Way Mix-Up Gives IVF Patients the Wrong Embryos’, Daily Mail, 28 October. Marx, K. 1976. Capital: Volume 1. New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. Mimica, J. 1991. ‘The Incest Passions: An Outline of the Logic of Iqwaye Social Organisation’, Oceania 62(1): 34–58 and 62(2): 80–113. Morgan, L.H. 1870. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Pocock, J. G. A. 1992. ‘Tangata Whenua and Enlightenment Anthropology’, New Zealand Journal of History 26(1): 28–53. Pook, S. and N. Martin. 2002. ‘Staff Shortage Blamed for IVF Clinic MixUp’, The Daily Telegraph, 29 October. Rivers, W.H.R. 1910 (1968). ‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry’, in W. H. R. Rivers (ed.), Kinship and Social Organization. New York: The Athlone Press, pp. 97–112. Schneider, D. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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‘Stewart Convicted on All Charges’. 2004. CNNMoney.com. 5 March 2004. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vayda, A. 1969. Environment and Cultural Behavior: Ecological Studies in Cultural Anthropology. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Weismantel, M. 1995. ‘Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions’, American Ethnologist 22(4): 685–704. Weston, K. 1995. ‘Forever Is a Long Time: Romancing the Real in Gay Kinship Ideologies’, in S. J. Yanagisako and C. Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge, pp.87–110.

Chapter 1

ARBORESCENT CULTURE WRITING

AND

NOT WRITING RACEHORSE PEDIGREES Rebecca Cassidy

W

hen Rivers popularized the genealogical model in the early days of the twentieth century, he created the possibility of comprehensive knowledge of society, and of each particular society. The model is apparently exhaustive (everyone has a mother and a father) and value neutral (the placement of men to the left of women and of the younger generations beneath the elder is merely conventional (Rivers 1900: plates II and III). As such, it is potentially liberating, universal, and in the context of the development of a structural-functionalist anthropology in opposition to the iniquity of social evolutionism, no doubt a ‘good thing’. However, the genealogical model contains a set of implications that militate against its use as a way of knowing and suggest that it is best thought of as a way of making knowledge of a particular kind. Apparently universal, inclusive and egalitarian, the genealogical model enshrines the modernist idea of progress. The genealogical model is a theory of attribution. It fixes the direction of time by granting special status to temporal anteriority. It reduces individuals and events to the playing out of the inevitable properties of people and of objects. It presents the contingent as necessary, and in doing so provides evidence supporting the most

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conservative of interpretations of the present. Much of its utility depends on an ability to separate the model from society, to allocate it a place within ‘nature’, and this separation entails violence done to data that may suggest contradictory interpretations. This separation also suggests that the model exists in a historical vacuum, and that it has no relationship to the models that preceded it and to some degree made it thinkable, such as family trees, trees of life, and pedigrees. In this way the genealogical model denies aspects of its own ancestry. In this chapter I want to explore some of the implications of pedigree thinking that, it has been argued, were part of the social repertoire on which the genealogical method drew (Bouquet 1993). More importantly, this chapter is an argument for suspicion of any kind of genealogy constructed without consideration of the particular way of knowing it might produce. As I will show through a discussion of nineteenth-century Bedouin and English thoroughbred horse breeding practices, merely producing a written pedigree transforms the manner in which knowledge about people (and horses) is envisaged. The recent creation of a cloned horse, the first in the world, has also provided a pertinent thought experiment for the current producers of the thoroughbred racehorse: what happens when pedigree stands still? What principles embodied by the pedigree (and by the genealogical model) are violated when descent is displaced by replication?

Context Races between horses (or more accurately, between people mounted on horses) take many forms all over the world, from the pony races of Galloway and Iceland to the Percheron plough pulling of Japan. This chapter is only concerned with horse racing that adheres to internationally recognized rules and takes place exclusively between selectively bred thoroughbred racehorses, defined as such by their presence in the General Stud Book (GSB), first published in 1791. Thoroughbred racing takes place all over the world and is based on a highly specialized domestic animal and a template (of rules, conditions, etiquette) that originated in Europe, and specifically in Britain and Ireland.1 It consists of three interrelated activities: the production of thoroughbred horses (the bloodstock industry), the staging of racing, and wagering or gambling. Very

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simply, demand for thoroughbred racehorses is stimulated by prize money, prize money is levied from betting turnover, and maximal turnover demands racing that is perceived as competitive and fair. Policing the boundaries of the breed has become increasingly important during the last century as competitions between thoroughbreds have come to dominate all other kinds of racing, including trotting, harness racing, pony racing and Arab racing. To a large degree, today racing is thoroughbred racing. A vast international sport and industry has been created based on this dominance. Pedigree is the mechanism that links the fortunes of the bloodstock industry with those of the massive wagering industries (currently estimated as constituting a £1 trillion market worldwide [Davis 2001]), because it limits the supply of horses capable of providing what has come to be regarded as the authentic racing product. The Roman Emperor Septimus Severus is said to have staged races between imported Arabian horses at York in 210 (Lyle 1945: 1). Having been wholeheartedly appropriated by Tudor and Stuart kings and queens, racing was subsequently exported by the British Empire to several of its colonies, most notably the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Recognizably British racing is still popular in India and in several former colonies in Africa, including Mauritius, where the Champ de Mars, one of the oldest courses in the world, has held races since 1810. At the present time the fastest-growing racing jurisdictions are those of Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong.2 My fieldwork takes place amongst the present-day custodians of the thoroughbred. Entry into this world depended not just on my ability to move safely amongst live racehorses, but also to navigate my way through the links created by their ancestors, both human and equine, dead and alive. To a degree that can seem entirely baffling to the outsider, pedigrees and genealogies establish ‘who’s who’ in the bloodstock industry. Amongst horses, breeding sells, and pedigrees are claims that must therefore be regulated (the GSB and the paraphernalia associated with breeding racehorses have enshrined this opportunity for wealth creation). The keepers of national stud books maintain strictly enforced regulations concerning entry, overseen by the International Stud Book Committee and supported by increasingly sophisticated identification systems.3 Amongst people, as this chapter will show, breeding suggests entitlement. The grammar of pedigree is particularly compelling to a group of people for whom daily life consists of the acting out of the principle that ‘like begets like’.

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Images The pedigree is the central organizing image of the bloodstock industry. To the extent that the value of a horse is more easily predicted by reading its pedigree than it is by looking at it, the ‘dry facts’ of breeding are more important than the ‘flesh and blood’ to which they relate. When thoroughbreds are sold at public auction as oneyear-olds (referred to as ‘yearlings’), they are assessed first by their pedigrees. A horse that is of reasonable conformation (muscular and especially skeletal form) will be expected to reach a certain price at auction. A yearling of average conformation with different breeding will be expected to reach a different price. The yearlings are therefore grouped together primarily on the basis of pedigree and only secondarily on the basis of appearance – despite the fact that pedigree is far from foolproof in predicting an individual horse’s ability.4 Thoroughbred pedigrees, in their standard format as they appear in sales catalogues, are read from left to right (see Figure 1.1). The

FIGURE 1.1: Catalogue page.

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individual whose breeding is recorded is alone on the left. The name of her sire, in this case Bluebird (USA), is recorded to the right and above. The name of her dam, Scammony (IRE), is recorded to the right and below them both.5 This format is repeated for each ancestor over four generations, so that the final line of the pedigree records eight individuals, sires above dams. In addition, information detailing the relatives (male and female) of her female relatives is provided in a list below the pedigree itself. This roster begins with the dam and continues with her offspring, and the offspring of her offspring. It then lists the second dam, her offspring and the offspring of her offspring. This process continues until the page is full. The information provided at this point is often highly selective. Breeders search for successful racehorses that can be linked with their mare, often described as a search for ‘black type’ (a reference to the fact that success in the most important international ‘Group’ or ‘Graded’ races are recorded in black type).6 This page is littered with black type, showing that the relatives and progeny of this mare have already been successful and suggesting therefore that this yearling will be similarly talented.7 The pedigree has two aspects, the upper male line, recording sires and sires of sires, which constitutes the strength of the pedigree, and the bottom line, which records the dam and dams of dams. During my fieldwork, the sire line was said to represent the strength against the weakness of the dam line. The purpose of the additional information offered regarding the mare was to reassure potential buyers of her relative lack of weakness. At auction, the sire will usually be far more influential in determining the price of the yearling than the dam, who was described to me by one of my informants as nothing more than ‘a mobile incubator’. This idea is clearly expressed in the shorthand for yearling pedigrees, which in this case would be ‘Yearling, Bluebird (Persian Bold)’.8 Pedigrees are not just employed to represent the quality of individual horses, but also serve as a kind of motif running through all of the stories that the racing industry tells itself (and others) about itself. Historians of racing society produce stories that combine humans and horses in mutually supportive genealogies. Selective breeding uses a patriarchal and aristocratic theory of heredity to determine mating decisions, just as the producers of racehorses use this theory to explain the outcome of unions between humans. This is history of the kind criticized by Nisbet, in which ‘events have events, as women have babies’ (1970: 354).9 Particular dynasties are linked to the fortunes of particular equine lines, and this conflation

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of human and animal is used to express the implicit logic of all pedigrees, that ‘blood will tell’. In the language of the genealogical historian, the explanation for the present lies in the properties of the past. However, amongst thoroughbred breeders an extra incentive to adhere to the idea of pedigree is provided by the idea of improvement, because it is here that gains in status can be made. The pedigrees of successful horses do not just offer ‘proof’ of the efficiency of selective breeding; they also credit the person who arranged that mating with the ability to improve nature. In a recent book about Ascot racecourse, I was struck by the juxtaposition of four pedigree-like diagrams, recording a series of human and equine relationships (Onslow 1990). Ascot is one of the premier racecourses in England, and the Royal Meeting over four days in June is perhaps the most famous race meet in the world. Once the central event in the social calendar of the Edwardian aristocracy, it is still important to the well-heeled. Each day of the meet is opened by a royal procession: the queen and her guests are transported by open horse-drawn carriage down the centre of the course to wave at the racegoers as the band of the Blues and Royals plays the national anthem in the stands. The meet is a British institution, covered by a team from the BBC including the royal correspondent and a squadron of fashion experts breathlessly describing the importance of a good hat and the difficulties of obtaining made-tomeasure gloves. The endless books written about Ascot are mostly the responsibility of the tame racing press. Typically, an author will celebrate the racecourses of the world before going on to say that Ascot is by far the best: ‘Elaborate splendour, often allied with elegance, and even sheer beauty, is the hallmark of (all racecourses), but none has the indefinable quality that the presence of the sovereign, pageantry, fashion, and racing of the highest quality combine to give to Royal Ascot’ (Onslow 1990: 206). In this case, the author is determined to stress the inevitability, the ‘rightness’, of this combination of human and animal excellence. On four pages, Onslow depicts the royal founders and supporters of Ascot, the most successful trainers at Ascot, and the pedigrees of winners of races at Ascot. The blurring of distinctions between humans and animals is particularly suggestive; the same hereditary principles are operating in each case. Queen Anne founded Ascot in 1711 (see Figure 1.2). Whereas her great-grandfather James I and uncle Charles II had been devoted to the racing and hunting opportunities of Newmarket Heath,

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FIGURE 1.2: Royal Family and Ascot.

Anne planned to develop Ascot so that she might watch racing whilst the court was based nearby in Windsor. Indeed, Charles II does not even appear on the diagram. These two trees can actually be linked, and the dynasty as a whole still has a close involvement with racing in Newmarket. During fieldwork, one of the first racehorse trainers I met (in the pub that served as ‘local’ to both of us) was a member of this family. As soon as he discovered that I was an anthropologist, he started telling me about his relatives and, to my surprise and consternation, began drawing a family tree on a paper napkin left over from our lunch

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FIGURE 1.3: Simplified Tree of the Jarvis, Butters, Leader and Hall Families.

(see Figures 1.3 and 1.4). All of my own reservations about the genealogical method were swept aside in his confident enthusiasm that this was ‘just the stuff I needed’. During the course of my fieldwork, spent meeting a highly selective group of his relatives, I recorded approximately five hundred individuals in nine generations. Just as Onslow’s trees omit individuals that do not serve to connect those associated with Ascot to each other, I found that I was recording some rather strange relationships. In particular, I found that people were reproducing asexually. At first I put this down to

FIGURE 1.4: The Day, Cannon, Piggott, Rickaby and Armstrong Families.

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my lack of focus – I was happy to listen to stories about relatives, but I was both lazy about the actual business of representing each person symbolically, and resistant in principle to such a practice. What did such a practice conceal? Was this method of recording data making alternative interpretations impossible? When the problem of missing ancestors persisted, I mentioned it to an informant. I was told that of course people who were not associated with racing were omitted, so long as they didn’t provide any links to other racing families. I tried to persuade my informants not to do this, and we argued the point. The compromise position that emerged was that we put a diagonal line through these human dead ends. When children were subsequently produced by nonracing relatives, this had the bizarre effect of recording reproduction that had apparently taken place from beyond the grave. In this case, the maintenance of ideas that pedigrees appear to express is more important than the tracing of biogenetic relationships. Pedigree is more than the tracing of blood ties; it is also the concentration of the social imagination on links that do in fact support the implicit suggestions of imagining relatedness in this way, as is clearest in the final case, the Royal Ascot winners in the male line from Stockwell (see Figure 1.5). What is interesting about this particular pedigree is that it is no longer bilateral, as Franklin has observed of Dolly the sheep’s genealogy (1997). Whilst Dolly’s genealogy eliminates the ‘noise’ of sexual reproduction, this pedigree or line shuts out the noise of mares and (other) losers. Causation is stripped down: Stockwell produced Doncaster, who produced Bend Or, who produced Bona Vista, etc., right up to Northern Dancer. This is the symbolic expression of patriarchy.

Origins Arab horses have been exchanged as gifts since Sheikh Haroun Al Rashid sent five to Charlemagne in 800 (Boucaut 1905: 121). However, the exchange of horses between East and West that eventually produced the thoroughbred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began in earnest with the import of Arabs by Emperor Septimus Severus in the second century.10 Septimus Severus was born in Africa and had fought his way across the Middle East, the ‘cradle’ of the Arab horse, before finding himself in Weatherby, in Yorkshire, where he conducted what are generally thought to be the first races

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FIGURE 1.5: The Royal Ascot winners in the male line from Stockwell.

in Britain (Lyle 1945: 1). Records from the time of King John suggest that the transportation and exchange of horses in order to improve the quality of native stock, particularly for military purposes, was one of the abiding occupations of the royal household. This practice was reinvigorated by Henry VIII, whose interest in North African breeds can be read from the title of his trainer as ‘Keeper of the Barra or Barbary Horses’ (Osborne 1881: 211). Henry VIII’s military campaigns decimated the existing stocks of English horses and forced the import of horses from the continent as well as the regulation of breeding at home (Thirsk 1978: 7–8). During the sixteenth century great anxiety had been expressed regarding both the scarcity and the poor quality of English horses, which were apparently small, light of frame and lacking in stamina. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I introduced extensive legislation that was intended to encourage the breeding of larger animals, and

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under their rule the improvement of the breed became a nobleman’s patriotic duty (Lyle 1945: 3). The export of horses was prohibited in 1531, and in 1535–36 and 1541–42, nobles were commanded to regulate the size of their stock so that ‘in all except the four northern counties, mares had to be at least thirteen hands high and stallions fourteen hands’ (Thirsk 1978: 12). By the early seventeenth century English horses had apparently recovered. The emergence of the thoroughbred cannot be separated from the foundations laid by Henry VIII: the historical association between military responsibility, patriotism, status and the horse was enshrined in law at this time. The intention of this legislation was to provide horses for military purposes, but the import of Arabs, Barbs and Turks also ensured a supply of horses for competition in the earliest forms of racing in Britain. Until the seventeenth century, races were a test of stamina or ‘bottom’, rather than speed. The military application of such a virtue is obvious, and these were still military horses, expected to hunt, race and carry their master in the field of war, each context demanding similar feats of bravery and soundness in horse and human alike. As racing developed as a sport, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a change in racing style took place that demanded a new kind of horse, no longer a versatile cavalry horse but a specialized animal capable of sprinting over short distances under light weights, providing multiple betting opportunities. This was the beginning of the change in racing that has affected the morphology of the racehorse up to the present day, when the ultimate sprinter can be found in the U.S. The history of the thoroughbred breed begins at this point, a history that is retrospective because it concentrates on three stallions, imported during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to whom all modern thoroughbreds in the world can trace their ancestry through the male line: the Darley Arab, the Godolphin Arab and the Byerley Turk. The history of the thoroughbred conventionally told reflects the priorities of the typical racing historian by concentrating on the famous three at the expense of mares and of stallions whose influence has not survived to the present time: ‘The existence of three initial progenitors, and their continuation by not more than one progenitor each and three progenitors in all, far from being a matter of course which every student of the Thoroughbred has always taken for granted as one of the curiosities of history, is instead a dramatic punctuation of the essence of the Thoroughbred as an elite animal destined to be influenced at every stage by an amazingly small number of individuals’ (Varola 1974: 7).

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The intention and effect of the focus on the three stallions is to produce an idea of the thoroughbred as a mythical beast, created not born, reproducing asexually and thereby preserving male attributes directly without the dilution or perhaps pollution introduced by a (female) mate. It produces the inevitability and therefore the moral rectitude of the diagrams created by Onslow. Dead ends are not pursued; alternative routes to the present are not countenanced.

Writing Pedigrees When the Italian equestrian authority Prospero d’Osma was commissioned by Elizabeth to report on the state of the royal studs in 1576, he commented at length on the quality of soil and pasture, warned against overgrazing, and favoured rotation and the provision of shelters for extremes of weather (Prior 1935: 8). He warned against the crossing of horses of distinct breeds, a practice that, he wrote, resulted in the production of ‘bastard horses’. Although each of the mares of the Royal Stud was named by d’Osma, no pedigrees were recorded, reflecting the view that it was not so much that the crossing of breeds was to be discouraged, but rather that there were proper crosses and crosses to be avoided. The role of the horse breeder in the sixteenth century was to enact the cross that would produce offspring capable of fulfilling a specific function. Imported stocks were returned to for their original properties, which were primarily environmentally determined (Russell 1986: 65). By 1607 the English authority Gervase Markham, who engaged with the accepted wisdom of the proper cross, also stressed the importance of the ancestry of each horse. His criticism of the Italian school marked the waning of their influence and the start of an obsession with pedigree in the breeding of fine horses: ‘A clown may beget a beautiful son, yet will he never beget an heroical spirit, but it will ever have some touch of baseness; and an ill-bred horse may beget a colt, which may have fair colour and shape, which we call beauty, yet still his inward parts may retain a secret wildness of disposition, which may be insufferable in breeding’ (Markham 1607: 21–22, quoted by Russell 1986: 72).11 By 1620, a certain orthodoxy could be detected between Markham and his competitor, Nicholas Morgan, the two most influential equestrian authors of the time: ‘To begin then with the art of breeding horses the first and principall foundation thereof consisteth in the election of stallions and mares, which are most fit and proper for that purpose, for the least

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carelessness therein is the utter ruine of all the whole work, since like engendring like, if any evil choice be made an evil product must remaine of the composition’ (Morgan 1620: 2, quoted in Russell 1986: 78). At the same time, the sport of racing was emerging in the form with which we are now familiar. Long-distance heats under heavy weights were being replaced by sprints under light weights. Prize money was growing, and with it the incentive to produce more and faster racehorses. The General Stud Book (GSB) was first published in 1791, in order to ‘rescue the turf from the increasing evil of false and inaccurate pedigrees’ (author William Sidney Towers, quoted by Willett 1991: 19). The need to record horses’ identities was the result of an increase in prize money in general, and in particular the increase in handicap races, according to which horses carry weights that correspond to their ability, so that each might have a chance of winning ‘at the weights’. The first form of handicapping was weight for age. Thus three-year-olds would carry a lighter weight than fouryear-olds in the same race, for example. The temptation was to present a four-year-old as a three-year-old, so that it might carry the lighter weight and enjoy an advantage over its less mature competitors. Horses are aged according to their teeth, which mature in predictable ways; however, teeth can also be manipulated by chisel or file – hence the need to locate this individual within the GSB. The book created a breed and closed this breed to outside influence. It also fixed the identity of every individual already admitted to the fold. The GSB was an attempt to use pedigree as a standard outside the subjective assessment of, for example, a horse’s teeth. It apparently removed the question of entry of each horse into a race from the realm of a personal claim by the trainer or owner to an objective standard outside horse and human. However, as American pedigree enthusiast John H. Wallace wrote in 1897, the creation of the first stud books was not quite this straightforward: ‘The first attempt made in this country, in the direction of publishing a stud book of American race horses was the product of Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, an eccentric and apparently not well balanced Irishman’ (1897: 99– 100).12 Edgar’s stud book was distinguished by three features: the absence of any dates and of any source or evidence for the pedigrees recorded, the large number of crosses involving animals never heard of before or since, and the absence of many well-known animals: ‘This book had been in print about thirty years before I ever saw it and the first impression it made on my mind was that the author was ‘clean daft’ … At the same time, through all his work there

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was a ‘method in his madness’ going to show the care he had taken to exclude or suppress any little fact that might lead to detection and exposure’ (Wallace 1897: 100). Wallace produced his own stud book in 1867, and had embarked upon a second volume as well as a version for trotting horses when he had a revelation.13 He had gathered material from Trotter breeders, and begun to compare this material with advertisements for their stallions: ‘The truth began to dawn on me that advertisements, whether in newspapers or on crossroads blacksmith shop doors, with scarcely an exception, were made up of statements that were utterly false and fictitious … On a careful and sorrowful review of my work of many years I found that I had been working on a wrong basis from the start. Instead of discovering and arranging a great many valuable truths, as I supposed, I had devoted years to perpetuating thousands of fictions (Wallace 1897: 103). Appalled at the thought of these ‘thousands of fictions’, Wallace washed his hands of the thoroughbred and was replaced by Kentuckian Colonel Sanders Bruce, credited with being the author of the first American stud book proper. Wallace is scathing about this work: ‘Bruce’s Stud Book accepted everything and rejected nothing, and it is not probable he ever investigated a pedigree in his life. His rule of action seems to have been to please his customers, and to scrupulously avoid all public discussions of pedigrees’ (1897: 104). As for the original GSB: ‘If we were to compare the English with the American methods of manufacturing pedigrees, it would be hard to determine which was the more shamefully dishonest’ (1897: 101). The bitter irony as far as Wallace was concerned was that his desire to catalogue the blood of the American race horse according to a format that transcended human manipulation had fallen foul of just that. The pedigrees of his time were revealed to be nothing more than advertisements making questionable truth claims whose potency stemmed from their adoption of a format that promised accuracy and immunity from wishful thinking, yet delivered neither. The separability of the record from the society for which the knowledge is significant itself creates a gap to be exploited by the unscrupulous. The ‘Running Rein’ Derby of 1844, for example, was won by a four-year-old (the derby is restricted to three-year-olds) and contained three other ‘ringers’. It was the nadir of the sport of racing in the nineteenth century, but not exceptional. It was not the recording of pedigrees that saved racing from oblivion and made the English sport the envy of the international gambling media–providing world today, but rather a change in governance and ethos. During

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the nineteenth century the Jockey Club took over the management of racing, becoming the major landowner in Newmarket, issuing licenses to all racing professionals, producing rules for recognized race meetings (thereby marginalizing nonregulation meets), and punishing cheats and mavericks with lifetime bans, enforced and recognized through the courts. The GSB did not improve the integrity of the sport. It was the sanctions threatened and enforced by the emergent Jockey Club that changed the face of racing. Facts extrapolated from people and from horses proved no use in curbing the excesses of the producers of the racing spectacle. In order to be operative, or powerful, the breeding of horses had to be reinserted into a hierarchical relationship in which livelihood was at stake. Eventually, and at the present time, racing’s producers have come to accept the enforced priorities of fairness and transparency (now referred to as ‘integrity’ in an interesting elision of fairness in general and accountability qua betting medium) as a part of the ethos of racing itself. This was the most powerful sleight of hand ever achieved by the Jockey Club: the licensing of racing professionals, the exclusion of ‘undesirables’ and the realization of its own highly specific vision of the sport, ‘all for the good of racing’.

Not Writing Pedigrees All commentators on the thoroughbred acknowledge that the breed can be traced in the male line to the three founding stallions that were imported from the (unspecified) ‘East’ at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. However, the source of the quality or essence of the thoroughbred as an elite racehorse is far more contentious. Some commentators have stressed the contribution made by what they described as ‘native’ or ‘English’ mares and stallions and their progeny, rather than that of the imported stallions (Osborne 1881, Robertson 1906, Wallace 1897). These men believed either that there was little of the Arab in the thoroughbred as ‘[t]he inheritance of Arabian blood in the veins of the English racehorse, if there was any such inheritance at all, was strictly infinitesimal’ (Wallace 1897: 106), or that ‘[t]he English racehorse of the seventeenth century had already proved himself superior to the best Eastern horses that had been imported. The improvement had no more commenced with (the Arabs) than it has ceased to continue since’ (Allison 1901: xxxix). This stance was the result

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of ambivalence concerning the status of the Arab horse, and of a concern to preserve the ‘Englishness’ of the thoroughbred. Other writers argued that the thoroughbred was almost entirely Eastern and specifically Arab in origin, and that insofar as domestic blood was represented in the breed it represented an impurity, a source of weakness (Blunt 1879, 1881; Borden 1906; Boucaut 1905; Davenport 1911; Tweedie 1894; Upton 1873, 1881; Wentworth 1938, 1945): ‘It is … absurd to suppose, as many do, that the thoroughbred is indebted to only some two or three half dozen Arabs for his Eastern blood, by way of lucky accident as it were, when, in fact, he is almost entirely Arab, and the only pure blood that he has got in him is Arab’ (Boucaut 1905: 87). The first group of commentators sought to claim the thoroughbred as a recent creation, indigenous to England and in this form superior to all other breeds of horses, including (especially!) Arab horses. The second were intent on explaining the deterioration of the breed as a result of its distance from the purebred Arabian horse. Arab enthusiast Lady Wentworth accuses Robertson and Osborne of failing to distinguish between ‘blood and locality’ (1945: 41, her italics); however, what she casts as confusion is actually deliberate polemic. The recording of pedigrees allowed the English thoroughbred breeder to establish a base point at which all of the complicated history of interaction was simply dismissed. The domestic origin of the thoroughbred becomes clear. Pedigrees run forwards, and the past is made irrelevant, being unrecorded. The lack of focus on the horse as it exists in the desert is complemented by a concern with its fortunes in England. The exoticism of the Arabian horse is partly celebrated, through the paintings of Wootton and Stubbs for example, and is partly denied, through the lack of focus on breeding preceding importation and the suggestion that Arab horses would serve to weaken, rather than improve the breed. Arab enthusiasts abhorred the modern thoroughbred, a ‘weedy sprinter’. The emphasis on short distances was associated with the greed of the breeding and gambling industries. Lord and Lady Blunt, convinced of the importance of the Arab to the thoroughbred, were the first to travel to Saudi Arabia in order to bring home choice specimens that they hoped might be used to reinvigorate the thoroughbred of the day. However, thoroughbred breeders, confident of the superiority of the breed in its present form (thoroughbreds had been consistently faster over shorter distances than purebred Arabs, Barbs and Turks since the seventeenth century) resisted the introduction of ‘foreign’ blood. The stamina and soundness that the Arab

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would apparently offer the thoroughbred was no longer in demand. The Blunts abandoned their quest to improve the thoroughbred in favour of preservation of the Arab itself. Travel to the Arabian Peninsula in order to ‘rescue’ the Arab horse must be placed within the more general context of travel in order to experience an ‘authentic’ way of life under the influence of Romanticism, ‘the unhoped-for ray of light, the languorous rapture, the oasis beneath the palm-tree, ruby hope with its thousand loves, the angel and the pearl, the willow in its white garb’ (de Musset 1975: 25). These men and women were belated travellers (Behdad 1994) who attributed to the Bedouin an authentic lifestyle and an unsullied nature insulated from the corrupting influence of the city, and of settlement more generally. Amongst the men and women who made the journey, Major Roger Upton (1873, 1881) is perhaps the most widely cited, although Lady Anne Blunt (1879, 1881), granddaughter of Lord Byron, is perhaps the more interesting figure. Upton made two visits to Arabia between 1870 and 1880, whilst the Blunts made their first visit later, in 1877–78. Lady Blunt was married to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, ‘[a]n amazingly handsome and splendid but utterly lawless young firebrand whose personality enslaved half the women of Europe’ (Wentworth 1945: 65). After the breakdown of their marriage and the dispersal of the Crabbet Stud in which she had invested so much,14 Lady Anne returned to Egypt and lived there from 1915 until she died at the age of eighty (Wentworth 1945: 74–75). Each member of this small group of writers betrays a concern with authenticity, expressed via the notion of purity, and specifically purity of blood. The aristocratic status of many of them, the Romanticism of their writing, and their tendency to have themselves painted in traditional Arabian dress make obvious their vested interests in pursuing an idea of noble savagery, whether via the purebred Arab horse or the purebred Bedouin. In the Bedouin they presume to have discovered true allies in this ‘quest’: “It is impossible” says the Emir Abd-el-Kader “we think, to get a pure race out of a stock the blood of which is impure.” On the other hand it is a well-authenticated fact, it is quite possible to restore to its primitive nobleness a breed that has become impoverished, but without any taint in its blood. In a word, a race may be restored, the degeneracy of which has not been occasioned by any admixture of blood’ (Upton 1873: 92). Although the presence of these people, in the situation in which they find themselves, is in every instance made possible by the un-

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equal relations of imperialism, their awareness of their own circumstances relative to those of the Bedouin is far from monolithic, as is their judgment of this relationship. The quest to save the Arab horse was a stand against the proto-industrial world. The championing of the purebred horse, and of the way of life that values such things in a wilderness setting where artifice has yet to take hold, is an explicit rejection of a universal empire. The Anazeh Bedouin is described as concerned with purity of lineage, at the expense of any consideration of form: ‘The horses bred from are not chosen for their size or their shape, or for any quality of speed or stoutness, only for their blood. We saw a horse with a considerable reputation as a sire, among the Aghedaat, for no other reason than that he was a Maneghi Hedruj of Ibn Sbeyel’s strain. The animal himself was a mere pony, without a single good point to recommend him, but his blood was unexceptionable, and he was looked upon with awe by the tribe’ (Blunt 1879: 83). According to Blunt and Upton, the mistake of the breeders of the West was to pay too little attention to blood and too much to performance, a manmade ideal. In the desert horses are bred in order to preserve the purity of their line, and no consideration is given to speed or any other function. Performance is not quantified, as horses are not used for racing. They are not measured, either against each other or against the clock, as they were by nineteenth-century English breeders in search of improvement. The emphasis on blood is not without its physical correlates, however. Blunt describes how evidence of good breeding can be detected through a physical examination of the horse: ‘The Bedouin’s judgment of the individual horse itself, when he does judge it is rather a guess at this pedigree than a consideration of his qualities. In examining a horse, the Bedouin looks first at his head. There, if anywhere the sign of his parentage will be visible. Then, maybe, he looks at his colour to see if he has any special marks for recognition, and last of all his shape’ (1879: 83). Similarly, Lady Wentworth suggests that a horse of pure blood is likely to be beautiful, and that a beautiful horse cannot be of anything other than pure blood: ‘The Arabian should be, on a small scale, the ideal horse of perfect beauty, the horse of one’s dreams, and as only perfect balance and symmetry can produce this beauty, the ideal horse will be as good for use as for ornament. It is impossible for all horses, or indeed the majority, even of the purest blood to reach this high standard, but without pure blood no horse will ever approach it’ (1945: 176).

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Tweedie mentions a different indicator of good breeding, based on the Bedouin idea that any inadequacy in the breeding of a horse will be found out by the pressures of military activity: ‘The Bedouin Arabs hold that a mare which is not a-sil (pure bred) cannot take care of her rider in Al Ghaz-U (war). It may be assumed that they are right in this belief. If they had not discovered that purity of blood was an essential quality, they would not have been so careful to produce it and maintain it’ (Tweedie 1894: 246). Walsh, writing in 1880, simply quotes the expression ‘El aond por ma audouche hiela’ (a horse of noble race has no vices). It is interesting to note both the equation of good breeding with particular qualities, and the intertwining of Bedouin and Western voices. The Bedouin authorities preferred to stress the value of the horse in war, while the Western authors seek ‘beauty’, a peculiarly Romanticist quality that evokes a whole set of related moral qualities. These enthusiasts are as fulsome in their praise for the Arab horse as they are in their condemnation of the thoroughbred, a crossbred parvenu produced according to the short-sighted ambitions of gamblers and crooks, the inhabitant of the corrupt and spoilt West. This corruption is plain for all to see in its physical appearance. They are similarly dismissive of the urban Arab, a distortion of the desert creature, as Upton says: ‘It is true that some townsmen do breed, but the less said about the produce the better, for I am in possession of data sufficiently convincing that purity of blood is not always to be depended upon in such cases’ (1881: 273). The writers and their informants reject both the urban Arab horse and the thoroughbred on the basis of their lack of purity. This lack of purity corresponds to an important difference in the means of recording pedigrees. Bedouin pedigrees, though unwritten (in contrast to both urban and thoroughbred pedigrees), are not unrecorded. Upton notes that ‘[i]n the desert we neither saw any written pedigrees of horses, nor heard of any; that is to say, there is no custom of keeping written pedigrees … Every horse, however, has a pedigree; the breeding of each one is well known.’ This is not a difference based on technological capacity, since ‘most of the Shaykhs of important tribes keep a secretary’ (1881: 378). Rather, it is described as a matter of principle: ‘It is not only that the Arabian nomad cannot read or write or cipher, but that he prides himself on it. He makes it his boast that he takes in his knowledge either from the lips of the experienced, or through his five senses; and that he keeps it after he has got it, not in bookstores, but at his fingers ends … Among them knowledge is not an affair of writing’ (Tweedie 1894:

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132, 248). Written knowledge was apparently regarded with great suspicion, ‘the mere fact of a thing being written is apt to lay it open, in his opinion, to suspicion of being a fabrication’ (Wentworth 1945: 82).15 Amongst the Bedouin, knowledge of the breeding of their horses was apparently dispersed amongst the group and served to bind individuals together in a mutual act of recognition: ‘The Arabs have no written pedigrees; it is all an affair of memory and of notoriety in the tribe … The breeding of every horse is a matter of common knowledge, and it would be impossible for his owner to fabricate a pedigree so as to deceive the natives, even if he were so inclined’ (Merwin 1892: 28). In the interior of the desert, ‘the Bedouins never make use of any [written pedigrees], because, among themselves, they know the genealogy of their horse almost as well as that of their own families; but if they carry their horse to any distance, as to Bassora, Bagdat or Damascus, they take care to have a written pedigree made out, in order to present it to the purchaser. In that case only would a Bedouin be found in possession of his horse’s pedigree. He would laugh at it in the desert’ (Youatt 1888: 25). The ‘truth’ was dispersed, and in this sense, proved far more resilient than those truths recorded on pieces of paper. The sanction in this case was honour: ‘As I have already said, they will not tell a falsehood in respect of the breeding of their animals, a habit partly due to the honour in which all things connected with horseflesh are held, partly, too, no doubt, to the public notoriety of the breed or breeds in each family, which would at once expose the falsehood; and public opinion is severe on this’ (Blunt 1879: 85). In part, this could be seen as an extension of pre-Islamic oral traditions, in which ‘[a]ccuracy was the glory of the reciter (rawi) and narrator. The alteration of a single syllable was an unforgivable offence and absolute ruin to the culprit’s reputation’ (Blunt, quoted by Wentworth 1945: 106). However, this honour also relates to the horse itself. It behoved the Bedouin to preserve the purity of their horses because the horse was, according to pre-Islamic poetic lore, the original inhabitant of the desert, the equine equivalent of the Bedouin himself, or, in post-Islamic times, a gift from God. The Bedouin did not seek to improve, but rather to preserve. In preserving the blood, they retained that which is best about the Arab horse; in moving away from purity they introduced weakness. The strength of the Arab horse lies in its ability to reproduce the past, rather than in its ability to define the future. Hence ‘[t]here is never the smallest question among the Nejd Bedouins of seeking

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new stallions from any quarter “to improve their own breed”. They do not believe that their breed can possibly be improved’ (Wentworth 1945: 86). In complete contrast to the thoroughbred, ‘[t]he Arabian horse is regarded as the work and gift of Allah, which neither needs nor admits of improvement’ (Tweedie 1894: 42). It is clear, from the writings of the small group of men and women who travelled to the Arabian peninsular at the end of the nineteenth century, that what is at stake here is more than just a purebred horse. The qualities attributed to the Arab horse – beauty, symmetry and intelligence – are moral qualities, and precisely those lacking in the thoroughbred, who, ‘[a]ccording to the standard of the desert … is a parvenu and although he is bigger, stronger, and faster than the Arab, he is less sound, beautiful, intelligent and gentle’ (Merwin 1892: 30). Davenport too attributes undesirable qualities in the racehorse to deficits in bloodline: ‘The weediness, the ill temper, the lack of constitution, and conformation in our thoroughbreds mean just one thing – namely, that the old blood has run out. It needs renewing from the fountainhead – the strain that holds still all the vital vigour of the sun and sand’ (1911: 91). The thoroughbred is here presented as entirely domesticated, the Arab horse as preserved in a state of perpetual wildness.

Conclusion It is generally assumed that our Culture, with its science and its technology, operates by measuring, predicting and harnessing a world of natural ‘forces’. But in fact the whole range of conventional controls, our ‘knowledge’, our literatures of scientific and artistic achievements, our arsenal of productive technique, is a set of devices for the invention of a natural and phenomenal world. (Wagner 1981: 71)

The written pedigrees of thoroughbred horses in Britain and the U.S. attempted, but failed, to catalogue the breed independently of human interests. Stud books were in fact ‘thousands of fictions’, their claims too valuable to leave to chance. Written pedigrees also embedded specific ideas of heredity into the thoroughbred as a breed. Although these conventions had changed, from a record of type in the sixteenth century to a record of ancestry in the seventeenth century, today’s breeders assign this latter method to ‘nature’. The naturalistic empiricism (Wagner 1981: 141) of thoroughbred breeders (creators of ‘truths’ including the pedigree) enables them to appeal to such processes in order to continue to justify specific, and unequal,

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arrangements between different groups of horses and also people (Cassidy 2002). The unwritten pedigrees of Arab horses sought to preserve the purity of the original breed in the individuals of the present. They did not relate to any function outside this preservation. They were unwritten but held in common, and sacred. They related to creatures that were either part of nature in its original (and therefore perfect) state, or part of Allah’s (perfect) creation. Producing Arab horses was therefore holy, an act of worship, of return, of reiteration. The act of writing pedigrees was, by contrast, unnatural, unholy and doomed, a conceit. Prometea, the first cloned horse, foaled on 28 May 2003 to her genetically identical birth mother, offers another opportunity to queer the genealogical model that usually serves as the map used to navigate the thoroughbred horse world. ‘Basically, she foaled herself’ (lead researcher Cesare Galli, quoted by Weiss 2003). Prometea was named after Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to man. She was produced from eggs collected from the bodies of mares in an abattoir (it is not clear from Nature whether the mares were alive or dead at the time). The DNA was removed from these eggs and replaced by DNA taken from adult male and female skin cells. Of a total of eight hundred and forty-one embryos, twentytwo developed to advanced embryos, seventeen of which were implanted into nine mares, resulting in four pregnancies and one foal (Galli et al. 2003: 635). This is a genealogy of an order entirely different from that of the perpetually bilateral and unidirectional pedigree. It fuses human and animal, life and death, male and female, mother and daughter. Prometea is Antigone’s queer sister. Like Antigone, who is her own father’s half-sister and her brother’s aunt, she is an example of kinship gone awry, in the sense that she questions the expected rules of succession, patriarchy and descent: ‘Antigone is caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship. She is not, strictly speaking, outside kinship, or, indeed, unintelligible. Her situation can be understood, but only with a certain amount of horror’ (Butler 2000: 57). Both Prometea and the Arab horse threaten the capacity of the pedigree to record the improvement of a domesticated animal at the hands of its human keepers. The Arab horse was used by a number of authors at the end of the nineteenth century to represent the original and perfect racehorse, from which all other racehorses (including thoroughbreds) were derived, in altered and therefore inferior form. This was their protest against the

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majority of thoroughbred breeders, who considered anything to be possible at a time of technological and industrial progress that had not been seen previously. These breeders saw intervention in the breeding of racehorses, on the basis of objectively measured performance, as expressive of a new and improved relationship with nature. Promethea halts this progress and suggests a new phase in the relationship between nature and humanity, one with which thoroughbred breeders, once at the cutting edge, are now out of step. The international racecourse ban on any horse produced by artificial insemination is pedigree’s last stand in the context in which it has been most fully developed. What will replace this ubiquitous metaphor is anyone’s guess. However, it is to be hoped that whatever it is, we will remain vigilant as to its use within and without animal breeding because, as Deleuze has stated: ‘We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 15).

Notes 1. This chapter is concerned with flat racing (as opposed to jump racing over hurdles or fences) that takes place on grass or turf. 2. Japan leads the world in the provision of prize money (US $1,193.72 million in 2000), boosted by the largest annual betting handle in the world ($34,738.63 million in 2000 – the U.S. was second with $14,320.93 million). In 2000, Hong Kong ranked behind only Japan and the U.S. in annual betting handle ($10,408.13 million). South Korea and Singapore are more recent entrants to the international scene. Betting handle in South Korea was $3,369.46 million in 2001, seventh in world standings behind Japan, the U.S., Hong Kong, the U.K., France and Australia. 3. Foal identity is DNA tested using hair roots. Foals are microchipped in the U.K. and lip tattooed in the U.S. 4. I have argued elsewhere that the resilience of this system rests upon its ability to reproduce the concerns of the society that produces thoroughbred racehorses, rather than in its ability to produce results as such (Cassidy 2002). 5. The suffix indicates where the foal ‘hit the ground’. Establishing national identity can be just as problematic and as controversial for horses as it is for humans, and a horse may now be bred in one country, ‘dropped’ in another, brought up in a third, trained in a fourth and retired to stud in a fifth.

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6. The most prestigious races in the world are described as ‘Group’ Races (Europe) or ‘Graded’ Stakes (U.S.). An international committee allocates particular values to particular races. The Epsom Derby, for example, is a Group One race. The explicit role of the international committee is to preserve the integrity of the pedigree as recorded in the sales catalogue. 7. This practice is reminiscent of that of Icelanders searching the web for famous relatives as described by Pálsson (this volume). 8. This patriarchal vision of thoroughbred breeding was dominant during my fieldwork. It is not, however, the only version of heredity that has been adopted at different times by thoroughbred breeders. ‘Ovists’, that is breeders who considered the mare to be equally or even more important than the stallion, have been periodically influential. At present, a small but vociferous group of breeders are campaigning for better recognition of the female line, either through a celebration of influential individuals (described as ‘blue hens’) or through the tracing of a particular gene thought to be associated with large hearts (the Xfactor) that is transmitted through the female line. 9. In Social Change and History (1969), communitarian sociologist Robert Nisbet argued that biological metaphors, such as ‘growth’ and ‘development’, when applied to the flow of events, serve ‘what might be called a dogmatic or prophetic function’ (1969: 24). They make sense of historical processes in a way that appeals to a familiar organizing metaphor, detracting from the messier business of cause and effect. 10. The continuing influence of these particular animals can be seen in the so-called ‘native breeds’ of the British Isles, especially the Welsh Pony, the Dartmoor and the Exmoor. 11. After a short military career in the Low Country, Gervase Markham (1568–1637) became the country’s most prolific writer on all matters horse. His first book, A Discourse of Horsemanshippe, was published in 1593. In 1607 he produced his most famous work, Cavelarice: or the English Horseman, which provided a comprehensive work on the animal, ‘with whose nature and use I have been exercised and acquainted from my Childhood, and I hope, without boast, need not yield to any in this Kingdome’ (preface). 12. John H. Wallace was born in Pennsylvania in 1822 and moved to Iowa in 1845 in order to become secretary of state fairs. He was renowned for his tireless pursuit of the pedigrees of even the most obscure horses, but had little interest in the practicalities of everyday horsemanship. He produced Wallace’s American Stud Book in 1867 and Wallace’s American Trotting Register in 1871. In 1875 he moved to New York in order to work on Wallace’s Monthly and Wallace’s Year Book, statistical records of trotting racing. In typical uncompromising style, he gave up the Trotting Register after a dispute with breeders over the pedigree of the mare Sunol in 1891. 13. ‘Trotters’ raced at a trot, rather than a gallop, and were a breed apart

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from, but related to, the thoroughbred. Trotting racing remains popular in the U.S. but has no professional presence in the U.K. 14. The Crabbet Stud, founded by Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in 1877, was the base from which the couple attempted to create British interest in Arabian horses. Mares and stallions were imported from the Middle East, and foals were sold at auction. The lack of popularity of the Arab horse relative to the thoroughbred can be deduced from the fact that the stud ran at a perpetual loss, subsidized by the Blunts, until a new market was discovered in the U.S. 15. Tweedie relates this contrast to a difference between town and desert dwellers. He writes that the Bedouin condemn the veil wearing, writing town dwellers, and takes ‘natural bareness and pride in being what he is – the opposite of a townsman’ (1894: 134).

References Allison, W. (ed.). 1901. Breeding Racehorses by the Figure System (compiled by the late Bruce Lowe). London: The Field and Queen. Behdad, A. 1994. Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Cork: Cork University Press. Blunt, A. 1879. Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates. London: Murray. ———. 1881. A Pilgrimage to the Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race and a Visit to the Court of the Arab Emir and ‘Our Persian Campaign’. London: Murray. Borden, S. 1906. The Arab Horse. London: Doubleday. Boucaut, J.P. 1905. The Arab: The Horse of the Future. London: Gay and Bird. Bouquet, M. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of British Kinship Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Butler, J. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Cassidy, R. 2002. The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davenport, H. 1911. My Quest of the Arabian Horse. London: Grant Richards. Davis, G. 2001. ‘Spicing up the Betting Game’ Guardian Online Section, 22 March, pp. 12–13. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 2002 [1988]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. De Musset, A. 1975. Venice. Stances. Chanson do Fortunio, trans. D. Ramage. Durham: privately printed for D. Ramage by Bailes and Sons. Franklin, S. 1997. ‘Animal Models: An Anthropologist Considers Dolly’, Environmental Values 6: 427–37. Galli, C. et al. 2003. ‘A Cloned Horse Born to Its Dam Twin’, Nature 424 (6949): 635. Lyle, R. 1945. Royal Newmarket. London: Putnam. Markham, G. 1607. Cavalarice, or The English Horseman. London.

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Merwin, H. 1892. ‘Arabian Horses’, Atlantic Monthly, July, pp. 27–33. Nisbet, R. 1969. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1970. ‘Genealogy, Growth and Other Metaphors’, New Literary History 1(3): 351–63. Onslow, R. 1990. Royal Ascot. Marlborough: Crowood. Osborne, J. 1881. The Horse-Breeders’ Handbook. London: Hare. Prior, C.M. 1935. The Royal Studs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Horse and Hound. Rivers, W.H.R. 1900. ‘A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 30: 74–82. Robertson, J. 1906. The Principles of Heredity Applied to the Racehorse. London: J.A. Allen. Russell, N. 1986. Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England. Cambridge: University Press. Thirsk, J. 1978. Horses in Early Modern England: For Service, for Pleasure, for Power. Reading: University of Reading Press. Tweedie, W. 1894. The Arabian Horse. Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons. Upton, R.D. 1873. Newmarket and Arabia: An Examination of the Descent of Racers and Coursers. London: Henry S. King. ———. 1881. Gleanings from the Desert of Arabia. London: C.K. Paul and Co. Varola, F. 1974. Typology of the Racehorse. London: J.A. Allen. Wagner, R. 1981. The Invention of Culture, revised and expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallace, J. 1897. The Horse of America in his Derivation, History and Development. New York: the author. Walsh, J. 1880 [1861]. The Horse in the Stable and the Field: His Varieties, Management in Health and Disease, Anatomy, Physiology, etc., etc. London: George Routledge and Sons. Weiss, R. 2003. ‘Scientists Clone Horse in Italy’, Washington Post, 7 August. Wentworth, A. 1938. Thoroughbred Racing Stock and Its Ancestors. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. 1945. The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants. London: Allen and Unwin. Willett, P. 1991. A History of the General Stud Book. Wellingborough: Weatherbys. Youatt, W. 1888. The Horse: With a Treatise on Draft, 4th edition. London: Longmans, Green.

Chapter 2

WHEN BLOOD MATTERS MAKING KINSHIP

IN

COLONIAL KENYA

J. Teresa Holmes

I

n the last decade we have seen a revival of interest in the study of kinship that has been fuelled, in large part, by a critical reassessment of many of our most cherished anthropological notions of the nature of kinship. Many of those works that have reflected on, and sought to transform, the anthropological perspective on kinship were informed by David Schneider’s (1968, 1972, 1984) influential argument that, with respect to the study of kinship, we must first determine the conceptual scheme, or the meanings and their configurations, that inform a cultural understanding of kinship, both at home and in a cross-cultural perspective (1984: 199). One anthropological notion that seems to have withstood this recent critique is the relevance of the genealogical method to the study of African kinship, especially forms of kinship found in what have traditionally been referred to as ‘segmentary lineage societies’ (see Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1949; Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Holy 1979a, 1979b; Middleton and Tait 1958; Southall 1952). This essay questions the continued use of the genealogical paradigm in the description and analysis of so-called segmentary lineage societies by examining the colonial roots of this practice in the area of western Kenya occupied, historically, by Luo peoples.1 Based on research in British colonial archives, I examine not only the colonial officials’

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reliance on the use of genealogical assumptions and forms, but also the concomitant assertions of alternative notions of relatedness on the part of Luo peoples living in this region.2 Archival documentation of colonial policies and practices from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates that British colonial officials used genealogical thinking to identify the Luo peoples of western Kenya as clan-based and to administer Luo communities as if all social identity (and thus all rights and customs) derived solely from kinship ties based on descent through men.3 At the same time, this documentation also suggests that the Luo themselves used less linear and more flexible and encompassing notions of relatedness to construct socially significant identities. This ‘lack of fit’ between genealogically based colonial models and documented Luo social practice suggests that there is a need to re-evaluate our reliance on models of African kinship that, like the segmentary lineage model, privilege ties of consanguinity and descent – or that assume that only blood matters – in the construction of community identity and relationship.4

Genealogy, Agnation, and the Segmentary Lineage Model We can trace the development of the anthropological model of the segmentary lineage system to the work of Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (see Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; EvansPritchard 1940; Fortes 1945). It was Evans-Pritchard who most clearly laid out what would become the paradigmatic model of the segmentary lineage system in his work on the Nuer of southern Sudan (see especially Evans-Pritchard 1940).5 Here he argued that the segmentary lineage system is ‘a conceptual skeleton on which the local communities are built up into an organization of related parts … a system of values linking tribal segments and providing the idiom in which their relations can be expressed and directed’ (1940: 212). Furthermore, his analysis designates consanguinity and descent through the male line as the primary organizational values in Nuer society. The ‘conceptual skeleton’ to which he refers, then, is the ‘highly segmented genealogical structure’ of the patrilineal clan and its component lineages (1940: 193). Thus, in this model of kinship and social structure, agnatic descent – or patrilineal connections of blood – matter fundamentally.6 For several decades in the mid twentieth century, lineage theory and the lineage model were central to the anthropological investi-

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gation and analysis of many African societies (see Evans-Pritchard 1949, 1951; Fortes 1945, 1949; Goody 1967 [1956]; Middleton and Tait 1958; Mitchell 1956; Southall 1952, 1970 [1956]; Tait 1961). And, although lineage theory no longer shapes the direction or the concerns of ethnographic research in Africa, the lineage model persists, often in a truncated or modified form, in many ethnographies.7 As Adam Kuper has noted, lineage theory has a ‘stubborn half-life’ (1982: 71) in the work of Africanist scholars. I would add that the same is true of the genealogical paradigm. Although the importance of agnatic descent persists as a central and unquestioned analytical concept in much African ethnography, certain aspects of the segmentary lineage model have been the subject of debate. One of the more lengthy debates has focused on the contradictions found in two of Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographies, The Nuer (1940) and Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951). These two books treat separately what Evans-Pritchard, and others of his generation, posited were two distinct domains of Nuer life: the politicaljural domain and the domestic domain (cf. McKinnon 2000). In their introduction to African Political Systems (1940), Fortes and EvansPritchard outlined the importance of this analytical distinction from the segmentary lineage model: ‘We must here distinguish between sets of relationships linking the individual to other persons and to particular social units through the transient, bilateral family, which we shall call the kinship system, and the segmentary system of permanent unilateral descent groups, which we call the lineage system’ (1940: 6). In keeping with this analytical distinction, The Nuer is a consideration of the ways in which the segmentary lineage system, and the values of agnatic descent, provide the structural foundation for sociopolitical identity and action in Nuer society. Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer, on the other hand, is a detailed description of what Evans-Pritchard considered the realm of interpersonal kinship and domestic relations. As described in this book, for the Nuer this realm of kinship includes a complex network of cognatic and affinal ties of kinship.8 Overall, then, the segmentary lineage model rests on a conceptual distinction that presumes the social structural relevance of agnation and descent in the shaping of (political) relationships between groups. At the same time, all other forms of relatedness (based on cognatic and affinal ties through women) are ‘relegated to the substructural domain of the domestic’ (McKinnon 2000: 41). This neat distinction is contradicted, however, by Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic descriptions of Nuer community life, found in Kinship and Marriage among

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the Nuer, which demonstrate the social structural relevance of nonagnatic (genealogically irrelevant) kinship ties. A number of scholars have debated this disjunction, noting the ‘lack of fit’ between the linear and circumscribed patrilineal ties of the segmentary lineage model and ethnographic accounts of how Nuer social identity and group relations are shaped by cognatic and affinal ties through women (see Evens 1984; Glickman 1971; Gough 1971; Holy 1979a, 1979b, 1996; Karp and Maynard 1983; Kelly 1985; Kuper 1982; Richards 1941; Sahlins 1965; Schneider 1965; Southall 1986; Verdon 1980, 1982).9 However, in considering this disjunction, most scholars have not questioned the theoretical premises of the segmentary lineage model.10 Instead, as McKinnon has recently noted, ‘many commentators have continued to see the Nuer as … patrilineal … by shifting the responsibility for the disjunction from Evans-Pritchard to the Nuer themselves and resorting to an explanation that relies on a distinction between Nuer ideals and the reality of Nuer behavior’ (2000: 37). In other words, these scholars have resolved the contradictions generated by the segmentary lineage model by continuing to rely on the genealogical assumptions that pervade this model and by offering solutions that affirm the ideological dominance of the agnatic principle in what have been characterized as segmentary lineage societies.11

Complicating Luo Kinship It is notable that the lengthy and ongoing interest in the contradictions inherent in Evans-Pritchard’s analytic models of Nuer society has not resulted in a more thorough rethinking of the assumptions of the lineage model in anthropological studies of so-called segmentary lineage societies. Certainly such a rethinking might have been generated by Schneider’s thorough rejection of ‘the genealogical unity of mankind’ and the long-held European cultural assumption that ‘blood is thicker than water’ (1984: 174). The fact that this has not happened, to any great extent, points to the conceptual and explanatory elegance of the lineage model, as well as to the power of Euro-American genealogical assumptions. One cannot help but wonder how many anthropologists working in patrilineal (or matrilineal) societies in Africa have struggled to reconcile potentially revelatory meanings and configurations of relatedness – especially those that are not shaped by lineal ‘blood’ ties – with the standard genealogical model of African kinship. In this essay I suggest that

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devoting attention to those unexpected notions of kinship may provide a crystallizing moment that allows us to re-imagine the possibilities of kinship. I had one of those crystallizing moments in the fall of 1989, while undertaking historical anthropological research on colonial societies in the Luo region of western Kenya. During this period I was working with British colonial documents in the Kenyan National Archives. To facilitate this archival research, and to further my own understanding of Luo history and culture, I was also taking language lessons in DhoLuo. One afternoon, when I had grown tired of learning the names of household objects, I asked my teacher, Ruth, if we could talk about the terms used to designate family and kinship groupings. Having diligently studied anthropological descriptions of the Luo segmentary lineage system before coming to the field, I thought that this would be a chance for me to show off some of my linguistic and ethnographic knowledge. To begin engaging Ruth in what I thought were the important aspects of Luo kinship – i.e., agnation and descent – I listed what I thought were the basic terms for lineage groupings and asked her to explain what these groups would look like, on the ground. Instead of launching into a description of the lineage system, however, Ruth asked me to clarify what I was looking for. In response, I drew the standard model of the segmentary lineage system.

FIGURE 2.1: The standard model of the segmentary lineage system.

But that didn’t seem to work either. Ruth was not going to be easily led into a discussion of the importance of descent, even with the help of my diagram. Instead, she tried a number of times to explain how various groupings of kin can be related in Luo society – some based on ties through men and others on ties through women. Finally, and I expect out of frustration and in hopes of making things clearer, she drew the following diagram:

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Figure 2.2: An explanation of how various groupings of kin can be related in Luo society.

The one thing that Ruth was particularly intent on explaining to me was that the centre circle represented a husband and his wife. She also pointed out that the other circles radiating out from this centre circle also represented both a man and a woman, married, who will have or have had children. She emphasized that this was important to understand because, as she said was the case with her father, the man might not belong to that community and so his wife is the ‘connection’ between him and the elders of the community. She insisted that ties through women can be just as important as ties of descent through men, because they can also shape social relationships. In other words, she was suggesting to me that agnatic ties of blood do not always matter in the formation of social identity. I must admit that initially, I did not understand Ruth’s diagram. It did not make sense to me because it did not match the traditional ethnographic understanding of the lineal structure of Luo society. Part of my inability to comprehend the significance of Ruth’s sketch was certainly due to my own training in an anthropological tradition, informed by the genealogical method, that privileges the lineage – or agnatic relations of blood – as the structural truth of Luo society. However, my confusion over how to interpret Ruth’s diagram was also due to the fact that the structural truth of the lineage model seemed to be repeated in a myriad of forms in the archival documents that consumed my attention almost every day. I could not make sense of what Ruth was telling me about her understanding of Luo identity because it did not match what I thought I was finding in colonial reports on localized Luo populations. In the archives, I kept coming up against maps, charts, reports and even ethnographic descriptions of Luo society that reproduced the lan-

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guage and assumptions of a tribal model of African society in which descent, or genealogical principles of relationship, were paramount. As I continued to work in the archives, though, I kept thinking about my conversation with Ruth. And over time, I began to realize that I was focusing primarily on the authoritative voices of colonial agents – voices that privileged genealogical relations of agnation – and that maybe I should also be recovering what I could of the less familiar, and often confusing, voices of Luo peoples. I thought that perhaps I could gain some insight into Ruth’s explanation of kinship by trying to find historical precedents for such a perspective. Looking back on this, I can say now that I was becoming interested in what Jean and John Comaroff refer to as the ‘endogenous historicity’ (1992: 24) of the Luo social world in the colonial period. Making sense of the fragments of a Luo colonial past meant recognizing the fact that there were several ‘partial hidden histories’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 17) in the archives. These histories related to the imagined and lived worlds of varying groups of colonizers and colonized. Most immediately available were those recorded fragments of British colonial discourse and practice that told a story of the process of constructing ‘knowledge’ about the colonized other – a knowledge that then formed the basis of colonial practice. But I was fortunate in that the archives also included many examples of Luo recorded speech and written texts. From these, I was able to trace out some of the stories that Luo peoples told themselves, and others, about their attempts to engage with the world of colonial society, often through forms of agency that challenged the assumptions of this world. Some of the more important stories within these archives have to do with social identity. They caught my attention because within them I could see the contradictions that I had been confronted with in the conversations I had with Ruth about kinship identity. As I read these accounts, it became apparent that the stories told by both the British and the Luo about indigenous kinship and its relationship to identity varied considerably: they were contested discourses rather than discovered facts. But what was most intriguing was to find that the epistemological gaps between British and Luo understandings of the nature of kinship mirrored, in many respects, the gaps in the conversations that I had with Ruth about this same topic. By delving into this conflict of interpretation, I began to recognize how questions of relatedness reflected differing colonial strategies of constructing Luo identity and also opened on to multiple and related questions about the anthropological endeavour in East Africa.

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Although the archives revealed many examples of Luo stories of identity that contrasted with British assumptions and constructions, some of the best-represented indigenous voices belonged to those people who claimed membership in the Kager clan. These people did not occupy a recognizable territory but were scattered throughout various communities in an area just to the south of the Nzoia River in central Kavirondo.12 The Kager groups that I focus on in this essay were living in and around the community of Musanda, located in southern Wanga. This was part of North Kavirondo District, which, within the framework of the native administration, belonged to a Bantu-speaking tribal group called the Wanga. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, these Kager groups were actively contesting their status in this region, using administrative channels to try and claim rights to land and to an identity as ‘owner of the land’, or wuon lowo. In the rest of this essay I examine both British and Kager notions of identity production as they are documented in archival records of conflicts over land. I consider how British colonial agents ‘made tribes’ in Kavirondo, creating an order in which the blood ties through men mattered fundamentally in the shaping of lineage and clan identities. I also look at how Kager peoples contested this tribal model and its structural and practical consequences, strategically asserting alternative and more fluid ways of constructing relatedness and performing identity. By paying attention to these contrasting stories, or discourses, of identity, I demonstrate how Luo kinship strategies operated within the colonial encounter, but also partially beyond its limits and frameworks, thereby complicating the ways that blood matters.

Tribal Pedigrees In 1895 the British Foreign Office sent First Class Assistant C.W. Hobley to Kavirondo territory. In Hobley’s words, he was sent there to establish an administration over ‘various sections of the turbulent collection of tribes’ about whom ‘nothing much was known’ (Hobley 1970 [1929]: 80). It is evident from the records Hobley left behind that the task he undertook was to make this ‘turbulent collection’ of peoples ‘known’ as members of distinct, clan-based tribal populations fixed within what was presumed to be the natural order of East Africa. These archival accounts suggest that this process of ‘making tribes’ invoked a discourse of classification and surveillance that relied, fundamentally, on the privileging of descent through men as the source of indigenous identity.

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Hobley’s desire to make the tribal populations of Kavirondo ‘known’ was certainly not unusual in the larger context of European colonial expansion. Colonial agents like Hobley ‘made’ tribes in western Kenya, and other parts of Africa, as they described what they believed to be the essential components of the native landscape. Various scholars have described how the fluid and shifting social spaces of indigenous communities were materially reordered as colonial agents established, or invented, the rigid and internally coherent structure of the ‘tribe’ as the conceptual framework for colonial administration and control (see Crehan 1997; Holmes 1997, 2000; Iliffe 1979; Jackson and Maddox 1993; Pels 1994, 1996; Ranger 1983; Southall 1970; Vail 1989; Worby 1994). These works show us that – in the first instance – the process of making tribes relied upon the documentation of these populations as ‘tribal’. Maps exhibiting territorial boundaries, diagrams of kin relations or patterns of inheritance and marriage, and written descriptions of the physical, cultural and social traits of local populations all provided the conceptual basis for the locating and naming of tribes. In his recent study of the role of writing in the colonization of the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, Sean Hawkins (2002) points to the importance of this process of documentation, noting that putting native populations on paper was crucial to colonial practices of appropriation and control. He argues that this ‘world on paper’ became ‘the official arbiter of legitimacy, a regulator of authenticity, and a source of power’ (2002: 4). With respect to the role of tribal documentation as a ‘regulator of authenticity’, I am particularly interested in how the documentation of Luo tribal relations, as relations of descent, defined the authenticity of some Luo populations and the inauthenticity of others. One of the common means by which local populations in Africa were invented as ‘tribes’ was by compiling examples and providing documentation of tribal custom. Scholars have looked at various descriptions of custom that worked to authenticate and give substance to European notions of tribe in colonial society. For the most part, however, they have not considered the written or diagrammed evidence on descent relations as part of this process of making tribes, nor have they considered the implications of the privileging of lineal relations of blood for our understanding of the nature of indigenous society.13 In the context of western Kenya, however, archival evidence demonstrates that colonial interest in indigenous relations of descent had more to do with European notions of tribal identity than it did with the objective collection and description of social facts. I argue

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that colonial practices of making tribes naturalized and fixed community identity as tribal and as descent-based by documenting and authenticating – on paper – the link between blood and territory. This was a process that tied indigenous identity solely to matters of ties through men and descent while obscuring other, equally significant forms of relationship. One of the important ways in which British colonial agents ‘discovered’ those so-called customary structures of descent so basic to the location of a tribal order was through the collection of genealogical information, especially the genealogies of those considered to be hereditary leaders of so-called tribal territories. In western Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, this was a primary means by which tribes were represented within, and emerged from, ‘the world on paper’. This method of locating the limits and membership of tribal populations in many areas of Africa was fundamental to the documentation of the centrality of descent. Today, the use of genealogies to record the structure of community and family relations is still a practice that is familiar and central to our own commonsense understanding of the basis of social relationship in African society. My intent is to defamiliarise this practice and suggest its links with British, or more generally European, sensibilities. As was the case in most colonial territories in Africa, the peoples of Kavirondo were made ‘known’ through practices that defined tribal space by providing evidence of territorial connections between presumably homogenous populations and specific areas of land. A common strategy was the determination of ancestral connections to the first occupants of this tribal territory through the collection of narratives, or oral traditions, that described the origins and local history of supposed tribal populations.14 This information was often included in official administrative publications or in reports by district officers intending to clarify the identity of specific groups, or to verify the tribal, or clan, rights of particular populations. Sometimes ancestral connections of tribal or clan groups were simply rehearsed within the context of a report, but in many cases this information was transferred onto ‘family trees’, genealogical charts that portrayed relations of descent between clan groups and male representatives, usually those said to have been chiefs, of clans.15 Certainly this and other kinds of kinship information would have been available from any collection of individuals or family groups within local communities. But what is interesting is that colonial officials only recorded information on relations of descent through men, usually men designated as chiefs, and only sought (or only re-

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ported) this information for those populations they believed to be associated with a recognized tribal territory. In 1903 C.W. Hobley presented the results of what he described as ‘minute research into the habits and beliefs’ of the Luo and other peoples of Kavirondo (1903: 325). His article included several Luo myths that recounted their origins and the story of their arrival in their current homes. In describing these origin myths, Hobley stated that they contained ‘genealogical tables … handed down verbally from generation to generation’ (1903: 326). Along with what appears to be an edited version of the myth itself, Hobley provided his rendering of the genealogical tables, which condensed only the information from the myths that referred to relations of descent between the original ancestor and his descendants. Notably, the origin myths, as reproduced in Hobley’s text, also included information about marriage or social connections between the original ancestor, his descendants, and those people already occupying these lands. This information, however, was not diagrammed by Hobley, perhaps because it could not have been contained within the linear structure of Luo genealogies of descent, but most likely because this information was not considered genealogically significant within the parameters of the tribal model. In Hobley’s genealogies, then, there is a direct connection implied between historical connections of descent and the authenticity of tribal, or clan populations within specific territories. It is important to consider the cultural logic that lay behind Hobley’s depiction of a coherent and territorially bounded genealogy of ancestral connection and his presumption of the connection between this genealogy and the tribal authenticity of specific populations. Hobley’s approach to the identification of tribal populations can be linked to more general Euro-American cultural assumptions concerning the universality of genealogical thinking and the predominant role played by kinship in the organization of ‘primitive’ societies. David Schneider demonstrates how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social philosophers and anthropologists presumed the ‘genealogical unity of mankind’ as they worked from fundamental European cultural beliefs that ‘blood is thicker than water’ and that, therefore, all forms of kinship rest on the natural bonds of relationship through blood (1984: 165–166).16 Significantly, Schneider also points to the presumption amongst these scholars that kinship and genealogical thinking play a dominant role in ‘primitive’ societies in the organization of social relationships and the determination of social identity (1984: 176; see also Bouquet 1993). For ex-

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ample, he notes that W.H.R. Rivers, who pioneered the genealogical method in British anthropology, argued that [n]early all, if not all, peoples of the world preserve, either in writing or in their memories, a record of those with whom they are related by consanguinity … Among many peoples, and especially among those of rude culture, the knowledge of relationship thus genealogically determined is far more extensive than among ourselves. Pedigrees preserved in the memories of a rude tribe of cannibals may rival, if not surpass, anything which even the most enthusiastic genealogist is capable of carrying in his mind (Rivers 1915: 700–1; cited in Schneider 1984: 105–6).

What is especially interesting here is the explicit association between genealogies and pedigrees. Mary Bouquet (1993) examines in detail the connections between the genealogical method in British anthropology and early twentieth-century English middleclass notions of pedigree and breeding. Given her demonstration of the importance of the notion of pedigree generally in British society during this period (see also Strathern 1992), I believe that we can extend her observations about the link between pedigree and the recording of genealogies to the amateur ethnographers of the colonial service as well. It makes sense that both British colonial agents and anthropologists, practising and writing ethnography at roughly the same time, were relying on a common cultural knowledge about the role of genealogies, or ‘family trees’, in the recording of human relationships (see Bouquet 1996). Drawing on Bouquet’s work, I argue that considering the importance of what she refers to as ‘pedigree thinking’ in British colonial practice will provide some clue as to what lay behind the presumption, seen in the writings of colonial agents like Hobley, that the collection of genealogies – in the form of blood ties through men – would provide a true accounting of the tribal order and understanding of which groups have authentic, or absolute, rights within a defined tribal territory. Bouquet suggests that ‘the connotations of English pedigree – snobbishness, animal breeding, “breeding” in the noble sense – were intrinsic to the original rationale for recording genealogies’ (1993: 189). She points out that the English obsession with pedigree is based on the idea that there are transmittable qualities that can be passed on in both animal and human bloodlines (cf. Cassidy, this volume). Considering the link between bloodlines and social class in British society, Bouquet suggests that pedigree became a means by which the natural purity of a bounded social group – or social class – could

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be managed and maintained. As applied to African society, information on blood relationship (or pedigree) would not have had the same connotations. Yet Bouquet argues that ‘pedigree thinking was so important to English middle-class intellectuals that it was absorbed into the processes of making knowledge about other peoples’ (1993: 219). To demonstrate the ‘“trace” of pedigree thinking’ in the genealogical method, Bouquet draws a comparison with early twentiethcentury English popular notions concerning the ‘well-bred’ animal. She analyses the animal tales of Beatrix Potter and suggests that they portray a (wild) animal world in which ‘breeding’ – or the ability to perform one’s proper social role – is evidence of the control exercised over interspecies interaction and procreation. This, she argues, provides an ethnographic understanding of English middleclass assumptions about the importance of pedigree in the making of social persons. In turn, Bouquet points to notable similarities between these commonsense English notions and the ways in which the genealogical method was applied to the study of ‘primitive societies’ by anthropologists like W.H.R. Rivers. She suggests that ‘[p]edigree used the (implicit) idea of distinction (based upon the ability to control reproduction among certain domestic species and the nobility, that involved keeping records) to effect radical transformations: wild animals became ‘persons’, and primitive people acquired ‘society’ … The ‘wild’ and the ‘primitive’ could be transformed into civilized symbolic capital by those able [to] dominate them intellectually’ (Bouquet 1993: 200–1). While the use of genealogies to record what was thought to be ‘primitive’ kinship did not entail the control of procreation, or the directed channelling of blood, it did rely upon a similar notion of what defines a social person – the identification, through written or graphic records, of connections of blood within localized communities. In this regard, breeding was related to one’s ability, as a member of a tribal group, to exercise rights over such things as land and political authority. These aspects of tribal custom were also seen as fundamental to the imagined civil society of the colonial order. So the acquisition of society by primitive people would have come about as a result of this process of recording, or making scientifically known, the ‘well-bred’ native. In the context of colonial practice, the focus placed on the collection of what amounted to ‘tribal pedigrees’ was one way that colonial administrators could insure the identification of naturally bounded (pure) tribal populations. The genealogies and official charts con-

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structed from this information on descent demonstrated, for specific individuals designated as tribal representatives and by extension all others claiming tribal or clan affiliation, a natural connectedness to the land passed on in the blood from original ancestral settlers. This notion seems linked to what Bouquet describes as a British anthropological assumption that in the world of primitive man, there is an ‘underlying notion of pedigree flowing … from one container to the other’ (1993: 194). This idea of pedigree privileges historical connections of descent and attachments to land – as the pedigree that flows from one individual to the next – and links them to the authenticity of tribal, or clan populations within specific territories. This discursive strategy of regulating tribal authenticity through the collection of tribal pedigrees had particular significance for Luo peoples living in the central Nzoia region of Kavirondo. We know from linguistic and archaeological evidence that historically, the central Nzoia region was occupied not only by Nilotic-speaking Luo peoples, but also by Bantu-speaking groups who had intermarried and shared resources with the Luo. It also appears that at the time of colonial intervention in the 1880s, this area of Kavirondo was a contested and fluid social field, characterized by the movement of people between communities and conflict over land and the control of trade. According to indigenous reports (as recorded in archival documents), at this time the primary occupants of the Musanda area were the Kager Luo and those Bantu-speaking peoples who came to be known as the Wanga. In 1898, shortly after he arrived in Kavirondo, C.W. Hobley published an article in The Geographical Journal of Great Britain that included a breakdown of the tribal populations of this area and a map (Hobley 1898). In this article, and on this map, Hobley located the Wanga tribe to the south of the Nzoia River, in sole possession of this region. He also included a genealogy of the Wanga, which authenticated their historical connections of descent to this region. Cartographic and descriptive representations of this kind naturalized and privileged Wanga occupation of this territory and delegitimated any Kager Luo claims to land or authority. Archival records indicate that by 1916, the Kager had begun to agitate for changes in native authority and land allocation.17 By the early 1930s this agitation had intensified, as some members of the Kager clan had organized their efforts and were petitioning the administration for these changes. In barazas (public meetings), in private meetings with district and provincial officials, and through formal letters and written appeals, the Kager were claiming rights to land and authority that predated British intervention.18 The actions

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and claims of these Kager can be seen as part of a coherent discursive strategy to contest not only the fact of Wanga dominance, but also British assumptions about the ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ nature of tribal identity, as defined by tribal pedigrees, and authentic rights to land and authority in this region of western Kenya. The conceptual dominance and the rigidly narrow framework of the tribal model make it difficult to comprehend indigenous discourses of this kind that might provide alternative or more encompassing notions of community identity and relationship. But the attempts of Kager peoples to claim rights to land in the community of Musanda is a particularly good example of how such discursive strategies can work as an ongoing form of identity construction. In this context the Kager were contesting their place, or status, within the descent-based tribal framework of community relations – a framework in which they had no rights to land because they had no recognized pedigree or authentic ties of blood. What the histories of Kager identity construction show, however, is that their strategy was not to claim that their blood also mattered, or mattered more. Instead, in their words and actions, they demonstrated that other forms of relationship also mattered in the ongoing construction and negotiation of identity within the orbit of a powerful colonial system. Thus the Kager, by looking beyond matters of blood for a source of meaningful identity, confounded British colonizers and future anthropologists in their attempt to map an orderly East Africa.

Authentic Landlords, Inauthentic Tenants One important fragment of the ‘partial hidden history’ of Luo identity construction can be revealed by considering the frequent administrative expressions of concern about the seemingly unnatural heterogeneity of local populations in central Kavirondo, especially in the Musanda region. This was, in fact, a common theme in the daily reports of district officers and commissioners working in this area. Between 1915 and 1935, summaries of census data almost always verified the presence of a significant population of Luo in Musanda. Nevertheless, colonial agents often reported this information in such a way as to suggest the illegitimacy of their presence.19 Indeed, it seems clear that the presence of groups without connections of descent to those imagined as original occupants was seen by colonial officials as problematic, creating what one district commissioner referred to as a ‘mixed population’.20

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This anxiety over the problem of unnaturally ‘mixed’ native populations suggests that the administrative campaign to define indigenous populations as tribal must be seen as an attempt to create order out of disorder. This concern with the location of tribal order intensified over the first few decades of colonial rule, as administrative officials were faced with an emerging pattern of native agitation in the Musanda region and increasing demands for rights to land.21 Not surprisingly, colonial administrators held fast to the tribal model in dealing with these attempts to redraw the supposedly authentic boundaries of tribal and clan territory.22 Generally reluctant to reconsider these boundaries, they insisted that all land should continue to be used by the ‘original’ tribal and clan landlords, i.e., those with authentic tribal pedigrees. This agitation continued, however, and by 1924 district and provincial commissioners had begun commenting on what they called ‘land-grabbing’ by ‘temporary cultivators’.23 This category of ‘temporary cultivator’ was used to refer to those individuals and/or family groups who, though they occupied and used land within a community, were not connected through blood to the clan associated administratively (or authentically) with this residential unit. This category of ‘temporary’ occupant, or ‘tenant’, soon became a standard administrative label used when referring to community conflict over land. Tenants were recognized as an improper category of community residents, distinct from those with presumably permanent (i.e., authentic) tribal rights to land as ‘landlords’. I do not want to imply, though, that the Luo did not also rely on categories of difference that distinguished between community members. It is clear from the archives that the Musanda Luo (like other Luo-speaking peoples in western Kenya) differentiated between jodak, those groups whose association with the community was more recent, and weg lowo, those whose longer association with the community meant that they controlled access to land (cf. Shipton 1984).24 Ethnographic evidence from the 1930s tells us that the Luo understood jodak as groups that were linked to weg lowo through women, or that had the potential to be linked through women. Although these ties were not patrilineal ‘ties of blood’, they were of considerable importance. Ethnographers have consistently reported that ties through women insured that jodak owed a certain amount of political allegiance and economic support to their weg lowo partners (see Butterman 1979; Goldenberg 1982). Archival evidence demonstrates, however, that those groups claiming wuon lowo status also benefited from this relationship. As I will discuss below, it appears

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that becoming and being wuon lowo rested on the ability to attract jodak to the community, and that this was a way of maintaining and controlling regional authority and rights to land. This suggests, then, that these indigenous categories shaped contingent and fluid social, economic and political relations in those communities where Luo peoples resided. It is important to note that regardless of the importance of jodak and weg lowo within indigenous communities, British colonial officials reduced these concepts to static and fixed categories that were solely linked to differential access to land and that implied a distinction between tribal authenticity and inauthenticity. In the context of this administrative discourse, jadak was glossed as ‘tenant’ and wuon lowo was glossed as ‘landlord’. This had the effect of reducing complex forms of identity to Euro-style categories of land tenure that were subsumed by the overriding logic of the tribal model.25 In the colonial society of Musanda the category of tenant provided an explanation for the presence of Kager Luo, who, according to the tribal model, were ‘out of place’. Archival documents indicate that large numbers of the Kager living in this area were well integrated into local communities and claimed residence for several generations back.26 These records also suggest that the Kager were connected to Wanga peoples through long-term uterine, affinal, or other, nonkinship ties. Yet the administrative understanding of tribal, or customary, law had now made these ties structurally meaningless. This meant that Kager living in this community had no recourse to a claim of any administratively significant identity – no ties of blood – and thus no rights to land. It is not surprising, then, that beginning in the late 1920s, Kager individuals and groups in Musanda were attempting to claim an identity for themselves as wuon lowo, or in administrative terms, ‘land lords’. What is interesting, however, is that archival records of these written and spoken claims of wuon lowo status, as well as the actions taken to further these claims, suggest that the Kager understanding of what it meant to be, and how one became, wuon lowo was rather different from that codified in customary law. In fact, Kager discourse relating to their claims to ‘own the land’ constructed a much more encompassing and fluid understanding of this concept, one that not only asserted their rights to become wuon lowo contrary to their defined administrative status as ‘tenants’, but also creatively used both administrative and indigenous concepts as a way of trying to open a space for Kager within the now ‘customary’ framework of colonial society.

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Becoming Wuon Lowo Archival records show a consistent pattern of Kager groups and individuals claiming wuon lowo status from the 1920s to the mid 1940s. I will focus on two examples of Kager discourse to provide some sense of the ways in which these peoples contested administrative conventions and discourse of tribal identity as part of a process of becoming wuon lowo that entailed constructing a more fluid and encompassing notion of community identity. By 1931 the Kager had stepped up their agitation for rights to land in the Musanda area, and provincial and district administrators were increasingly troubled by the implications of their actions. In December of 1931, the district commissioner held a meeting to which he invited Wanga and Kager representatives. His intent was to impress upon the Kager the importance of acknowledging their tenant status. Records of this meeting include translations of speeches made by Kager elders that provide clues as to their strategies for becoming wuon lowo, as well as some sense of the basis upon which they were making these claims. Of particular interest is the testimony of one Kager elder who made a particular impression on the district commissioner. Records indicate that this elder caught the attention of the crowd as he rose, made his demands, and provided some historical evidence to support his claims: ‘We want our old country to ourselves with a headman of our own … we see others in our ancestral bomas [homesteads] while we are kept out although allowed to have fields nearby. Our trouble is that the Wanga did not drive us out, Hobley did. Others who were beaten by the Europeans are in their bomas now, why aren’t we. Besides there was a time when we defeated the Wanga … Then [they] gave us a girl, and we helped [them] in their war against the Kitosh.’27 This was not the last time that Kager elders told this story as a way of emphasizing their historical ties, through women, to the Wanga. Taken at face value, the story would appear to contradict Kager claims of rights to land in this region. After all, it implies that shortly before the arrival of the British, the Kager became affines and allies of the Wanga, rather than replacing them as landowners through conquest. Yet the persistence with which this story was told as proof of rights to ‘own the land’ suggests that it should be taken seriously as part of a larger Kager strategy to become wuon lowo. To unravel the significance of the Kager story of ‘getting the girl’ from the Wanga, I want to consider once again the Luo concept of

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jodak. I have already noted that in the colonial context of the 1930s, this concept was used to designate those individuals or groups living in a community who had actual or potential ties through women to established weg lowo groups, those peoples that the British had designated landlords. In other words, those people that the British designated tenants – those people without agnatic blood ties to weg lowo – the Luo referred to as jodak. I contend that by consistently referring to their historical connections through women to landowning Wanga peoples, which effectively established their historical status as jodak, Kager elders were asserting an understanding of the significance of these ties in the indigenous community that differed significantly from that of the British administrators. I believe that this Kager understanding contained the possibility of becoming wuon lowo through the creation of links between various landed populations based on ties through women, a possibility that, by the 1930s, was denied to the Kager under the provisions of customary law as dictated by the tribal model. There is ample evidence in archival records and in ethnographic accounts that, at least in the colonial period, Luo peoples recognized a process of becoming wuon lowo, rather than merely being wuon lowo as a result of descent from tribal or clan ancestors authentically linked to the land.28 What is significant, however, is that these records and accounts characterize this process as problematic and as a deviation from the tribal norm. Some of the clearest indications of this can be seen in the descriptions of customary systems of land tenure in the accounts of ethnographers who worked amongst Luo peoples. Based on research carried out in this region in 1936, E.E. Evans-Pritchard argued that the overcrowding occurring in Luo tribal areas was leading to conflict over land and problematic attempts by jodak to achieve weg lowo status. With respect to this practice, he noted that ‘[t]ribal cohesion has suffered from peace and land hunger has increased disharmony … stranger lineages which have grown numerous and powerful may claim to be [wuon lowo]’ (1949: 38). Similarly, in his discussion of Luo land tenure customs of the past, Parker Shipton points out that ‘[t]here are many Luo stories, and recorded cases, in which people who were invited onto the land of affinal lineages eventually grew numerous enough, and gained enough supporters from outside, to subjugate their old hosts as jodak or squeeze them off completely’ (1984: 126). While Shipton sees this practice as occurring outside of clan-based norms, he also recognizes that it was a process that had been acceptable in certain cases, until it was made impossible by customary law.

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Traditionally, lineages and oganda [tribe] leaders, and the elders who advised them, had considered land cases largely in terms of relative needs. They had bent the rules now and then to permit gradual encroachments as adjacent groups grew and shrank in relation to each other, and as land clients became established in the territories of their hosts. But when colonial authorities and Luo elders in the 1950s codified what they considered the customary laws, they left out this discretionary element. By the new code, a jadak and his descendants were jodak forever. (1984: 126)

Taking note of the frequency with which this sort of thing occurred, Shipton then concludes that ‘[t]he system was rigid in theory, but fluid in practice’ (1984: 125). In other words, he continues to rely on the assumption that the system – loosely described by colonial administrators and modelled by ethnographers – was based on genealogical principles of descent that could, on a discretionary basis, be ‘bent’ to accommodate the contingencies of social practice.29 Such interpretations of Luo community relations, like those of colonial administrators, characterize the ‘practice’ by which jodak might become wuon lowo as something that occurred outside of tribal norms. Nevertheless, the emphasis placed by the Kager on the creation of more inclusive and flexible ties in their attempts to claim status as wuon lowo does raise the possibility that our understanding of community norms might be overly constrained by the genealogical principles of the tribal model. We could read Kager references to the significance of the creation of affinal ties with the Wanga as an indication that they perceived rights to land as partial, negotiable, and based on nonlinear and shifting fields of community ties. This is quite different from the rigid, bounded and linear definition of those rights in customary law as defined by the lineage system. To demonstrate this final point, let me return to the meeting held in December of 1931 and the recorded testimony of the Kager elder. After telling the story of being given ‘the girl’ by the Wanga, this elder went on to make more specific demands and then ended, rather dramatically, by stating that ‘we want a house for the Kager’. I argue that the use of the term ‘house’ can be seen as more than just a quaint request made by disgruntled Kager for a clan-based location of their own. In fact, I believe that it may have considerable significance for the ongoing, contingent and developing forms of Kager agency that were involved in claiming status as wuon lowo. The Luo term that would most likely have been translated as house in this context would have been dala, which refers to ‘home, homestead, or “village”’ (Stafford 1967: 97).30 This is a term that is

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unspecific and that can be used to convey a sense of place, or belonging, with reference to the polygamous family as well as the larger, more dispersed communities occupied by wuon lowo and by jodak. For that reason, and to better understand what this elder might have meant by his request, we need to connect the concept of a ‘house’ back to the practice discussed above by which, for at least part of the colonial period, Luo peoples attempted to transform their status to that of wuon lowo by creating their own jodak relationships. There are numerous places in the archives where we can begin to see how Kager peoples were attempting to fashion an identity as wuon lowo by creating residential units that brought together a network of individuals and groups that had actual or potential ties through women, as well as blood ties through men. For the Musanda region, in particular, there are frequent references in administrative records to the problem of Kager ‘bringing’ Luo from other areas to live as jodak on that land which they officially occupied as tenants.31 As I have already pointed out, this was a practice that anthropologists like Evans-Pritchard would characterize as a sign of the breakdown of the proper tribal framework. However, there is ample evidence – both ethnographic and archival – that this was not an unfortunate circumstance of colonization and subsequent overcrowding but a form of political action, a process by which one could establish and negotiate relations of power and thus access rights to land. There is also historical evidence from the precolonial period of this kind of political action. David Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo (1989) documented the composition of occupying groups in seven Luo settlements in this general region and found ‘little indication of corporate action of agnatic groups, little evidence … that patrilineality defined the modes of recruitment … Rather, the conscious accounts of settlement where those are available, and the reconstruction of one [settlement] … indicate that … occupying groups were constructed through alliances of unrelated individuals and alliances marked by affinal connections’ (1989: 13). Although Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo’s analysis of Luo settlement patterns refers to much earlier periods of initial conquest and settlement, it does demonstrate the importance of a more fluid system of alliance in the construction of community identity in western Kenya. It also suggests that this ‘heterogeneity of social identity’ within Luo communities persisted into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at which time the colonial state began ‘inventing’ homogenous identities of tribe, clan and lineage (1989: 28).

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What I am suggesting, then, is that to demonstrate the possible significance of the elder’s request for a ‘house’ for the Kager, we need to consider the ‘house’ as a place of contingency and social heterogeneity, a place in which agnatic connections (or ties of blood through men) and ties through women were both created and contained in new sets of colonial power relations. If we consider the historical evidence of wuon lowo and jodak relations, it appears that the Luo term dala, or ‘house’, connotes a physical and conceptual space that encompasses a variety of social relations that are constantly being made and remade. Yet ethnographers of Luo society have described the Luo house as a bounded unit in which the component parts of the tribal whole are socially, and physically, reproduced, ignoring the disparate and potentially conflicted relations between wuon lowo and jodak (see Butterman 1979; Evans-Pritchard 1949; Goldenberg 1982; Shipton 1984; Southall 1952).32 These interpretations obscure the possibility that the Luo house can be a place through which one can become wuon lowo as part of a process of acquiring localized power against a backdrop of colonial projects and logics. It is possible that the Luo house can be seen as a place of political action, not just a unit of social reproduction. As a discursive strategy, the Luo elder’s request for a ‘house’ for the Kager points to the importance of the Luo community (or ‘house’) as a place in which identity is continually constructed through forms of agency that renegotiate and contest relations of power and authority. In the colonial context, the ‘house’, as a place of agency, would have taken on a particular significance as a means of contesting the objectified identity conferred by the colonial apparatus of the tribal model. I argue that if we put aside the assumptions of the tribal model, we can consider the possibility that Kager claims of ‘owning the land’, and their request for a ‘house’ of their own, can be seen as a ‘socially transformative endeavour that [was] localized, politicized, and partial’ (Thomas 1994: 105). These claims and strategies can be seen as an attempt to remake a viable community identity over and against that asserted within a dominant administrative discourse in which only blood mattered.

Conclusion To conclude, I would like to return to my conversation with Ruth about contemporary Luo understandings of kinship, especially to her insistence that women must be represented within a diagram of

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kinship relations in a community. Certainly this points to the conceptual importance of those connections through women that defined relations between wuon lowo and jodak. In the same vein, the diagram itself, with its radiating connections to a centre couple, provides a more encompassing perspective on the local community, a perspective that was also hinted at by the Kager in references to their desire for a ‘house’ of their own.33 Finally, this diagram does not have the linear and fixed quality of the traditional anthropological model – it can expand or contract in many directions as individuals or groups are attached through women, or as they create attachments of their own to jodak groups. So, like the Kager elder’s image of a ‘house’ for the Kager, Ruth’s diagram opens up the conceptual spaces of identity in Luo society. It allows us to consider the possibility that, at least for some Luo, the community is a place of fluid, encompassing, and shifting identities – a place in which relations of power are negotiated and fashioned by complicating and reformulating colonial kinship, rather than by reproducing kinship in and through ‘the blood’.34 Thus, Ruth’s diagram provides some support for my contention that the Kager requests for a ‘house’ were in fact a strategic act and a means of contesting tribal identity. In many ways, this is a hard case to make. After all, I am proposing an understanding of kinship, and of its role in constructing identity, that stands in stark contrast not only to colonial ‘knowledge’ but to the anthropological paradigm of traditional African forms of social structure. But perhaps we need to rethink our reliance on this anthropological paradigm, the colonial model of the tribe to which it is conceptually related, and the genealogical method that informs them both. In this regard, I am reminded of an observation made by Evans-Pritchard about the Nuer lineage system in his ethnography, The Nuer. In the chapter on the lineage system, Evans-Pritchard included a diagram (Figure 2.3) that he said was a depiction of ‘how the Nuer themselves figure a lineage system’ (1940: 202). In describing this diagram, Evans-Pritchard noted that ‘when illustrating on the ground a number of related lineages they do not present them the way we figure them … in a series of bifurcations of descent, as a tree of descent … [Instead] they see it primarily as actual relations between groups of kinsmen within local communities rather than as a tree of descent (1940: 202). Keeping in mind Ruth’s description of her own, rather similar diagram, I often wonder what the circle in the middle of this diagram represented to the Nuer individual who drew it: a man, or a man and a woman?

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FIGURE 2.3: Depiction of a Nuer lineage system. [From E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, 1987 Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.]

In my own work on Luo society, my conceptual reliance on an association between non-Western society and the forms of blood relationship inherent in the genealogically based model of the lineage certainly helps to explain why, at first, Ruth’s diagram did not make sense to me. My attempt to ‘read’ her diagram through the paradigm of segmentary lineage relationship literally blinded me to the possibilities of her construction of community identity. Not until I found the same sense of a developing and contingent identity in the archival fragments of Kager social practice did I began to make connections that allowed me to think beyond an anthropological paradigm constrained by the legacy of the genealogical method.35 I suggest, then, that through our reliance on a model of consanguinity and descent to define indigenous social relations, we continue to validate a genealogical perspective on African kinship that limits our understanding of the localized meaning and significance of those relationships that do not fit neatly within the anthropological object of the lineage. Hopefully, by denaturalizing this object we can open a space for the further reconsideration of our anthropological commonsense notions of historical and contemporary forms of identity and agency in African society and their relationship to the cultural logic of kinship.

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Notes 1. The Luo of western Kenya belong to the Nilotic language family of East Africa and are related linguistically and culturally to other Nilotic peoples in Uganda and southern Sudan, most notably the Nuer. They are generally considered to be a classic example of a segmentary lineage society (see, e.g., Butterman 1979; Evans-Pritchard 1949; Goldenberg 1982; Shipton 1984; Southall 1952). 2. This essay is based on historical ethnographic research carried out from June of 1989 to March of 1990 in the archived collections of British colonial documents from Kenya Colony held in the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens (England), the Church Missionary Society Archives at the University of Birmingham (Birmingham, England) and the Kenya National Archives (KNA) in Nairobi, Kenya. I am grateful to the Wenner Gren Foundation of Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council for their generous support of my research. 3. Here I am not questioning British colonial (or later anthropological) observations that the Luo reckon physical relatedness through the male line. I am suggesting, though, that the British colonial (and later anthropological) reliance on genealogical notions obscured the importance of other forms of relatedness, primarily those created by ties through women, in Luo society. I will argue that this focus on agnation and unilineal descent reveals what Mary Bouquet (1993) has identified as a ‘descent bias’ in English notions of genealogy stemming from embedded assumptions of pedigree (see also Cassidy, this volume). See below for a further discussion of the links between pedigree and genealogy and the significance of this for the forms of unilineal descent that are central to the segmentary lineage model. 4. We can trace an association between the models of Luo kinship and social organization developed by the amateur ethnographers of the British colonial service and anthropological models that characterize the Luo as a segmentary lineage society. For example, E.E. Evans-Pritchard made note of the earlier published writings of colonial officials in his seminal article on the Luo segmentary lineage system (Evans-Pritchard 1949). Although he makes reference to the ‘poor quality’ of these works, he must certainly have relied to some extent on information they provided, as he only undertook a six-week survey of the Luo. His reliance on colonial knowledge is suggested by his acknowledgement of the help he was given in the field by Archdeacon W.E. Owen, an Anglican missionary who spent many years in western Kenya. As Evans-Pritchard notes, Archdeacon Owen ‘knew the Luo better than anyone has known them’ (1949: 24). An anthropological connection with colonial knowledge is also suggested in a report dated September 1936 from the Provincial Commissioner of Nyanza Province (western Kenya), who noted that Dr. Evans-Pritchard had just completed a preliminary study of the

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Luo of Central Kavirondo District (Nyanza Province). The Provincial Commissioner also remarked that it was evident that Evans-Pritchard had ‘arrived with a prejudice against Kenya and her native administration [British colonial administration], which his visit to Kavirondo enabled him to correct’ (Kenya National Archives [KNA] PC/NZA4/5/2, Intelligence Report, Provincial Commissioner, 18 September 1936). Evans-Pritchard later affirmed the similarity between the Nuer and the Luo segmentary lineage systems. In his initial study of Luo social organization he noted that his enquiry had ‘shown that Luo political structure with its lineage framework is in essential characteristics like that I have recorded for the Nuer’ (1949: 39). Likewise, in his study of Luo social organization, Evans-Pritchard notes that ‘[t]he Luo clan … has a lineage structure, which means that every member of it can trace his exact genealogical relationship to every other member’ (1949: 29). Perhaps because the lineage model so greatly influenced many of the foundational ethnographic studies in Africa, it persists as a taken-forgranted – and therefore unexamined – paradigm. Thus we find that lineage, as a central form of relatedness, is an assumed reality in the work of many contemporary scholars. As a general rule, we no longer find the detailed descriptions and in-depth analyses of the structure and the function of the lineage in a particular African society. Instead, authors will most often reference the lineage system, as described by earlier ethnographers, as a prelude to an analysis of other aspects of African social and cultural life. It should be noted that, while a considerable number of contemporary scholars do not critically reflect on their continued use of the lineage model, or the concept of the lineage, there are scholars who have begun to question the continued use of the lineage and are suggesting alternative approaches to the anthropological analysis of kinship identity and relationship (see, for example, Hutchinson 1996; Piot 1999; see also McKinnon 2000). Evans-Pritchard did not produce two separate analyses of Luo society, one focused on the political-jural realm and the other on the domestic realm, as he did for the Nuer. However, in his article ‘Luo Tribes and Clans’ (1949), he reproduced this distinction by referring solely to the patrilineal clan in reference to political or intertribal matters and by noting the role of other forms of kinship (cognatic, affinal) only in relation to marriage. For a critique of the distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘public’ domain, see (among others) McKinnon (2000), Rosaldo (1980), Yanagisako (1979), and Yanagisako and Collier (1987). Evans-Pritchard also noted this ‘lack of fit’ between his analytic model and empirical descriptions. This led him to make the claim, now known as the ‘E-P paradox’ (Sahlins 1965: 105) that ‘[i]t would seem it may be partly just because the agnatic principle is unchallenged in Nuer society that the tracing of descent through women is so prominent and matrilocality so prevalent. However much the actual config-

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12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

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urations of kinship clusters may vary and change, the lineage structure is invariable and stable’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 28). For a review of this debate see Karp and Maynard (1983) and McKinnon (2000). For exceptions to this general trend see Kuper (1982) and Southall (1986), both of whom question the applicability of the lineage model to Nuer society (although Southall suggests that it is a viable model in other African societies, most notably for the Luo of western Kenya). Of particular interest is McKinnon’s insightful re-analysis of the Nuer material, in which she questions the centrality of the agnatic principle and argues that there is a ‘tension’ in Nuer communities between links through women and links through men that ‘gives the Nuer political order its form and movement’ (2000: 68). In 1899, colonial officials created Kavirondo Province by dividing what had been known as Kavirondo territory at the Yala River, creating Mumias District to the north and Nandi District to the south. In 1900 they renamed these districts Elgon and Kisumu respectively, while the territory south of Ugowe Bay (later Kavirondo Gulf) was named Ugaya District. There were several suggested changes in the name of Kavirondo Province in the early 1900s – for a while it was known as Kisumu Province – and in October of 1909 it became Nyanza Province. At the same time, Elgon and Ugaya Districts were renamed North and South Kavirondo. The name of Kisumu District did not change at that time, but by 1926 this district was referred to as Central Kavirondo. For a notable exception see Tapper 1999, 2001. See, for example, Central Nyanza District Archives, Kisumu, Political Records, Book II, [25:3:13], District Commissioner S.H. Fazan, 1913 (cited in Ogot 1967: 229); Dundas (1910, 1913); Hobley (1902, 1903); KNA, DC/CN3/5, Political Record Book, Notes on the Wanifwa, 14 April 1911; KNA, DC/NN3/1, Political Record Book, North Kavirondo, Report on the Waholo Tribe, 1916. For a discussion of the historical significance in European culture of the family tree and its ties to genealogical diagrams, see Bouquet (1996) and Pálsson’s chapter in this volume. Similarly, Marilyn Strathern demonstrates Charles Darwin’s reliance on the assumption that ‘a genealogy is a recorder of natural relations’ in his attempts to naturalize the ancestral connections between species (1992: 91). See KNA, DC/NN3/1, Political Record Book, North Kavirondo. See especially KNA DC/NN10/1/1 and the following communications: letter from Chief Othieno of Waholo to Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza, 8 March 1931; letter from Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza, to District Commissioner, North Kavirondo, 8 April 1931; report from Acting Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza, to District Commissioner, North Kavirondo. Also see KNA DC/NN3/3/7, report from District

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19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

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Commissioner, North Kavirondo, July 1931; KNA DC/NN3/2/18, 13 December 1931, extracts from Kager speeches at Matungu . See, for example, KNA, DC/NN3/3/6, Safari Report, Assistant District Commissioner (North Nyanza) W.H. McGeach, 9 March 1929. In this report McGeach provides a list of all of the clans belonging to the resident Bantu-speaking subtribe in Buholo, the total number of villages belonging to the component clans of this subtribe, and then the number of Luo huts to be found in each village. The latter stands out in this report as the marked, or problematic, category. This impression is strengthened by the accompanying record, presumably collected by McGeach, of the history of these local clan groups. Central Nyanza District Archives, Kisumu, Political Records, Book II, [25:3:13], District Commissioner S.H. Fazan, 1913 (cited in Ogot 1967: 229). While agitation of this kind had begun in the previous decade in some parts of Kavirondo, especially in Buholo and South Wanga among Kager populations, it had become much more widespread by the early 1920s. See KNA DC/CN1/5/2, Annual Report, District Commissioner (Kisumu District), 1921; KNA PC/NZA1/18, Annual Report, Provincial Commissioner (Nyanza Province), 1923; KNA PC/NZA3/26/4/1, Provincial and District Diaries, 1924. KNA PC/NZA3/26/4/1, Provincial and District Diaries, 1924; KNA PC/NZA1/25, Annual Report, Provincial Commissioner, 1930. KNA PC/NZA1/19, Annual Report, Provincial Commissioner, 1924; KNA DC/CN1/6/1, Annual Report, District Commissioner (Central Kavirondo), 1924. Archival documents from this period rarely include any portions of native testimony or evidence in DhoLuo or in KiSwahili (although in later years there are several examples of the latter). This could have been because Luo representatives tended to be ‘mission boys’ and thus communicated with administrators in English, or it could have been because administrators worked with translators. There are, however, a few instances in which indigenous terms slipped into the records. On the basis of this, it does appear that the term ‘strangers’ was used by Luo peoples as a gloss of the term jodak (‘people who stay’; sing. jadak), while the term ‘owners’ was used by the Luo as a gloss of the term weg lowo (‘fathers of the land’ or ‘owners of the land’; sing. wuon lowo). It is more than likely, though, that these English glosses had been used by British administrators and then picked up by the Luo to be used in their own communication with colonial authorities. It would appear that the Luo concepts of wuon lowo and jadak are reduced to categories of land tenure in the ethnographic literature because of the overriding dominance of tribal discourse and the segmentary lineage model. There are numerous descriptions of the social and political significance of this set of relations (see Butterman 1979; Hay 1972)

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27. 28.

29. 30.

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and of its fluidity (see Evans-Pritchard 1949; Shipton 1984). Nevertheless, this evidence is treated as incidental to the primary ‘reality’ of consanguinity and descent as the source of community identity. Consequently, the presence of jodak groups who are not agnatically linked to landed clans is treated as problematic and/or as outside of the norm as dictated by the lineage model. Aside from McGeach’s Safari Report discussed in note 12, see KNA DC/NN10/1/1, Evison (Lawyer for Kager Luo) to Chief Native Commissioner, 19 April 1932; KNA DC/NN10/1/1, Petition from Ugenya Kager Luo Clan Association, 15 August 1932. KNA DC/NN3/2/18, Excerpts from speeches given at Baraza, Matungu (Wanga Location), 13 December 1931. While colonial documents demonstrate that the Luo relied on a memory of, and the construction of, affinal and cognatic ties through women to assert their rights as wuon lowo, it is difficult to ascertain from archival accounts what other strategies or concepts may have been part of this process. There is a suggestion in colonial reports on the activities of one Kager Luo religious leader, who broke away from the Anglican Church to begin his own religious sect, that this process also involved the creation of ritual ties to the land (see Holmes 2000). See Bamford (this volume) for a consideration of how, among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea, the creation and maintenance of ties to the land is, at the same time, a process of constructing and maintaining social relations through time. Of course, Shipton also provides documentation of a much more fluid system that created situations in which people could become wuon lowo. There is another Luo term that could have been translated as ‘house’. Ot refers specifically to the dwelling of a woman and her children within the larger dala. I was told by informants, however, that the Kager elder in this instance had most likely used, or had in mind, the term dala. Yet the individual houses of women and their children are obviously an integral part of the larger ‘house’ that contains the extended family. Interestingly, the Luo term dhoot, which translates literally as ‘mouth of the house’, has been used by ethnographers to refer to the minimal lineage within the larger segmentary lineage structure. Thus a term that signifies the way in which people can be connected to the larger community through women is used, within the tribal model, to signify those places of potential segmentation within a larger lineage. Thus the fluid and encompassing nature of ties through women are reduced to points of fragmentation in this model. See, for example, Petition received from Ugenya Kager, 25 September 1933 (KNA DC/NN10/1/1); Intelligence Report, North Nyanza, 24 October 1938 (KNA PC/NZA4/5/2); Secretary of the Ugenya Kager Luo Clan Association to Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza Province, 14 May 1946 (KNA DC/KMG1/1/33).

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32. This is also true of related ethnic groups, like the Nuer. For example, in his description of the Nuer segmentary lineage system, Evans-Pritchard notes that the ancestors in the lineage model may often be women (i.e., points through which stranger groups are attached), yet he insists that these ancestors are treated ‘as if’ they were men. This is the process by which the Nuer clan is reproduced as a totality that encompasses the village (a village in which there are stranger groups attached through women). 33. This diagram has further significance in the context of Evans-Pritchard’s (1951) discussion of the structure of the Nuer community. In describing the community of Nyueny, he notes that when people live together as members of the same small local community female links are often given equivalence to male links in a genealogy, [thus] a cluster of kin such as that of Nyueny can be presented as descended from a common ancestor. It might be described as a cognatic lineage, but in speaking of the Nuer I think it wise to restrict the term ‘lineage’ to a group of agnates within a system of such groups and to speak of a cluster like that of Nyueny as being a lineage to which are attached, on account of common residence, other lines of kin through females. (1951: 17) Considering this situation once again later in the same chapter, he goes on to suggest that ‘it may be partly just because the agnatic principle is unchallenged in Nuer society that the tracing of descent through women is so prominent and matrilocality so prevalent’ (1951: 28). He thus creates a paradox within his model of Nuer kinship by insisting on the dominance of agnation (for a discussion of how he justifies this, see McKinnon 2000). 34. It was apparent from archival records that notions of identity and relationship were contested within indigenous colonized populations as well as between these groups and colonial agents. For example, Wanga authorities very clearly used the concepts and terms of the tribal model, the authenticity of descent and consanguinity, in countering Kager claims and asserting their own rights as ‘landlords’. Thus, I should also note that Ruth Atieno’s encompassing and fluid diagram of Luo kinship was at odds with other descriptions of Luo kinship that stressed lineality and consanguineal relationship. Certainly we cannot deny that agnation and descent are fundamentally important in the construction of contemporary Luo identity. This has been clearly shown, for example, in Parkin’s (1978) study of the significance of the concept of lineality in Luo political struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. 35. See McKinnon (2000) for a re-analysis of Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic description of the Nuer segmentary lineage system that amply demonstrates the importance of thinking past this particular anthropological paradigm.

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References Bouquet, M. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of British Kinship Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1996. ‘Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(1): 43–66. Butterman, J. 1979. ‘Luo Social Formations in Change: Karachuonyo and Kanyamkago, c. 1800–1945’, Ph.D. dissertation. New York: Syracuse University. Cohen, D.W. and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo. 1989. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. London: James Currey. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Crehan, K. 1997. ‘“Tribes” and the People Who Read Books: Managing History in Colonial Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 23(2): 203–18. Dundas, K. 1910. Ethnology of North Kavirondo. Kenya National Archives. ———. 1913. ‘The WaWanga and Other Tribes of the Elgon District, British East Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 43(1): 19–75. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1949. ‘Luo Tribes and Clans’, Rhodes Livingstone Journal 7: 24–40. ———. 1951. Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evens, T. M.S. 1984. ‘Nuer Hierarchy’, in Jean-Calude Galey (ed.), Differences, Valeurs, Hierarchie. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, pp. 319–34. Fortes, M. 1945. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1949. The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi. London: Oxford University Press. Fortes, M. and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds). 1940. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press. Glickman, M. 1971. ‘Kinship and Credit among the Nuer’, Africa 41(4): 306–19. Goldenberg, D.A. 1982. ‘We Are All Brothers: The Suppression of Consciousness of Socio-Economic Differentiation in a Kenya Luo Lineage’, Ph.D. dissertation. Providence, RI: Brown University. Goody, J. 1967 [1956]. The Social Organisation of the Lowiili. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gough, K. 1971. ‘The Nuer Kinship: A Re-Examination’, in T.O. Beidelman (ed.), The Translation of Culture: Essays to E.E. Evans-Pritchard. London: Tavistock, pp. 79–121.

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Hawkins, S. 2002. Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hay, M.J. 1972. ‘Economic Change in Luoland: Kowe, 1890–1945’, Ph.D. dissertation. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Hobley, C.W. 1898. ‘Kavirondo’, The Geographical Journal 12(4): 361–72. ———. 1902. Eastern Uganda: An Ethnological Survey. London: Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Occasional Paper No. 1. ———. 1903. ‘British East Africa: Anthropological Studies of Kavirondo and Nandi’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain Ireland 33: 325–59. ———. 1970 [1929]. Kenya From Chartered Company to Crown Colony: Thirty Years of Exploration and Administration in British East Africa. London: Frank Cass and Company Ltd. Holmes, J.T. 1997. ‘Contested Kinship and the Dispute of Customary Law in Colonial Kenya’, Anthropologica 39(1/2):79–89. ———. 2000. ‘A “House” for the Kager: Negotiating Tribal Identities in Colonial Kenya.’ Ph.D. dissertation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. Holy, L. 1979a. ‘Nuer Politics’, in L. Holy (ed.), Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Belfast: Department of Social Anthropology, the Queen’s University of Belfast, pp. 23–48. ———. 1979b. ‘The Segmentary Lineage Structure and Its Existential Status’, in L. Holy (ed.), Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Belfast: Department of Social Anthropology, the Queen’s University of Belfast, pp. 1–22. ———. 1996. Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto Press. Hutchinson, S.E. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Iliffe, J. 1979. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, R.H. and G. Maddox. 1993. ‘The Creation of Identity: Colonial Society in Bolivia and Tanzania’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35(2): 263–84. Karp, I. and K. Maynard. 1983. ‘Reading The Nuer’, Current Anthropology 24(4): 481–92. Kelly, R. 1985. The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an Expansionist System. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kuper, A. 1982. ‘Lineage Theory: A Critical Retrospect’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 71–95. McKinnon, S. 2000. ‘Domestic Exceptions: Evans-Pritchard and the Creation of Nuer Patrilineality and Equality’, Cultural Anthropology 15(1): 35–83. Middleton, J. and D. Tait (eds). 1958. Tribes Without Rulers. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Mitchell, J.C. 1956. The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Ogot, B.A. 1967. History of the Southern Luo. Vol 1. Migration and Settlement, 1500–1900. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Parkin, D. 1978. The Cultural Definition of Political Response: Lineal Destiny among the Luo. London: Academic Press. Pels, P. 1994. ‘The Construction of Ethnographic Occasions in Late Colonial Uluguru’, History and Anthropology 8(1–4): 321–51. ———. 1996. ‘The Pidginization of Luguru Politics: Administrative Ethnography and the Paradoxes of Indirect Rule’, American Ethnologist 23(4): 738–61. Piot, C. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ranger, T. 1983. ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–62. Richards, A. 1941. ‘A Problem of Anthropological Approach’, Bantu Studies 15(1): 45–52. Rivers, W.H.R. 1915. ‘Kin, Kinship’, in J. Hastings (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume 7. New York: Scribner, pp. 700–7. Rosaldo, M. 1980. ‘The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding’, Signs 5(3): 389–417. Sahlins, Marshall. 1965. ‘On the Ideology and Composition of Descent Groups’, Man 65: 104–7. Schneider, D.M. 1965. ‘Some Muddles in the Models: Or, How the System Really Works’, in M. Banton (ed.), The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, ASA Monograph 1. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 25–79. ———. 1972. ‘What Is Kinship All About?’ in P. Reining (ed.), Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. ———. 1980 [1968]. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shipton, P. 1984. ‘Lineage and Locality as Antithetical Principles in East African Systems of Land Tenure’, Ethnology 23(2): 117–32. Southall, A. 1952. ‘Lineage Formation among the Luo’, International African Institute Memorandum XXVI. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1970 [1956]. Alur Society: A Study in Processes and Types of Domination. Nairobi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986. ‘The Illusion of Nath Agnation’, Ethnology 25(1): 1–20. Stafford, R.L. 1967. An Elementary Luo Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tait, D. 1961. The Konkomba of Northern Ghana. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tapper, M. 1999. In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2001. ‘Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 329–54. Thomas, N. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vail, L. 1989. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London: James Currey. Verdon, M. 1980. ‘Descent: An Operational View’, Man (N.S.) 15(1): 129–50. ———. 1982. ‘Where Have All Their Lineages Gone? Cattle and Descent among the Nuer’, American Anthropologist 84(3): 566–79. Worby, E. 1994. ‘Maps, Names, and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 20(3): 371–92. Yanagisako, S.J. 1979. ‘Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups’, Annual Review of Anthropology 8: 161–205. Yanagisako, S.J. and J.F. Collier. 1987. ‘Toward a Unified Analysis of Gender and Kinship’, in J.F. Collier and S.J. Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 14–50.

Chapter 3

THE WEB

OF

KIN

AN ONLINE GENEALOGICAL MACHINE Gísli Pálsson

The engine suggests feedback, and new machines extend feedback into new situations. —David Rothenberg 1993, Hand’s End

D

rawing upon recent writings by historians of science, I argue in this chapter that digital genealogies, a by-product of experimental biomedical projects, can be usefully regarded as machines, as vehicles for generating connections and histories and for changing existing notions of kinship and belonging. I shall focus on the so-called Book of Icelanders, an extensive computerized database on Icelandic family histories that was made available on the Web in January 2003. Earlier, the database was made accessible in an encrypted form to the biomedical researchers of the company deCODE genetics. The genealogical database, then, has a dual role as both a public resource and an essential ingredient of biomedical research. As we will see, it has an aura of science fiction, combining elements of the cumbersome hypertext of late-medieval ancestral albums and the rhizomatic kinship of artificial life (see Helmreich 2001) – and yet it is ethnographically salient, a part of the everyday world of Icelanders. The reference to machines should not be taken as mere metaphor. In Mumford’s analysis, a machine is a ‘minor organism’ in that it ‘involves the notion of an external source of power, a more or less

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complicated inter-relation of parts, and a limited kind of activity’ (Mumford 1963: 11). The standard dictionary definition of ‘machine’ (from the Latin noun machina corresponding to the verb machinari, ‘to plot’) is ‘any contrivance for the conversion and direction of motion; an apparatus for doing some kind of work’ (see Hornborg 2001: 121). Given such a definition, machines can take many forms. The political economy of human-machine relations, however, varies from case to case. Some relations may be seen as mutual subjugation, others are more properly characterized as slavery, and still others represent symbiotic cyborgs. While machines are constructed by humans for specific purposes, they sometimes seem to acquire autonomous, self-generating powers, constituting society and ‘plotting’ its course. Much as viruses and other subjects of experimental biology ‘have taken researchers to unanticipated destinations’ (Creager 2002: 325), machines sometimes open up new vistas and avenues. The Book of Icelanders would not have been brought into being had it not been for the genealogical enthusiasm of Icelandic scribes and collectors through the centuries and the gene talk of the modern age – but, as we shall see, once in existence it had important repercussions. The material, literary and social technologies that constitute the world of experimental science – so-called experimental systems – are inherently unstable and path dependent (Pickering 1995), driven ‘from behind’ by their own history and dynamics rather than a teleological quest for a given future (see Rheinberger 1997: 28). Much recent research on scientific practice, indeed, tends to shift the agency behind the system in question from the inventive researcher mixing his or her labour with the productive material to the material itself. Echoing the position of Latour (1988), Kohler (1994) and Creager (2002) emphasize that the ‘standardized’ laboratory fly, virus and mouse are organic machines endowed with an agency of their own, colonizing the landscapes of laboratories and taking the centre stage of experimental genetics.1 Knorr-Cetina treats cells and organisms used in the production systems of laboratories as biological machines (1999: 149), and indeed, they do a lot of work. In many countries, large-scale medical databases are being constructed for the purpose of exploring the potential genetic roots of common diseases as well as for monitoring and managing public health. Inevitably, family histories play an important role in such databases. In a digital form, they may become efficient machines for exploring the temporality and distribution of disease. The construction of pedigrees is a widespread commodity industry in the EuroAmerican context, a critical component in the mapping of genes

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and bodies in the era of modern biomedicine (Tutton 2004). At the same time, family trees have become public goods. The kinds of databases discussed in this article will no doubt play an increasing role in the future. In the modern era of molecular biology, genetics and bioinformatics, kinship diagrams are routine figures. The pages of many scientific journals, in fact, are teeming with ‘family trees’. The current fascination with ‘genetic kinship’ echoes developments captured by the anthropological terms of ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow 1996: 102) and ‘medicalization of kinship’ (Finkler 2000). Not surprisingly, genealogical information is subject to competing property claims. While property has more to do with relations than the essence of things, establishing bonds and boundaries within communities of potential property holders, the way in which possession is established must partly depend on the nature of the thing in question. As Rose has argued, ‘property doctrine often takes at least some of its shape from the material characteristics of the ”things” over which property rights are claimed … the physical characteristics of the resource frame the kinds of actions that human beings can take toward a given resource, and these in turn frame the ”jural relations” that people construct about their mutual uses and forbearances with respect to the resource’ (1994: 269). For Rose, property is an unstable phenomenon, established and maintained by successful speech acts, through rhetoric and persuasion. As a result, the visual clues available to competing claimants are important for establishing property rights. To the extent that genealogies represent property, they are examples of intellectual or cultural property (Boyle 1996; Brown 2003). In much recent biomedical research, the gift economy has increasingly given way to the commercial circulation of patented information. Biomedical knowledge is more and more produced within multinational companies that claim ownership of the resources they use and the knowledge and technologies they produce. As we will see, the tension surrounding the biomedical use of the Book of Icelanders helped to ensure that another, ‘short edition’ appeared in the public domain. The outline of the chapter is as follows. I first give a brief account of the imagery associated with family trees in European history and the tension between alternative modes of visual expression. I then present the background to the Book of Icelanders, the two kinds of genealogical machines involved – in the private domain of biomedicine and on the Web, respectively. This is followed by a discussion of the negotiations between the makers and the users of the public version of the genealogical database – what I take to be the fine-

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tuning of the machine – as well as some of the larger implications of the digital database for notions of belonging and for the social construction of intellectual property. Finally, I conclude with some observations about the metaphors of machines and trees.

Family Trees The temporalization of experience, the notion of time as a framework within which life unfolds, is not a universal one but rather the product of modernity and the Middle Ages (Bender and Wellbery 1991: 1). One of the early means of tracking time was that of the imagery of the tree (Tassy 1991). Initially, the ‘genealogical tree’ was adopted by agrarian elites for documenting social honour, the symbolic and social capital on which political alliances were based. In societies of estates, honour was frequently claimed with reference to properties of the human body, the essences of families, lineages and estates. ‘My lineage, my branch, my name, my coat of arms’, as Connerton emphasizes (1989: 86), ‘all these terms … allude to something that is distinctly and directly corporeal: blood.’ The genealogical tree, however, is necessarily an historical artefact, and indeed, it has taken many forms. For one thing, its visual representation exhibits more diversity than the popular reference to the key-metaphor of ‘trees’ may suggest (de Haan 1994; KlapischZuber 1991, 2000). Not only have the use and layout of family trees taken various forms, but they are also embedded in different projects, cultures and property regimes, much like the living organisms we call trees (Jones and Cloke 2002; Rival 1998). Klapisch-Zuber (1991, 2000) has nicely documented and analysed the history of the family tree in medieval Europe. As she points out, the Middle Ages inherited a series of concepts, figurative representations and formal traditions from classic Antiquity, all of which combined to construct an elaborate language of genealogy. While we tend to take that language for granted as it is firmly rooted in Western imageries of kinship, in fact it was the result of complex experimenting with visual tools and organizing metaphors (KlapischZuber 2000: 339).2 After 1550, the imagery of the family tree was spectacularly successful. Europeans were obsessed with genealogical details and their visual tree-like representation. Some family diagrams drawn on rolls of parchment nicely demonstrate this; avoiding the interruption of a new page some of them were no less than ten meters in length.

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FIGURE 3.1: La Lignée de Sainte Anne. Source: Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon, © Studio Basset.

Over time, European lineage imagery was subject to conflicting ideologies. On the one hand, some genealogies were to be read from top to bottom. A lower position in such a scheme not only indicated a chronologically later moment but also suggested deterioration or demotion, a departure from the honoured distant past. Such imagery documented both the continuity of the lineage, the direct line between the present and the past, and the humble status of contemporary humans underlined in eschatological, Christian schemes. The alternative up-ending of the lineage in terms of the flowering tree,

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however, had an even greater appeal, underlining the joyful proliferation of the lineage drawing its vital energy from the earth and stretching into the divine light in the heavens. Such a horticultural metaphor appeared in various forms from at least the eleventh century onwards, but it was only in the fifteenth century that it acquired its canonical imagery, with a founding ancestor in the trunk of a tree and his descendants scattered above among its branches. Despite its joyfulness and its success in representing and reinforcing kinship, the metaphor of the flowering tree was also seen to be theologically problematic. Given the need to project the past in magnificent terms, the image of the ascending, growing tree, with the ancestors (and the gods) in the mundane soil and degenerated contemporaries in the glorious heavens, was bound to be met with resistance if not disgust. The tree metaphor, in fact, was riddled with tensions, which ‘obliges us to ask questions about the connections between language or text and the logic of graphic means of expression which are used to give a visual account of it’ (Klapisch-Zuber 1991: 112). The medieval imagery of the tree was not exclusively focused on ‘blood’ connections. Interestingly, sixteenth-century genealogical trees showing the kings of Navarre in Portugal included their wives on discrete branches, mixing blood relationships and marital alliances in the same imageries. Nor was the tree imagery the only one employed. In fact, as Klapisch-Zuber points out (1991: 110), it is ‘quite possible to adopt other graphic systems, simpler but equally effective, for visually presenting the obsessive repetition of genealogical descriptions’. Rival metaphors, including those of the human body and the house, appeared from time to time in artistic representations of relatedness. The flowing river of descent captured the Christian imagination; some medieval mnemonic devices merely linked names of descendants with a series of curving lines without any botanical reference. Much later, one may note, Lewis Henry Morgan developed a language that allowed him to discuss genealogical and geo-hydrological issues, the channels of water and blood, in similar terms (Feeley-Harnik 2001). In due course, as Tassy explores (1991: 306), the family tree was transformed into an abstract diagram where the trunk has more or less disappeared; only the end points, the leaves, are clearly visible. According to Klapisch-Zuber (2000: 332), this transformation of the genealogical tree was more or less completed in Italy, the focus of her analysis, around 1600. The family tree continues its evolutionary course in the age of molecular biology, bioinformatics and digi-

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tal design, where the abstract diagram is the focus of intensive visual experimenting for the purpose of economizing and packing information in an appealing and readable form. Some diagrams take the form of a circle, others are more like a horseshoe, and still others are more like trees proper, unfolding from left to right, from bottom up, or upside down (Pálsson 2002). Some are narrow and egocentric while others are fairly inclusive, and so on. Whatever the form, the end result of such geometries, as Ingold argues (2000: 135), is usually to underline deterministic and essentialist classification, ethnic, national or racial – what is ‘in the genes’. Personhood simply emerges at the encounter of lines of ‘descent’, usually with the vertical passing on of substance from one generation to another. Such geometries are characteristic of the Book of Icelanders.

The Book of Icelanders Genealogical interest has a long history in Iceland, although the enthusiasm and the motives have varied from one century to another. Several kinds of historical records on families and genealogies have survived into the modern age – the Book of Settlement (Landnámabók, written around 1125), the so-called Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur), church registers, administrative records, censuses, published registers and national databases. Some of the censuses are only partial lists of farmers and taxpayers, while others are relatively complete. Contemporary genealogists draw extensively upon earlier efforts, including the records of a certain Jón Espólín (b. 1769), a knowledgeable and enthusiastic collector of manuscripts. Collectively, these early documents established what might be called a ‘medieval medical anthropology’ of Icelanders. Not only did they chart a person’s position within a web of natural and social relations, they also outlined his or her history, character and appearance. The Genealogical Society was founded in Iceland in 1945 to foster genealogical studies, to sustain important historical and demographic documents and to publish censuses and family histories. The society now has eight hundred members, organizes several lectures per year and publishes a newsletter. A few Icelandic companies specialize in the tracing of family trees and the computerization of genealogies. Also, a number of genealogy enthusiasts specialize in particular families, both for themselves and for anyone interested in their expertise. All of this testifies to the Icelanders’ current interest in genealogies. Some years ago, Frisk Software developed a computer

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program for handling genealogical information (named Espólín, in honour of the early collector) that sold well on the market, in more than one thousand editions. The maker of the program reckons that many of these were bought for birthday presents, pointing out that genealogical interest comes with age ‘like the consequences of a slowly-impending genetic defect’. The idea of constructing a comprehensive genealogical database on Icelanders is not a novel one. In an essay written in 1943, the Nobel Prize–winning author Halldór Laxness suggested that an ‘anthropological institute’ (mannfræðistofnun) be established, an office that would document, for the purpose of marketing and research, information on every Icelander ever recorded: Information on every family would be organized (kerfaðar) so that the employees of the institute would be able to assemble, at short notice, the family history of any Icelander … Thus, the study of Icelandic genealogy would reach the state whereby genealogists would be superfluous; the female [sic] clerk of an official institute could extract at any moment in time the family records of any Icelander, living or dead, with minor effort … and hand them over to a contractor in return for an inconsequential fee. In addition, such a file would be the key to various kinds of research on social life since settlement. (Laxness 1962: 155–56)

As a serious social thinker and a critical commentator during the Second World War and in the heyday of eugenic theorizing, Laxness was well aware of the potential misuses of records of this kind. He concluded his essay on ‘indexing human life’ by pointing out that the German security police had constructed records on tens of millions of people in many countries throughout the world, with detailed information on social background, life histories and political inclinations, ‘for the sole purpose of being able to identify them and execute them at a convenient moment’. ‘In comparison with Himmler’s database, which is aimed at murder’, Laxness adds, ‘it would be a small job to grant these few Icelanders life in a catalogue’ (Laxness 1962: 157). It is only now, however, that Laxness’s grand idea of granting Icelanders eternal life in a complete and easily accessible genealogical file has become a realistic one, thanks to modern bioinformatics and computer technology. The Book of Icelanders has been under construction for several years (see Pálsson 2002). Approximately seven hundred thousand people are recorded in the database, the majority of the total number of people born in Iceland since the Norse settlement in the ninth

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century. A team of about fifteen researchers and computer programmers at Frisk Software and the biotech firm deCODE genetics in Reykjavik have compiled the information contained in the Book of Icelanders and designed the necessary programs for displaying and analysing it. The whole point, of course, is not simply to record individuals but rather to be able to connect them to each other. The ‘connectivity rate’, the rate of documented connections between an individual and his or her parents, is close to 95 per cent. Frisk Software in Reykjavík originally began the construction of a genealogical database on Icelanders on its own early in the 1990s, starting with three censuses (1703, 1801 and 1910) that covered the whole country at points in time sufficiently different to minimize overlap, as well as the up-to-date national records (Þjóðskrá). The director of the company, Friðrik Skúlason, happened to be a genealogical enthusiast eager to use his programming skills for his hobby. Among the sources available to him was the Icelandic Database compiled by Vasey and others (see Vasey 1996), which in addition to censuses includes digitally stored records on births, marriages and deaths from surviving parish registers (the birth records were originally converted to digital format by the Genealogical Society of Utah). Later on, deCODE genetics signed an agreement with Frisk Software to speed up the construction of the database by adding information from a variety of available sources, focusing on twelve censuses taken from 1703 to 1930. ‘Pretty much everybody,’ as Skúlason put it during an interview, ‘is included.’ deCODE’s chief aim was to use the database for advancing genetic and biomedical research. There are a number of empty spaces in the genealogical database. Part of the problem stems from missing information about paternity. The scale of the problem of missing pages in the Book of Icelanders varies from one century to another and from one region to another. Generally, the further one goes back, the more erratic the records become. Most of some districts’ records of the past have been lost due to fire or negligence. Not only are there empty spaces in available records, there are errors, too. Adoptions pose a particular problem for deCODE genetics and others interested in genetic connections. Sometimes families have ‘purified’ their records, possibly to prevent disclosure of information about teenage mothers or to avoid an image of inbreeding. However, recent estimates indicate that the problem is a minor one, for example with an error rate of 0.7 per cent in maternal connections (Sigurðardóttir et al. 2000). Often, the genealogical team of deCODE genetics and Frisk Software have had to ‘socially construct’ the information they have in

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the light of their understanding of Icelandic history and culture and the nature of the sources at their disposal, making inferences, for instance, about births, marriages, deaths and family connections. Earlier generations of scribes were just as concerned with errors in their records as modern genealogists. For instance, the historical records state that a man born in 1795 is registered as the father of a child named Ingibjörg ‘while most people think’ she is the daughter of someone else. Skúlason, the chief mechanic of the genealogical database, has likened his task to ‘working out a puzzle the size of a football stadium, with half of the pieces missing and the rest damaged and randomly scattered,’ a gigantic enterprise indeed. As we will see, the genealogical machine of the Book of Icelanders takes two forms. Machine 1: The Biomedical Project One version of the Book of Icelanders is available only to the biomedical company deCODE genetics. In this case, no names are included, only numbers or identifications that allow for the combination of different datasets on a limited basis for particular research purposes. A complex process of encryption, surveillance and monitoring has been designed to prevent any illegitimate use of the data. Such a database, it is argued, combined with genetic and medical data, provides an invaluable historical dimension to the search for genes with mutations and other potential causes of common diseases. Current work at deCODE genetics typically begins with a contract with one or more physicians specializing in a particular disease with a potentially genetic basis. Through a contract with the pharmaceutical company Hoffman La Roche, deCODE genetics focuses on research on twelve common diseases. In their practice over the years, the physicians have constructed a list of patients with the particular symptoms in question. This list is passed on in an encrypted form to a research team within the company, which, in turn, runs the information provided through its computers, juxtaposing or comparing patients’ lists and genealogical records by means of specialized software developed by the company. The aim is to trace the genes responsible for the apparent fact that the disease in question occurs in families. Such an analysis may show, for example, that of an original list of about one thousand patients, five hundred or so cluster in a few families. In the next step, the physicians affiliated with the research team collect blood samples from patients and some of their close relatives for DNA analysis. In the final stage of the research, statisticians evaluate the results of the genetic analy-

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sis, attempting to narrow down in probabilistic terms the genes responsible for the disease. In practice, this is a highly complex interactive process combining different kinds of mapping, in particular genetic maps indicating genetic distances on a chromosome and more realistic physical mapping. Moreover, strategies of gene hunting are adopted and revised both intuitively in the laboratory or at the computer screen and in formal or informal meetings. These procedures are not, of course, unique to deCODE genetics, not even in the Icelandic context. However, with the so-called Health Sector Database that is expected to cover extensive medical records on Icelanders, the power of genetic and epidemiological analyses may grow exponentially, incorporating far larger samples and more families. Theoretically, the addition of the national medical records available since 1915 allows for the exploration of a set of new questions on the interaction among a number of variables apart from genetic makeup and genealogical connections, including variables pertaining to lifestyle, physical and social environments, the use of particular medicine, and degree and kind of hospitalization. The results may be useful, according to the designers of the project and the medical authorities, for pharmaceutical companies and for the medical service, yielding information about potential drugs, particular genes or proteins, and possible preventive measures in terms of consumption and lifestyle. At the same time, the construction of the Health Sector Database, which is still on the drawing board, raises fundamental questions about ethics, access and property rights. To illustrate the deCODE approach to the exploration of the role of familial relations in explaining differential occurrence of common diseases, it is useful to focus on the team studying osteoarthritis (hereafter OA), one of the most common human diseases, affecting joints in the fingers, knees and hips (see Pálsson 2004). The OA team of deCODE genetics is one of the more established teams within the company, with several permanent members, mostly biologists and technical laboratory assistants, collaborating closely with statisticians and physicians specializing in OA. Their project started with the initiative of the physicians. Then the pharmaceutical company Hoffman La Roche arrived on the scene, and a contract was signed with the clinical collaborators, focusing on two particular phenotypes of the disease, OA of the fingers and hips. Later on, the study of OA of the knees was also incorporated. It has often been assumed that OA ‘simply’ comes with age. Indeed, the Icelandic term for osteoarthritis, slitgigt, refers to the kind of arthritis that develops as people become ‘worn down’ due to slit

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(drudgery) during the life course. When the deCODE project started, it was assumed that there was some underlying genetic factor, since siblings were known to have a higher risk than others of hip replacement; however, no one had successfully ‘cracked’ a complex disease like OA, or in other words, identified the genetic factors involved in the phenotype. The identification of families with the right phenotypes, obviously the critical starting point in work of this kind, is somewhat problematic due to the nature of available sources. S.E. Stefánsson, the leader of the OA team, explained in an interview: ‘It’s not easy to find well-defined families. One of the problems with past records is that diagnoses often were poor. People didn’t know the difference between rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.’ By using the Book of Icelanders’, he suggests, his team is able ‘to show that OA is inherited, there is a founder effect. Simply by going back one generation after another. Patient groups have fewer founders than others. They are significantly different from control groups.’ Having established a familial connection, the OA team has set out to locate the genetic factors involved. Stefánsson elaborates on the relative competitive advantage of the deCODE genetics team thanks to the ‘deep’ genealogy of the Book of Icelanders: ‘Most other groups are looking at sib pairs. They have less resolution than we have for linkage analysis as they don’t have the genealogies. We only need to know how people are related.’ By running their encrypted patient lists (of people diagnosed with osteoarthritis) against the encrypted version of the Book of Icelanders, the OA team explores ‘how people are related’. By knowing the genealogical relationships and establishing meiotic distances (the number of links separating any two persons in a pedigree) among the patients, the researchers seek to confirm and narrow down candidate regions in the genome, i.e., regions with genes whose protein products are assumed to affect the disease. The greater the historical depth of available genealogical records, the narrower the candidate region becomes, and the narrower the region, the less time-consuming the hunting of the genes involved. If this reasoning is correct, when combined with medical and genetic records the genealogical database is a highly valuable resource, an essential component of the broader biomedical machine. Indeed, the genealogical machine is doing a reasonably good job. While the scientific breakthroughs repeatedly promised by deCODE genetics and its main corporate financier, Hoffman La Roche, have been slow to appear, some of the results of the deCODE project, including those pertaining to research on OA, are impressive. A recent ar-

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ticle by the OA team (Stefánsson et al. 2003) reports mapping hand OA to three prominent locations on chromosomes two, three and four. Also, it describes a mutation in a gene associated with some patients diagnosed with hand OA. Among other successes of the deCODE project is the mapping of Parkinson’s disease (Gulcher, Kong and Stefánsson 2001) and the demonstration of a strong familial component to longevity (Gudmundsson et al. 2000). Machine 2: Kinship Goes Online The Book of Icelanders is now available on the World Wide Web for genealogical enthusiasts and the general public (http://www .islendingabok.is). While virtually public and free of charge, this version is only accessible to those included in the database – that is, to living ‘Icelanders’. Those who are interested in exploring the database have to request a password, and as long as they have an Icelandic security number, they are provided with access by mail a few days later. This version, of course, includes personal names; there is no encryption. It enables Icelanders to trace their family histories and to explore their genealogical connection to almost any Icelander living or dead. The responses to the genealogies on the Web were overwhelming. Overnight, the Book of Icelanders became a popular pastime. In a few weeks, one hundred thousand Icelanders, a substantial proportion of the total population of three hundred thousand, requested a password to explore their relations with neighbours, colleagues, and friends (DV 2003). Soon the database became a party game. Newspaper reports and discussions on the Web indicate that families actively search for genealogical connections during informal social occasions, including dinner parties. Sometimes young people playfully explore connections with each other at drinking parties, theorizing about potential spouses and good matches. Also there are reports of people checking on connections at work, to establish rapport at meetings and to facilitate some kind of collaboration. Much of the media coverage of the Book of Icelanders plays on both humour and vanity. Apparently, many people have explored their connections with public figures such as the prime minister and the musician Björk, celebrating the fact that they are related to important people. On April Fool’s Day 2003, one of the local media made up the story that the database had shown that a certain Lord Dillon turned out to have had Icelandic blood in his veins. That day, about three hundred users logged in to the database to see if they were related to Lord Dillon. Sometimes, when browsing their web

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of kin, users sadly discover that they have a closer connection than they would like to admit with well-known crooks and criminals. In some cases, users’ discoveries turn out to be shattering. One woman was shocked to discovered that she had a half-brother in town (Morgunblaðið 2003). She knew that at some point her mother had given birth to a boy, but she had been told that he was stillborn. The fact of the boy’s existence had been published in a family history that the makers of the Book of Icelanders had access to, but the woman found out only decades later, while browsing the Web, that she had a brother alive. While the original fascination with the Book of Icelanders has slackened, figures supplied by deCODE genetics show that public use of the database is maintained at a somewhat surprisingly high level (see Figure 3.2). The frequency of visits on the Web reached its peak, of almost 18,000 logins per day, around two weeks after the launching of the Book of Icelanders. For the following three months it slowed down until it reached the stable level of about 1,000 logins per day during weekends and 1,500 on working days. The launching of the Book of Icelanders on the Web encouraged Icelanders to think that they are all fairly closely related, suggesting an imagined community based on kinship ties. In a sense, Icelandic society has been celebrating itself in Durkheimian fashion, by digital

FIGURE 3.2: Operating the genealogical machine: number of visits (log-ins per day). Source: deCODE genetics.

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means and on the Web. Most Icelanders, in fact, are related through an ancestor seven or eight generations back. But if the imagined community of Icelanders turns out to be a huge extended family, kinship and belonging seems bound to change. The implications are contradictory, and only the future will tell which way things are going. On the one hand, given that most people are related through a common ancestor only several generations back, there are virtually no non-relatives, apart from the relatively few immigrants whose parents represent other cultures, nations or populations. For Icelanders, it was argued some years ago (Rich 1989), the strength of the kinship bond is more a matter of degree than an ‘either/or’, relational space and distance being opportunistically defined according to context. Perhaps this will be even more the case in the future than in the past, keeping in mind Icelanders’ playful use of the genealogical machine. On the other hand, if practically everyone turns out to be fairly closely related to everyone else, the notion of ‘relatives’ becomes a bit too broad to have much significance. During the nationalist era, the notion of the bounded and integrated extended family easily made sense, uniting Icelanders against a common ‘enemy’. Now, in the era of globalization and multiculturalism, such an idea seems to disappear into thin air. Whatever the implications for Icelandic notions of kinship, which for the time being must remain only good guesses if not pure speculations, the complete genealogical database is obviously revolutionizing genealogical practice in Iceland. Genealogical enthusiasts and family historians no longer have to struggle with a variety of obscure documents, past and present, as most available material has now been digitalized and compiled in a single database. Interestingly, the typical user of family histories is no longer an elderly, scholarly male. The Book of Icelanders seems to be used by both men and women from most walks of life. Internet access is fairly widespread in Iceland. Among the most enthusiastic early users of the Book of Icelanders were groups of young girls who apparently wanted to explore kinship connections with their friends. While genealogical information on Icelanders has been in the public domain for centuries, its assembly and use in the digital form of the Book of Icelanders has been somewhat controversial. Increasingly, genealogical records, which have traditionally been in the public domain without restrictions on recording and publishing, are being treated in the same legal fashion as other ‘sensitive’ personal information. This shift in legal framing of genealogical data during recent years has been partly informed by intense public debates sur-

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rounding the Health Sector Database (Pálsson and Harðardóttir 2002), debates that had an international wing. Given the synergic importance of genealogical records for deCODE’s biomedical project, the issue of access and ownership has been even more contested than their potential infringement on privacy and autonomy. In 2000, the publishing company Genealogia Islandorum challenged deCODE genetics and Frisk Software in the courts for using previously published genealogies whose rights, it claimed, belonged to the company. The company claimed that scholars it employed had searched original documents in local archives throughout the country (genealogies, farm histories and folklore), compiling massive amounts of information and arranging it in readable fashion, in a series of costly commercial publications. Now, the company claimed, its property rights were being violated as others, namely deCODE genetics, punched in these records, copying and marketing the products of earlier efforts to make profit, partly through biomedical research. The issue of the ownership of the machine, then, became a central one. The staff of deCODE genetics rejected the claimants’ arguments, pointing out that genealogical facts on their own did not constitute private property. Also they suggested that along with Frisk Software, the company had added extensively to earlier compilations by independent research and, moreover, designed its own electronic format of storing and usage. DeCODE genetics further claimed that genealogical information about Icelanders constituted a common heritage, and that by taking the makers of the Book of Icelanders to the courts Genealogia Islandorum was effectively trying to appropriate genealogical information that had been the joint possession of the Icelandic nation for centuries. Finally, deCODE genetics announced that it would be offering its genealogical program and database for free, in the public domain, so as to ensure public access to this important resource. The case was taken to the Icelandic Supreme Court. The court appointed two independent evaluators of the case, who concluded: As a genealogical database, the Book of Icelanders is based on original sources, but in the process of its construction many printed or published sources have also been consulted. The sources that have been used have always been properly cited. This approach testifies to scholarly methods which resonate with the finest procedures applied by genealogists in recent times when composing their writings … All published genealogies naturally add to previously available information … making it easier at the same time to connect persons or accelerating the process. Likewise, such comparison is necessary to both

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allow for corrections and to establish cases where different sources fail to agree. (Morgunblaðið 2002)

The publication and free distribution of the Book of Icelanders on the Web is bound to affect the market for books on genealogies that in the past has been a lively one. However, these are radically different kinds of publications. The Book of Icelanders only includes basic facts on birth and death dates, residence and occupation, while the printed books on the market tend to provide much ‘thicker’ descriptions of families and histories, sometimes adding photographs of individuals, families and farms, descriptions that tend to interest consumers. The critical issue under Icelandic law, however, was not one of marketing but rather the extent to which the new electronic database was the result of original, independent work or the reproduction of earlier texts. Icelandic law enacted in 1972 provides protection against violations of the right of authorship. The laws, which were modified in 2000 in accordance with a European order of 1996, protect authorship of collections of independent works, whether in the format of books or digital files. According to the laws, the protection of authorship is conditioned on contributions to the works in question in terms of financial commitment and contributions. These laws apply to genealogical databases. The password provided for the Book of Icelanders only allows for limited access, in the sense that the user cannot freely explore other families or the database in general. Access, in other words, is egocentric: a person can trace his or her relationships to any other Icelander, but not the relationships between any two Icelanders. Moreover, detailed information on residence and genealogical sources is provided only for very close relatives and long-gone generations of distant relatives, with only rudimentary background information on the vast genealogical space in between. Thus, the designers of the Book of Icelanders have deliberately, it seems, avoided further legal hurdles involving competition with published works. At the same time, such restrictions prevent others from downloading extensive information from the database, securing the property rights of the companies involved.

Fine-tuning the Machine Following the launching of the Book of Icelanders on the Web, the public responded enthusiastically by sending corrections, complaints

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and additions to the company responsible for updating and maintaining the database. In just a few months the company received thousands of e-mail messages from users of the database. These messages provide a fascinating window into Icelandic kinship, an ‘ethnography of creation’ (Feeley-Harnik 2001: 58) offering insights into genealogical concepts and practices. Here I can explore only a few aspects, the tip of the iceberg. Below are some extracts from these messages to give the gist of users’ responses. Many comments expressed the enthusiasm of thankful users of the database: Gosh, this is really exciting!!! Now we finally have a point of departure. I got thinking of this when I was having my hair dyed at the hairdresser. On both sides were women saying ‘Listen, my son-in-law turns out to be your husband’s cousin’ etc. Suddenly all sewing circles and cocktail parties have been turned into family reunions. I have no doubt that this has increased solidarity among us. This is wonderfully specially Icelandic. Again, congratulations!

Some of the comments were written in a humourous style, sometimes with a sarcastic undertone, correcting sensitive information about paternity, marriage and cohabitation: I don’t know this woman. And, in any case, I am not married to her. But if this, indeed, were the case, by all means don’t tell anyone about it. I just wanted to say that this is a fantastic web site. The problem is, however, that my dad is not registered as my father. I have raised this to my parents and they guarantee that I am their daughter. Would you please correct this. Thanks. I know I am related to my dad as I inherited a disease from him; that is my proof. Thanks for a good initiative contributing to the family history of Icelanders. I have been browsing through this and I noticed that my father seems not to have any genealogical connections on the web … In my case and my children’s all lineages are shown except that of my father. This is a bit strange; I know that he was not immaculately conceived (eingetinn). The other day I was browsing through information on myself. My spouse was listed as my partner and when I clicked on him the name of his former GIRLFRIEND since college days appeared. Today we are married and the only thing that my husband and his former girlfriend have in common is a dog that was put to sleep in 1998. So, I don’t see any point in listing this woman there, at least not as part of my

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information … I am not going to explain to my children who this woman is; she has never been part of our life. THANK YOU.

A few comments underline serious concerns with belonging and exclusion from the community of Icelanders. Some people who, owing to error or lack of information, have not been ‘connected’ to their parents in the database have expressed their existential anxiety, as if the lack of digital connection forced them into exile or nonexistence: I registered for the Book of Icelanders and according to the records I have no parents! Am I a clone? My friends and acquaintances had told me that I was the only Icelander they could not find any connection to in the database. I decided to log in and to check for myself, only to find out that according to the Book there is no connection with a single human being! … It would be fun to know what went wrong … I have enjoyed telling my friends that I am a clone composed of all the best material that the human race has to offer … But it would be good if you could fix the error so that I can convince myself that I actually do exist.

Judging from such comments, being included and connected in the database is equivalent to a declaration of citizenship. Some comments seem to have been written in an angry and desperate mood: I have been told that the Book of Icelanders contains misleading information about me. I haven’t seen this myself as I am still waiting for a password!! … Apparently, it is claimed that I am living with N.N. which is complete rubbish. … I demand that this will be deleted, for particular reasons!!! I sincerely hope that you will take this into account as this is a chapter in my life that I have erased myself and I never mention to anybody nowadays . . . On the other hand, you might mention my current marriage status! That is, after many years of loneliness I am finally married!!! Please correct information about paternity in line with the sheriff’s statement … following a DNA check … It would be nice if you could settle this … so that the child can explore its father’s family in the future. I am the brother of this boy … And we are full brothers. Do you have to label our mother as a tart? I suggest you fix this before my father and my mother go on the web and have a fit.

Many of the comments and corrections are fed simultaneously into the database on the Web to comply with public understandings

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of kinship and belonging. Often, however, this is problematic due to conflicting positions and demands. The most sensitive comments involve illegitimacy and the children of single parents, as Skúlason explains in a newspaper interview (Morgunblaðið 2003). One contested issue involved a man who had fathered a child outside marriage. The child’s mother requested that the father be linked to the child in the Book of Icelanders. The wife of the biological father, however, insisted that this information not be published, as the children she had with her husband remained unaware of his infidelity. Skúlason draws attention to an inherent gender difference in the treatment of information about the children of single parents: A child of a single parent is by default linked to the parent that has the custody. If the parent is male, this is straightforward. In that case, we call the man and ask him about the mother. This is never a secret. If on the other hand the child is linked to its mother – and, indeed, single mothers are far more numerous than single fathers – we have a problem. We cannot ask the mother as this would be against the working rules of the Book of Icelanders and, indeed, violate rules of ethics. Neither can we ask the child itself, at least not until it has become legally autonomous.

Some of the corrections by the users of the database on the Web, corrections involving genetic kinship, are obviously relevant for the encrypted version used in the biomedical project. Gradually, these corrections are incorporated in new ‘editions’ of the Book of Icelanders. Occasionally, the staff of deCODE genetics discover a mismatch in their anonymous database, a contradiction between genetics and social paternity. In that case, the records are simply dropped from the biomedical database as they are useless for genetic and biomedical purposes. Since, however, these corrections relate to the encrypted version and no one knows the names or identities of the persons involved, they obviously cannot be introduced on the Web even if someone wants them to be. In any case, the Web version is bound to give priority to legal notions of social kinship, not genetics. What matters is how people construct and negotiate their relatedness and what is backed by law.

Conclusions The machine metaphor, no doubt, is one of the seductive metaphors of our times. ‘Can we’, Rothenberg asks, ‘see nothing more than

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machines anymore in the world around us?’ (1993: 131). However, digital genealogies, I have suggested, can be usefully regarded as machines, generating – for social, commercial and managerial as well as epistemological purposes – connections, questions and answers. In Iceland, a rich local tradition of collecting and storing family histories, a tradition established and developed during the Middle Ages, has been adopted and enhanced by the powerful tools of computers and modern informatics. The encrypted database, created for researchers tracing the presumed genetic roots of common diseases, has proved to be a powerful navigational aid in the cartography of the human genome, much like GPS technology and remote sensing are essential for modern travellers and explorers. Theoretically, at least, it generates a vast amount of information on useful ‘hunting’ grounds, the causes of diseases, and their eventual treatment and management. The other version of the Book of Icelanders, the genealogical search-engine available on the Web, easily establishes connections that would otherwise remain hidden, managing histories and identities, personal, familial and national. A recent study of photocopier repair technicians emphasizes the triangular relationship and negotiation among technicians, customers and machines: ‘The problems encountered by technicians are most fundamentally breakdowns of the interaction between customers and their machines, which may or may not include a malfunction or failure of some machine component. Diagnosis requires negotiation with both customers and machines, first to assess the breakdown and determine the problem and then to produce an acceptable solution’ (Orr 1996: 3). Running the digital machine represented by the Book of Icelanders requires similar negotiation. Frisk Software rightly claims that through the enthusiastic cooperation of the Icelandic public the company has effectively ‘hired’ a substantial part of the population for free to correct and ‘finalize’ the genealogical database. The public, then, has been both busily fine-tuning the machine, ensuring that it runs smoothly and accurately – and, at the same time, reflecting upon relatedness and redefining community. For the spokespersons of deCODE’s project, a relatively homogenous population such as the Icelandic one (see Helgason et al. 2003) with good medical records for precise phenotypic identification is the ideal experimental site for biomedical research. For them, the royal road to identifying the underlying cause of pathology is through linkage analysis: ‘The most important asset of linkage analysis is its ability to screen the entire genome with a framework set of markers; this makes it a hypothesis-independent and cost-effective ap-

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proach to finding disease genes’ (Gulcher, Kong and Stefánsson 2001: 264). In such a scheme, genealogies represent a powerful machine. As Latour has argued, “whenever we learn something about the management of humans, we shift that knowledge to nonhumans and endow them with more and more organizational properties … industry shifts to nonhumans the management of people learned in the imperial machine” (1999: 207–8; emphasis in the original). Much as the ice-core isotopic records from Greenland, extracted through the application of heavy machinery, give some hints regarding the past climate of Iceland, building up a detailed account of environmental change that extends hundreds of years into the past (see, for example, Ogilvie and Pálsson 2003), drilling into the past by means of the genealogical machine of the Book of Icelanders helps to establish social connections and reinvent family histories as well as to speed up the search for mutant genes and to manage the body politic. In her ethnographic description of medical encounters in the analysis and treatment of cancer, Gibbon refers to the ‘mostly hidden “technology”’ (2002: 429) involving the production and use of family trees. In her view, ‘clinical family trees gain much of their “force” from being both a form of family genealogies and simultaneously a type of scientific pedigree’ (2002: 433). As we have seen, Icelandic genealogies are both a communal or a familial property and a scientific or industrial commodity. The tension surrounding the biomedical use of the encrypted version of the Book of Icelanders issued for the deCODE project helped to ensure that the other, ‘short edition’ appeared in the public domain, easily accessible on the Web to most Icelanders via computer. The highly visible version of computerized genealogies publicized on the Web justified the largely hidden version, in Gibbon’s terms, exploited in the context of private industry. These developments illustrate Strathern’s (1998: 216) prediction of ‘an explosion of concern with ownership’ as a result of increasing contests over what she calls ‘aspects of life and body’. The genealogical view of the world that emerged during the Middle Ages outlined the common roots and relatedness of different groups and nations, providing the classificatory rationale for ethnographic collections and museum cabinets. Linguistics and biology presented a purified vision of languages and organisms as timeless artefacts with parallel roots and histories. In anthropology, the genealogical method had important implications for both theory and empirical approach: it ‘fixed birth as the defining moment of kinship, and fixed the instruments for its recording accordingly’ (Bouquet 2000: 187). Recently, however, the phylogenetic tree of evolution-

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ary biology has been shaken by research on gene transfer. Darwin posited a universal phylogenetic tree that united the great kingdoms of nature, but now it looks like the kingdoms have been swapping genes back and forth for a very long time (see, for instance, Doolittle 1999), introducing fundamental messiness into biological classification. Thus, early eukaryotes picked parts of their genome from their food. Such ‘horizontal’ transfer of genes – prehistoric equivalents of modern gene hunting and genetic engineering, perhaps – may be the major evolutionary source of true innovation. According to researchers at the Human Genome Project, many human genes seem to have been horizontally acquired from bacteria. While that claim is currently being contested, it underlines the possibility that part of the human genome is horizontally acquired or second-hand – or, to paraphrase Bakhtin (1986) on words in language, half somebody else’s. Under certain conditions, genes, then, pass across organisms, adopted much like children – or ethnographers in the field. Quite possibly, as a result, the notion of the universal evolutionary ‘tree’ needs to be revised. Recently, some scholars have suggested fungus – with its open-ended, subterranean network of mycelial fibres – as a paradigmatic life form (Ingold 2000; Rayner 1997). Perhaps the discovery of gene swapping invites a gestalt shift in biological and evolutionary perspectives, from trees to fungi. If the evolutionary tree is being radically refigured along these lines, the paradigmatic family tree seems bound to change as well. After all, throughout the history of the tree imagery the evolutionary tree and the family tree have co-evolved, nature and society (evolution and history) mutually informing each other (Bouquet 2000; Feeley-Harnik 2001). In fact, traditional notions of human relatedness seem to be undergoing a ‘lateral’ shift, qualifying and undermining the ‘vertical’ determinism of contemporary discourses on genetics and relatedness. Recently the paradigmatic family tree has been challenged from several directions: a variety of ethnographic accounts of cultural concepts of substance and materiality, widespread practices of adoption and fostering (and gay parenting), and a growing literature on the practice and representation of friendship. Instead of the metaphor of the tree, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) suggest the notion of the rhizome, a decentred cluster of interlaced threads connecting any point to any other point. Perhaps the negotiations on relatedness described above, involving consumers and makers of the Book of Icelanders and their collective finetuning of the genealogical machine, will in the long run highlight and reinforce a rhizomic notion of relatedness. Fusing the horizon-

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tal and the vertical, the order of law and the order of nature in Schneider’s (1980) and Strathern’s (1992) terms, the ‘authoritative’ digital genealogy of Icelanders becomes a complex, tight-knit web, more like subterranean fibres than trees. Quite appropriately, the web of kin is increasingly digitally explored on the World Wide Web. Like the rhizome, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, the web has ‘multiple entryways’ (1988: 12); everything is potentially interconnected with everything else.

Acknowledgements The material presented in this chapter is discussed in greater detail in my book Anthropology and the New Genetics (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The research on which it is founded has been supported by the Nordic Social Science Research Fund (NOS-S), the Icelandic Science Fund and the Research Fund of the University of Iceland. I thank Kristín E. Harðardóttir (University of Iceland) and Örn D. Jónsson (University of Iceland) for their useful comments on some of the arguments presented. Also, I acknowledge my debt to the staff of deCODE genetics – especially Stefán Einar Stefánsson, the leader of the osteoarthritis team, and Þórður Kristjánsson, in charge of the Book of Icelanders – as well as Frisk Software, in particular Director Friðrik Skúlason and anthropologist Elín Klara Grétarsdóttir Bender.

Notes 1. Raffles argues (2001) in a parallel fashion that Amazonian beetles and butterflies set the stage for interesting developments in biology, establishing the fame of distinguished nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. 2. Among the earliest surviving images that position living people and their ancestors on the branches of a tree is the genealogy of the Babenberg family of Austria, represented in an engraving decorating the work of a man born in 1491 (Klapisch-Zuber 2000: 7).

References Bakhtin, M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V.W. McGee. Eds. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Bender, J. and D.E. Wellbery (eds). 1991. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Book of Icelanders. Online at http://www.islendingabok.is. Bouquet, M. 2000. ‘Figures of Relations: Reconnecting Kinship Studies and Museum Collections’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 167–90. Boyle, J. 1996. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, M.F. 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Creager, A.N.H. 2002. The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Doolittle, W.F. 1999. ‘Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree’, Science 284(5423): 2124–8. DV. 2003. ‘Ættarhöfðinginn’ [The Tribal Chief], 13 February, Reykjavik. Feeley-Harnik, G. 2001. ‘The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 55–84. Finkler, K. 2000. Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the New Medical Frontier. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gibbon, S. 2002. ‘Re-examining Geneticization: Family Trees in Breast Cancer Genetics’, Science as Culture 11(4): 429–57. Gudmundsson, H., et al. 2000. ‘Inheritance of Human Longevity in Iceland’, European Journal of Human Genetics 8(10): 743–49. Gulcher, J., A. Kong and K. Stefánsson. 2001. ‘The Role of Linkage Studies for Common Diseases’, Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 11(3): 264–67. Haan, H. de. 1994. In the Shadow of the Tree: Kinship, Property and Inheritance among Farm Families. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Helgason, A., et al. 2003. ‘A Reassessment of Genetic Diversity in Icelanders: Strong Evidence from Multiple Loci Relative Homogeneity Caused by Genetic Drift’, Annals of Human Genetics 67(4): 281–97. Helmreich, S. 2001. ‘Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 116–43. Hornborg, A. 2001. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

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Jones, O. and P. Cloke. 2002. Tree Cultures: The Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place. Oxford: Berg. Klapisch-Zuber, C. 1991. ‘The Genesis of the Family Tree’, I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4(1): 105–29. ———. 2000. L’Ombre des Ancêtres: Essai sur l’Imaginaire Médiéval de la Parenté. Paris: Fayard. Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kohler, R.E. 1994. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 1988. The Pasteurization of France, trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laxness, H.K. 1962 [1943]. ‘Mannlíf á spjaldskrá’ [Indexing Human Life], in H.K. Laxness (ed.), Sjálfsagðir hlutir: Ritgerðir. Reykjavík: Helgafell, pp. 155–57. Morgunblaðið. 2002. ‘Lýsing ÍE á þróun gagnasafnsins er rétt’ [deCODE’s Description of the Development of the Database is Correct], 25 September, Reykjavik. ———. 2003. ‘Ljóstrað upp um hliðarspor í Íslendingabók’ [Disclosures on Infidelity in the Book of Icelanders], 15 March, Reykjavik. Mumford, L. 1963 [1934]. Technics and Civilization. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company. Ogilvie, A.E.J. and G. Pálsson. 2003. ‘Mood, Magic, and Metaphor: Allusions to Weather and Climate in the Sagas of Icelanders’, in S. Strauss and B.S. Orlove (eds), Weather, Climate, Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 251–74. Orr, J.E. 1996. Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Pálsson, G. 2002. ‘The Life of Family Trees and the Book of Icelanders’, Medical Anthropology 21(3/4): 337–67. ———. 2004. ‘Decoding Relatedness and Disease: The Icelandic Biogenetic Project’, in H.-J. Rheinberger and J.-P. Gaudillére (eds), From Molecular Genetics to Genomics: The Mapping Cultures of Twentieth Century Genetics. London: Routledge, pp. 180–99. ———. 2007. Anthropology and the New Genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pálsson, G. and K.E. Harðardóttir. 2002. ‘For Whom the Cell Tolls: Debates About Biomedicine’, Current Anthropology 43(2): 271–301. Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, P. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Raffles, H. 2001. ‘The Uses of Butterflies’, American Ethnologist 28(3): 513–48. Rayner, A. 1997. Degrees of Freedom: Living in Dynamic Boundaries. London: Imperial College Press.

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Rheinberger, H.-J. 1997. Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rich, G.W. 1989. ‘Problems and Prospects in the Study of Icelandic Kinship’, in E.P. Durrenberger and G. Pálsson (eds), The Anthropology of Iceland. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 53–79. Rival, L. 1998. ‘Trees, from Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts’, in L. Rival (ed.), The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–36. Rose, C.M. 1994. Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rothenberg, D. 1993. Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schneider, D. 1980 [1968]. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sigurðardóttir, S., et al. 2000. ‘The Mutation Rate in the Human mtDNA Control Region’, American Journal of Human Genetics 66(5): 1599–1609. Stefánsson, S.E., et al. 2003. ‘Genomewide Scan for Hand Osteoarthritis: A Novel Mutation in Matrilin-3’, American Journal of Human Genetics 72(6): 1448–59. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. ‘Divisions of Interest and the Languages of Ownership’, in C. Hann (ed.), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–32. Supreme Court of Iceland. Online at http://www.haestirettur.is. Tassy, P. 1991. L’Arbre à Remonter le Temps: Les Recontres de la Systématique et de l’Evolution. Paris: C. Bourgois. Tutton, R. 2004. ‘“They Want to Know Where They Came From”: Population Genetics, Identity, and Family Genealogy’, New Genetics and Society 23(1): 105–20. Vasey, D. 1996. ‘Premodern and Modern Constructions of Population Regimes’, in G. Pálsson and E.P. Durrenberger (eds), Images of Contemporary Iceland: Everyday Lives and Global Contexts. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 149–70.

Chapter 4

GENES, MOBILITIES AND THE ENCLOSURES OF CAPITAL CONTESTING ANCESTRY AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN ICELAND Hilary Cunningham

Introduction Technological advances and new discoveries in the field of molecular biology are perhaps among the most significant historical and cultural developments to emerge in the last two decades. They have already radically altered, for example, the ways in which humans can produce food, identify genetically linked diseases, and potentially prevent and cure these diseases. In addition to advances in agriculture, pharmaceuticals and medicine, however, biotechnology has also generated a powerful cultural imagery. As the authors Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee observed in their book The DNA Mystique (1995), ‘the gene’ plays an increasingly important role in popular culture, in understandings of what constitutes human variation and behavior, in discussions about families and bearing children, and in expectations of what the future holds for human health and well-being. Scholars such as Nelkin and Lindee contend that genetic imagery has become so pervasive in North America that the gene itself has become ‘iconic’ and, as such, is profoundly reshaping cultural consciousness in the twenty-first century.1

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Despite the pervasiveness of the gene as a cultural icon, however, genetics remains a highly specialized and often impenetrable science. Many, perhaps most, would be hard pressed to come up with a biologically accurate definition of a gene, let alone identify where genes are located and spell out what exactly they do. Various folk traditions or metaphors assist publics as they make conceptual leapings to the world of genes. In U.S. and European circles, for example, some of the dominant metaphors for DNA have included depictions of genes as units of information or as codes (Kay 2000; Keller 1995, 2002; Yoxen 1981), as icons of ‘life itself’ (Franklin 1995a, 1995b; Haraway 1997; H. Rose 2001a), and as a kind of ‘landscape’ that can be mapped, navigated and mined (Dreger 2000; Haraway 1997, 2000). Of all these metaphors, the notion of genes as ‘information’ is perhaps the most pervasive, conveying a commonly held perception that genes are a kind of ‘substance’ that expresses information in a direct way. The history of this perception predates recent developments in molecular biology by several centuries. The idea that ‘substance’ – be it pedigree, disposition, character traits (both good and bad) or physical appearance – can be passed down or bestowed through generations has been central to European genealogical thinking (Bouquet 1996). Charles Darwin gave notions of genealogical bestowal a biological basis in the nineteenth century when, in speculating on why certain traits persisted through generations of species while others did not, he proposed a theory of natural selection (though the phrase itself was not his but Herbert Spencer’s). The discovery of the rules of genetic inheritance by Gregor Mendel in the same century provided the mechanism for evolutionary progress by establishing that genes work in terms of predictable combinations of dominant and recessive factors. Darwinian and Mendelian conceptions of genetic inheritance, however, were radically changed by the invention of recombinant DNA in 1975, one of the first technologies that allowed scientists to move genes from one organism to another. This technology and many subsequent ones have given genes and the ‘information’ they express new possible ‘mobilities’ within and across species. I use mobilities here with reference to Latour’s insightful probing of how we interpret symbolic texts. Dispensing with simple ‘scientist’ excavations of symbols, Latour turns his attention to the transformations and mediations that images always entail. Yet, while he adheres firmly to the idea that meanings emerge as part of a continually shifting terrain, Latour is also fascinated by what he terms ‘immutable mobiles’ – i.e., the fact that certain constant features are always carried,

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intact, through seemingly endless shifts in representation (1998: 425). As Latour points out, these immutabilities – the conserving of a constant through successive changes – are not unproblematic. Choices have to be made about what is constant and what is not, particularly as mediating influences create alignments around constants, thereby making some transformations possible while disposing of others (1998: 426). What is fascinating about genes and the images associated with them is that they also reference certain constants within the context of transformation. While the most dramatic genetic mobilities have transformed fruits, vegetables and livestock, it is not clear how they will impact the human family and how cultural understandings of genes and genealogical inheritance will change as a result of new biotechnologies. Genes do indeed direct attention to particular constants (e.g., skin pigmentation or resistance to freezing), but what is also a ‘constant’ (in Latour’s sense) is genetic mobility itself. Genes are on the move in the new biological era, and they promise transformation – but how (and in what ways, and the extent to which) humans can intervene and direct genetic mobilities is one of the central ethical and political issues of genomic technologies (Leach, this volume). The idea of genes as units of information is also illustrative of how deeply genetics is being shaped by twenty-first–century capitalism. Genes, of course, are only one component in a larger collection of human body parts (such as organs, blood, tissues, cells, proteins, etc.) that are currently being isolated and processed for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes (Scheper-Hughes and Waquant 2002). As Gisli Pálsson notes, once these parts are identified, they become ‘quickly absorbed into the market place where they are exchanged in the form of commodities’ (Pálsson 2000: 1). The commodities, however, are not simply biological in scope but encompass a fusion of what Hilary Rose terms ‘two huge technosciences’ – biotechnology and informatics (Rose 2001a: 119). In bioinformatics, genes constitute one form of data in a larger matrix combining information about an individual’s genetic make-up (genotype), their family history (genealogy) and their medical condition (phenotype). Bioinformatics not only posits a new set of relationships between gene and genealogy but also fosters new conceptions about how genetic information can be moved around, positioned and deployed. Consumers of biotechnologies must therefore come to new understandings of not only what genes are and what they do, but also the possible mobilities of genes. In this chapter, I explore what some of

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these mobilities might be in relation to two examples. In the first, I discuss possible readings of the images that the journals Nature and Science used to announce the seminal publication of a draft sequence of the human genome in February 2001. Here I focus on the ways in which genetic mobilities as both horizontal and vertical trajectories are coordinated across the imagery of the two covers. Although some of the most common commercial images of genes are those that evacuate DNA of any social context, I argue that linear genealogical readings remain central to the ways in which publics are being inducted into the world of mobile genomics. I view these two readings as complementary, not oppositional, and argue that the vertical and horizontal movements of genes are an intrinsic aspect of the capitalization of human DNA. In the second example, I briefly look at how some of the issues around genetic mobilities have been played out in a specific cultural, economic and political context. The example discussed is that of Iceland and the recent, successful implementation of a bioinformatics project by a private biotechnology firm. In exploring some of the controversies that emerged as a result of the project, I focus on the public perceptions of genetic trajectories and the kinds of issues that emerged in relationship to the mobility of genes in the bioinformatics matrixes.

Genetic Mobilities and the Human Genome: ‘Your Own Personal, Portable DNA Laboratory in a Suitcase’ One of the most common representations of commercial DNA is that of the peripatetic gene, an idea frequently found in the advertisements of U.S. biotechnology trade magazines. In one advertisement from Techdigest (2006), a woman in a corporate-looking suit stands in front of a briefcase and smilingly announces, ‘Your Own Personal, Portable DNA Laboratory in a Suitcase’ (see techdigest.tv/ 2007/09). Emphasizing the rapidity with which a DNA sample can be produced, the advertisement conveys a powerful sense of the DNA’s easy portability and hence its ability to go just about anywhere it is needed to do a particular job. In this advertisement, the DNA is produced – not passed on, as in a genealogical paradigm – for the customer. There are no intermediary bodies, no ancestors, no lineages or kinship regulations that interfere with the mobility of the DNA strand. In this image, the DNA is unmoored from all of its social and familial anchors.

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Genetic commodities, such as the DNA strand above, that are ostensibly bereft of ‘the social’ may be quite attractive to certain entrepreneurs in biotechnology industries, but for publics consuming the new biotechnologies in the forms of diagnostic tests, gene therapies, genetically modified foods and publicly funded genomic research, the social life of genes – where they come from, where they are heading and what they will do once they arrive – are of the utmost importance. Genealogical readings not only remain central to the production of pharmaceuticals, but also play an important role in how publics are negotiating notions of identity, social location and, increasingly, citizenship (Rapp 2002). In making conceptual leapings, so to speak, to the world of genomics, publics are confronting genes as mobile pieces of information whose patterns of predicable inheritance have been transformed from probabilities (or inevitabilities) into possibilities. Biotechnology promises the possibility of intervention – of catching a gene before it expresses itself, of inhibiting the expression of a gene in place, or of inserting specific expressions into an organism and possibly its offspring. In order to accomplish this, researchers must know the exact order of the nucleotide sequences that make up an organism’s genome and from there, determine what regions of DNA code for a gene.2 Once this is done, a gene’s function can be identified, and as a corollary, a mutated gene can be identified by measuring it up against the normal one. To sequence an organism’s DNA, however, can be a project of extraordinary proportions – the human genome, for example, contains some three billion DNA base pairs. The project of mapping the human genome was eventually proposed by the United States beginning in the 1980s, when developments in computer technologies made such a sequencing possible and feasible. Like so many twentieth-century technologies, however, biotechnologies have their roots in larger discourses about national political, economic and military aspirations. As a result, the mapping of the human genome was promoted in strategic ways – especially since it was American taxpayers who would be largely the ones to foot the bill for the multi-billion dollar project (Dreger 2000). In the following section, I briefly recount the history of the Human Genome Project and focus on two central semiotic sites that emerged around its completion – the Nature and Science covers that accompanied the publication of the first draft sequence of the human genome. I focus on these texts not only because they became organizing signifiers of the historical event (much like the picture of Earth did for the American space program), but also because they

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represent a distinctive moment in conveying a set of meanings about genetic mobilities. While readings of the texts should be viewed as anything but closed, they, like the many examples contained in Nelkin and Lindee’s book, represent important symbolic interfaces where one can begin to discuss the ways in which specific kinds of genetic mobilities are being projected.

The Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) has been one of the most ambitious and certainly widely publicized genetic events of the past decade. Although the project started officially in 1990 and in 1991 became jointly sponsored by both the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it has its provenance in the U.S.’s postwar nuclear program. Although few are aware of it, the HGP is an initiative that grew directly out of the nuclear medicine program developed under the Atomic Energy Commission, the precursor body to the current U.S. DOE. (It is perhaps for this reason that it is sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Project of Biology.) The initiative emerged as chief medical officers for the Manhattan Project began to make plans to continue the work that they had been doing on the medical effects of radiation under tight security conditions, but adapt it to a postwar world (Lenoir and Hays 2000: 30).3 One of the principle goals of this postwar adaptation was to transfer technologies to the private sector and stimulate American economic activity in the newly emerging fields of radiobiology and nuclear medicine. In 1946, the Manhattan Project evolved into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and one of its subsequent projects was the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission, a joint American-Japanese investigation into the long-term, radiobiological effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Beatty 2000: 133). While this research on the effects of radiation spanned several decades, it took a decisive turn in 1984 when the DOE sponsored a conference in Alta, Utah. The conference brought researchers together to discuss the possibility of developing more refined ways of detecting genetic mutations among the offspring of survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. (At this point in 1984, scientists were still studying mutations largely at a gross phenotypic level, meaning that their research was still confined to monitoring dominant mutations.) At Alta, scientists talked about the possibility of studying genetic mutations more directly – at the level of DNA, for example –

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which opened up the prospect of directly sequencing the DNA of parents and offspring. The DOE supported the initiative, recognizing that the sequencing technology and resulting genomic maps might well have value far beyond the detection of genetic mutations (Beatty 2000: 147). The Human Genome Project was officially launched in 1990, six years after the Alta meeting, and began as a fifteen-year, US $3 billion project to identify all human genes, along with the added goals of storing this information in databases, developing new tools for the analysis of genetic data and transferring these technologies to the private sector. In order to do this, scientists had to determine the exact sequence of the chemical bases that make up human DNA, so the HGP was often described as a ‘mapping’ of a hitherto ‘uncharted’ genomic ‘landscape’ (see also Flower and Heath 1993). The Draft Sequences The HGP involved the participation of eighteen countries and generated several controversies, one of which occurred on 20 June 1991 when Craig Venter, then an NIH researcher, filed patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for 337 DNA sequences related to the human brain. Although the patents were eventually rejected, these actions generated a storm of protest around the commercialization of the human genome and sparked the submission of other patent applications. Venter subsequently left the HGP consortium to form his own company, Celera, and began to sequence the human genome using a different (and what he claimed was a superior) technique. The U.S. media often depicted the parallel project, funded as a private enterprise, as a rival competitor to the publicly funded HGP. In 2000, both Celera and the HGP announced the completion of a ‘working draft’ of the human genome, and in February of the following year two draft sequences were published. The first draft, representing the work of the U.S.-led consortium, appeared in Nature on 15 February (Figure 4.1). The second draft, produced by Celera, was published in Science and appeared the next day, 16 February (Figure 4.2). Both drafts represented a successful survey of the three billion nucleotide base-pair sequences that make up the human genome and were celebrated as remarkable and novel scientific accomplishments. In the press conference that announced the draft, tensions between private and public efforts were downplayed and, speaking from the Oval Office, U.S. President Bill Clinton described the publication of the drafts as the dawn of a new and wondrous era:

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Nearly two centuries ago, in this room, on this floor, Thomas Jefferson and a trusted aide spread out a magnificent map – a map Jefferson had long prayed he would get to see in his lifetime. The aide was Meriwether Lewis and the map was the product of his courageous expedition across the American frontier, all the way to the Pacific. It was a map that defined the contours and forever expanded the frontiers of our continent and our imagination. Today, the world is joining us here in the East Room to behold a map of even greater significance. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.

Although such publicity ensured that the draft sequences were to be treated as momentous events, the texts discussing the draft sequences in Nature and Science were quite dense and required, at the very least, a working knowledge of genetics and a familiarity with the workings of DNA. The covers of the Nature and Science editions, however, were and are another matter. Like the cover of the nowfamous 1968 edition of National Geographic that gave thousands of subscribers their first photographic glimpse of Earth, these covers, too, represent portraits of a ‘humanity’ hitherto unseen. It is to these covers that I now turn to discuss more directly genealogical readings of the human genome. Nature’s Cover: A Horizontal Genealogy? Nature’s cover features a panoply of tiny fragments, each one, upon closer inspection, containing a human face (Figure 4.1). Here, in a word, is everybody. Here is an expansive human mosaic in which the traditional markers of physical difference are obscured, buried perhaps, beneath the preponderance of human diversity – a diversity unified only by the emblem of the DNA double helix that is both superimposed upon and emanating from the gene pool. Although the cover resonates with Nelkin and Lindee’s thesis, mentioned above, that human biology has become so geneticized that we now negotiate human relationships principally through the lens of genetic-relatedness, there is a sense here that human biological connection is also being reorganized spatially, a theme explored in the work of Sarah Franklin. Building on Marilyn Strathern’s understandings of kinship as a processual, historically contextualized, and ever-changing social practice, Franklin links the development of genetic technologies – such as cloning, gene sequencing and gene

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FIGURE 4.1: Cover of Nature. Reprinted with permission.

transfer – to a respatialization of biology. Franklin argues that the production of genes as units of information has given genetics a new set of technological flexibilities, which in turn have resulted in new patterns of and possibilities for relatedness. The new genomics, Franklin argues, is not rooted in a linear, Darwinian model of descent but in what she terms a new ‘axis of transformation’: a post-

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Darwinian recombination. According to Franklin, the ability of technoscience to identify, isolate, remove and insert genetic fragments across the old biological categories, independent of natural selection, has meant that the human (as well as other plants and animals) has become, not a genealogical inevitability, but a ‘horizontal assemblage’: Another way to describe the consequences of molecular genomic prowess is that they entail a respatialisation of genealogy, so that genetic information no longer necessarily passes in a one-way, linear path of descent from one generation to the next. Rewritten as information, message, code or sequence, the gene becomes newly flexible as it also becomes differently (re)productive. The ability to recombine genes from different species has detonated the formerly rigid conduits of DNA transmission, enabling mice and goats to express human genes, plants to express genes from fish, and sheep to produce human proteins because they have been equipped with the missing parts of the human genome lacking in sufferers of rare inherited diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Just as the human genome represents a molecular globalisation of human kinship, so the transgenic industry has created postmodern genealogy, shorn of the very limits by which consanguinity was once defined—the slow predictable and regular brachiations of the familiar family tree now superseded by more flexible dimensions of genealogical time (as speed) and space (which is post-arboreal). The neat genealogical system that Darwin described as natural history is no longer closed, tree-like, or unified. (Franklin 1995a: 2)

Franklin’s insights about the flexibility of the gene are intriguing in relation to Nature’s seminal cover depicting the human genome. The image itself appears organized around a horizontal spread of people whose phenotypic differences are recessed in relation to the generic DNA brand. But just what is it that makes us the same? As many biologists have noted, one of the ironies of producing a map of the human genome is that there is not just one human genome. On average, any two humans will have genomes that are 99.9 per cent the same; thus the ‘horizontal’ is really that of the species classification for Homo sapiens. Then what makes us different? (Given that human genomes are so similar, one might expect that the answer would be framed in more social terms: for example the different occupations, languages or religions of individuals pictured.) But what makes humans biologically different is, in many respects, much more important to genetics and biotechnology. Any two humans will vary genetically by roughly one nucleotide base per thousand (Sulston and Ferry 2002: 198), but these differ-

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ences are not constant and also vary between any two people. These fractional differences in a person’s genome (what are called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNIPs) often have no detectable consequences for an organism, but in some cases they can make person predisposed to a disease or, conversely, confer an advantage (such as the ability to produce a higher-than-average number of red blood cells, an adaptive advantage for populations living in high altitudes). Over time, these differences can accumulate in pools of people (families and populations), which will make both those individuals and the groups in which they live genetically distinctive. Biological understandings of genetic diversity, therefore, are rooted in a sense of essentialized qualities already inherent in a person, not in that person’s positioning vis-à-vis another person in the world (i.e., a social relationship) (see Ingold 2000: 138; Clarke and Parsons 1997). As Pálsson observes: ‘DNA analyses and molecular biology have given genetic relatedness a renewed, supreme status, allowing little room for culture and social construction’ (2002a: 340). The use of mosaic imagery enhances this focus on the essentialized over the social. The fragments of smiling individuals invite a closer inspection – with a magnifying glass, perhaps – and the viewer’s gaze consequently becomes oriented to the ‘microscopic’ in the hunt for what makes humanity ‘essentially diverse’. Science’s Cover: Reading Genetic Difference Vertically In Science’s cover, the relationship between the genetic and the social, and the articulation of sameness and difference, are equally complex. Unlike the Human Genome Project, which used genetic resources from a wide variety of individuals, Celera used genetic samples from a specific ‘mixed race’ sample of five individuals who, in this image, are arranged in a vertical chain suggestive of the twisting motion of a double helix (Figure 4.2). Although there are many ways to read this image from a genealogical perspective, in this representation racial categories are a dominant theme and constitute not only a spectrum of diversity, but also a vertical arrangement of diversity. By positioning the Caucasian baby at the lower terminus of the helix, presumably the most recent addition to the DNA chain (by virtue of its age), the image invites linear readings. Not only is the baby (as in many eugenic paradigms) a cumulation of a past genetic history, it is also an entity powerfully oriented towards the future and what it might hold. The baby in this sense is a fulcrum of the image through which the significance of both the past and the future is read.4

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FIGURE 4.2: Cover of Science. Reprinted with permission.

This cover, appearing the day after Nature’s publication of the draft sequence, is also a potent text playing with conceptions of genes and their significance as organizing principles. Like its predecessor, this text has several possible trajectories as an origins story, a schema of (racialized) genetic interrelationship and a geneticized social order. Here, however, I would like to begin a reading of this text by build-

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ing on some of Tim Ingold’s insights about genealogies as cosmological systems that, according to Ingold, fundamentally dichotomize ‘relationship’ and ‘relatedness’. For Ingold, genealogies (specifically ones that model trees) delimit the ways in which humans can imagine relationships among each other by orienting them toward static and rigid models of relatedness that are based on the linear generation of essential substances. Generation, Ingold argues, is characteristic of all linear genealogical models and is rooted in the idea that a set of constituent elements (what he terms the ‘essential or substantive components of personhood’) are transferred, passed on ‘fully formed’ from a set of predecessors to the next generation in the form of an ‘endowment’. Although Ingold focuses on notions of personhood more generally, clearly there are many things attributed to genetics (such as intelligence, disposition, sexual preference, etc.) that are also regarded in this way. For Ingold, what is particularly significant about this arrangement is that these ‘essential elements of personhood … are given by virtue of genealogical connection, independently of the situational contexts of human activity’ (2000: 135). The generative dimension of genealogies therefore creates a peculiar kind of social location because everyone in the chain becomes a kind of intermediary, given that they are both the recipient of a (finished) past and a conveyor of essential elements to the next generation. For Ingold, a linear genealogy therefore ‘represents a history of persons in the very peculiar form of a history of relatedness which unfolds without regard to people’s relationships – that is, to their experience of involvement in, perception and action with their human and non-human environments’ (2000: 136). A genealogy then, is a model that works upon the assumption that persons are ‘brought into being … independently and in advance of their entry into the lifeworld, through the bestowal of a set of ready made attributes from their antecedents. This assumption lies at the very core of the genealogical model and all its remaining features can be derived from it. In particular, it implies that the generation of persons is not a life process. On the contrary, life and growth are the enactment of identities, or the realization of potentials, that are already in place’ (Ingold 2000: 136). If the baby on Science’s cover is indeed the recipient of essential genetic ingredients from its predecessors, and if its special location is one principally of genetic relatedness, then what, one might ask, has been passed on and who has passed it? While the image itself invites diverse readings, what does seem to be underscored is a kind of genetic patrilineality. Read in a linear and vertical way, the double

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helix begins with a Caucasian man and his seed, so to speak, which travels though two females (suggestive of the Mongoloid racial category?) and then moves on through the Negroid category to its expression in a white offspring. Read in reverse, up the helix, the same trajectory is reproduced. The baby’s maternity is very much recessed – the picture is not only framed by males top to bottom (the females are also outnumbered by males) but also shows the baby being held by a male as, again presumably, the baby’s closest predecessor. Clearly the Y-chromosome has been given some precedence here. But perhaps more ambiguous is what exactly has been passed on, and how? How, for example, did the baby, connected apically to a Caucasian ancestor, ‘stay white’, having presumably ‘passed’ through the other racial categories represented? (The question itself is underscored by the fact that baby is held by its ‘racial opposite’, a man of African Ancestry, presumably its most immediate biological predecessor.) Interestingly, all of the figures in the image are in some ways derivative of the white male, since – building on the insights of Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1993) in their work Reading National Geographic – the other racialized subjects (genetic exotics?) also cohere around a Caucasian body aesthetic. Is the suggestion here that ‘whiteness’ itself is genetically dominant, or does the human genome offer the possibility of new (technologically mediated) mobilities and transfers (e.g., of ‘whiteness’ and its correlates of ‘health’ and ‘success’) through the uneven terrain of genetic diversity and sameness? This is a question that speaks to the tensions or possible complementarities raised by horizontal and vertical readings of the human genome.

Genetic Mobilities Much of the scholarly work on the biotechnologies has focused on the social, ethical and political implications of what might be termed the new ‘genetic flexibilities’, the often strange and patented ‘horizontal assemblages’ of a post-Darwinian technoscience: onco mice, Dolly, and terminator seeds. For Franklin and others, the production of genes as units of information is a critical semiotic moment, one that makes possible certain kinds of usages and applications of genetic technologies. This is an important point that connects to Paul Rabinow’s discussion of how different conceptualizations of genes lend themselves to particular kinds of instrumentalization and capitalization (Rabinow 1992). Here I want to focus on genetic flexibil-

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ities in terms of what might be called the new ‘mobilities’ associated with genes – mobilities that can nevertheless be premised upon older and more traditional models of genetic linearity. The linear mobility of genes, I suggest here, is as critical to the instrumentalization and capitalization of genes as is their semiotic production as units of information. If ‘whiteness’ is, as the Science cover implies, a mobile genetic unit, then how does it navigate sameness and difference, in what directions and to what end? If genes are newly flexible, then their mobilities are clearly something that must be managed and transformed into available and desirable commodities. A mobile gene is one thing, but biotechnology promises the management of genetic mobility (its enclosure, in other words) so that genes behave in particular ways and fulfill particular goals: i.e., produce organisms that do not reproduce themselves, develop skins that can withstand deeper refrigeration, or generate ‘better babies’. Such is the eugenic promise of genetic capitalization, which must simultaneously market the possibilities of new genetic mobilities and yet carefully enclose these mobilities across consumer’s desires. At question here, then, is not only the mobility of genes but also how the mobility gets played out, in terms of social tools and vis-àvis cultural discourses and political projects. Genealogies, Ingold has suggested, are a particular kind of ‘skill-set’ for organizing human thinking and establishing the parameters of possible relationship. In the current instrumentalization of genetics, genealogies have also become a primary tool for not only educating publics in the genetic sciences, but also establishing relationships between the individual self and the potent mobilities of genes. Although the Nature and Science covers seem to posit the tension inherent between horizontal and vertical readings of the human genome, the two in fact work together to convey a point that is essential to the capitalization of genes as units of information: because genes can move not only vertically (the old genealogical, Darwinian model), but also horizontally across populations, they raise important questions about what new kinds of enclosure (i.e., limits to their mobilities) might be desired. In the case of the Science cover, after all, a white male’s genes have moved across races but nevertheless in a linear direction to a white offspring. Again, how did this happen? Is the baby the product of natural selection, or did the Caucasian man make a series of directed choices across the terrain of race – or not? The idea that genes – as units of information – can be directed across the space of ‘horizontal assemblages’ in selective ways is also cen-

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tral to the capitalization of genes, largely because this idea undergirds twenty-first–century genetic consumerism. Examples of this kind of genetic formation are prevalent in many popular culture texts, an excellent example being the ‘Stars in Your Eyes’ feature posted in 2006 on the BBC’s Science and Genetics interactive website. The game asked viewers: ‘Have you ever wondered why your children’s eyes are the colour they are? Have you ever paused to think what colour they’d be if Robbie Williams was the dad? Well now’s your chance! Get ready to play … Stars in Your Child’s Eyes’. In a series of steps, visitors to the web site were asked to identify themselves as male or female. Depending on this answer, the next screen proffered a selection of three female celebrities to male players and three male celebrities to female players, one of whom is selected as a potential mate. After identifying a celebrity’s eye color in terms of dominant and recessive genes, the game asked the player to identify his or her own eye color. The screen then announced: ‘Let’s Make Babies’. Sperm and egg icons, each carrying the genetic codes for the eye color of the celebrity and the player, then swam across the bottom of the screen from opposite sides, careened into each other in a flash, a star then appeared, announcing ‘congratulations’ and specified an eye colour. Although the game with eye color was designed to teach the rubrics of Mendelian genetics in a fun way, it nevertheless posits a distinctive sense of human agency in the unfolding of genetic inheritance. The agencies of what Tim Ingold would term ‘the genealogical intermediary’ are subtly changed here, to create a different sense of how ‘substance’ is bestowed. In becoming a person who self-consciously chooses a mate on the basis of their mutual genetic make-up and its possible combinations, the game player is transformed into a consumer, not only of a ‘cute guy’ or ‘starlet’, but of the mobilization of genetic information itself.5 The point that I am making here is perhaps a simple one, and yet the characterization of genes as newly mobile, as information that moves in a consequential fashion, is critical to the capitalization of genes as pharmaceutical products and the ways in which consumers manage the risks associated with genetic mobilities. The portrayal of genes as something that makes us all the same at a general level and yet substantially different at a microscopic level is conducive to the shaping of particular kinds of genetic mobilities. If genes are indeed mobile, then what are the possibilities for their movement? Can consumers generate certain mobilities yet enclose others? And to whom would one turn for the tools of this new skill-set? One could

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argue that all of these issues are aspects of the latent semiology in the covers of Nature and Science, and that publics consuming these images are experiencing genetic mobilities as possibilities, but as possibilities that are nevertheless contingent. How these contingencies are played out, and in relationship to what kinds of disclosures, is one of the central ethical and political issues of genomic technologies.

Generating Genetic Mobilities: Iceland’s Health Sector Database Genealogical records and family trees are never innocent phenomena. This is because they have a social life of their own – a social life informed by a cultural landscape that makes diverse claims about hierarchy, authority, citizenship, and control. (Pálsson 2002a: 338)

In recent years, pharmaceutical industries have directed the treatment of disease to the genetic features and propensities of individuals. As a consequence, diagnostic tests and drug therapies have been designed so that they can be tailored to an individual’s genetic make-up. In order to accomplish this effectively, pharmaceutical companies are greatly aided by family histories, and hence genealogical research has become a significant component of pharmaceutical drug research and development. Genealogical records, however, are not always easy to find, and populations that lend themselves to genealogical research (i.e., smaller populations that have fairly circumscribed marriage patterns) are also limited. Iceland is one such population: its number of inhabitants is fairly small, the country has been relatively isolated for much of its history, and it also has an extraordinarily comprehensive and deep genealogical record for many of the nation’s families, some of which extend back to the ninth century and the island’s founding families. Gisli Pálsson has written extensively about Iceland and its recent, controversial project to combine medical and genetic records with genealogical information. Pálsson’s work (2000; Pálsson and Helgason 2003) has explored the ‘changing implications of family trees as they become enmeshed in biomedical projects and political debates’ and argues that such debates can tell us a great deal about how different cultural groups are negotiating identity, relatedness and belonging in the era of genomic technologies. Significantly, Pálsson points to the importance of looking at how these issues are brought to bear in specific cultural, economic and political contexts and within specific relations of power. Building on the work of Pálsson and other

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scholars, below I briefly explore the Icelandic case in terms of how genetics and genealogies are being aligned and how those alignments are being contested, as well as focus on how themes of genetic mobilities and enclosures play out in some of these debates. Population Genetics in Iceland As we discussed, Iceland is perhaps the best genetic laboratory since there has been virtually no immigration (lots of emigration, of course); it is of manageable size (200,000+ inhabitants), is an island expected to have many founder effects, has high quality national healthcare – from which we can expect excellent disease diagnosis, has formidable genealogies and the population is Caucasian – of most interest to pharmaceutical companies.(From a letter to Kari Stefansson from Kevin Kinsella, then President and Chief Executive Officer of Sequana, 26 May 1998 [quoted in Greeley 2000: 164])

One of the most comprehensive and controversial projects for genetic research involving the medical and genealogical records of a large population was initiated in 1996 in Iceland. In that year, Kari Stefansson, a native Icelander and former Harvard Medical Center neuropathologist, submitted a proposal to the Icelandic government for the creation of a comprehensive database that would combine genetic information about Icelanders with their genealogical and medical records. Stefansson’s idea was to conduct commercially viable and lucrative research that would tap into Iceland’s distinctive gene pool in combination with its excellent genealogical and medical records. To this end, on 26 August 1996, Stefansson became one of the founders of deCODE, a company incorporated in the U.S. state of Delaware with US $12 million in venture capital financing from seven U.S. firms (Greeley 2000: 165). DeCODE’s vision was to identify the genetic mutations that cause common diseases such as osteoarthritis, schizophrenia, familial essential tremor, preeclampsia, multiple sclerosis and obesity, among others, as well as stimulate drug development for the treatment of these diseases (Potts 2002: 3). As suggested above, Iceland ideally suited deCODE’s interest in population-based research (pharmacogenomics), mainly because its gene pool is regarded to be relatively ‘homogeneous’.6 Briefly, population genetics work on the idea that researchers can discover the mutations that cause diseases by comparing the DNA of a healthy person to the DNA of a person suffering from a particular disease. In theory, the comparison of the genetic sequences of a healthy person with those of a disease sufferer should clearly distinguish the mutation(s) causing a disease. One of the central problems for phar-

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macogenomics, however, is that in heterogeneous populations it is difficult to differentiate between natural genetic variation and a disease-causing sequence, chiefly because healthy and afflicted people will have different sequences throughout their DNA and not just where a disease gene occurs. One way to compensate for this kind of variation is to work with populations that are small and relatively homogenous, i.e., with a small gene pool and a limited number of lineages, the idea being that the homogeneity of a population can make the differences between healthy and diseased individuals more pronounced (Potts 2002: 6). Iceland was seen to fit the bill on both these counts, owing to factors both geographical (significant immigration to the island did not occur until the Second World War) and historical (including epidemics of bubonic plague and smallpox, famine and a serious volcanic eruption) that have reduced the population to several lineages. In other words, Iceland possesses a small ‘founding pool’ that has subsequently been narrowed by epidemics, natural disasters and a lack of substantial immigration (Potts 2002: 6). Once incorporated, deCODE began amassing blood samples from research subjects (recruited through referrals from collaborating physicians) and started a genetic database. The company used informed consent for these samples and by 2002 had collected DNA samples from 50,000 Icelanders. Genetic information about disease, however, is more useful when it can be referenced with genealogical information. DeCODE therefore proposed to utilize family data in conjunction with genetic profiling. Again, Iceland seemed to be the ideal place for this, given that not only is genealogy something of a cultural passion for Icelanders, but also the nation possesses remarkably extensive and ‘deep’ genealogical records for much of the island’s population.7 In the late 1990s, therefore, deCODE began to catalogue the bloodlines of all present and past Icelanders and established a database of this information called The Book of Icelanders. The two types of data indicated above (genetic and genealogical) would be more useful to deCODE’s pharmaceutical research if they could be coordinated with medical records revealing the manifestation and treatments of particular diseases. Iceland again was an optimal place for this to occur, since it had a well-funded and maintained system of universal health coverage and comprehensive health records that, in some cases, stretched back for several generations. Unfortunately for deCODE, the information in the medical records was scattered throughout different health care institutions in Iceland. To address this problem, Stefansson proposed the creation of

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a centralized database that could then form a third source of information in his vision of coordinated databases. The majority government of Iceland’s parliament agreed to the formation of a centralized medical database, and in the spring of 1998 the Icelandic majority parliament introduced the first version of what became the Act on the Health Sector Database. The first version was quite controversial, and a second, revised bill was introduced in September 1998 and passed by a vote of 38 to 23 (Greeley 2000: 170). In addition to authorizing the creation of a centralized database for all of Iceland’s medical records, the act authorized the government to grant permission to a licensee to establish and maintain the single database for patient health records. The act required the licensee to fund the construction of the database in exchange for the use of the database for private commercial profit. In January 2000, deCODE received exclusive rights to utilize Iceland’s health records for its own private and commercial goals. The act also specified that consent for the transfer of an individual’s medical records to deCODE’s database would be presumed rather than informed – meaning that patients would have to affirmatively opt out of the project by submitting a formal written request if they did not wish to have their personal data entered. DeCODE’s program of genetic research therefore required the coordination of three types of information about an individual: genotype, genealogy and phenotype (the last referencing the physical and observable manifestation of a disease). The acquisition and utilization of these three types of data set into motion a series of controversies over the project, with the most heated debates focusing on the production of the matrix itself, the ownership and control of the information, and the possible social and political trajectories of such a project. In each case, the circulation – the mobility, so to speak – of genetic data (particularly in relationship to the other two kinds of data) was of central concern.

Contesting and Regulating Bio-informatics Although space does not permit a thorough discussion of these debates here,8 one of the burning issues that emerged in the debates centred on the actual collection of the data required by deCODE’s project. These debates encompassed the constitution of genealogical and medical data as ‘property’ as well as their collection as such. Because there were no formal property rights to Iceland’s health rec-

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ords (the data belonged neither to the patient nor to the health institutions maintaining the records), Iceland’s government assigned property rights to the data. Proprietizing health information gave Icelander’s genetic, genealogical and medical data a new set of mobilities that were largely shaped by deCODE’s desire to direct these data into a centralized reservoir. This, however, was clearly a controversial step that engendered a series of different contestations around ownership. For example, deCODE’s appropriation of genealogical records was challenged when an Icelandic company, Geneologia Islandorum, accused deCODE and its collaborator, Frisk Software, of violating copyright laws by using previously published genealogical records. DeCODE responded by stating that the genealogies were the common heritage of all Icelanders and that its intention was to continue this tradition by making the genealogical records available to the public. (Needless to say, the ironies of a firm bent on privatizing and commercializing genetic data by making claims to a ‘commons’ were not lost on deCODE’s critics.) Another form of contestation emerged around how the data was to be extracted from the Icelandic population. DeCODE met perhaps its most formidable opposition in the form of doctors refusing to hand over the medical records of their patients. As deCODE did not have direct and immediate access to health records, it was forced to contract with health organizations and hospitals to gain access to medical information – after primary caregivers had coded the information. Many doctors opposed the consent protocol of the Act on the Health Sector Database because it presumed the consent of patients to release their medical records and several doctors blocked the movement of medical information into the centralized database by refusing to release medical records, thereby confounding the production of the larger data matrix. The act fuelled not only anxieties among citizens who saw their genetic, genealogical and medical histories being propertied and transferred into a centralized database without their full informed consent for each kind of data, but also further concerns about the privatization of personal information towards a commercial end. Some Icelanders decried this as an explicit form of exploitation coordinated between the state and private commercial interests, and criticized the project as an instance of a nation’s wealth being transferred to a few privileged individuals. Proponents of deCODE countered these claims by playing up Iceland’s unique role as a nation in the emergent world of commercial genomics and pharmaceuticals. These discourses underscored the unique character of Iceland’s pop-

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ulation, its role in contributing to the furtherance of medical research and its potential as a ‘niche’ for genomic industries (thereby attracting foreign investment and creating employment). Interestingly, even the nationalistic arguments in favour of the data matrix also contained several qualifications regarding the mobility of Iceland’s genetic and genealogical heritage. As a result, in the final act, deCODE (in addition to providing for the cost of the database) had to agree to keep the database exclusively in Iceland and was discouraged from developing collaborative efforts with non-Icelandic entities. Further, the act prohibited deCODE from transferring health records or linking them to other databases without government permission (Potts 2002: 12). Perhaps the most difficult area to assess is the spectrum of public responses to deCODE’s proposal. According to polls taken before the passage of the database act, the majority of Icelanders supported the genetic research and were agreeable to the deCODE initiative. But it is also is clear that there were many reservations about how the matrix of gene, genealogy and health records would affect individuals and their families. Iceland’s encounter with eugenics and the forced sterilization of several hundred women in the 1930s also engendered apprehension over the role of the state in the project. Although great pains were taken to make sure that information gathered would be rigorously encrypted and therefore anonymous, the trust that individuals would have to place in both the state and deCODE to protect confidentiality was also largely presumed. Hilary Rose’s research (2001a, 2001b), conducted in Iceland at the time of the public debates about deCODE’s proposal and the Health Sector Database, has shown that confidentiality was a particular concern for many women, who were also more likely to have reservations about what the project might mean for their children (an issue they felt was glaringly absent in the debates prior to the act’s passage). The concerns of Rose’s research subjects resonate with Pálsson’s observation that even Iceland’s most remote genealogical histories have always been embedded in a kind of cultural commentary – bits of information about positive and negative social behaviours – that belies the idea that ‘character’ is linked to the inheritance of ‘substance’. Reading genealogies backwards and forwards into time is therefore always a loaded prospect because genealogies are, themselves, ‘moral landscapes’ that are never ‘innocent’ (Pálsson 2002a: 338). Although contemporary readings may take a different form than they did a hundred years ago, the matrix connecting substance, history and character – the rough correlates of gene, genealogy and

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phenotype – is obviously an older one, relying on calibrations of these elements in the production of social identities and locations. As ‘substance’ is increasingly defined as genetic, what, many wonder, are future calibrations likely to be, and what will be their social and political consequences? In Iceland, these questions are rooted in debates about presumed consent and new state-designated property rights in health care records. Given that the legacy of Nazi-era eugenics is still within historical memory for many Europeans, these questions continue to powerfully inform attitudes towards state and private sector collaborations as well as genetic research and its alignment with genealogical information.

Conclusion As this paper has suggested, the mapping of the human gene, its subsequent vertical and horizontal trajectories, and the unfolding of deCODE’s biomedical project for Iceland are not ‘innocent’ either, but rather embedded within larger political, economic and cultural frameworks that cannot be divorced from questions of power and geopolitical purpose. By reviewing the genomic depiction of the human family in Nature and Science, I have shown how questions of whiteness-health-and-success can be contoured through landscapes of genetic sameness and diversity. Moreover, I have attempted to trace how the human genome – as a genetic landscape – is profoundly spatialized by its capital projects. Current and dominant images of genes follow what might be called a sequence of capitalization, in which genes are constituted as mobile units of information, and therefore as consumable commodities. Once commoditized as mobile, genes consequently become aligned with what the consumer marketplace deems desirable – including racial privilege, social status, longevity and celebrity-sired offspring. As the Iceland case demonstrates, however, the mobilities of genes are not only framed by consumer desires and ideologies about difference, but are also enclosed by political economies, in Iceland’s case the power of the state to legislate consent and sponsor the commercialization of medical data. The ways in which new genetic enterprises have been depicted raise important questions about the ‘ideal human’, the ultimate ‘designer baby’ and its ethnic, national and personal attributes. Through the example of Iceland, I have attempted to demonstrate how the capitalization of human genes entails a profound reworking of traditional alignments between heredity, family and character. These

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alignments have coalesced in complementary horizontal and vertical movements, themselves coordinated across consumer choice and directed genetic mobilities. In this commercialization of biology, the notion of genealogies and family history is being taken out of the realm of social history and placed into a different context – that of emerging biological commerce. The dazzling gleam of ‘stars in our eyes’, then, may also require a new vigilance against becoming blind to the larger patterns and implications of this new commercial genetic moment.

Notes 1. See also Lewontin 1991, Fischer 2001, Lock 2001, Lock and Franklin 2003, Strathern 1992,Van Dijck 1195, 1998. 2.. A genome is all the DNA of an organism. DNA has a strand-like form and is coiled up tightly as an organism’s chromosomes, which are themselves located in the nucleus of cells. DNA consists of four nucleotide bases, adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). In most pictures of DNA, the bases are abbreviated to ATGC respectively. A strand of DNA is really made up of two strings of the ATCG bases that face each other like the sides of a ladder twisted in a double helix formation. Across these two strands, A always pairs with T and G always pairs with C. The AT/GC pairs are called DNA base pairs, and the human genome has some three billion of these base pairs. The base pairs, however, are not arranged randomly but in specific sequences. Only certain lengths or fragments of these long sequences are genes. The genes are said to ‘instruct’ the production of proteins that are responsible for making an organism grow and function in a particular way. 3. See also Cook-Deegan 1997, Sulston and Ferry 2002. 4. The baby is also resonant with the notion that relations among humans are formed primarily at the moment of conception, an idea common to genealogical diagrams (Pálsson 2002a: 354). 5. Celebrities, of course, are not only persons, but consumer products as well. 6. There is some debate among population geneticists about the validity of this claim. See Árnason 2003; Pálsson 2007. 7. The family studies that Iceland presented were therefore also critical to its attractiveness as a research area, largely because they would provide information on inheritance patterns. Correlating genetic sequences between the living and the dead had great potential to help geneticists working in Iceland reveal who a founder of a disease was and therefore lessen the problem of multiple genetic sources for a disease. 8. There are several very good and thorough reviews of these debates: see Anderson 1998; Enserink 1998a, 1998b; Fortun 2001; Glasner and Roth-

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man 2001; Greeley 2000; Jonatansson 2000; Marshall 1997; McInnis 1999; Pálsson 2000, 2002b; Pálsson et al. 2002, Pálsson and Rabinow 2001; Potts 2002; Sigurdsson 2001; Simpson 2000.

References Anderson, R. 1998. ‘The DeCODE Proposal for an Icelandic Database’. 20 October. Online at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/iceland.pdf. Árnason, E. 2003. ‘Genetic Heterogeneity of Icelanders’, Annals of Human Genetics 67(1): 5–16. Beatty, J. 2000. ‘Origins of the U.S. Human Genome Project: The Changing Relationships between Genetics and National Security’, in P.R. Sloan (ed.), Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp.131–53. Bouquet, M. 1996. ‘Family Trees and Their Affinity: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(43): 43–66. Clarke, A. and E. Parsons (eds). 1997. Culture, Kinship and Genes: Towards a Cross-Cultural Genetics. London: MacMillan. Cook-Deegan, R. 1997. The Gene Wars: Science, Politics and the Human Genome. New York: Norton. Dreger, A. 2000. ‘Metaphors of Morality in the Human Genome Project’, in P.R. Sloan (ed.), Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 155–184. Enserink, M. 1998a. ‘Physicians Wary of Scheme to Pool Icelanders’ Genetic Data’, Science 281(5379): 890–1. ———. 1998b. ‘Opponents Criticize Iceland’s Database’, Science 282(5390): 859. Fischer, M.M.J. 2001. ‘Ethnographic Critique and Technoscientific Narratives: The Old Mole, Ethical Plateau, and the Governance of Emergent Biosocial Politics’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 25(4): 355–93. Flower, M. and D. Heath. 1993. ‘Anatomo-politics: Mapping the Human Genome Project’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17(1): 27–41. Fortun, M. 2001. ‘Mediated Speculations in the Genomics Futures Markets’, New Genetics and Society 20(2): 139–56. Franklin, S. 1995a. ‘Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary’. Online at: http://www.comp.lanc.ac.uk/sociology/soc048sf.html (Department of Sociology, Lancaster University). ———. 1995b. ‘Science as Culture, Cultures of Science’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24:163–84. Glasner, P. and H. Rothman (eds). 2001. ‘Symposium on Icelandic and UK Genetic Databases’, Special Edition of New Genetics and Society 20(2).

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Greeley, H.T. 2000. ‘Iceland’s Plan for Genomics Research: Facts and Implications’, Jurimetrics 40 (winter): 153–91. Haraway, D. J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan*Meets_ OncoMouse.* Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. ‘Deanimations: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself’, in A. Brah and A.E. Coombes (eds), Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 111–36. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jonatansson, H. 2000. ‘Iceland’s Heath Sector Database: A Significant Head Start in the Search for Biological Grail or an Irreversible Error?’ American Journal of Law and Medicine 26(1): 31–67. Kay, L.E. 2000. ‘A Book of Life? How a Genetic Code Became a Language’, in Phillip R. Sloan (ed.), Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Persepctives on the Human Genome Project. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 99–130. Keller, E.F. 1995. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1998. ‘How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science and Religion?’ in Caroline Jones and Peter Galison (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art. New York, Routledge, pp. Lenoir, T. and M. Hays. 2000. ‘The Manhattan Project for Biomedicine’, in Phillip R. Sloan (ed.), Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 19–46. Lewontin, R. 1991. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press. Lock, M. 2001. ‘The Tempering of Medical Anthropology: Troubling Natural Categories’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(4): 478–92. Lock, M. and S. Franklin (eds). 2003. Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Lutz, C. and J.L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, E. 1997. ‘Whose DNA Is It, Anyway?’ Science 278(5338): 564–67. McInnis, M.G. 1999. ‘The Assent of a Nation: Genetics and Iceland’, Clinical Genetics 55(4): 234–39. Nelkin D. and M.S. Lindee. 1995. The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. New York: W. H. Freeman. Pálsson, G. 1999. ‘Iceland: The Case of a National Human Genome Project’, Anthropology Today 15(5): 14–8. ———. 2000. ‘Genomes and Genealogies: Decoding Debates about DeCODE’, Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millenium, International Association for the Study of Common Property Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, May 31–June 4.

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———. 2002a. ‘The Life of Family Trees and the Book of Icelanders’, Medical Anthropology 21(3/4): 337–67. ———. 2002b. ‘Debates about Biomedical Databases’, Swiss Academy of Sciences, Research on Genetics Forum, 2 September: 2–6. ———. 2007. Anthropology and the New Genetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pálsson, G. and A. Helgason. 2003. ‘Blondes, Lost and Found: Representations of Genes and Identity in History’, Developing World Bioethics 3(2): 159–169. Pálsson, G. and P. Rabinow. 2001. ‘The Icelandic Genome Debate’, Trends in Biotechnology 19(5): 166–71. Pálsson, G., et al. 2002. ‘For Whom the Cell Tolls: Debates about Biomedicine’, Current Anthropology 43(2): 271–301. Potts, J. 2002. ‘At Least Give the Natives Glass Beads: An Examination of the Bargain Made Between Iceland and deCODE Genetics with Implications for Global Bioprospecting’, Virginia Journal of Law and Technology 7(3): 1–40. Rabinow, P. 1992. ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds), Incorporations. New York: Zone Books, pp. 234–52. Rapp, R. 2002. ‘Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship’, Public Culture 71(2): 533–56. Rheinberger, H.J. 1995. ‘Beyond Nature and Culture: A Note on Medicine in the Age of Molecular Biology’, Science in Context 8(1): 249–63. Rose, H. 2001a. ‘Gendered Genetics in Iceland’, New Genetics and Society 20(2): 119–38. ———. 2001b. The Commodification of Bioinformation: The Icelandic Health Sector Database. London: The Wellcome Trust. Scheper-Hughes, N. and L. Wacquant (eds). 2002. Commodifying Bodies. London: Sage Publications. Sigurdsson, S. 2001. ‘Yin-yang Genetics, or the HSD deCODE Controversy’, New Genetics and Society 20(2): 103–17. Simpson, B. 2000. ‘Imagined Genetic Communities: Ethnicity and Essentialism in the Twenty-first Century’, Anthropology Today 16(3): 3–6. Sulston J. and G. Ferry. 2002. The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome. London: Bantam Press. Strathern, M. 1992. Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. New York: Routledge. Van Dijck, J. 1998. Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1995. ‘Public Image of Genetics: Reading the Human Genome Narrative’, Science as Culture (23): 217–47. Yoxen, E. 1981. ‘Life as Productive Force: Capitalizing the Science and Technology of Molecular Biology’, in L. Levidow and B. Young (eds), Science, Technology and the Labour Process. London: CSE Books, pp. 66–122.

Chapter 5

SKIPPING A GENERATION AND ASSISTING CONCEPTION Jeanette Edwards

I

t was partly an assumption of the fixity of the genealogical grid that encouraged its use in comparative tool kits of early twentiethcentury anthropology. David Schneider (1968, 1984) urged us to think of it in terms of a Euro-American folk model. Mary Bouquet (1993) suggested we needed to be more specific, positing a specifically English folk model. Yet if we look at ethnographic examples from England, it is not clear that English folk everywhere and always draw on genealogy to reckon kin, and when they do genealogical links are not necessarily as fixed and uncompromising as the model might suggest. Catherine Nash (2002) has provided a compelling argument for imaginative genealogical reckonings that militate against fixity and ‘rootedness’. Her focus is on the quest of ‘settler’ groups in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States for European, particularly Irish, ‘roots’ and on the genealogical industry this has spawned (and see Basu 2007 for Scottish examples). She argues that genealogies can ‘productively unsettle exclusive versions of belonging’ (2002: 48). Nash is interested in the relationship between the contemporary and burgeoning interests in both genealogical and genetic identity: ‘[B]oth genealogy and genetics involve heady, compelling and often interconnected imaginations of family, race, individual, sex, nation, blood, gene, gender and technological and bodily

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processes of generation, inheritance, representation and procreation. … I consider genealogy as a practice through which ideas of personal, familial, collective, ethnic, and sometimes national senses of culture, location and identity are shaped, imagined, articulated and enacted’ (Nash 2002: 28). Heady stuff indeed. Nash provides a way of interrogating what Sandra Bamford perceptively identifies as an emerging ‘genealogical imperialism’, or what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro critiques as the ‘Western standard model’ (both this volume). Nash highlights another ‘side’ to the genealogical imagination: a side less pure than its stereotypical image would have us believe and full of interconnection, contamination and complexity. In this chapter, I focus on the way in which genealogy informs and is informed by relationships forged through ‘new reproductive technologies’ (NRT).1 I have argued elsewhere that residents of a town in the northwest of England, which for present purposes I call Alltown, explore the implications of technological or medical assistance of conception through their understanding of kinship, that is, through what they know about the making and breaking of intimate social relations and the growing of ‘proper’ persons (e.g., Edwards 1999, 2000; Edwards et al. 1999).2 They also explore innovative techniques of conception by way of what they know about the town, its people and its past, and also by way of what they know about the wider political and economic worlds in which they live (and see Edwards and Strathern 2000). They connect disparate and diverse elements of social life (which include genealogies) and in so doing map out a range of possible futures. This chapter centres on the connections that Alltown people make and the things they enlist in their focus on NRT.3 They draw on pasts and predict futures and, as Lisa Malkki writes, if histories and futures are different, ‘it is not because one is real and the other imagined – both are imaginative constructions built out of people’s perceived realities’ (2001: 328). My interest is in the way in which a genealogical model is mobilized to narrate connections forged in novel forms of conception. I am also interested in the limits of the model and in the way in which the ‘trickiness’, as one Alltown woman put it, of actual and lived relationships cuts across it.

‘The Blood Thing’ In November 2000, a British Sunday newspaper reported that men regularly donated sperm to their sons in an article headlined ‘Infer-

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tile men turn to their fathers for sperm’ (Burke and Harris 2000).4 Journalists Jason Burke and Paul Harris report ‘a senior medical figure’ as saying the practice is ‘logical, appropriate and ethical’ and Shadow Home Secretary Anne Widdecombe as saying she would never endorse such a thing because ‘[t]he tangled webs that we are weaving for future generations are just horrifying’. The report spells out the implications for kinship in this way: ‘It makes a father’s son his biological half-brother and a child’s biological father his or her grandfather’ (Burke and Harris 2000). What is it that makes the substitution of a man’s sperm with that of his father either completely logical or absolutely horrifying? As in the art of Israel Mora (Bamford, this volume), commentary on the possibility of a man donating sperm to his son reveals the role that both substance (in each case semen) and genealogy play in a particular formulation of kinship.5 I turn to Alltown to consider how the substitution of a man’s semen with that of his father impinges on genealogical thinking. At the time of the newspaper article cited above I was carrying out residential fieldwork in Alltown, talking to residents (again and amongst other things) about new reproductive and genetic technologies.6 Supporting the view of the ‘senior medical figure’ cited above, several people with whom I spoke about the report pointed to the logic of such a procedure. ‘They’ve got a point’, one man reflected: ‘it would be the nearest thing genetically’. He went on: ‘Of course, a brother would be even better because with a brother you would be even more likely to get the same type’. One Alltown woman told me that she could understand ‘that blood thing’. She explained: ‘For a man, it would be better to receive sperm from a close blood relative than from a stranger out of bottle … because then you’d know’. Know what? This woman alludes to the origins of the sperm (from a known relative rather than a stranger). Her remarks suggest the importance of familiarity and recognition. You would know the ‘close relative’ who produced the sperm, but you would also know (recognize) the child – who would be familiar.7 The unknown is epitomized in ‘the stranger in a bottle’: unrelated, unfamiliar and evocatively encapsulated in-vitro. Knowing is perceived to be good in itself, alleviating insecurity and diminishing unpredictability. For the Alltown man cited above, it is what is perceived to be shared between father and son and between siblings in terms of genetic ‘make-up’ that makes a father a suitable sperm donor, and a brother even more suitable.8 A ‘family resemblance’ is predicted in the future

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child. The child born using the gametes of kin rather than of an anonymous donor will be of the ‘same type’, not only as its parents but also as its wider kinsfolk, who already include those who provided the gametes. The ‘same type’ will be visible (recognizable) in behaviour and appearance that are familiar.9 The Kamea notion of ‘one blood’, which refers to siblings nurtured in the same womb, compels me to dwell on ‘the blood thing’ identified by the Alltown woman above. For Kamea, siblings who have the same mother, regardless of who their father might be, are related by ‘one blood’. Kamea parents and children are not ‘oneblood’: they are not, in an Alltown idiom, ‘the same type’. In the English example, substituting the sperm of a man with that of his brother will create offspring who are more ‘the same type’ as the man than if his father’s sperm were used. From this perspective, brothers are more closely related (alike) than a father and his son. They have more genealogical substance – in this case blood, but elsewhere genes – in common. At the same time, as with the Kamea, siblings who share a mother and not a father are thought to be more sibling-like (more connected) than siblings who share a father and not a mother. Relatedness is forged and augmented in the womb. I return to this point below, but first let us take a closer look at the contours of genealogy when men donate sperm to their sons. Susan McCall, a youth and community worker in Alltown, provides us with an image of a slanted genealogical profile, which she calls ‘a diagonal’.10 Thinking about the implications of a man obtaining semen from his father, she notes: ‘We look at family trees and we draw lines. You know, it’s like grandfather, great grandfather and all that and it’s drawn like that [pause]. I can’t imagine a diagonal in a sense.’ McCall’s diagonal directly links a grandfather to a grandchild, bypassing his son, the child’s father. A generation is skipped in the diagonal line. McCall goes on to identify the direction in which the ‘gift’ of gametes should flow: children receiving gametes from their parents is not as ‘bizarre’ (her word) as parents receiving gametes from their children. Addressing the possibility of daughters donating ova to their mothers, she points out emphatically that it is definitely not the direction in which such substances should flow. Reversing the direction of gametes in this way, she argues, is like reversing the usual flow of time. In her words: It’s almost like going back in time. I’m not sitting here saying that they’d be wrong to do it … If a daughter donates an egg to a mother, there is no reason why there is going to be a genetic problem with that, is there? Because she [the mother] is purely a carrier. I tell you

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what, if it was written on a piece of paper, I’d say ‘oh yes that’s fine’, but actually thinking through the relationships is tricky [pause]. It’s almost like saying the father is fertilizing the daughter’s egg [pause], which does bring up all sorts of fears about inbreeding even if it isn’t actually incest.

I draw out three points from Susan McCall’s comments. First, she notes the direction in which substances that already carry relationships should move: in this cultural logic, they should flow, like care and attention, from parents to children. Second, she draws attention to the explicitness with which the abstraction (the connections written on a piece of paper) and the untidiness and trickiness of actual and intimate social relations are distinguished. This points to the difference between a diagrammatic representation of connections between kin made in the substitution of gametes, and the everyday conduct of family relationships.11 Third, she notes that mixing the gametes of a father and daughter, while not ‘actually incest’, is nevertheless incestuous.12 Incest was the uninvited guest in many Alltown conversations that turned to the possibility of the substitution of gametes between kin. A noteworthy example was provided by a group of young women who call themselves ‘young mums’ and meet once a week in a local youth and community centre. The young women are in their teenage years, which is what makes them eligible for access to the youth service and to the building in which they meet. The centre caters for them and their pre–school age children, providing a meeting place, a crèche, transport and activities. I met with them on several occasions and with their permission recorded our conversations. At one meeting, I brought up the newspaper piece cited above, which provoked lively discussion. One of the young women asked us to imagine what it would be like using ‘your boyfriend’s dad’s sperm’. Before we could respond, she told us, in no uncertain terms, what it would feel like: ‘It would feel like you had sex with your boyfriend’s father!’ She pointedly asked her friend, sitting on the couch next to her, ‘Would you have your boyfriend’s father’s sperm inside you?’ Her friend responded with a heartfelt ‘Yuck!’ These women objected as much to the idea of sexual intimacy with their boyfriend’s father, as well as corporeality and incorporation of a viscous substance (cold) that originated in the body of their boyfriend’s father, as they did to a confusion of kin roles (Edwards 2004). But this particular substance is neither inert nor alienable. It would connect a woman, in this case, to her boyfriend’s father, bypassing her boy-

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friend.13 It would also carry with it a substantial and axiomatic connection to an ensuing child, which again would bypass her boyfriend, the father of her child.14 Another possibility explored by Susan McCall (amongst others) was of daughters donating ova to their mothers. The fact that this practice might entail the mingling of a father’s sperm and daughter’s ova gives pause for thought. This is no less problematic for taking place in a Petri dish, without sexual intercourse. It involves the inappropriate mixing of material that is already too close, and such a possibility evokes the spectre of ‘inbreeding’, which for nonhuman animals, in this cultural logic, might be positively construed but for human animals never is. Idioms of incest and inbreeding make the problem with a daughter donating an egg to her mother tangible. Listen to Susan McCall again: It’s interesting because going back to, say, my father … there is no way he would donate sperm to fertilize an egg of mine, at all, absolutely not! He would be completely against it. He would think it was dreadful and disgusting and he is by no means a religious man, he’s agnostic – well he says he’s agnostic – but he would find that morally outrageous … He wouldn’t be able to disconnect the product from the sexual act. I think he would see sperm as the result of a sexual act. So to let it fertilize my egg is the equivalent of having had sex with me. He would not get his head round it. The poor little sod [the child] anyway! His [her father’s] genes are so dominant – all three of my siblings, we look so much alike him – this poor sod [with] this genetic soup from my father and me would look just like me.

She joked that another ‘downside’ of getting sperm from her father (as if further evidence were needed of its folly) is that the child’s genetic make-up (the mixture evocatively brought to mind in the image of ‘soup’) would result in the child inevitably looking ‘just like’ her (and her father) – its appearance unmediated by a ‘different type’. The resemblance between her and her siblings and their father is evidence of the dominance of his ‘genes’. While full siblings inherit genes from the same two parents, making them more similar to each other (more ‘the same type’) than parents and offspring, they are also known to come in different strengths. A common explanation for a child looking more like one parent than the other is that the resembled parent’s genes are ‘dominant’ or stronger. Knowledge that the substance bequeathed by one parent may have a greater impact than that bequeathed by the other, together with an understanding that connection is augmented (strengthened) in the womb,

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expands a genealogical model that ostensibly only classifies in a linear (vertical) fashion. Additionally and by the way, Susan McCall was convinced her father would react in the same way she described earlier if it were his son who required sperm. Her father’s semen would, in effect, be incorporated by his daughter-in-law, and he would consider this to be ‘like having sex’ with his daughter-in-law.

Of Sons and Half-brothers It is November 2000 and I am sitting, for the second time in two weeks, at Mabel Cooper’s kitchen table with a tape recorder and a notebook. Mrs Cooper tells me of something she read in the newspaper some time earlier in the week about a couple who were suing a fertility clinic for the birth of triplets. The clinic was meant to have implanted only two embryos. Mrs Cooper is harsh in her criticism of the woman. ‘Grasping’, ‘greedy’ and ‘cashing-in’ are some of the idioms she uses to convey her censure. They might be forgiven, she says, if they intended to donate the money to research or to help somebody else. She makes the point that there are ‘thousands of women’ who cannot afford fertility treatment and money given to the couple in compensation will reduce the amount available for providing services to the less well-off. Besides, she asks: ‘Compensation for what? Having three children instead of two?’ From this angle, it is inexplicable to Mrs Cooper why, after so much effort to conceive, three children are not an improvement on two. Besides, she asks, putting herself in the position of the parents, ‘How would you choose which of the three you didn’t want?’ And from the perspective of the offspring, ‘How will they feel knowing that one of them was not wanted?’ Mrs Cooper’s last point brings me back to the ties that connect siblings and to knowledge that cannot be unknown. The tie that exists between the triplets, in Mrs Cooper’s example, is such that they will ‘feel’ as a collective and on behalf of each other. The parental action of suing the clinic will, according to Mrs Cooper, have consequences beyond the clinic and the parents. She predicts that it will impinge on the children, who will ‘feel’ that their parents would have preferred two rather than three of them. It will also impinge on the less well-off; particularly on those who cannot afford access to private fertility clinics. Mrs Cooper, like many Alltown people with whom I spoke about NRT, is concerned with dimensions of social

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class in both fertility services and abilities to ‘reproduce’. I was told emphatically and often that access to fertility services should not depend on wealth. I was also told, equally emphatically and often, that the rich were much more likely than the poor to get what they want (in this case, a baby). A eugenic implication of unequal access to successful fertility treatment was never far from the surface in these conversations. I tell Mrs Cooper about the article I read in the newspaper about men asking their fathers for sperm. ‘For their wives?’ she asks. This is more a statement than a question. A man may be infertile and it may be appropriate for him to ask his father for assistance, but the request is on behalf of his wife and literally for his wife insofar as it will be incorporated by her. Thinking of the connection between a father and his child, Mrs Cooper follows the same train of thought as Shadow Home Secretary Widdecombe, cited above. MC But wouldn’t that make [pause], surely then that child would be his half-brother? It wouldn’t be his son. It’d be his half-brother. Wouldn’t it? Technically? Genetically? [Pause.] Genetically – if this fellow wanted a son, it wouldn’t be his son, would it? It’d be his half-brother.15 JE Would it matter? MC That’s strange, isn’t it? Would it matter? It’s like sleeping with your father-in-law. Would it matter to the immediate family? How’s the mother of this fellow gonna feel? I mean this is her stepson, it’s not her grandson, it’s her stepson. JE Couldn’t it be both? MC Oh, I think that’s very complicated, that.

The possibility of a man’s semen being substituted by that of his father results in a doubling-up of classificatory relatedness. First, a father is also half-brother (biological), and second, a father (biological) is also grandfather. The father in each case is connected differently in terms of biogenetic connection to his child but they nevertheless occupy the same genealogical position (father). Meanwhile the procreative sperm has forged another father (biological) who remains genealogically a grandfather. Mrs Cooper turns to the women involved in this transaction. For the woman who receives semen from her father-in-law, it is the mingling in her body of substances usually brought together in sexual intercourse that is signif-

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icant.16 At stake for the woman whose husband provided the semen is her relationship with her grandchild. Asked why it would be problematic, Mrs Cooper replies: Do you mean emotionally? Legally, I think there could be all sorts of problems. Suppose the mother was in an accident – [the mother] of this child. Suppose the mother had an accident and she was killed. There could be all sorts of legal wrangles – the grandmother could claim the child . . . What sort of rights has the husband of that woman got when genetically that child isn’t his [because] it’s his dad’s? So surely the grandmother would have more claims on that child than the father, and the grandfather would have more claims on it too. Even if they don’t want them rights, could somebody make them take responsibility for it? … You know, social security, dependants – they’re chasing absent fathers now, aren’t they – the CSA [Child Support Agency]. Well could the same apply to the dad if anything happened to the mother of this child, or the father of this child? What happens if the daughter-in-law and the son fall out with the grandparents? Can the grandfather take the son to court for visitation rights, for access to this child? I think it opens all sorts of loopholes, to be honest.

Mrs Cooper draws attention to claims activated along genealogical lines, and conversely claims that are truncated when genetic connection is absent. A genetic stake implies a claim couched in terms of ‘rights’. A grandfather who is also the genetic father, is perceived to have a stronger claim on his grandchild, which he may exert or be required to exert. Mrs Cooper is reminded of the CSA, which in the U.K. is the agency responsible for pursuing absent fathers to secure their financial contribution to the upkeep of their children.17 She tracks the implications of men donating semen to their sons laterally across familiar terrain. She knows of the remit of the CSA, and of disputed claims made on children by kin, absent or otherwise, and of the emotion-filled content of kinship ties. She predicts the kind of legal tangles that might emerge in unfamiliar procedures and goes on to describe what she considers the emotional factors. MC And emotionally – this granddad knows that that’s his child … is he strong enough to just sit back? He’s got to think a lot of [his son] – he’s got to be very parental, you know, to do that in the first place [pause]. So can he just take a back seat and let his son and his daughter-in-law bring this child up without any sort of interference? I don’t know.

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JE You think he’d want to be more involved? MC I think if he thought so much of his son that he’d do that for him, then he isn’t like one of these fathers who couldn’t give a toss and [who] goes and spend his nights down the pub … So, he’s a loving sort and very family orientated, isn’t he? So could he just take a back seat? JE Would it be important that he did take a back seat? MC Oh, yeah, just as a role as a granddad. I think he’d have to take a back seat. JE Why? MC Because it’s not his son, it’s his grandson. I know biologically it’s his son, but emotionally it’s his grandson and he’s not its father.

For Mrs Cooper, a man willing to assist his son in this way is necessarily ‘family orientated’, and that same family orientation would make it difficult for him to unknit his double-plied relationship with the child. Inbuilt in the relationship between parents and grandparents, in the cultural logic with which I am concerned here, is the potential for conflict over the raising of children. It is understood that parents are responsible for a child’s upbringing, and that the way in which children are ‘brought up’ is central to their ‘growing up’.18 There is a fine line between intervention and interference that grandparents are perceived and perceive themselves to be always on the brink of crossing. Mrs Cooper gives examples from her relationship with her own daughter and grandchildren of how easy it is for parents to construe advice as criticism when it comes from their parents and when it addresses the care of their children. MC

I mean, all grandparents – I look at Evelyn [her daughter], the way she brings them two up and I think ‘Well I would never have done that’, we can’t help it, we do. So how much greater [pause]

JE

But you have to keep your mouth shut?

MC

Yeah, you’ve to keep it shut. Sometimes I go, ‘Evelyn, is there any need for that?’ and she’ll go, ‘Not yours!’ Do you know what I mean? Although we do get involved with the children, they come to me and they whinge about ‘she’s always shouting at me’. And so we do get involved as grandparents, but you do

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have to button your lip because there’s things Evelyn does and I think ‘No, you shouldn’t be doing that’. So how much greater is it gonna be for them? It will cause resentment – ‘How dare he try to tell me how to bring my child up’. JE Do you think it happens a lot in families? Do you think that’s a common thing? MC Yeah. I can remember me mum going, ‘Well, what you should be doing is this’ and I’m thinking, ‘Who do you think you are, telling me?’ So, yeah, there is that and I don’t think that’s just my family. I think that’s all families.

Inappropriate intervention in the upbringing of children is a theme often raised when Alltown people explore the possibility of substituting the gametes of kin. Intervention in the way in which parents raise their children is already perceived as interference, and the danger is increased when a grandfather or an uncle is also a father, or when a grandmother or an aunt is also a mother.19

Traces and Traits Sean Taylor is in his early thirties and commutes to work as a teacher in a nearby city. We first meet at the theatre during a rehearsal for the annual pantomime, which this year is Jack and the Beanstalk. He says he has heard about me and about the kind of research I am doing and remarks that I should interview him because it would be good for me to get the views of a single, gay man who has no intention of having children. I visit him at home one evening, and he tells me about his house and his neighbourhood and his family. The area in which he lives, he says, has a ‘terrible reputation’, but he loves it. He bought his house relatively recently, and his auntie lives next door and his cousin behind him. His parents live a mile or so away, in a different part of town. Although his ‘mum’s mum’ lived in this neighbourhood all her life, his father never liked this area – it’s ‘a snobbery thing’, Sean explains: ‘My grandmother [father’s mother] was a Whittacker, as in Whittacker Mill, you see? So they are different to me. Whereas my mum’s mum’s family …’ He leaves the sentence unfinished. His point about the class difference between his mill-owning father’s family and his mother’s family has been made. Dwelling on the housing estate in which his maternal grandmother grew up, and neighbour

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to his mother’s sister and his mother’s sister’s son, Sean locates himself on his mother’s side of the class divide. His choice of residence renders him ‘the same type’ as his mother’s family.20 Sean goes on to tell me about his work and his role as a teacher in a successful multicultural school faced with the confusions and constraints imposed by Section 28.21 He talks of the children he teaches, their ‘identity’ and the influences on them of what he calls ‘culture’ and ‘upbringing’. I ask him where he thinks children’s identities come from: ST Parents - if they are a positive role model. And if they don’t have a positive role model, it comes from their own experiences of life. My temperament – I am very much like my mother and father, whereas my younger brother has not been away to college. He is like the father of my mother, very hot-tempered. I am a mellowed version, very independent. JE Do you think of identity as your personality? ST Yes, it’s part of personality and it’s experience of life. It is the whole package. It is what you have been through as a teenager – as a young adult – and what makes you into an adult. Your life experiences. For example, my brother – he is younger – I am not saying he’s not had the same upbringing, but I have been away to college, I have stayed in a hotel. Des is different, he drives a flashy car, BMW, leather seats, you know, credit cards and everything. He is totally different to what I am … JE How much do you think genes play in it? Play in personality? ST Genes do have an [influence]. Genes come from your family and you still have a trace … as you grow older you become more accustomed to your family traits – [the things] that you do as a family. My brother thinks exactly the same as my father, exactly the same and I don’t.

Sean goes on to demonstrate a kind of gesture that his father and his brother share; as well as ‘thinking alike’ they have a certain physical habit in common. In Sean’s narrative, experience of life mediates the inevitability of inheritance and vice versa. Good parents mediate their children’s experience of life and in Sean’s words provide a ‘positive role model’. If parents do not influence their children, then they are left to their own devices. Yet Sean’s brother, his experience unmediated by college or living away from home, is like his mother’s father – hot-tempered – and like his father in the

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way he thinks. Sean’s brother is connected directly (lines that are unmediated) to his maternal grandfather and to his father in ways that for Sean are less than positive – hot-tempered and somewhat conservative. Summoning either genes or experience, Sean considers himself and his brother to be quite different. They live in the world in different ways and they have different temperaments.22 For Sean, ‘family traits’ – the traces of the past that show up in families – are inherited, but not equally nor once and for all. They may show up more in one sibling than another, or become more familiar as you get older because, over time, you become more accustomed to them. Let me pursue the notion of ‘family traits’ a little further. A family trait lumps together (classifies) those who share it. I am reminded of a conversation I had with Jane and Malcolm Griffiths, a married couple, who at the time of interview were in their early forties. JG I’m not at all convinced about some of the theories of – I mean a lot of the things that affect – that are normally considered to be nurture, I think are inherited and vice versa. I don’t think we’ve got it right at all. I mean I can certainly see our Stephen doing things that my granddad did. And my granddad was dead before our Stephen was born so there’s no way our Stephen could have copied it. And you can see the lads now, [pause] the family’s split and all over the place [but] bring all the lads together and sit them down in a room and you know they’re all from the same family and they’ve all got the same bits of traits and looks, haven’t they? MG Mmm. JG You can put all the lads together and as soon as – they don’t see each other for ages, maybe years and years, but you bring them all together and they get on like that [snaps fingers], right away. Don’t they? MG Yeah. JG Aren’t they? And they’re all one family. MG That’s right. And we went to – it was a christening, wasn’t it? Last Sunday – JG Yep, you bring them all together and what did he say? Our Edward said to me – it was [in the] church, we had a christening – and he said, ‘Eh, you can tell them that’s not in family can’t you?’ And you can.

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‘The lads’ to which Jane refers include her son and the sons of her siblings. They are recognizable as ‘belonging’ to the same family. They share ‘bits of traits’ and look alike. Furthermore, they may not see each other often but when they do meet they know they have something in common and ‘get on’. Jane’s brother takes this idea further. For him, the strangers in the congregation – the non-kin – are recognizable as such.23 Returning to Sean Taylor, he tells me why he would not personally consider donating sperm. Well, I wouldn’t think bad of anybody who actually did it because it is entirely up to them and it is their own views and opinions. But, for me, I would always be wondering: ‘Well, I wonder if that’s it’ [his child] [pause] – you know what I mean? It is the uncertainty – what it could have been used for. My sperm could have been used to father a child. And that is what I wouldn’t like. Not because I think it is morally incorrect but because I would think, ‘Have I fathered a child somewhere in the world?’

And later on in our conversation: If people want to donate sperm, there is nothing wrong with it. If they don’t feel there is nothing wrong with it, then fine. I wouldn’t do it, not because I don’t believe it, like I said earlier on, but because I would want to know: ‘Is that my child?’ ‘Does that look like me?’ You might bump into it in McDonalds and it might be the spitting image of you [pause]. And that is what I wouldn’t like, the uncertainty of that.

Sean would be unable to unknow the fact that he might be related to a child he did not know. His sperm not only carries the potential of creating a child but, if it were to do so, would automatically connect him to that child. Marilyn Strathern (1999) writes of the contemporary Euro-American preoccupation with openness and transparency. This translates in NRT as the right of children ‘to know’ both the manner of their conception and their ‘genetic origins’.24 Strathern points to the way in which kinship knowledge has ‘certain built in effects’. There is no choice in it. Information about birth and parentage is significant for personal identity; and personal identity is construed in relation to a wider set of relationships. Furthermore, ‘one piece of information can automatically obliterate another taking away the status of previous information’ (Strathern 1999: 75). Thus Mrs Cooper asks us to consider the status of the woman whose husband provides sperm for his son. The woman, otherwise the child’s

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grandmother, is now related additionally and differently to the child through her husband’s contribution to its conception. But Mrs Cooper also knows, through experience, that grandparents have to make an effort to ‘take a back seat’ and ‘to button their lip’. To have information about the person who donated the semen with which you were conceived is also to know something about how you are related to those who care for you – to those who are your parents. That same information connects you to a wider set of persons you may never meet, such as the sperm donor’s parents, siblings and children. When genealogical knowledge is activated, it can cut across other ways of being related. It might be an abstraction (an intellectualization), and entail a process of objectification (which Alltown people take to), but it also has an effect. At the same time, knowledge about the trickiness of everyday relationships, the ties forged through intimacy and care, the fine line between interference and intervention, and so on cut across the process of objectification. Neither genealogy nor affective ties are pure, fixed or uncontaminated. Nor are they necessarily and always pitched against each other. Genealogical thinking in the kinship that has informed this chapter is not only about classification of a vertical kind, but accommodates the diagonal and is enlisted in stories people tell about futures, pasts, places and persons. It is given, insofar as it cannot be undone: a sperm donor may be a father whether he practices fatherhood or not, but it is also undone by those very practices that characterize fatherhood. The ‘Western standard model’, which pitches nature against law and substance against code, and which Viveiros de Castro points out has been theoretically universalized by many as ‘human kinship’, is itself theoretically universalizing. Rather than a standard model that fits all in ‘The West’, there is a standard model deployed by a wide range of social commentators (including anthropologists). How far an English genealogical imagination is isomorphic with a genealogical method, a heuristic tool central in the development of British anthropology, is an empirical question. The examples from Alltown indicate that genealogical thinking is more than the reductive or essentialist exercise that its stereotype would have us believe.25 Genealogical links are gendered, they come in different strengths, they ‘skip’ generations: genealogy is enlisted (laterally integrated) into the complex ways in which belonging to families, communities, social classes and so on, both past and future, are imagined.

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Notes 1. I use NRT to refer to technologies of assisted conception that include donor insemination (DI) and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with or without the substitution of gametes or surrogacy arrangements. The term is old-fashioned and inaccurate insofar as many of the techniques that fall under its rubric are neither new nor require sophisticated technologies; nevertheless, I retain it as shorthand with these caveats in mind. 2. Alltown has a population of approximately 15,000 people. It grew with the cotton industry and shrank with its decline. It is one of many northern English towns that have been left out of recent waves of urban regeneration and have not found a postindustrial economic niche. I have worked there as an anthropologist on and off since 1987 and am indebted to many residents. Their generosity (in all kinds of ways) is deeply appreciated. 3. I find Tim Ingold’s formulation of the kind of knowledge generated in practices of wayfaring fruitful here (this volume, and see also Ingold 2007). He contrasts laterally integrated knowledge, which comes from ‘inhabiting a country and its constituent places’ and is epitomized by the ‘story’, with vertically integrated knowledge, the official version of science that is epitomized by classification. For Ingold, both scientific and inhabitant knowledge are generated ‘within the practices of wayfaring’ – in movement and in ‘passage from place to place’. 4. Robert Winston is reported as saying that the practice is not common but not unknown, and Jack Cohen, a reproductive biologist, as estimating that twelve out of one thousand artificial inseminations involve a man’s father’s sperm. 5. We might gloss this as Euro-American, with all the caveats such a concept requires. It is useful in thinking about the ‘cultural continuities broadly identifiable across Europe and North America’ (Strathern 2002: 992), but only if we avoid reifying it as either a population or a place. 6. A Wellcome Trust Fellowship allowed me to carry out six months residential fieldwork between October 2000 and March 2001; the conversations reported here were recorded during that period. I am grateful to the Wellcome Trust for their support of this project. My research in 1990 in Alltown had focused on the way in which residents explored social implications of new reproductive technologies. My aim (broadly conceived) on this occasion was to investigate whether a decade had or had not made a difference. 7. The stranger is doubly unfamiliar for having arrived (come) in a bottle. The image of the bottle lends itself to imagining a commercial and commercially packaged (bounded) kinship. 8. I have written elsewhere about the notion of ‘make-up’ in terms of

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identity and have argued that ‘life experience’ cuts across ‘genetic origin’ and places a limit on its effect. Personality is as much a function of experience as it is of biology (Edwards 2005). From one perspective, genes are thought to exert a lesser effect and life experiences a greater effect as time goes on. Diana Marre and Joan Bestard (2008) write of the significance of ‘family resemblance’ in Spain and of how adoptive parents also identify family resemblances between their adoptive children and other family members. According to Marre and Bestard, they ‘consider resemblance as a way of strengthening connections’, and by narrating family resemblance parents tie the new individual into the family body. Our conversation took place in a coffee bar set up as a ‘drop-in centre’ for young people in order to facilitate their access to youth workers and ‘information’. Susan McCall had been working in Alltown for only six months when I met her. Employed as a youth and community worker, she was optimistic about plans for regeneration and was enjoying what she called the challenge of the town. She told me that she liked the architecture and ‘the feel’ of the place. Ingold notes that stories always and inevitably connect what classification divides. The ‘stories’ Alltown people tell about NRT relate these technologies to their own and other people’s lives. They are told from a particular perspective, for example, of the child, the gamete donor, the infertile ‘couple’, society and so on. Françoise Héritier quotes a psychology professor commenting on the affair between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn: ‘[I]t’s incestuous even if it’s not incest’ (1999: 311; also cited in Edwards 2004). For Héritier (1999) the incestuous union would be between the two men whose procreative substances come into contact with each other in the body of the woman. Bouquet notes that the visual representation – the genealogical diagram – ‘is part of what constitutes kinship for us’. She writes: ‘The visual nature of the genealogical diagram is absolutely central to the way in which kinship came to be conceived by anthropologists. This visualisation undoubtedly facilitated winnowing the social from the biological in kinship studies, and holding the biological referent steady’ (2000: 187). The degree of convergence between the genealogical diagrams of anthropologists and those drawn by ‘inhabitants’ locating themselves in ‘families’ is an ethnographic question. In the world of thoroughbred horse breeding, individuals not associated with horse racing or providing links with other racing families are, without compunction, left out of the diagram (Cassidy, this volume). And Icelandic genealogists are considered more or less creative or ‘poetic’ according to their skills at covering up certain genealogical facts (Pálsson, forthcoming).

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15. Earlier Mrs Cooper had told me about her husband, who brought up two of her children from a previous marriage ‘as his own’. She emphasized how he was the father of the children because it was who had ‘brought them up’. The children, she remarked, considered him more ‘their father than their father’. But in thinking about the substitution of a man’s sperm with that of his father, it is the genealogical links, or absence of them, which she brings to the fore. 16. For Héritier, incest prohibition is ‘a means of regulating the circulation of fluids between bodies’ (1999: 11, cited in Edwards 2004). What she defines as ‘incest of the second type’ (of which she finds historic examples in Greek philosophy, the Bible and the Koran, and ethnographic examples in Burkina Faso, Sudan and French soap operas) rests on the inappropriate mingling of bodily substances. Héritier’s interest is in the incest implied between consanguineous kin of the same sex when their ‘body substances’ come into contact with each other. If we were to extend Héritier’s thesis to the examples cited here, then a man’s semen placed in the body of his son’s wife would create an incestuous link between him and his son as their bodily substances come into contact with each other in the woman’s body. But note that Susan McCall’s focus is on gametes and fertilization. Included in Héritier’s starting premises is the fact that ‘intimate bodily contact is necessary in order to procreate and that sexual relation is essential for breeding, that men are born neither through parthogenesis nor cloning’ (1999: 209). Assisted conception techniques cut across such a premise, while nevertheless relying on the bodies of women (see, for example, Stolcke 1986; Thompson 2001). 17. The CSA is interested in genetic fathers, and DNA tests are increasingly being used to prove or disprove paternity. Interestingly, the CSA can pursue men who have donated sperm (if known) despite any agreement made between donor and recipient, a further and rather stark example of how genealogical knowledge has an effect. 18. Rita Astuti (this volume) also notes that from an English perspective, birth parents have exclusive claims on children. This is apparent here in the way in which child care and the responsibilities of parents for the upbringing and well-being of their children are perceived. It is less clear when claims to and from a patronym set, for example, are made. Male Edwardses, for example, which include my father, my brothers, my father’s brothers and their sons (collectively ‘the lads’), are said to resemble each other, and common family knowledge has it that you can ‘pick out’ an Edwards anywhere. 19. Similar concerns were expressed from the perspective of the child: for example, ‘What is the child going to think [that] “my granddad is also my daddy?”’ 20. From the transcript of our conversation:

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ST My mum’s dad came from Ireland … So they lived up here and my Auntie Mavis lives next door, she has lived up here all her life. JE And your Auntie Mavis is your mum’s sister? ST Yes. My cousin and his wife live where my house is – their garden backs onto mine. JE And your cousin is your mum’s sister son? ST Yes, he’s the eldest. JE So do you see a lot of each other? ST Auntie Mavis lives next door, she comes in and cleans for me every day, puts the lights on at night, you know, and things like that. Some days I go to work and don’t lock my side door. I mean, where [else] can you do that? JE You have the best of many worlds. ST I am very happy, close to my family. 21. Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988 controversially forbade ‘the promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. It was repealed in September 2003. 22. The word is wonderfully evocative – its dictionary definition recalls a latter-day variety of ‘essential substances’ prior to a dominance of genes: ‘temperament n. 1. individual character of one’s physical constitution permanently affecting the manner of acting, feeling and thinking … (formerly attributed to predominance of blood, lymph or phlegm, yellow bile, black bile)’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 7th ed.). 23. This is a familiar story (see note 18). Of interest, and something that needs pursuing elsewhere, is the patrilineal bias of ‘family traits’ and the way in which ‘family traits’ and the patronym set coincide (see also Nash 2002). 24. At the time of writing this, the U.K. government was seeking advice on changing the legislation that ensured anonymity of sperm donors: the move was towards providing identifying information about sperm donors. By the time of publication, the law had been changed. In March 2005 children conceived from donated gametes were given the ‘right’ to know the identity of their genetic parents upon reaching the age of eighteen. 25. Drawing again on Ingold, genealogy in this ethnographic example is more (and less) than a system of classification that relies only on vertically integrated knowledge.

References Basu, P. 2007. Homecomings: Genealogy, Heritage-tourism and Identity in the Scottish Highland Diaspora. London: Routledge.

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Bouquet, M. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portugese Refractions of British Kinship Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2000. ‘Reconnecting Kinship Studies and Museum Collections’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 167–90. Burke, J. and P. Harris. 2000. ‘Infertile Men Turn to their Fathers for Sperm’, Observer, 19 November. Douglas, M. 1970. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Edwards, J. 1999. ‘Why Dolly Matters: Culture, Kinship and Cloning’, Ethnos 64(3): 301–24. ———. 2000. Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. ‘Incorporating Incest: Gamete, Body and Relation in Assisted Conception’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(4): 755–74. ———. 2005. ‘“Make-up”: Identity, Upbringing and Character’, Ethnos 70(3): 413–31. Edwards, J., S. Franklin, E. Hirsch, F. Price and M. Strathern. 1999. Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Edwards, J. and M. Strathern. 2000. ‘Including Our Own’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–66. Héritier, F. 1999. Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest, trans. J. Herman. New York: Zone Books. Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Malkki, L. 2001. ‘Figures of the Future: Dystopia and Subjectivity in the Social Imagination of the Future’, in D. Holland and J. Lave (eds), History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities. Oxford: James Curry, pp. 325–48. Marre, D. and Bestard, J. 2008. ‘The Family Body: Persons, Bodies and Resemblances’, in J. Edwards and C. Salazar (eds), European Cultures of Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Nash, C. 2002. ‘Genealogical Identities’, Environment and Planning 20(1): 27–52. Pálsson, G. Forthcoming. Anthropology and the New Genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, D. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stolcke, V. 1986. ‘New Reproductive Technologies – Same Old Fatherhood’, Critique of Anthropology 6(3): 5–32. Strathern, M. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.

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———. 2002. ‘Still Giving Nature a Helping Hand? Surrogacy: A Debate about Technology and Society’, Journal of Molecular Biology 319(4): 985–93. Thompson, C. 2001. ‘Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–202.

Chapter 6

‘FAMILY TREES’ AMONG THE KAMEA OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA A NON-GENEALOGICAL APPROACH TO IMAGINING RELATEDNESS Sandra Bamford

I

n December of 2001, newspapers throughout Canada featured the story of Israel Mora, a Mexican performance artist. Mr Mora was one of forty artists selected by the internationally renowned Banff Cultural Centre to explore ‘the continuum of time’ during a sevenweek residency. As part of his project, Mr Mora ejaculated once a day for seven days, filling seven glass vials with his semen. The vials were then placed in a refrigerated cooler that the artist wheeled through downtown Banff on a small pushcart (Williamson 2001). The cooler was then strung up between two trees at the centre where it remained on display for seven days. Stencilled on the outside of the container was a sign that read: ‘Warning: contains 6.0 ml of semen extracted through masturbation distributed among seven glass vials’ (Remington 2001). Mr Mora entitled the exhibit ‘Level 7’, claiming that the vials represented ‘the cycle of life in his family’.1 The case of Israel Mora is intriguing to consider in terms of what it reveals about how kinship is conceptualized in the West. Although Mr Mora’s exhibit sparked considerable controversy – within both the United States and Canada – nobody interviewed questioned the

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meanings that he attached to his display. Instead, the ensuing polemic focused exclusively upon determining whether or not his project could legitimately be labelled ‘art’. Taking my cue from Mora, I use this opportunity to reflect upon several interrelated components of genealogical thinking. In particular, I am concerned with examining the role that ‘substance’ plays in naturalizing notions of relatedness in the West. A foundational tenet of genealogical thinking is the idea that physiological traits (along with the social relationships that often accompany them) are acquired on the basis of a principle of ‘descent’. Characteristics defined on a biogenetic basis are ‘passed down’ through the generations, forming an irrevocable bond between parents and offspring. It follows that contained within the bodies of living human beings is a protracted history of procreative events extending back in time from the present to the remote past. This system of ideas shapes more than our understanding of human kinship. Perhaps most significantly, it precipitates a cleavage between human beings and the environment within which they dwell (Ingold 1990, 2000). To the extent that reproductive histories are used as the criteria for defining species boundaries, a genealogical framework leaves human beings estranged from other life forms on the planet. This has, in turn, shaped the largely negative public response to transgenic species crossings. As recent controversies surrounding the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) suggest, crossing species boundaries is seen by the vast majority of Europeans and North Americans as being both ill-advised and intuitively ‘wrong’ (AEBC 2003; Davies 2001). Not only does it fly in the face of the ‘nature of things’, but it also threatens the existing world order insomuch as it promises to bring in its wake evolutionary Armageddon. Seen through genealogical eyes, the world is populated by various categories of beings, each hermetically sealed in a constitutive sense from all others (cf. Ingold 1990, 2000). In this paper, I explore the contours of an alternative cultural logic. Drawing upon research carried out with the Kamea of Papua New Guinea,2 I describe a world in which a genealogical framework ceases to be culturally relevant. In contrast to Europeans and North Americans, Kamea do not rely on physiological reproduction as a means of tracking social relationships through time. Despite my repeated efforts to ground intergenerational relations in a procreative bond, Kamea were quite insistent on the fact that neither a mother nor a father shares substance in common with their offspring. Instead, the parent-child tie is imagined as an inherently disembodied one. This shift in perspective carries with it a number of important

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implications. As we shall see, ‘crossing’ species boundaries and forming intimate relations with the nonhuman world does not threaten the existing social and moral order for Kamea; instead, it is constitutive of it.3 In this paper, I use Kamea conceptions as a counterreflexive voice through which to consider several unexamined assumptions that accompany a genealogical framework. In particular, I highlight the extent to which a genealogical model has structured – both implicitly and explicitly – Euro-American understandings of the relationship between human beings and other constituents of the organic world.

Setting the Scene For the purposes of this paper, it will suffice to know that Kamea are a highland people who number some fourteen thousand and occupy the heavily forested interior of Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea. Linguistically and culturally, they belong to the Angan ethnic group, who are perhaps best known to anthropological audiences through the ethnographic writings of Maurice Godelier (1982, 1986) and Gilbert Herdt (1981, 1987). Like most of their neighbours, Kamea derive a living from a combination of shifting horticulture and the raising of pigs. Their main agricultural crop is the sweet potato, which is cultivated in family plots at elevations ranging from two thousand to six thousand feet. Hunting and gathering contribute minimally to their diet but figure significantly within the context of social and ritual prestations. Like other highland peoples, Kamea are nominally ‘patrilineal’ in the sense that continuity with past generations is seen to adhere in the male line and becomes the basis through which claims to property are activated. Land, paternal names and modes of ritual competence are all transmitted through men, typically from a father to his son. Yet it is important to note that gaining access to these and other resources is not an automatic concomitant of patrifiliation. Instead it is constitutive of it. I first became aware of the non-genealogical basis of Kamea kin conceptions soon after arriving in the field. In January 1990 I settled at Titamnga, the Kamea village where I conducted the bulk of my research. The furor that my arrival engendered was displaced, in part, by an event that had taken place the night before. A young man named Pecos from the neighbouring village of Hambia had died suddenly and unexpectedly, an apparent victim of sorcery (pangga).

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Suspicion quickly came to rest upon a man named Hawo, a resident of Titamnga who was known to have worked many nefarious deeds in the past. The story that circulated most widely during my residency at Titamnga was that Hawo had transformed himself into a flying fox (opa) and in this form had killed Pecos and engaged in a cannibalistic feast. In the wake of these allegations (and fearing retribution from the dead man’s relatives), Hawo fled Titamnga to seek refuge with relatives at Aseki – his place of origin. He remained absent from Titamnga for several weeks thereafter. Discussions of the Pecos incident dominated my first few weeks of fieldwork. Each day, a large crowd would gather near the centre of the village to discuss Pecos’s death and to speculate on the anticipated date of Hawo’s return. As I struggled to make sense of what was going on around me, my newfound friends recounted to me other incidents of sorcery that had taken place in the past. Although their stories differed markedly in content from one another, an underlying theme began to emerge: sorcerers, in contrast to the ‘moral majority’, were seen to have only tenuous connections to the land. Lacking such connections, they satisfied their hunger by feeding off of the bodies of fellow human beings. It was to be many months before I came to realize that having indeterminate ties with the land also meant existing outside the scope of positive social relations.

Conceiving Generational Discontinuity At first glance, Kamea sociality seems to fit rather easily into the established categories of Western social science. Like most other Papua New Guineans, they believe that repeated acts of sexual intercourse are necessary to create a child. Conception is said to take place when sufficient quantities of a man’s reproductive fluids (iya coka) both mix with and are encompassed by the fluids of his wife (panga coka). This ‘outer’ female covering will eventually form the skin and surface blood vessels of the child, while the father’s semen contributes to the making of bones and internal organs. Yet although both parents contribute bodily substance to the making of a child, this is not seized upon as a significant feature of the parent-child relationship. Unlike many Euro-Americans, Kamea draw a sharp distinction between what goes into the making of a person in a physical sense and what connects them through time as social beings. The difference between Western and Kamea formulations is revealed in the fact that although Kamea use the idea of ‘one-blood’

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groupings to differentiate persons in their social universe, this expression does not refer to genealogical connections. Instead, it speaks to the shared experience of having been grown within the same woman’s womb. The term hinya avaka refers to ‘one-bloodedness’ and is used to refer to a sibling set. Apart from this term, there is no way for a speaker to refer to all of his or her siblings as a single, undifferentiated category. All other terms in the language of Kamea use sex and age to distinguish between different types of siblings. Yet despite their use of ‘blood’ as an idiom of relatedness, Kamea formulations of kinship bear little resemblance to Western ones. Any children that a woman bears, regardless of who the father might be, are said by Kamea to be ‘one-blood’ with one another (see Figure 6.1). The same does not necessarily hold true for the children of a man. Should a man have more than one wife during the course of his life,4 any children that he has with these separate women will not be spoken of in terms of the ‘one-blood’ relationship. Only persons born of the same womb are hinya avaka. To be ‘one-blood’ is to have originated from the same maternal container. This same notion of ‘one-blood’ groupings effectively separates a woman from her offspring, rather than connecting her to them. I initially confused the notion of ‘one-bloodedness’ with our own ideas concerning the inheritance of biogenetic substance and assumed that the expression referred to the cultural fact that blood is the female contribution to conception. Kamea, as it turned out, did not share my seemingly natural acceptance of a biological framework. Neither a woman nor a man is considered to be ‘one-blood’ with their children. The term refers exclusively to having issued from the same prenatal environment. Thus, one’s mother, for example, would be ‘one-blood’ with her own true siblings, but not with any person in the ascending or descending generation. Kamea

FIGURE 6.1: The ‘One-Blood’ relationship.

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women bestow upon their children a ‘horizontal’ type of relatedness that is imagined in terms of ‘containment’ rather than the lineal transmission of bodily substance (see Bamford 1997, 2004a, and 2007 for further information). This system of ideas has a number of important implications. While Kamea see human life as having its origin in sexual reproduction, substance-based idioms are not used to think about intergenerational relations. The people with whom I worked had no difficulty in specifying who their mother and father were, in the sense that these people contributed the necessary elements to conception, but the parent-child tie is imagined as an inherently disembodied one. Kamea do have a means of tracing social relations through time, but it is not based on physiological connections. Instead, it eventuates from those ties that people form with the land.

Cultivating Social Relations Throughout the Kamea region, land is inscribed with the identities of those who have worked it. Men and women move through a ‘mosaic of special places, each stamped by human intention, value, and memory’ (Buttimer 1976: 283; cf. Maschio 1994; Rodman 1987; Kahn 1990, Ingold 1992, Schieffelin 1976). Patches of secondary regrowth, former house sites and tracks through the forest all bear the imprint of human activity. These sites are named, and their names provide a record of human movement across the landscape through time. For Yango, a middle-aged man with a wife and ten children, Sobwa is the place where his father’s father cleared a garden; Kwoi’imnga is where he himself was initiated; his mother’s brother was killed in a fight at Yemibango; his father’s body was placed at death in a limestone cave at Ya’a. For each individual, the country is redolent with the identities and works of significant others. As a boy is growing up, it is the responsibility of his father to walk him about the lands he may one day inherit, pointing out the boundaries of the allotment and the exact location of different resources (cf. Rodman 1987). A boy will also be taught who worked the land before him and where his predecessors gardened, built their houses and hunted for game in the bush. Knowledge of this history – of one’s ties to place – is of crucial importance in establishing claims to ground. It is not genealogical connections that are remembered through time, but rather the history of individual men and their relationships to the land.

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Of particular importance to the creation of lineal continuity is a special class of narratives known as tambuna storis (literally, “ancestor stories.”). Tambuna storis outline the comings and goings of particular men: where they travelled, how they lived, who they married, and how the land was transformed through their productive efforts. Portrayed as a recollection of actual events, these stories have a perceived historical significance. They generally open with a named individual heading out to explore a previously unoccupied tract of ground. As the tale unfolds, the narrative assumes the structure of a journey through space where the hero travels from place to place, planting trees, clearing gardens, and engaging in other productive endeavours (cf. Maschio 1994; Munn 1973; Myers 1986). He may stop to make salt at one location, hunt for game at another, and collect rock from a quarry at a third. Wherever he goes, he generally manages to leave something of himself behind in the form of making the land more habitable for future generations. Tambuna storis are cited in legal disputes, particularly those having to do with access to land. Kamea say that men are expected to follow ‘in the footsteps of their fathers’. Where their tambuna walked about, cleared a garden and made a house is where they and their sons should do the same. Such a pattern of land use establishes a continuous line of cultivation extending from the mythical past to the present. Some men become particularly conversant with respect to the ties that bind them to place. Others, however, lack the detailed knowledge that is necessary to defend their claims in the face of competition from rivals who either know more or can speak more persuasively on their own behalf. Within the context of the contemporary setting, those men who have spent time working on the coast or at the gold fields in Wau are at a particular disadvantage. They return to Titamnga with cash in hand but have little knowledge of those links that bind them to the nonhuman world. These ex–wage labourers are in constant danger of losing their access to ground, insomuch as they are unable to assert their place within the socialized landscape. Yet knowledge alone is not enough to establish claims to land. An individual who fails to activate these claims through the investment of his own self in the land is apt to break the continuous line of male enchainment. Not only will his own rights be called into question, but so too will the subsequent claims of his sons. During my time at Titamnga, I encountered several individuals who had been disenfranchised from the system of land ownership because either they or their fathers had failed to fix their identity in the land, and

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thus to become part of the humanized landscape (see Bamford 1998 for a detailed discussion of this point). These individuals will cease to be remembered in the tambuna storis that form a history of human interaction with the environment. Effectively, they will cease to exist in intergenerational time. So far we have seen that Kamea intergenerational relationships are inseparable from the kinds of relationships that men form with the land. From the perspective of any individual, the environment is imbued with social significance: ‘it stands as an enduring record of and testimony to the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it and in so doing have left there something of themselves’ (Ingold 1993: 152). Still, more is involved than merely a process of objectification. To view the landscape as a template upon which human social life is inscribed is to address only half the picture. For Kamea, moving through space is also an act of incorporation whereby the land comes to be embodied by human beings in meaningful ways. By engaging (or alternatively, not engaging) in specific acts of consumption, components of the nonhuman world enter into the very constitution of living persons. Men do not simply impress their identities on the land. Instead, the capacity to act as a reproductively competent male is precipitated by those ties that men form with the land. Like many other highland people, Kamea practice male initiation. One of the most important secrets revealed to boys during their entry into the men’s cult concerns the special use of the yangwa tree, a type of ficus. Scattered at regular intervals throughout the Kamea habitat, this tree is a pervasive feature of the landscape. In addition to its publicly acknowledged use in the production of bark cloth, the yangwa tree has a more compelling use that is known only to older initiated men. The inner core of this tree contains a milky white sap that, if drunk, is believed to replace semen that has been lost through sexual intercourse. As one man explained: ‘If you want to come up “new” again, you will go to the forest without women. You will get the juice of this tree and drink it. If a man wants to ”make work” [i.e., engage in sexual intercourse], this juice will change him. The tree has an unlimited supply of milk. If a man drinks it, he will become “new” again.’ A married man will begin to plant yangwa trees shortly after the birth of a son, using cuttings that have been taken from trees that he acquired from his own father. These trees mature slowly, and a period of ten to fifteen years is required before either their bark or sap is ready to be used. As the tree grows to maturity, its development parallels the growth of the child himself. By the time

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the tree is ready to be used by the son, the latter will have taken a wife himself and will begin to plant yangwa trees in anticipation of his own son’s future use. The cultivation of yangwa trees establishes a link between men of different generations who are not otherwise united by bonds of shared bodily substance. Although physiological reproduction is not emphasized as a point of connection between parents and children, men nonetheless provide their sons with an externalized and partible equivalent of seminal fluid that gets handed down through time and across generations. Men plant trees, and trees, in turn, operate to elicit the growth of future generations of men. In the absence of an ideology based on descent, the nonhuman world serves as a point of attachment between generations, giving Kamea sociality its decidedly patrilineal cast. Land, lineality and maleness are part of an integrated conceptual bundle. They are mutually constitutive aspects of a social whole.5 It is within the space that potentially exists between sociality and place that one finds the much-feared figure of the witch. Numbering among the dispossessed, he is one of the unfortunate few who is forced to wander from place to place, ungrounded with respect to his ties to either land or people. Through circumstances that often are beyond his control, he has been disenfranchised from the system of land tenure. In the absence of unambiguous connections to place, he lacks an embodied historical connection to other people. Although his matrilineal kin may allocate temporary use rights to garden land to the sorcerer, he is unable to establish anything more than tenuous claims to land and other resources. His disengagement from the nonhuman world does more than threaten his ability to make a living; it simultaneously defines him as existing outside the scope of normative social relations. Separated from meaningful forms of engagement with the nonhuman world, the witch gives in to his cannibalistic appetites and appeases his hunger by consuming the bodies of his fellow human beings. The situation of Hawo, mentioned previously, is a case in point. Having grown up at Aseki, a village situated several days’ walk due east, he came to Titamnga as a young boy in order to escape a series of wars that had erupted in the Aseki area. Arriving at Titamnga but possessing no land to call his own, he was shuffled from one category of matrilateral kinsman to the next. During the twenty years or so before the time of my fieldwork, he was given temporary use rights to countless plots of land. Once his crops were harvested, he was asked to leave and was then forced to negotiate new arrange-

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ments with another kinsperson. Today, Hawo does not know the history of the land he has worked, nor has he been able to inscribe his identity on the land in any meaningful way. Hawo’s prospects for the future remain bleak. He has now lived at Titamnga for nearly twenty years. His prolonged absence from Aseki makes it nearly impossible for him to return to his birthplace, as his claims to land there would be flawed: he has neither come to know the history of the Aseki landscape, nor managed to infuse anything of his own identity within it. The only way out of this predicament would be for someone to grant Hawo continuing rights to land. So long as he used the land on an ongoing basis and learned its history, his rights to it would be secure. But at the time of my fieldwork, no one had yet extended such an offer to him. What one sees here in terms of land use is the ongoing construction of social relations. Using land and moving through space are not merely the performance of sociality, but also the means by which ties are created and rejected between men through time. While rights to use land typically devolve from a father to his son, this pattern of transmission is neither necessary nor automatic. A man who lacks male offspring can allocate his holdings to any other male of his choosing. So long as the recipient uses the land in question on a continuing basis, his rights to it will not be called into question. In a like manner, existing rights can be invalidated if an individual fails to use the land in an appropriate manner. Lineal continuity is not coterminous with Western ideas of descent. Indeed, in many ways, it makes more sense to speak of relationships of ascent, in that intentional human effort is required to attach oneself to the male line. Kamea do not hold land so much as it comes to hold them and, in so doing, elicits a sense of generational continuity.

Reconceiving the Genealogy of Life To conclude, I return to Israel Mora and the significance of a cosmology that is focused on genealogical connections. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the concept of the ‘family tree’ has long figured centrally in Western thought. Once used as a means of legitimating ‘privilege’ and ‘entitlement’ among the European upper classes (see Beer 1986; Strathern 1992), family trees were brought into mainstream anthropological thought through the publication of W.H.R. Rivers’s essay ‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry’. Since that time, it has become standard for anthropol-

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ogists to ‘re-present’ social relationships among non-Western peoples through the all too familiar apparatus of the genealogical diagram. Israel Mora’s effort to display his own personal connections takes this range of associations one step further. In his exhibit, male procreative substance actually hangs from trees in a remarkable literalization of Euro-American imaginings. What both Mora’s art and conventional anthropological understandings of the ‘family tree’ have in common is that they serve as representational devices: a convenient way to map a different – and supposedly more fundamental (i.e., essential) – level of reality. Trees are a ‘map’, a ‘depiction’ of reality. That is all they can be, given that the Western world dissolves itself into a series of innate biological distinctions, each defined on the basis of its own reproductive potential. While human beings are seen as linked to other species through common descent in an evolutionary sense, they are also significantly separated from such forms on the basis of their current reproductive history. It follows, from this perspective, that other life forms play no role in defining human social relations. Nor do they enter into the constitution of persons. Land can be lived upon and can also be owned as property, but it is separate in an ontological sense from human existence. Current debates concerning the advisability of GMOs are informed by this cultural logic. In September 2003 the British government, under the auspices of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC 2003), carried out a national survey of public attitudes towards genetically modified organisms. Respondents were asked to state their views on genetic modification and the growing of genetically modified crops in the United Kingdom. Did they want genetic modification and genetically modified crops to be adopted in the U.K.? If they were prepared to consider their widespread use in the future, what information and/or evidence would they like to see presented first? One of the most interesting findings of the AEBC report is that it is the notion of ‘crossing’ species boundaries that Europeans and North Americans find particularly disquieting. While the majority of respondents (a resounding 86 per cent) were vehemently opposed to the use of GMOs under any circumstances, their reasons for feeling this way are revealing. Human health risks and political concerns relating to the ownership of GMOs (i.e., the potential that Southern countries will become even more dependent on Northern ones for their subsistence) rated last and second-to-last on respondents’ lists of objections. Far more pressing in the minds of many was a vague

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anxiety concerning the potentially unintended consequences of crossing ‘species boundaries’. As we have seen, Euro-American understandings are informed by the view that all constituents of the organic world fall into a series of naturally occurring types that are defined on the basis of their supposed unique reproductive histories. This system of ideas can be traced back to the seventeenth century (if not earlier), when the botanist John Ray suggested that sexual reproduction be used to classify organisms in the natural world (Mayr 1982). Ray argued that however much variation existed among individual organisms of the same general type, ‘one species never springs from the seeds of another, or vice versa’ (quoted in Mayr 1982: 257). For the majority of Europeans and North Americans, the most disturbing thing about genetic engineering is that it involves taking genes from one organism and introducing them into the living body of another. What is seen to be the ‘purity’ of a natural type is thereby compromised (Bamford 2007). As Mary Douglas (1966) told us over forty years ago, collapsing the categories upon which a conceptual system rests will be seen by its adherents as being not only polluting but dangerous as well. Producing crops that contain their own herbicidal properties will lead to the production of ‘superweeds’ (Goodyear-Smith 2001; Kenward 1994); pest-resistant forms will enter the food chain with disastrous consequences (Knestout and Wiser 2000; Niles 2001); new diseases will be born, and old ones will mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics that were previously effective (Bremmer 1998). In the Euro-American worldview, essential distinctions exist between certain forms of life, and blurring these types will lead to evolutionary Armageddon. Within this context, it is highly significant that the practice of mutagenesis by plant breeders has not met with the same kind of resistance that has accompanied the manufacture of trans-species GMOs. Mutagenesis involves exposing plants to a variety of mutagens, including chemicals or gamma radiation, in order to induce mutagens into the structure of the plant, thereby giving rise to novel characteristics that can be passed on to subsequent generations (Davies 2001: 427; cf. Nuttall 1998). The new traits can then be selected and introduced into new cultigens using traditional plant breeding techniques. The practice of mutagenesis has not prompted any strong reaction on the part of the public, despite the fact that it also uses biotechnology to intentionally introduce a change in the genetic structure of an organism (Davies 2001: 427). Unlike those techniques of genetic engineering that rely on transgenic (i.e., inter-

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species) applications, mutagenesis does not involve crossing so-called species boundaries. It follows that the practice is not viewed as particularly threatening or dangerous by the vast majority of Europeans and North Americans (see Davies 2001 for a more detailed discussion of this point). It is ironic and perhaps more than a bit disconcerting that over the past few years, indigenous peoples like Kamea have been on the receiving end of global environmental planning. Since I left Titamnga in the early 1990s, the people with whom I worked have become the unwitting subjects of Western environmentalist initiatives that are intended to preserve ‘global biodiversity’ for the benefit of all citizens of the world (see Bamford 2002). Kamea are learning about the need to protect biodiversity and the idea that it is incumbent upon everyone the world over to limit our consumption of nonhuman species. We are perhaps not premature in speaking of an emerging form of genealogical imperialism – one that will have significant repercussions in the years to come. In this chapter, I have highlighted the extent to which a genealogical paradigm both informs Euro-American kinship configurations and underpins our theoretical imaginings of the world at large, including our relationship to other life forms. Kamea help to illustrate the extent to which a genealogical model is in fact only a model, one that we need to avoid mistaking for reality lest we elide one form of diversity – the diversity of different social traditions – in the interest of preserving the biological diversity that we imagine to be another, separate sphere.

Acknowledgements Select portions of the material presented in this paper have appeared previously in S. Bamford 2007, Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (Berkeley: The University of California Press); Bamford 1998, ‘Humanized Landscapes, Embodied Worlds: Land and the Construction of Intergenerational Continuity among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, Social Analysis 42(3): 28–54; Bamford 1998, ‘To Eat for Another: Taboo and the Elicitation of Bodily Form among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, ed. M. Lambek and A. Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 158– 71); and Bamford, 2004, ‘Conceiving Relatedness: Non-Substantial Relations among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the

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Royal Anthropological Institute 10(2) p. 287–306. Reprinted with permission.

Notes 1. Mora was alternatively quoted as saying that the seven vials represented seven members of his family (Graveland 2001). 2. My research in Papua New Guinea was carried out over a thirty-one month period from August of 1989 through February of 1992. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for their generous financial support of my work. 3. As we shall see, the language of ‘crossing’ species boundaries is in many ways inappropriate here because Kamea do not see the world as being based upon a series of naturally occurring biological types. 4. A fairly common occurrence given that polygamy is frequent. 5. As I discuss elsewhere (Bamford 2007, 2004b), Kamea women have a different relation to land and resources – one that effectively prevents them from forming remembered intergenerational links, but is critical in the framing of intragenerational relations.

References Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC). 2003. ‘GM Nation? The Findings of the Public Debate’. London: Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission. Bamford, S. 1997. The Containment of Gender: Embodied Sociality among a South Angan People. Ph.D. dissertation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. ———. 1998. ‘Humanized Landscapes, Embodied Worlds: Land and the Construction of Intergenerational Continuity among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, in S. Bamford (ed.), Nature, Culture and Identity: Environment and Sociality in Melanesia. (Special Issue) Social Analysis 42(3): 28–54. ———. 2002. ‘On Being “Natural” in the Rainforest Marketplace: Science, Capitalism, and the Commodification of Biodiversity’, Social Analysis 46(1): 35–50. ———. 2004a. ‘Embodiments of Detachment: Engendering Agency in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea’, in P. Bonnemère (ed.), Women as Unseen Characters: Male Ritual in Papua New Guinea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 34–56. ———. 2004b. ‘Conceiving Relatedness: Non-Substantial Relations among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(2): 287–306.

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———. 2007. Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beer, G. 1986. ‘The Face of Nature: Anthropological Elements in the Language of The Origin of Species’, in L. Jordanova (ed.), Languages of Nature. London: Free Association Books, pp. 207–43. Bremmer, M. 1998. ‘Why Alien Genes Can Run Amok’, Financial Times, 28 March, p. 6. Buttimer, A. 1976. ‘Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66(2): 277–92. Darwin, C. 1979 [1859]. The Origin of Species. New York: Gramercy Books. Davies, K. 2001. ‘What Makes Genetically Modified Organisms So Distasteful?’ Trends in Biotechnology 19(10): 424–27. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Godelier, M. 1982. ‘Social Hierarchies among the Baruya of New Guinea’, in A. Strathern (ed.), Inequality in New Guinea Highlands Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. The Making of Great Men: Male Power and Domination among the New Guinea Baruya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodyear-Smith, F. 2001. ‘Health and Safety Issues Pertaining to Genetically Modified Foods’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 25(4): 371–74. Graveland, B. 2001. ‘A Meat Dress, Rotting Rabbits and Now a Masturbating Mexican Has the Canadian Alliance Heritage Critic Angry and Appalled’, Banff Centre, Newswire Article, 5 December. Herdt, G. 1981. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill. ———. 1987. Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Ingold, T. 1990. ‘An Anthropologist Looks at Biology’, Man 25(2): 208–29. ———. 1992. ‘Culture and the Perception of the Environment’, in E. Croll and D. Parkin (eds), Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development. London: Routledge, pp. 39–56. ———. 2000. ‘Ancestry, Generation, Substance, Memory, Land’, in T. Ingold (ed.), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, pp. 132–151. ———. 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25(2): 152–74. Kahn, M. 1990. ‘Stone-Faced Ancestors: The Spatial Anchoring of Myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea’, Ethnology 29(1): 51–66. Kenward, M. 1994. ‘Pure Geneius’, Director 48(3): 54–58. Knestout, B. and J. Wiser. 2000. ‘Food Fight’, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine 54(1): 58–60. Maschio, T. 1994. To Remember the Faces of the Dead: The Plenitude of Memory in Southwestern New Britain. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

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Mayr, E. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Munn, N. 1973. Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Myers, F. 1986. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Niles, T. 2001. ‘The Illusion of “Frankenfood”’, Washington Times, 7 November, p. A18. Nuttall, N. 1998. ‘Silent Spring, 2020’, The Times, 13 July, p. 15. Remington, R. 2001. ‘Banff Centre Boss Apologizes for Semen “Art”: Embarrassment to Some’, National Post, 13 December, p. A5. Rodman, M. 1987. Masters of Tradition: Consequences of Customary Land Tenure in Longana, Vanuatu. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Schieffelin, E. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, K. 2001. ‘Groups Appalled by Semen Art Project: Mexican Masturbator’s “Performance Art” at Banff Centre Called “Insane”, “Obscene”’, Ottawa Citizen, December 6.

Chapter 7

KNOWLEDGE

AS

KINSHIP

MUTABLE ESSENCE AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSMISSION ON THE RAI COAST OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA James Leach

I

n the logic of the genealogical model of kinship, biological relatedness, that is, portions of similar or identical biological material within separate bodies, is understood to be the basis of social relatedness. One recognition of similarity comes to explain or legitimate another kind of recognition of connection. Until recently, kinship reckoned on this basis was not perceived as subject to human intervention, other than in perpetuating certain essences through time by procreation. Interventions that now make substances mutable have emerged in biological sciences as a part of this logic, placing those interventions firmly in the realm of expert techno-science. Those subject to such interventions are apparently merely exercising the social agency of choice (Strathern 1992b) through the expert intervention of others. The relation between human artifice and given nature is thus still a closed one for most people, a given of transmitted substances that are so fundamental to human being that they are outside quotidian human intervention. Anthropologists are well aware of the variations possible in such a logical construction (see Viveiros de Castro, this volume) – mistaken recognition of some connections and not others, fictive rela-

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tions based on analogy to biological connection that do not actually change the essences that people carry and share, and so forth. Under this logical scheme, transmission changes nothing essential by intention (Leach 2004: 160). Sequences of persons unfold as closed entities with cultural and social licence to create, make, destroy as social acts, but no biological freedom. As others in this volume point out, such logic is compatible with ideological constructions of value and worth in persons based not on what they do, but what they are. The cultural interest in pedigrees, still apparent in these pages and elsewhere, has been part of a technology perpetuating a particular political and social hierarchy, one that has drawn on the ideological support of ‘reality’ determined through scientific intervention, for generations (Latour 1999, 2004). I look to use ethnographic material to complement Bamford’s contribution in the previous chapter and give evidence of an alternative to this generative system. I come on to expose some of the consequences of these formulations for the way we are able to understand humans’ relations to each other and to their surroundings. To that end, I focus upon knowledge, and its role of connecting people as a social relation that is also an essential connection on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. The point here is that although knowledge is vital and connects people, it is mutable, changing and open. People therefore are mutable, changeable, and open to the interventions and agency of others through a radically different set of technologies than those of contemporary techno-science. These technologies are things we might otherwise call ritual, or art, or exchange cycles, but that are also correctly described as instruments through which the reality of another mode of existence is brought into being.

Palem and the Generation of Persons Nekgini-speaking people of the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea live in small hamlets that are based around a meeting house and a cult house. The residential group is named the palem, a word that also refers to a platform in the meeting house on which ceremonial payments to affines are piled. The cult house contains the paraphernalia of different spirits (kaapu) that are called upon exclusively by men. Kaapu are musical, known by their ‘voices’, which are the melodies of sacred songs. They reside in specific places in the landscape and are called to the hamlet for specific purposes: life cycle changes, exchanges and ceremonial performances. Each spirit is owned by par-

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ticular palem members. Ownership is transmitted through inheritance of a palem identity, and also transacted between palem. Palem are the focus of a generative system. Persons become related to one another through living together in a palem. All secondgeneration residents of a palem are siblings in Nekgini reckoning. The hamlets are recognized as whole units (palem konaki) at the point where they collectively produce a payment to another residential group. These payments are made for women who arrive in marriage, and for their children. The payments take the form of an effigy, made up of garden produce, wealth items and a live pig. These items are explicitly named as body parts. The kaapu animate this body, giving it voice and calling for the recipients. Palem are named after the site of their cult and meeting house, and the effigy is ‘at their door’, born from their collective work. Places as combinations of people and spirits come to have identity through the recognition they gain in dramatising their existence through exchange. Each payment made as a palem constitutes the work of the palem as the work of producing its children. Such children are siblings because they embody elements from the same place. They are differentiated from one another, just as palem themselves are, through the relationships they have external to the palem. It is in these relationships that the particularity of the person/palem emerges because of its unique position (name) and unique set of constitutive relations to other places, affines or maternal kinsmen. This is a system that generates new palem, new named social groups and new spirits (and designs to accompany them) through the work of growing crops, growing animals and entering into complexly structured exchanges that are ultimately focused upon the generation of socially significant persons of various complementary or competing types (Bateson 1936; Leach 2002, 2003: 67, 129). Palem construction begins with producing a large garden of taro. From the very outset in the garden, it is a man’s knowledge of local names, myths and animating spirits that allows him to grow the elements that are finally given away. Reite people plant taro with many embellishments: they have garden magic involving the names of taro deities (pel-patuki), and secret procedures for ensuring that the taro grows correctly, replenishes itself in the garden, tastes sweet and so on. These procedures are vital, as the first responsibility of a man and wife who need to produce an affinal payment in the form of a palem, is to produce abundantly from garden land. In addition in these presentations, there ought to be dried marsupials and other wild meat caught through hunting on a man’s land, as

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well as some left over to feed spirits when they are first called to the hamlet. Hunting successfully involves the knowledge of names of places and events in the land on which a man hunts, along with what Lawrence (1964:17) describes as ‘strict taboos on food and sexual relations’. Growing pigs likewise is accomplished speedily when a man has knowledge of esoteric names, procedures and specific mythic places from which to draw substance for the pigs’ growth (Leach 2008). When his garden is ready to be harvested, a man enlists the support of the kaapu (spirits), which reside in pools formed by springs in the limestone landscape. These kaapu are summoned from their different pools on land owned by close kin. They are brought to the hamlet’s men’s house, where they are kept out of the sight of women. Spirits actively contribute to the preparations for the palem from there. Their presence is known by their musical but eerie voices (Leach 1999),1 and by the presence of the men of the cult who accompany them night and day on slit-gong (kiramung or garamut in Tok Pisin) and hourglass (pariwah) drums. While the kaapu are in residence, the owner of the production must keep them fed with meat. The group of initiated men who ‘watch over’ the spirits are known collectively as ‘the tambaran’. This entity of men and spirits in combination moves around during the day, busy with preparations. It is sent to bring back newly dug taro and yam from the gardens, to cut timber for the palem platform, and to erect a coconut mast that stands beside the construction (see Figure 7.1). At each completed stage of the preparation, slit-gong drums are beaten announcing the achievement. When the coconut mast is raised, for example, the beat for coconut is repeated many times. Thus affines and receivers are made aware of the progress of the hamlet’s tambaran and reminded of their obligation to come and receive the payment. It is said that it is the tambaran that ‘pulls’ the receivers to the exchange. During the construction and performance, the man in whose name the palem is made is taught the names (paru) of mythic beings (patuki) who allow the successful completion of each stage of the production. This is done in the context of the tambaran. In her description of malangan ceremonies in New Ireland, Suzanne Küchler makes points relevant to my explanation of Nekgini payments. She describes how the ‘ritual confederations’ that arise through sharing land and sharing the memory of a carved image (malangan) do not depend on clan affiliation: ‘The regulation of relationships over land, labour and loyalty is virtually independent of

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FIGURE 7.1: Palem constructed in Ririnbung Hamlet, September 2006. Photograph by James Leach.

clan identity and marriage. It is articulated rather with participation in the mortuary ceremonies which climax in the production of sculptures’ (Küchler 1992: 96). People who share the memory of a carved image, presented on the death of a person, ‘purchase’ this right from the kin of the deceased. This occurs at a ceremony named after the generic term for the carved images themselves: malangan. Sharing the

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rights over reproduction of an image (that purchased at a malangan ceremony) gives rights over the land of the deceased. The confederation of persons with rights to reproduce this image share the land of which the image is the ‘skin’ (tak). People who share in an image, in knowledge, come to be of the same ‘skin’. Sharing land is the determining criteria for membership of these federations, as joint work on the land implies joint work for the dead, and is thus ‘articulated’ by the joint memory of the image that is produced at this time: ‘The intimate relation between land and sculptured image is highlighted by the indigenous term for skin (tak) which applies to both … Those who share land on account of sharing the memory of an image call each other “of one skin” (namam retak)’ (Küchler 1992: 96). Sharing land in Reite, and sharing the site from which payments (bodies) generated by this land are given away, make persons ‘one door’ to one another; one palem. There is a perception of a single source for the offspring of a place – a single container from which they emerge as they appear at the same door. Those who share a palem also share a named place. The palem as a social group is more than a ritual confederation; it is a kin confederation in which connections to co-residents and supporters are generated through sharing in the labour of producing food, children and ‘bodies’ of wealth to give away. Separations from other places (affines) are demonstrated through the removal of a payment from an (apparently) singular source. They are also demonstrated in the different forms that persons take. That is an outcome of being enmeshed in the particular and distinctive relations of that place. What gives form is knowledge of that place.

Knowledge as Kinship Palem first came into being through the actions of beings that Nekgini speakers know as patuki. Pomo patuki is a particular narrative of the actions of certain patuki that tells of the transition from a primordial state without gender, marriage or exchange, to existence as it is currently experienced. The characters (patuki) presided over the first palem formation, in a place called Pomo, and the first exchange relations. Their actions caused the emergence of reproductive species in the environment, and differences between the character, material culture and geography of people and places. All this followed from an initial act of differentiation. A ‘mother’ or ‘sister’ had a vagina/ design tattooed between her legs. This act precipitated anger and

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fighting between the other characters of the myth (a pair of siblings), and in the subsequent movements of their fight, chase and eventual reconciliation through exchange (from different positions in the emergent landscape), human existence came into being (Leach 2003). Pomo patuki is a patuki belonging to everyone. Pomo patuki is the condition of human existence. The term patuki covers not only the narrative and characters of myth; it also designates knowledge itself, and the power of knowledge to have effect as the magical names of these powerful beings. The appearance of patuki is in the physical forms of the landscape, of different exchange items produced in various places and most fundamentally in the gendering of bodies. All this is to say that ‘myth’ (knowledge) itself is not thought of by these people as intellectual as opposed to physical. Differences are between kinds of people with different control over knowledge, not between intellectual and other forms of activity. Narrative, character and power are in the form of persons, and are distributed through and in the persons who embody this power. Pomo patuki is not abstract knowledge but is the existential condition that persons exhibit in their distinct gendered forms, belonging to and constructing palem. If Nekgini speakers see Pomo patuki as the practice that is generative of their particular social form, then they assume that this is how people must be as humans. Each marriage is an instantiation of that patuki. Reproduction, then, as the initial condition of human emergence, is always present in the form and generation of persons as palem members. Social life does not have a structure independent of the creative power of patuki (people’s action). Such narratives do not outline possibilities, they outline a necessity, that is, the necessity of keeping the human world in existence (Mimica 1991). Relationships within and beyond the palem are not contingent to the person, their identity or their bodily substance. They are that body, identity and person (See Astuti this volume for the connection of children to a wider group than their birth parents). The distinctions noted in this volume, central to the genealogical model, between mind and matter, reproduction and mental creation, are not present as aspects of Reite people’s action when making new palem. People as creations of other persons, not nature or biology, are able to create other bodies through their use of the substance of human life: knowledge of generation, separation, containment and growth. All these elements are patuki. In this context (and as I have dwelt upon elsewhere), Reite people were concerned to tell me only of knowledge that they them-

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selves ‘owned’. By passing it on to me, they would be liable, in a local legal sense, for any knowledge they claimed to own. Passing on knowledge, ritual forms or designs is open to challenge for a specific reason: expressing knowledge amounts to claiming inclusion in the relationships (including those to land and spirits) that generated that knowledge. One cannot ‘know’ something without it being a part of one’s make-up, and as such, something that connects one to others. In myth (patuki), the personification of knowledge, its discovery and the characters who passed it on are run together. Although people acknowledge that a vital part of each patuki from the past is the secret name (paru) of the character involved (it being the name, and perhaps the tune or voice that goes with that name, that allows people to use a patuki to aid their endeavour), nevertheless, even the narrative of each patuki’s doings is jealously guarded (Leach 2000). The ownership of ideational forms in Nekgini practice derives from the link they make between land, knowledge and the history of social life (kinship). Patuki means knowledge, mythic character and procedure, all in one. There is a history of palems, and people remember past cooperation in the construction of palems, referring to those made ‘one palem’ through previous palem association as siblings. Descendants who can trace a common ancestor in a single palem are thus linked as the descendants of siblings. The palem is thus the basis of a complex and generative kinship network. As Andrew Strathern has pointed out, co-residence often ‘creates’ kinship in Papua New Guinea (Strathern 1973; Weiner 1988), which created problems for anthropologists working with African lineage models (Barnes 1962).2 Marilyn Strathern (1992a) concludes that the essence of the problem faced by analysts of Papua New Guinea highland societies lies in the tension between society and biology, or between social relationships and genealogical relationships, in anthropological accounts. Those who have given wealth in the form of a palem to affines have a right to follow the recipients home and ‘dance on the ashes of his fire’ (the fire that cooked the pig they gave). The hosts gather up their spirits, designs, instruments and decorations and go to the receiver’s hamlet to dance. The group of men who go and dance use other patuki and paru (names of ancestors) to make their voices and appearances irresistible to those who will observe their dancing performance.3 Indeed, the purpose of all this preparation is to cause emotion on the part of the viewers. The performers anticipate that people, especially women, will follow the dancers and their kaapu home, falling in love with the smell, sight and most of all, the reso-

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nant voices of the men and women of the visiting hamlet singing together with their animating spirits. The songs they sing speak of the land from which the dancers come, of the process of life in that land. Each presentation is unique, and only possible in that form because of the knowledge (patuki) shared by the people from the dancing hamlet. Their identity is thus fully bound to the recognition of the differences in the patuki that they collectively utilize, from those of other hamlets. An interesting aspect of this form of ritual production is the fact that new spirits, new kaapu personas (linked tunes, names, songs and designs), are coming into being all the time. That is, people dream of new spirits, and in those dreams, the tune/voice, designs and name of the kaap is revealed to the dreamer. These spirits are then revealed to others in a performance. Control over the use of these new spirits, like the old ones, is of great concern to Nekgini speakers. The only circumstance in which others may use the tune and form of a spirit in their own performances is if they have been granted permission as a part of the wealth given in exchange. The mechanisms of connection are important, for despite the ‘individual’ revelation, one that places the dreamer in a position of some standing in the wider community, there is no sense that this spirit belongs exclusively to this man, nor that he would be able to transact its image for reproduction elsewhere, even as part of a bridewealth exchange, without the consent of his fellow palem members. The revelation is not phrased as an invention or act of individual creation, but as something arising from the particular man’s affinity with, and knowledge of, a place in the landscape, a set of people, a group of spirits. This kind of connection is based on work and residence, in which others are closely implicated. Spirits are always located in places, and places are made through the ongoing work of palem members. Spirits are not ascribed to places by their inventors, but discovered ‘in’ places by people who constitute those places through their ongoing (combined) work. It is land and places that have the basic role of forging (futuredirected) and maintaining (past-oriented) social relations; thus it is land (as places) that underwrites the social identity of those who claim and use it. The combination is itself produced as an entity (a place) in which knowledge is known to inhere. That is, the power of one’s connections and labour are made apparent in the recognition given from other places. Knowledge connects people to one another as kin, is emergent in the work of people and has transformative effects on people. It is the relations that generate bodies that

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are demonstrated in spirit performances, in knowledge of myths, stories and secret names. These things evoke a place, in the specific sense of a known piece of land whose history is the history of particular social relations and productions (kinship). The future of a place in this sense is anticipated in the production where it is made to appear. What men and women do in constructing a palem is show their control over the fecundity of the land, over its potential to grow bodies in the form of taro, pigs and dancers, over its spirits and the designs and songs these spirits inspire in them. The specific forms the garden ritual takes – the shape of plantings, the patuki, kaapu and designs – are all intimately connected to people who trace their generation to the place defined by these forms. If kinship is about the production of persons, relations focused on, and made possible by, the emergence of knowledge are the basis of kinship. Spirit voices, designs and the kaapu that animate the construction and performance of a palem ceremony continue to belong to the donors of the substitute body. Sharing these myths, stories and spirits allows the production of the palem and the recognition of its producers as kin. The audience, the receivers of the body, reciprocate by their acknowledgement of the power of the nonpartible elements of the performance. These are exactly the knowledge (patuki, paru), spirits, designs and songs that make the presentation possible. An important aspect of placement in Reite is the ability it gives the ‘owners’ to generate new ideational forms – spirit voices, designs, patuki – that give weight to the producer’s claims to be seen as socially significant to others. That is, it is the potential future in terms of relationships to other people (as Harrison notes for Melanesian economies in general [1992: 235]), through the power of ideational forms to generate a productive and attractive appearance, that are the object of ownership there.

Anthropological Accounts and the Genealogical Model I have covered in depth elsewhere (Leach 2003) the difficulties produced by approaching this material through the analytic assumptions embedded in the genealogical model. That model is incapable of accommodating the idea that kinship can be knowledge, that knowledge could exist as the substance that connects people. It sounds absurd. The fact that connections and relations are modelled on pedigree

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and the representational image of the family tree, impedes recognition of profound and significant differences in how people relate to one another. It is because we can apparently map relations so easily onto genealogy that the model has such salience, but this may well have been something of a disaster. Schneider (1980 [1968]) established long ago that the genealogical model is a socially specific rendering of connection, an ethnographically specific mode of imagining relatedness. As a version of our own rendering (although see Edwards this volume) it is unsurprising that it should have such a pervasive organisational influence for us. The famous follow-up to Schneider’s ethnographic demonstration, his Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), was phrased in terms of culture. Knowing others’ culture through our culture, as if these were the only points of meaningful comparison, quickly appeared to render the enterprise futile. But we might say that in this expression of futility, the reality of the genealogical model was reinscribed, even as it was apparently undermined. While as analysts we could not study ‘kinship’ (there being no objective basis on which to compare systems), as members of Euro-American society we could not do without our culture of genealogy. The infinite regress, highlighted by Schneider, of imagining knowledge as only knowing itself has been countered, in some recent kinship studies, by what Latour has called ‘particular universalism’. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (this volume) argues that particular universalism – the tolerance of difference at the level of epistemology, which conceals an intolerance at the level of ontological difference – has crept back, more or less explicitly, into the way kinship is now discussed in anthropology. Relatedness is about what people do on the back of their biological being. Relatedness is culture. Processes of relatedness then are construction; process is flexibility, choice and creativity. But it is not constitution, and one can discern here the persistence of thinking in the mode of the genealogical model. Thus the outcome of the focus on kinship as Western cultural construction has perversely resulted in a reinscription of the notion that human beings are everywhere biological beings with the capacity for culture. Culture would equate to knowledge in the above. And this brings the absurdity. People may share culture, but it never makes them kin. In genealogical thinking, creativity (the artifice of culture) is separated from the process of physical becoming, valued and validated as a contingent extra to the mechanistic recombination of elements, in novel forms, through what Ingold has described as the dual interplay of chance and necessity in nature or biology (Ingold 1986).

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Why should kinship theorists turn to choice, creativity and construction in the face of challenges to the apparent rigidity and naturalism of the genealogical model? It may well be because the correct conditions for recognizing personhood in this logic – control over the object world by the thinking subject – are thus fulfilled. Nature provides the basis (genealogical connection); culture orders it creatively. This powerful but implicit organization of knowledge and understanding becomes very apparent as one comes to understand the place of land and knowledge in relation to persons on the Rai Coast. In that area as in many others, people’s relations to land could be seen as something not very interesting. Land and environment have been relegated to the realm of subsistence economics; they are discussed in terms of property ownership, or as a resource out of which the representational edifice of cultural symbolism is constructed. However, it is clear that people’s relationships to land, and to the history of human relationality as inscribed in localities, are fundamental to how they operate in terms of what we would want to call ‘kinship’. What is fundamental to Reite villagers, and therefore what I feel I ought to describe, is obscured by the assumptions of the genealogical model. Below are two statements made by Reite people in the context of disputes over marriage and exchange. Although not amounting to an argument in their own right, put alongside the arguments already outlined they demonstrate these people’s understanding of blood and connection as land-based. These comments came in the context of the ethnographer following up disputes and pushing for specifics on the ‘meaning’ of the term asurung (‘blood’, or what connects people) for these people (Leach 2003: 117–18). In 2001, Palota Konga, from the hamlet of Sarangama/Kumundung, made the following statement to me: When I organized the bride payments for my wife Moita, my neighbours in Sarangama who were eligible to receive these payments (because of their close ties to her origin hamlet) said, ‘But we live close by, and we cannot eat your payments’. This is how we always do things. Having ‘one door’ is a big thing for us, follow your mother, or follow your father [in reckoning connection], but locate yourself with one shared door, make a palem, you make yourselves the same now. It is our foundational understanding. I live with someone, it will be hard for that person with me to eat [pig, that is, accept exchange payments from me]. We share things, and then we also accept decorative valuables in payment? This is not correct as we feel things. That

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is [our] custom. If I reside with [them], we should help, not receive [from them]. Blood runs out. Your sister goes in marriage to another place and bears her children. Do they have your blood or not? They [your sister] travels to another place and another blood emerges from them.4

Whereas kinship studies in the area have run into difficulties because they assume that land is a substrate upon which the important relations of society work to order people’s activities and associations, Reite people show that the incorporation of land and places (through their generation of knowledge in the form of kaapu and patuki, designs and melodies, procedures for growing crops, etc., which actually animate and differentiate people) into a history of social relations is fundamental to social organisation. Reckoning kinship, inheritance and identity from procreation itself is not part of this complex.

Cognatic Kinship The Rai Coast is an area famous for the complexity of cognatic kinship (Lawrence 1955, 1965, 1984; Leach 1965). But I now believe that the notion of cognation itself is a red herring in this case. Cognation means connected to both maternal and paternal lineages through ties established by procreation. The complexity of Rai Coast kinship was explained through this genealogical model. Connection was imagined as ramifying because it was bilateral. The idea that each person was specific because of the knowledge they share or do not share with others is difficult to entertain on the basis of the assumptions behind the description ‘cognatic kinship’. Why is that the case? To start with, we need to split apart the connection between the sharing of substance (which Reite people do describe) and genealogical connection. It is the combination of these that lies at the heart of conventional kinship theory (Carsten 2000). As I have argued (Leach 1997, 2003), drawing upon dialogues with Ingold (2000), even an innocent-looking kinship diagram has built into it the assumption that the essence of a person is received, by transmission, at the point of conception. Each line in the diagram depicts a channel for the transmission of this essence. It follows from this assumption that a person’s essence is given ahead of his or her growth. Growth is conceived of as an autonomous development that serves merely to ‘express’ or ‘bring out’ what is already present

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(the received essence). As Ingold points out, this is precisely in line with the structure of modern biological theory with its genotype/ phenotype distinction. It is assumed that what is ‘passed on’, through genealogical lines of transmission, is a context-independent specification of the organism-to-be. (Noting the connections of the model with other disciplines, and thus tracing a field of influence in which the genealogical model has a central place, is a major aim of this volume.) However, against both biological theory and conventional kinship studies, the crux of my analysis of Reite is that human beings are grown, and that in their growth they draw substance from the land. People share substance, and are therefore connected, because they have grown in the same land. Knowledge, with the effective action based upon it, is the form that this substance takes. Growth does not take place in isolation, but in what I have called a field of nurture dependent upon others knowing a place and its history, possibilities, forms. Critically, this field is constituted in the work of other people; hence knowledge is a social relation and an essence shared by people of a particular place. It is mutable despite being an essence. The essence is of a shared positioning. It is thus open, rather than closed, yet nonetheless foundational for that. Such a perspective is fundamentally contrary to the genealogical model. To draw a line from father to son (in a kinship diagram) and say that this is a kinship connection is meaningless in Reite, for the role of the father is not to pass on some component of substance to the son (cf. Bamford this volume) but – through his work – to establish the conditions for the latter’s growth on the land. Growth here is not merely expressive, it is generative. Thus notions of ancestry, descent and the transmission of substance should be replaced by the notion of regeneration in this case. In the genealogical model, the land may be viewed as a kind of container in (or on) which life goes on. It holds life, but it is in no way constitutive of it. Life itself is equated with what is inside, with the transmitted essence received at the point of conception. Thus the land, being external to life, is inanimate. But Reite people operate their generative sociality with the principle that the land has a voice, that its power is manifested as spirit voices and that these things are integral to the growing of persons. The land is very much alive and enters directly into the constitution of persons. The relation between land and person is not one of containment, with the land outside and the essence of the person inside, but of integration. What ‘essence’ becomes in such cases is a fascinating question, and one I am answering here by asserting that essence is knowledge. As

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such, essence is mutable and transforming, as well as transformative. To use genealogical models for analysing social organization is to import an assumption of an immutable biological basis of relatedness and difference. As theorists, we imagine that kin terms amount to variable ways of ordering a base reality of procreation and affiliation (through society). The issue of marriage among Reite people highlights these assumptions. Many people in these hamlets marry people described as ‘too close’, that is, they marry their parents or siblings. It seems ‘incest’ is common. But it is at least possible that, if we say kinship is related to the spatial distribution of particular generative networks, then ‘too close’ means something radically different from incest. The notion of incest relies upon proximity in terms of genealogy, not geography. Reite kinship relies on geographical proximity. In a case such as that of Reite people, kinship theory reliant upon the assumptions of a genealogical model would ask, ‘What relation does “true” genealogy have to the social definition of genealogy in a kinship terminology? Do people marry their actual mothers, or “just” classificatory ones?’ These dualisms were first addressed by Lewis Henry Morgan over a century ago (Morgan 1870). They were also the basis of the analysis of kinship in this region as ‘cognatic’. In this cognatic system, the socio-cultural principles that added to biological specification needed to be added by the analyst of society to explain association and marriage. But these additions were so complex as to be virtually useless in this case (see Strathern 1992a). I suggest as an alternative that the source of the problem lies in an assumption that Reite people patently do not make, namely, that classification is about entities. This partakes of a notion of essence as internal to the identity of entities. Our model of classification assumes that a priori entities need to be grouped together, classified. Differentiation is given by biology. Thus the project of classification arises through recognition of the essence, or nature (biology), of the pre-given entity. However, Reite assumptions are very different. Changing definitions of the person depend on where they reside and which relationships they are constituted within. Thus when Reite people use kinship names in their speech, these usages are not classificatory or taxonomic, but are part of the process by which persons are made to appear, in the perception of others, as standing in a certain relationship (of wife, say, rather than sister). The relationship does not follow from pre-recognition of the person as of a certain biologically or genealogically defined type. Reite people assume a person’s definition as an aspect of a process in which change oc-

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curs. I think we are called upon to think of the social as the ontological in this case. I am concerned that I not be read as conflating “‘social’ relation”, as I use it here, with ‘constructed’ or with ‘optional’. While (social) process appears to threaten the notion of structure, employing the social as an alternative to what is given in nature serves only to reinforce the analytic necessity of describing what flexibility can be judged against. Hence the genealogical definition of kinship as a given structure is maintained. The results of people’s choices appear against the system, while constructed kinship itself appears against the background of biological givens. ‘Kinship’, in the context of the social as the ontological and definition that occurs in ongoing processes of generation, cannot be separated from other creative endeavour, from the processes whereby persons and places come into being. Such production is also the dissolution of other reifications, of other structures and entities, including persons and previous definitions of them. This description, and all the possible implications of allowing that constitutive relations can occur between persons and land, has been fashioned throughout this chapter in opposition to the ‘reality’ of genealogical modelling of connection.

Notes 1. Leach (1999) contains photographs of torr posts, and also recordings of tambaran performances. 2. This ground is covered extensively, among other places, in Strathern (1992a) and Leach (2003). 3. These are powerful forms of love magic. 4. Mi wokim samting bilong Moita, ol lain long Sarangama ol bilong kaikai bilong Moita, tasol ol save tok, mipela istap wantaim, na mipela ino inup long kaikai. Mipela wokim olsem olgeta taim. Wandur em bikpela samting behainim mama, o behainim papa, tasol sindaun long wanpela dur, wokim palem, yupela kamap wanpela nau. Em bikpela as tingting bilong mipela. Mi sindaun wantaim, em bai hat long man istap wantaim bai kaikai. Mipela save senisim samting wantaim, na mipela gerup ken na kisim pe bilas bilong en, em ino stret long felim bilong mipela. Disela em kastom. Sapos mi sindaun klostu, em bai mipela helpim na no inup kaikai. Blut save go sot tasol – susa bilong yu igo long narapela ples na ol pikinini bilong en bai gat blut o nogat? Em bai go long narapela ples na narapela blut kamap long en.

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References Barnes, J.A. 1962. ‘African Models in the New Guinea Highlands’, Man 62: 5–9. Bateson, G. 1936. Naven. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press Carsten, J. (ed.). 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, S. 1992. ‘Ritual as Intellectual Property’, Man (n.s.) 27(2): 225–44. Ingold. T. 1986. Evolution and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Küchler, S. 1992. ‘Making Skins: Malangan and the Idiom of Kinship in Northern New Ireland’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon. Latour, B. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Boston: MIT Press, pp. 14–41. Lawrence, P. 1955. Land Tenure among the Garia. Canberra: Australian National University. ———. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1965. ‘The Ngiang of the Rai Coast’, in P. Lawrence and M. Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 198–223. ———. 1984. The Garia: An Ethnography of a Traditional Cosmic System in Papua New Guinea. Carleton: Melbourne University Press. Leach, E. 1965. ‘Review of Lawrence (1955)’, Man 56: 32–33. Leach, J. 1997. ‘The Creative Land: Kinship and Landscape in Madang Province in Papua New Guinea’, Ph.D. dissertation. Manchester: University of Manchester. ———. 1999. ‘Singing the Forest: Spirit, Place and Evocation among Reite Villagers of Papua New Guinea’, Resonance (Journal of the London Musicians Collective) 7(2): 24–28. ———. 2000. ‘Situated Connections: Rights and Intellectual Resources in a Rai Coast Society’, Social Anthropology 8(2): 163–79. ———. 2002. ‘Drum and Voice: Aesthetics and Social Process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(4):713–34. ———. 2003. Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

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———. 2004. ‘Modes of Creativity’, in E. Hirsch and M. Strathern (eds), Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia. Pp. 151–175. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Leach, J. and P. Nombo, Reite Plants. An Ethno-botanical Study, Canberra: ANU Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs Series. 2008. Mimica, J. 1991. ‘The Incest Passions: An Outline of the Logic of Iqwaye Social Organisation’, Oceania 61(1 and 2): 34–58 and 80–113. Morgan, L.H. 1870. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Schneider, D.M. 1980 [1968]. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Engelwood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Strathern, A. 1973. ‘Kinship, Descent and Locality: Some New Guinea Examples’, in J. Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–33. Strathern, M. 1992a. ‘Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships in a PostPlural World’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualising Society. London: Routledge, pp. 75–104. ———. 1992b. Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weiner, J. 1988. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimensions of Foi Sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press. This article draws upon material also discussed in the article, ‘Situated Connections: Rights and Intellectual Resources in a Rai Coast Society’, published in Social Anthropology in 2000.

Chapter 8

STORIES

AGAINST

CLASSIFICATION

TRANSPORT, WAYFARING AND THE INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE Tim Ingold

The Genealogy and the Classification Human beings are supremely knowledgeable creatures. That much is obvious. It is not so obvious, however, how they come to know what they do. By all accounts, without such knowledge they would be helpless. Nonhuman animals seem to know instinctively what to do in any circumstances they would normally encounter. But human beings are apparently born with a deficit, a gap – as Clifford Geertz once put it – ‘between what our body tells us and what we have to know in order to function’ (1973: 50). This gap, Geertz goes on to tell us, is filled by culture, a corpus of information containing all the essential guidelines for a certain way to live and distinguished by the fact that it is passed on from one generation to the next by some mechanism other than genetic replication. It is, in other words, acquired rather than innate. This is not to say that by comparison with its human cousins, the nonhuman animal learns nothing. Every organism lives and grows in an environment, and at any stage of development, environmental impacts can prompt it to follow one course rather than another. The animal’s learning could be described as the developmental outcome of a series of responses

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to such prompts. It is in this sense – to adopt Peter Medawar’s terms (1960: 90–94) – an ‘elective’ process. The acquisition of culture, by contrast, is ‘instructive’. That is to say, it is a matter not of the environmental steering of development along one of a number of possible routes, but of the installation of those programmes without which normal development could not take place at all (Ingold 1986: 357–59). The picture I have just presented is widely accepted in mainstream science. Though debates continue about whether cultural learning is truly unique to humans or more widely distributed in the animal kingdom, few doubt that its overwhelming importance for humans is unmatched in any other species. There are debates, too, about the extent to which the forms of acquired culture are constrained by the psychological mechanisms, presumed innate, that make this acquisition possible (Sperber 1996). But again, these debates have no bearing on the fundamental logic of the argument. This is that human beings are universally equipped, thanks to their evolutionary heritage, with a suite of capacities – for language, for reasoning, for symbolic imagination – which are then filled in the lifetime of every individual, especially during the early years, with variable cultural content. Since the capacities have to be in place in advance of the content to be received into them, they must be built according to specifications that are transmitted genetically, as must all those other characteristics that make us creatures of a manifestly human kind. Cultural content, on the other hand, is said to be transmitted by non-genetic means, by which is usually meant some form of observational learning that leads to the replication, in the minds of novices, of representations guiding the conduct of already knowledgeable practitioners. Equipped with these representations, freshly enculturated individuals can go forth into the world where they will encounter diverse environmental conditions, causing their knowledge to be ‘expressed’ in one way or another, in the subtle variations and idiosyncrasies of observed behaviour. One fundamental assumption, however, underlies this argument. It is embedded in the very metaphor of transmission by which we so readily describe the twin processes of biological and cultural reproduction. The metaphor implies that information is being ‘passed along’ (D’Andrade 1981: 179) the lines of descent linking successive generations. It is supposed that in biological reproduction this information is encoded in genetic material, whereas in cultural reproduction it is encoded in words and symbols. In both cases, however, we are required to assume that the information can be ‘read off’

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from the materials by which it is conveyed, by means of decoding rules that are independent of the specific environmental contexts in which it is applied. In biology this assumption underwrites the distinction between genotype and phenotype. The genotype is imagined as the covert specification of an organism-to-be, built out of elements passed down the line from ancestors and installed through genetic replication at its point of inception; the phenotype is the manifest form of the organism as it is subsequently realized through a lifehistory of growth and development within a particular environment. Using precisely the same logic, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd distinguish between the ‘phenotype of a cultural organism … and its “culture-type”, the cultural message that the organism received from individuals of the same species’ (1978: 128). The culture-type is established through a process of instruction, which ensures that the informational content of the message is copied into the heads of novices. The phenotype, in turn, is the outcome of an elective process: it is the manifest behaviour that results when already copied representations are applied in specific environmental circumstances (see Figure 8.1). This is where ‘knowledge’, in Geertz’s terms, gives way to

FIGURE 8.1: The dual inheritance model of genetic and cultural transmission. Both the genotype (G) and the ‘culture-type’ (C) are established through the replication of elements handed down from previous generations. Together they specify the individual in its essential constitution (inner circle). The phenotype (P, outer circle) is then the expression of this constitution within an environment (E). Adapted from Diener et al. (1980: 12).

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‘functioning’. The assumption, then, is that individuals are specified in their essential genetic and cultural constitution – as genotype and culture-type – independently and in advance of their life in the world, through the bestowal of attributes from ancestors.1 And this assumption lies at the very core of the genealogical model. Let us run with this model a little further, to see where it leads. My concern, in particular, is with what it implies about the nature of cultural knowledge. Evidently, to the extent that knowledge is passed down the line from ancestors, it cannot have its source in the experience of inhabiting particular places or their surroundings. An individual’s genealogical position, after all, is fixed without regard for where he lives or what he does in life. One implication of the genealogical model, therefore, is that knowledge already acquired is imported into the contexts of practical engagement with the environment. What kind of knowledge of the environment, then, can preexist such engagement? It must, in essence, be categorical. That is to say, it must permit the isolation of discrete phenomena as objects of attention from the contexts in which they occur, and the identification of these objects as of a certain kind on the basis of intrinsic attributes that are invariant across contexts. In short, the content of the message that is supposedly transmitted across generations by nongenetic means is tantamount to a system of classification. To function in the world, or so the argument goes, you have first to know what you are dealing with, and to know what you are dealing with you have to be able to assimilate every object you encounter to the idea of a class of objects sharing the same characteristics. This idea is a concept. Thus conceptual knowledge is classificatory knowledge. It operates by fitting particulars encountered at ‘ground level’ into classes of progressively higher order, working ‘upwards’ from the most specific to the most general. Such knowledge, we could say, is vertically integrated. But if the genealogical model implies a transmission of vertically integrated, classificatory knowledge, the reverse also holds. That is, the project of classification, combined with a principle of transmission by descent, generates the genealogical model. Common to both are the familiar tree diagrams of taxonomy, with higher-order categories at the top splitting up at lower levels into ever finer divisions. In both, things are identified on the basis of specifications that are intrinsic and invariant to each. Where it is further supposed, as in the case of living things, that every individual derives the essential specifications of its constitution by descent, the taxonomic tree – for example, of orders, genera and species – readily translates into a ge-

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nealogical one (Ingold 2000: 138–39). In sum, the genealogical model and the classificatory project are mutually reinforcing: each entails the other. One holds that the knowledge we receive from our ancestors, which enables us to function, comprises a system of concepts for classifying the objects we encounter in the world. The other, in seeking to classify living things (including human beings) in terms of transmitted attributes, converts the resulting taxonomy into a genealogy. Indeed, whether we start with the one or the other, it seems that we are caught in a loop from which there is no escape. In what follows, however, I want to suggest a way out. I shall argue that the genealogical model offers an inadequate and unrealistic account of how human beings come to know what they do. By the same token, I contend that knowledge is not classificatory. It is rather storied.

Classificatory Knowledge and Storied Knowledge This contrast can best be introduced by way of a distinction, proposed by David Rubin (1988), between what he calls ‘complexstructure’ and ‘complex-process’ metaphors. Rubin is specifically concerned with the ways we talk about memory, but his argument applies more generally to the understanding of knowledge and its formation. We could say, adopting the complex-structure metaphor, that knowledge takes the form of a comprehensive configuration of mental representations that has been copied into the mind of the individual, through some mechanism of replication, even before he or she steps forth into the environment. The application of this knowledge in practice is, then, a simple and straightforward process of sorting and matching, so as to establish a homology between structures in the mind and structures in the world. A complex-process metaphor, on the other hand, would lead us to prioritize the practice of knowing over the property of knowledge. Rather than supposing that people apply their knowledge in practice, we would be more inclined to say that they know by way of their practice (Kurttila and Ingold 2001: 191–92) – that is, through an ongoing engagement, in perception and action, with the constituents of their environment. Thus, far from being copied, ready-made, into the mind in advance of its encounter with the world, knowledge is perpetually ‘under construction’ within the field of relations established through the immersion of the actor-perceiver in a certain environmental context. Knowledge, in this view, is not transmitted

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as a complex structure but is the ever-emergent product of a complex process. It is not so much replicated as reproduced.2 With its presumptions about the replication and transmission of complex, classified information, the genealogical model is clearly locked in a metaphorical frame of the complex-structure kind. Yet as Rubin (1988: 375) shows, whatever can be explained through a complex-structure approach can, in principle, be just as well explained through an approach that emphasizes the complexity of process. Were we to adopt such an approach, what could be said about knowledge and its integration? The answer hinges on how the idea of process is itself to be understood. In the language of complex structure, typical of mainstream cognitive psychology, the verb ‘to process’ is generally used in a transitive sense to refer to what the mind is supposed to do to the raw material of bodily sensation. Thus the cognitive ‘processing’ of sensory data is equivalent to their sorting by the categories of a received classification. In every case it begins with an object in the world and ends with its representation in the mind. In terms of the complex process metaphor, however, knowing does not lie in the establishment of a correspondence between the world and its representation, but is rather immanent in the life and consciousness of the knower as it unfolds within the field of practice set up through his or her presence as a being-in-theworld (Ingold 2001: 143). This unfolding is the complex process to which the metaphor refers. Here, ‘to process’ is understood in an intransitive sense. Like life itself, it does not begin here or end there, but is continually going on. It is equivalent to the very movement – the processing – of the whole person, indivisibly body and mind, through the lifeworld. The claim that processing involves movement is critical (Ingold 2000: 18). It implies that knowledge is integrated not by fitting isolated particulars encountered here and there into categorical frameworks of ever wider generality, but by going around in an environment. The point has been well made by David Turnbull. ‘All knowing’, he writes, ‘is like travelling, like a journey between the parts of a matrix’ (Turnbull 1991: 35). That matrix is, in effect, a tangled mesh of paths of coming and going, laid down by people as they make their way from place to place. Of course, not even the advocates of a complex-structure approach would deny that people move about. But from their point of view, these movements are entirely ancillary to the process by which knowledge is integrated, serving merely to transport the individual from one stationary locus of observation to another. It is then supposed that the data collected and extracted

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from each locus are inputted to higher processing centres in the mind, where they are sorted and assembled within an overarching system of classification that is indifferent to the contexts in which they were encountered. From a complex-process perspective, by contrast, movement is knowing. The integration of knowledge, in short, does not take place ‘up’ the levels of a classificatory hierarchy, but ‘along’ the paths that take people from place to place within the matrix of their travelling. One way of putting this would be to say that for the inhabitants of the lifeworld, knowledge is not vertically but alongly integrated.3 I have already shown that the epitome of vertically integrated knowledge is the classification. Our next step is to show that the epitome of alongly integrated knowledge is the story. In a classification, as we have seen, every entity is slotted into place on the basis of intrinsic characteristics that are given quite independently of the context in which it is encountered, and of its relations with the things that presently surround it, that preceded its appearance, or that follow it into the world. In a story, by contrast, it is precisely by this context and these relations that every element is identified and positioned. Thus stories always, and inevitably, connect what classifications divide. Another way of expressing the same contrast would be in terms of a distinction suggested by the physicist David Bohm (1980). The world according to classification is what Bohm would call an explicate order, in which every thing is what it is due to its own given nature, and is connected to other things only through an external contact that leaves this nature unaffected. Thus we need not attend to the connections to know what things are, for what they are is specified independently of what they do, and only in what they do – in their functioning – do things connect. In the genealogical model, this same principle is extended to living things, in the distinction between genotype and phenotype, and to persons, in the distinction between transmitted culture and manifest behaviour. The storied world, by contrast, is an implicate order in Bohm’s terms. It is a world of movement and becoming, in which any thing – caught at a particular place and moment – enfolds within its constitution the history of relations that have brought it there. In such a world, we can understand the nature of things only by attending to their relations, or in other words, by telling their stories. Indeed, the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world, things do not exist, they occur. Where things meet, occurrences intertwine, as each becomes bound up in the other’s story.

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Every such binding is a place or topic (see Example A). It is in this binding that knowledge is generated. To know someone or something is to know their story, and to be able to join that story to one’s own. Yet of course, people grow in knowledge not only through direct encounters with others, but also through hearing their stories told (Example B). To tell a story is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past, bringing them to life in the vivid present of listeners as if they were going on here and now. Here the meaning of the ‘relation’ has to be understood quite literally, not as a connection between predetermined entities, but as the retracing of a path through the terrain of lived experience. Making their way from place to place in the company of others more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices learn to connect the events and experiences of their own lives to the lives of predecessors, recursively picking up the strands of these past lives in the process of spinning out their own. But rather as in looping or knitting, the strand being spun now and the strand picked up from the past are both of the same yarn (Figure 8.2). There is no point at which the story ends and life begins. Stories should not end for the same reason that life should not (see Example C). And in the story as in life, it is in the movement from place to place – or from topic to topic – that knowledge is integrated.

FIGURE 8.2: Story and life. In storytelling, past occurrences are drawn into present experience. The lived present, however, is not set off from the past of the story. Rather, past and present are continuous.

EXAMPLE A

Among the people of Kandingei, on the Middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, the most important man in every group keeps a knotted cord – some six to eight metres long and three centimetres thick – that is said to represent the primal migration in which the founder of the clan, following in the path of a crocodile, journeyed from place to place. Each large knot in the cord, into which is woven a dried piece of betel-nut shell, represents a primal place, while the smaller knots preceding it stand for the secret names of the totem dwelling in that place. In important ceremonies, the cord’s owner lets it run through his fingers, rather as though he were handling a

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rosary, ‘singing’ each place and its associated totems. Thus the movement of slipping the cord through the fingers retraces the movement of the clan founder as he journeyed from one settlement to the next. In mortuary ceremonies, it also retraces the movement of the ghost who is travelling to the land of the dead on a grass island that becomes temporarily anchored to one spot after another along the way. Just as each anchorage on the ghost’s journey is a place, so every corresponding knot on the cord is a topic, binding the respective trajectories of the ancestral crocodile, the totems of each place, and the clans that live there (Wassmann 1991: 54–59, 114). The knotted cord is perhaps the perfect exemplar of alongly integrated knowledge. EXAMPLE B

Among the Koyukon of Alaska, many animals are known by their stories. These stories tell of the Distant Time before the various inhabitants of the earth had become unequivocally differentiated as either animal or human. In their present lives, the animals continue to reenact their stories. One such story concerns a fish, the longnose sucker. Its Koyukon name translates as ‘bad man in the water’. In the Distant Time, sucker-man was a thief who went around stealing a motley assortment of things. He stole a pair of moose antlers, two duck’s feet, two little combs, and a tree stump, packing away all the loot into his head. But there was no room left for a bunch of needles that he had also stolen, so when sucker-man became a fish, the needles became the bones of his tail-fin. All the other objects, however, were turned into the odd collection of bones that are still to be found in the sucker’s skull. As people eat the boiled fish, an elder will pick out the skull bones, finding each of the items that suckerman stole, and telling the story as he proceeds. It is a moral tale, about the impropriety of taking other people’s things. Sucker was a bad man. Indeed, for this very reason some people prefer not to eat the fish, lest they should acquire something of its thieving personality (Nelson 1983: 75–76). This kind of concern becomes much easier to understand once we recall that in the world of the Koyukon, beings – whether human or nonhuman – do not come with their essential attributes already predetermined but rather enfold, at any moment in time, a past history of growth and movement within a field of relationships with others. Eating an animal contributes directly to the growth of the person; through this act the animal’s story, indeed the very trajectory of its life, merges into and becomes one with the life of the eater. So when you eat a longnose

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sucker, the sucker’s story becomes your own as well. Its thieving past becomes part of your own past, and as such is liable to affect your future development. EXAMPLE C

In a recent conference, the Russian anthropologist Natalia Novikova introduced a paper on the meaning of self-determination for the Khanty people of western Siberia, by telling us how old Khanty storytellers would keep going in the evenings until everyone else was asleep, so that no one would know how they really finished (Novikova 2002: 83). The Khanty word usually translated as ‘story’ literally means a ‘way’. What is important for Khanty people today, as for the storytellers of old, is that this way should have no final destination. Self-determination should not mean having a future mapped out in advance, but ensuring that wherever people are, they have the possibility of carrying on.

Transport and Wayfaring Precisely because storied knowledge is open-ended rather than closed off, because it merges into life in an active process of remembering rather than being set aside as a passive object of memory, it is not transmitted. That is to say, it is not passed on as a compendium of information from one generation to the next, but rather subsists in the current of life and consciousness. No one has put this better than V.N. Volosinov, in his masterpiece of 1929, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Language, Volosinov argued, is not tossed like a ball from generation to generation. It endures, ‘but it endures as a continuous process of becoming. Individuals do not receive a readymade language at all, rather they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate’ (1973 [1929]: 81). As with language in particular, so with knowledge in general: what is carried on is the process and not its more or less ephemeral products. We cannot therefore regard knowledge along the lines of the genealogical model, as a kind of heritable property that comes into the possession of an individual as a legacy from his or her ancestors. To be sure, the expert is more knowledgeable than the novice. What distinguishes them, however, is not a greater accumulation of mental content – as though with every increment of learning yet more representations were packed inside the head – but a greater sensitivity

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to cues in the environment and a greater capacity to respond to these cues with judgment and precision. The difference, if you will, is not one of how much you know but of how well you know. Those who know well are able to tell. They can tell not only in the sense of being able to recount the stories of the world, but also in the sense of having a finely tuned perceptual awareness of their surroundings. Thus knowing is relating the world around you, and the better you know, the greater the clarity and depth of your perception. To tell, in short, is not to represent the world but to trace a path through it that others can follow. Of course anthropologists have long recognized the educative functions of storytelling among people the world over. But they have been wrong to treat stories as vehicles for the intergenerational transmission of encoded messages that, once deciphered, would reveal an all-embracing system of conceptual categories. Stories do not, as a rule, come with their meanings already attached, nor do they mean the same for different people. What they mean is rather something that listeners have to discover for themselves, by placing them in the context of their own life histories.4 In fact, it may not be until long after a story has been told that its meaning is revealed, when we find ourselves retracing the very same path that the story relates. Then, and only then, does the story offer guidance on how to proceed. Evidently, as Volosinov said of language, people do not acquire their knowledge ready-made, but rather grow into it, through a process of what might best be called ‘guided rediscovery’. The process is rather like that of following trails through a landscape: each story will take us so far, until we come across another that will take us further. I refer to this trail-following as wayfaring. And my thesis, in a nutshell, is that it is through wayfaring, not transmission, that knowledge is carried on. It is usual to say of the people of a culture that they follow a ‘way of life’. More often than not, this is taken to mean a prescribed code of conduct, sanctioned by tradition, that individuals are bound to observe in their day-to-day behaviour. The task of the wayfarer, however, is not to act out a script received from predecessors but literally to negotiate a path through the world (Ingold 2000: 146–47; Kurttila and Ingold 2001: 192). Thus the way of life is a path to be followed, along which one can keep on going rather than reaching a dead end or getting caught in a loop of ever-repeating cycles. Indeed, ‘keeping going’ may involve a good measure of creative improvisation. It is in following this path – in their movement along a way of life – that people grow into knowledge. Perhaps an analogy might be drawn in the plant world, with the growth of roots and

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runners that trail behind their ever-advancing tips as the latter grope for a path through the tangle of vegetation above or below the soil (see Example D). I want to draw on this analogy to make an emphatic distinction between wayfaring and transport (Figure 8.3). By transport I mean the displacement or carrying across of an already constituted, self-contained entity from one location to another, rather like the ‘move’, in draughts or chess, of a piece across the board. This is how all movement is understood in the terms of the genealogical model. In wayfaring, by contrast, things are instantiated in the world as their paths of movement, not as objects located in space (see Example E). They are their stories. Here it is the movement itself that counts, not the destinations it connects. Wayfaring always overshoots its destinations, since wherever you may be at any particular moment, you are already on your way somewhere else.

FIGURE 8.3: Wayfaring (above) and transport (below). In transport, a preconstituted entity is displaced laterally across a surface, from one location to another. In wayfaring, the thing is a movement along in the world, creating itself endlessly in the process.

EXAMPLE D

Batek women from Pahang, Malaysia, according to Tuck Po Lye (1997: 159), say that the roots of wild tubers ‘walk’, as humans and other animals do. This idea may seem odd to us, but only because we assimilate walking to the idea of transport, as though each of us inhabited a body that – by means of a mechanism of bipedal locomotion – ‘walked’ us from point to point. For the Batek, however, walking is a matter of wayfaring, of laying down a path as one goes along. And this is exactly what roots do as they make their way through the soil. The walker’s trail, and the trailing root, are phenomena of the same kind. As Lye observes for the Batek, ‘like the roots of the rhizome, [trails] integrate diverse elements of the forest and serve as passageways for the ongoing experiences of people’ (Lye: 166).

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EXAMPLE E

In his contemplation on the Arctic, Playing Dead (1989), the Canadian writer Rudy Weibe compares native Inuit understandings of movement and travel over land or sea ice with those of the sailors of the Royal Navy in their maritime search for the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient. For the Inuit, as soon as a person moves, he (or she) becomes a line. To hunt for an animal, or to find another human being who may be lost, one lays one line of tracks across the expanse, looking for signs of another line of motion that would lead to the objective. Thus the entire country is perceived as a mesh of lines rather than a continuous surface. The British sailors, however, ‘accustomed to the fluid, trackless seas moved in terms of area’ (1989: 16). The vessel, supplied for the voyage before setting sail, was conceived as a moving dot upon the surface of the sea, its position always located by latitude and longitude. The Inuit, of course, are wayfarers. The ships of the Royal Navy, by contrast, were engaged in transport. To this distinction between wayfaring and transport there corresponds an important difference in our understanding of the world in which movement occurs. The definitive feature of the genealogical model, as I have shown, is that every living thing is specified in its essential nature through the bestowal of attributes passed down along lines of descent, independently and in advance of its placement in the world. It follows that the world is presented to life as surface to be occupied – as empty space – at once continuous, homogenous and finite in extent. Characteristically, this surface is represented as a globe. There is an essential complementarity between the genealogical modelling of life as a tree and the geographical modelling of the world as a globe, and it is no surprise that the two so regularly occur together in the canons of modern thought (Ingold 2000: 217). Where the tree classifies things according to their natures, on the globe they are indexed according to their locations. Each such location is specified independently of the things that are found there, just as each thing is specified independently of where it has been or where it is currently found. Suppose that I find object X at location A. Then X will be a member of a class, whereas A will be a point in space. In a system of transport, these points are connected by lines, each of which is equivalent to a ‘move’ that could take X from location A to another location B. They are like the lines of marine navigation or on an air traffic route map. Thus while clas-

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sification arranges things vertically into a hierarchy of taxonomic categories, transport links locations laterally in a network of pointto-point connections. To the classificatory knowledge of things there corresponds, therefore, a networked knowledge of locations. The first gives us the opposition between the particular and the general, the second the opposition between the local and the global. But the storied knowledge of the wayfarer is neither vertically nor laterally integrated. It is not hierarchical, like a classification, nor is it ‘flat’ or planar, like a network. The world is not presented to wayfarers as a surface to be traversed, for in their movements, they thread their way through this world rather than routing across it from point to point. Of course the wayfarer is a terrestrial being, and must perforce travel over the land.5 The surfaces of the land, however, are in the world, not of it (Ingold 2000: 241). And woven into the very texture of these surfaces are the lines of growth and movement of living beings. What they form is not a network of point-to-point connections but a tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands. This mesh is indeed something like a net in its original sense of an open-work fabric of interlaced or knotted cords. But through its metaphorical extension to the realms of modern transport and communications, and especially information technology, the meaning of ‘the net’ has changed. We are now more inclined to think of it as a complex of interconnected points than of interwoven lines. For this reason I find it necessary to distinguish between network and meshwork, corresponding to the distinction I have already drawn between transport and wayfaring (Figure 8.4). The key to this distinction is the recognition that the lines of the meshwork are not connectors but rather the paths along which life is lived and knowledge integrated. Or in a word, they are stories. And it is in the binding together of lines, not in the connecting of points, that the mesh is constituted. Storied knowledge, in short, is neither classificatory nor networked. It is meshworked.

The Genealogical Line Every organism, the philosopher Henri Bergson argued in his Creative Evolution of 1911, is cast like an eddy in the current of life. Yet so well does it feign immobility that we are readily deceived into treating it ‘as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement’. In truth, Bergson declared, ‘the living being is, above all, a thorough-

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FIGURE 8.4: The meshwork of entangled lines (above) and the network of connected points (below).

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fare’ (1911: 135). It would be wrong, therefore, to compare the organism to an object, for ‘the organism that lives is a thing that endures’. Like a growing root, it creates itself endlessly, trailing its history behind it as ‘the past presses against the present’ (1911: 16, 29). By the middle of the twentieth century, Bergson’s vision of evolution, as a meshwork of intertwined thoroughfares along which organisms follow their respective ways of life, had been comprehensively discredited. A resurgent Darwinism had dismissed the key idea of the vital force, élan vital, as a metaphysical delusion that could in no way account, as Bergson had claimed, for the creation of novel forms. In its place, however, it substituted the equally metaphysical concept of the gene, as a particle of information that could somehow be inserted into the organism-to-be before its life in the world has even begun. With that, science legitimized the triumph of the genealogical model. Thenceforth, every organism was to be understood as an object whose essential specifications were given in advance of its growth and development in an environment. Each organism exists, according to the model, to be itself, to fulfil a project coterminous with the bounds of its own existence. What is passed on to the future is not its life, but a set of elementary instructions that may be recombined in the formation of other projects for other lives (Ingold 1986: 106–7). The effect of the genealogical model, as Charles Gillespie rightly notes, was to convert ‘the whole range of nature which had been relegated to becoming, as a problem in being, an infinite set of objective situations reaching back through time’ (Gillespie 1959: 291). It follows that while the organism may be depicted geographically as making a sequence of strategic moves across a planar surface, from a genealogical perspective its entire life is condensed into a single point. It is no wonder that Charles Darwin, in the only illustration in The Origin of Species, chose to depict the phyletic line as a series of dots (Darwin 1950 [1859]: 90–91). In the very similar diagrams constructed by anthropologists to depict human genealogies, the dots are replaced by equally punctual symbols – conventionally triangles for men and circles for women – that are then connected by lines. These lines are not, however, indexes of growth or movement. They are rather lines of genetic or cultural transmission, down which are supposed to pass not the impulse of life but information for living it. Insofar as they connect points, they resemble the lines of a transport network. But whereas transport lines mark out an individual’s moves on the plane of the present, lines of transmission connect the sources and recipients of information in diachronic se-

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quence (Figure 8.5). Transport and transmission are arrayed along the separate axes of space and time. But now let us suppose, following the imagery of Bergson rather than Darwin, that every being is instantiated in the world not as a bounded entity but as a thoroughfare, along the line of its own movement and activity. This is not a lateral movement ‘point-topoint’, as in transport, but a continual ‘moving around’ or coming and going, as in wayfaring. How then would we depict the passage of generations, where each – as Bergson put it (1911: 135) – leans over and touches the next? Figure 8.6 depicts a descent line of five generations, on the left, according to the conventions of the genealogical model, and on the right, according to our alternative view, as a series of interlaced trails. As generation B matures it follows a path increasingly divergent from that of the parental generation A; likewise C diverges from B. Yet it is from the grandparental generation A that C learns the stories that it, in turn, will carry forward in life, above all through its offspring D (who may, in fact, take

FIGURE 8.5: Lines of transmission and transport. Lines of transport connect points marked out in space upon some arbitrarily delimited region of the surface of the globe. Lines of transmission connect individuals in a diachronic, ancestor-descendant sequence, irrespective of their spatial locations.

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FIGURE 8.6: A sequence of five generations depicted, on the one hand, according to the conventions of the genealogical model, and on the other, as a series of interlaced and overlapping trails.

the grandparental name and be regarded as continuations of their ancestral namesakes). Similarly, D’s offspring E follow in the footsteps of generation B. The result is a meshwork that continually unfolds as lives proceed. Of course the depiction is highly schematic, and any real situation is bound to be very much more complex. But it should suffice to illustrate the possibility of thinking of life as a transgenerational flow in which people and their knowledge undergo perpetual formation. It also gives us a way of describing ancestry and descent that, I believe, more faithfully reflects the way people generally talk about such matters – in terms of the narrative

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interweaving of present and past lives rather than the application of classificatory schemata. To conclude, I return to the distinction with which I began, between innate and acquired knowledge. Recall that according to the genealogical model, a suite of genetically transmitted capacities condition the acquisition, by non-genetic means, of cultural content. I have shown, however, that people grow into knowledge rather than having it literally passed down to them. Stories cannot serve as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge – that is, for its importation into contexts of development – for the simple reason that there is no way of ‘reading’ them that is not dependent on these contexts. Otherwise put, the reading of stories is tantamount to the process of development itself, of which knowledge is the ever-emergent outcome. Precisely the same objection, however, can be levelled against the notion of genetic transmission. For transmission to occur, information specifying the genotype must be copied into the incipient organism in advance of its growth within an environment. No mechanism has ever been demonstrated that is capable of bringing this about. I have shown that people grow into knowledge, and do not receive it ready-made. That growth, however, is but part and parcel of the total process of development of the human organism-person in his or her environment. Like the powers of the human body, the capabilities of the mind are not given in advance but are emergent within this process. If there is a difference in this regard between humans beings and nonhuman animals, it lies not in the extent to which, in humans, genetic preprogramming facilitates the instructional acquisition of a complementary corpus of conceptual categories, but in that peculiarly human ability to weave stories from the past into the texture of present lives. It is in the art of storytelling, not in the power of classification, that the key to human knowledgeability – and therefore to culture – ultimately resides.

Notes 1. There seems, at first glance, to be a contradiction between the assertions, on the one hand, that culture is acquired in the lifetime of individuals, and on the other, that the acquisition of culture precedes their life in the world. Orthodox culture theory resolves the contradiction by supposing that enculturation takes place in sequestered spaces of observation that present a simulacrum of the world rather than the ‘real thing’.

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2. On this distinction, see Jablonka (2000: 39) and Ingold (2002: 60–62). 3. I apologize for inventing a new word, but at this juncture the normally versatile English language has let me down. Initially I had followed Casey (1996: 30) in contrasting vertical and lateral modes of integration. ‘Lateral’ however, suggests sideways displacement across a surface. Here, however, I mean the tracing of a path through the world. For reasons that will become clear later on, it is important that these should not be confused. 4. The same is true of the meanings of words, which are, in effect, but highly compressed and abridged, miniature stories. As Jean Briggs has shown in her study of word meanings in the Inupiaq language, ‘knowledge is personal and experiential, and can best be communicated by sharing one’s own experiences and allowing learners to participate in constructing meanings in whatever ways they are capable of’ (Briggs 2002: 80). 5. This is not to deny that people may also travel by sea (see example E). But marine travel raises special issues in part because of the way the liquid medium erases all trace of the activities that have taken place there. The wake of a small, nonmotorized boat fades rapidly, as does the sound of the spoken word. Thus land is to sea travel rather as writing is to speech.

References Bergson, H. 1911. Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell. London: Macmillan. Bohm, D. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Briggs, J.L. 2002. ‘Language Dead or Alive: What’s in a Dictionary?’ in M. Nagy (ed.), The Power of Traditions: Identities, Politics and Social Sciences, Topics in Arctic Social Sciences 4, International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA). Quebec City, Canada, pp. 69–82. Casey, E.S. 1996. ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 13–52. D’Andrade, R.G. 1981. ‘The Cultural Part of Cognition’, Cognitive Science 5(3): 179–95. Darwin, C. 1950 [1859]. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Watts [reprint of First Edition]. Diener, P., D. Nonini and E.E. Robkin. 1980. ‘Ecology and Evolution in Cultural Anthropology’, Man (n.s.) 15(1): 1–31. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

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Gillespie, C.S. 1959. ‘Lamarck and Darwin in the History of Science’, in B. Glass, O. Temkin and W.L. Straus, Jr. (eds), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745– 1859. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 265–91. Ingold, T. 1986. Evolution and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. ‘From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention’, in H. Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography. Oxford: Berg, pp. 113–53. ———. 2002. ‘Between Evolution and History: Biology, Culture and the Myth of Human Origins’, Proceedings of the British Academy 112: 43–66. Jablonka, E. 2000. ‘Lamarckian Inheritance Systems in Biology: A Source of Metaphors and Models in Technological Evolution’, in J. Ziman (ed.), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–40. Kurttila, T. and T. Ingold. 2001. ‘Perceiving the Environment in Finnish Lapland’, in P. Macnaghten and J. Urry (eds), Bodies of Nature. London: Sage, pp. 183–96. Lye, T.-P. 1997. ‘Knowledge, Forest, and Hunter-gatherer Movement: The Batek of Pahang, Malaysia, Ph.D. dissertation. University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Medawar, P. 1960. The Future of Man. London: Methuen. Nelson, R.K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Novikova, N. 2002. ‘Self Government of the Indigenous Minority Peoples of West Siberia: Analysis of Law and Practice’, in E. Kasten (ed.), People and the Land: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, pp. 83–98. Richerson, P.J. and R. Boyd. 1978. ‘A Dual Inheritance Model of the Human Evolutionary Process I: Basic Postulates and a Simple Model’, Journal of Social and Biological Structures 1(2): 127–54. Rubin, D. 1988. ‘Go for the Skill’, in U. Neisser and E. Winograd (eds), Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 374–82. Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Turnbull, D. 1991. Mapping the World in the Mind: An Investigation of the Unwritten Knowledge of Micronesian Navigators. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Volosinov, V.N. 1973 [1929]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wassmann, J. 1991. The Song of the Flying Fox, trans. D.Q. Stephenson. Boroko, Papua New Guinea: National Research Institute. Wiebe, R. 1989. Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Edmonton, Canada: NeWest.

Chapter 9

REVEALING AND OBSCURING RIVERS’S PEDIGREES BIOLOGICAL INHERITANCE AND KINSHIP IN MADAGASCAR Rita Astuti

The Critique of the Study of Kinship One of the most serious charges that can be directed against fellow anthropologists is that their theoretical assumptions distort and impair their understanding of the people they study. The field of kinship studies is arguably where this charge has been made most frequently and harshly. For example, Edmund Leach judged some of the central distinctions used in the comparative study of kinship systems by his contemporaries to be a harmful ‘straitjacket of thought’ (Leach 1961: 4). In his view, apparently obvious and innocuous category oppositions such as patrilineal/matrilineal were in fact responsible for ethnocentric biases, tautology and circularity. In the same vein, he castigated Malinowski for a number of tendentious assumptions on which he based his interpretation of the Trobriand word tabu (that kinship terms refer to individuals, and that their primary meaning stems from the nuclear family), which pushed him into a maze of anomalies and forced him to adopt desperate analytical expedients (1958: 143).

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Needham (1962) made similar points when he attacked Homans and Schneider’s analysis of unilateral cross-cousin marriage. The central tenet of Homans and Schneider’s theory was the extension of sentiment hypothesis, and Needham’s main line of attack consisted in showing that neither Homans and Schneider nor RadcliffeBrown before them had adduced any empirical evidence for the alleged process of extension. Moreover, following Hocart, Needham pointed out that only a prejudice on the part of the European observer could lead one to believe that kinship terminologies (i.e., the extension of certain kinship terms beyond their alleged ‘primary’ meanings) could provide such evidence (Needham 1962: 37). But apart from the passionate criticisms, Needham had a positive and concrete recommendation to offer: ‘when examining a system of prescriptive alliances [it is essential] first of all to make the most intense imaginative effort to think in terms of [the people’s own] classification’ (1965: 85). Arguably, it is Schneider (1984) who has best demonstrated the consequences of a failing imagination. Rhetorically, his critique of the conventional study of kinship was particularly powerful because, in the first instance at least, it was directed at no other than himself. He famously admitted that his original studies of Yapese kinship were seriously flawed for he had wrongly and ethnocentrically assumed that relations that mapped onto the ‘genealogical grid’ (e.g., the relation between father and child) were ipso facto kinship relations. Only later did he realize that what he had mistakenly taken to be relations defined by a link of procreation were in fact locally defined by a link of dependence established through people’s association with the land and through work. For this reason, he argued, these Yapese relations were not kinship relations, and he predicted that if anthropologists were to treat the existence of kinship as an empirical question – rather than assume it – they would come to realize that kinship is ‘a special custom distinctive of European culture, an interesting oddity at worst, like the Toda bow ceremony’ (1984: 201). Schneider blamed W.H.R. Rivers’s ‘genealogical method’ for misleading anthropologists into ‘assuming kinship’ where none is present. As Schneider himself admitted, ‘the fact is that one really can collect a genealogy from any people, and by asking simply for the father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband or wife of each person on it expand that genealogy as far as the informant’s memory will carry him’ (1968: 13–14). The problem is that by so doing anthropologists foreclose the outcome of their enquiry: before they even start plotting down the pedigrees, anthropologists

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have already assumed that their informants have kinship. In other words, because of the method they used, anthropologists were biased to find natural links of procreation even when the people they studied invested such links with radically different meanings. Rivers was of course acutely aware of ‘the great difference between the systems of relationship of savage and civilized peoples’ (1968: 97), and he designed his method accordingly. His recommendation was to use as few kinship terms as possible (father, mother, child, husband and wife) and to make it clear that one wanted the names of the informant’s ‘real’ parents and not of any other people who might be called such as a result of the classificatory system of relationship (1968: 97). He was confident that such a distinction could be elicited simply and straightforwardly – deeming his method to be appropriate even for anthropologists ‘with no knowledge of the language and very inferior interpreters’ (1968: 107) – because he believed that, insofar as people universally recognize the links that are engendered by human reproduction, they will also recognize the difference between ‘real’ parents and parents who are such as a result of a social convention. Rivers’s method, in other words, was not only predicated on the assumption that everywhere kinship categories have a biological referent, but also on the assumption that everywhere people draw a principled distinction between biological and social relations. In the opinion of many, this latter assumption has been as fundamental to kinship theorizing as it has been fatal. By imposing alien ontological categories – the distinction between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’ – kinship theorists have systematically distorted our understanding of other people’s ‘cultures of relatedness’ (Carsten 2000). And this, as suggested at the outset, is surely one of the gravest failures for any anthropologist.

Rivers in Madagascar To illustrate the point, I shall start by imagining what would happen if W.H.R. Rivers arrived in a Vezo village on the western coast of Madagascar, armed with ‘the genealogical method of anthropological enquiry’ (Rivers 1968). One of his aims would be to collect the pedigrees of as many knowledgeable and trustworthy informants as possible, in order to compile a complete and accurate genealogical record of the whole community. Since Rivers told us how to collect a pedigree, we know exactly how he would start: by asking each of

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his informants to name their ‘real’ father and ‘real’ mother as opposed to the vast number of people also referred to by these terms (e.g., father’s brothers, father’s and mother’s sisters). To convey this, Rivers would need to know the verb teraky, which is used to refer to the physiological act of generation of both mothers and fathers.1 Allocutions such as ‘neny niteraky anao’ (lit., the mother who generated you) and ‘baba niteraky anao’ (lit., the father who generated you) mark precisely the distinctions Rivers’s genealogical mapping calls for. Despite the relative ease with which Vezo can be made to discriminate linguistically between a person’s ‘real’ and ‘classificatory’ parents, one should carefully consider the discrepancy between Rivers’s and Vezo informants’ deployment of this distinction. Quite simply, while it is the discrimination that Rivers needs most of all, it is the one that Vezo people are most reticent to make. Let me explain.

On Babies’ Looks There is no denying that Vezo adults recognize the unique role played by father and mother in generating a child. Although my informants were somewhat tentative in their views on such matters, their views about human procreation can be summarized as follows. The father’s semen is responsible for placing the child inside the mother’s womb. The womb is called ‘the house of the child’ (tranon’ zaza) and it is in this house that the child is gradually formed. The child grows little by little, thanks to the semen that the father keeps throwing in, while the mother’s menstrual blood – which stops flowing out of the womb – builds up the placenta that envelops the baby. The baby is also hungry for food, which is supplied by what its mother eats during pregnancy and, later, by her breast milk. Thus, while ‘the man is the source of the pregnancy’ (lehilahy ro fotoran’ ateraha), the mother is ‘the real source/owner of the child’ (ampela ro tena tompony), since she is the one who puts in all the hard work of housing and feeding the baby (for more details, see Astuti 1993). These views about conception and gestation appear to stipulate a strong bodily connection between the child and the parents who have generated it.2 Nonetheless, when it comes to explaining how their babies turn out to look the way they do (e.g., big eyes, light skin colour, bent nose, etc.), Vezo adults, like other people in Madagascar, invoke mechanisms other than procreation, and the contributions of people other than the baby’s birth parents (see, e.g., Bloch 1993; Thomas 1999). For example, if a pregnant woman takes a strong

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dislike to someone, whether related to her or not, her baby will come to resemble the disliked person. By contrast, spending a lot of time with, or even just thinking a lot about someone during pregnancy will cause the child to look like the frequented person. If a pregnant woman has a lover, the lover will ‘steal’ some of the baby’s facial traits, which means that the baby’s face will bear some signs of its mother’s relationship. More seriously: why was a certain child born with a clubfoot? Because when his mother was a child she used to tease one of her contemporaries who had a clubfoot, the result of a badly administered quinine injection. When she gave birth, she was shocked to see that her baby had a defect identical to the one she used to make fun of. While still in uterus, if not before, the baby’s appearances seem thus to be shaped by the social relations in which it is already fully – if only vicariously – immersed. Such immersion will intensify after birth, resulting in the further moulding of the baby’s physiognomy. During the first few weeks after birth, mother and baby are literally fused into one another as they lie together wrapped up in layers and layers of blankets; at this time, it is the mother’s responsibility to protect and guard the baby from the many wandering spirits that, if they find the baby alone, will take hold of it and change its physiognomy – erasing, in so doing, the traces left by previous human relationships. Such spirits have an easy job because of babies’ phenomenal plasticity, well captured by the pan-Malagasy term used to describe them: they are ‘water babies’ (zaza-rano) – wobbly, bendable, boneless. As such, their hold on life is at best tenuous and is certainly never taken for granted. This explains a rather curious practice concerning the way people relate to babies and toddlers. Whenever Vezo adults see a newborn baby for the first time or encounter an older one they have not seen for a while, the only thing they ever say about its physical appearance is that the baby in question is very ugly. They say it very emphatically (r-a-a-a-ty zaza ty), so emphatically that one can sense that they do not really mean it. The stated reason for such behaviour is that people do not want to bring bad luck on the baby by saying that it looks beautiful, healthy and chubby. Compliments call for trouble, as if one were drawing the attention of powerful forces, such as disaffected ancestors, which may intervene to transform good-looking, healthy and chubby babies into ugly, sickly and bony ones. There is, however, another aspect to this over-emphatic absence of compliments and appreciation for babies’ looks. While people are

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busy saying how ugly the baby is, they do not engage in the standard European practice of scanning the baby to establish its resemblance to its birth parents. During fieldwork, as I struggled to remember to say that stunningly beautiful babies were very ugly, I did not think of asking Vezo adults why they do not talk about the resemblance between babies and their birth parents. The answer to this question might explain why, instead, they talk so much about the resemblance between babies and people other than their birth parents, as these two ways of ‘seeing’ resemblance are clearly connected. I shall suggest an explanation. When people in England say, as they do, that my son resembles his father and me (e.g., he has taken after his father in the shape of his mouth, and after me in the shape of his eyes), they establish our exclusive claims as his parents. We would find it odd if someone said, as Vezo people would, that my son resembles the yoga instructor I met weekly when I was pregnant. The reason we would find it odd is not simply that we do not believe that a baby’s features can be affected by the mother’s relationship with her yoga instructor (especially if she is a woman!); more profoundly, we would find it odd because we do not feel that a yoga instructor should have any claim over her pupil’s baby. By contrast, what Vezo people would find odd is the suggestion that birth parents have exclusive claims over their children, and remarks about the resemblance between children and the parents who have generated them would be interpreted as a way of suggesting just that. This would explain why Vezo people are not predisposed to see resemblance where its existence is an index of a unique and exclusive relationship between parents and their children. Instead, the many ways in which babies come to resemble people other than their birth parents work to dissolve that uniqueness and exclusivity, by socializing parenthood and extending the child’s bodily connections well beyond those with its parents. This way of (not) seeing resemblance is just one instance of a much wider strategy. As argued elsewhere (Astuti 2000a), the notion that children ‘belong’ to more people than their birth parents (and that grandchildren and great-grandchildren ‘belong’ to more people than their grandparents and great-grandparents) is central to Vezo kinship and to the realization of people’s most valued aim in life: to reach old age surrounded by a vast number of descendants. While this objective is inherent to the Vezo undifferentiated system of kinship reckoning, which is inclusive rather than exclusive, people also actively pursue this end in their everyday practices. For example, although children tend to be raised by their birth parents, it

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is considered unforgivably rude for such parents to assert their unique rights or duties over their children.3 By contrast, every effort is made to break down the boundaries that demarcate individual family units – for example, by encouraging children to eat from any of the kitchens of their numerous ‘parents’ (e.g., mother’s sisters, mother’s brothers, father’s sisters, father’s brothers, and so on).4 Although there is a well-understood practical advantage in sharing children in this way, an important effect of this practice is that it trains children and adults alike to disregard the distinctions between one’s birth and other classificatory parents, between one’s full and one’s classificatory siblings. Exactly the same effect is achieved when people do not attend to the resemblance between babies and their birth parents and choose to see it elsewhere.

Incommensurable Ontologies? The ethnographic evidence I have presented so far suggests that Vezo people ignore the differences that are so central to Rivers’s genealogical method. Indeed, Vezo cultural practices have the overall effect of obscuring the contours of the pedigrees that Rivers’s method is designed to reveal with such precision and definiteness. I suggest that there are two ways in which anthropologists can approach and make sense of this discrepancy. The first one is to argue that, just like the Yapese or Malay practices described by Schneider (1984) and Carsten (1995, 1997), Vezo cultural practices reveal an ontology that does not draw the distinction between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’5 – for example, the beliefs about the source of children’s physiognomy suggest that biological parenthood is socialized (as evidenced by the many people the baby will resemble), while nurturing relations are somatized (because of the effect that nurture has on the bodily make-up of the person). In this view, Rivers’s method and the study of kinship built on it are inadequate because they are predicated on a distinction that is disallowed by Vezo ontology.6 The second way, which I am advancing here, is to question whether Vezo cultural practices can be taken as reliable evidence of people’s ontological commitments. If, as I show below, Vezo distinguish between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’, the problem with Rivers’s method is not that it imposes alien ontological distinctions. The problem is that it fails to capture the efforts through which Vezo people create a world in which these distinctions have been made irrelevant.

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To introduce my argument, I want to start with a vignette from my last visit to the field. I was sitting next to Korsia, my 38-year-old Vezo sister, who was preparing a chicken for the evening meal. In previous conversations with other Vezo informants, I had noticed a marked resistance against any attempt on my part to draw parallels between animal and human anatomy (e.g., by pointing to the internal organs of an animal to elicit the name of the same organs in humans). The narratives, gossip and moralizing tales in which Vezo adults explicitly formulate the idea that people are not animals – that humans are of a categorically different kind than animals because they have taboos (see Astuti 2000b) – seemed to explain this resistance. And yet, as I was looking at Korsia’s expert handling of the chicken, I decided that I should try my compare-humans-toanimals question once more. The conversation started like this: ‘What’s the name of these things [the chicken’s lungs]?’ When I asked whether human beings also have them, she thought about it, and then, with the same uneasiness I had detected in previous conversations, she said: ‘Yes, they must have them, the same as this chicken, if they breathe’ (tsy maintsy misy, manahaky akoho ty, laha miay). She then looked up, stopped what she was doing, and asked herself, surprised and alarmed by what she had just said: ‘Human beings like chickens?!’ (olom-belo manahaky akoho?!). As she resumed handling the chicken, I asked her another question, this time introducing the comparison between animals and people in the opposite direction. All human beings have something called vavafo, literally the mouth of one’s heart,7 which is located at the centre of one’s chest, at the base of one’s breastbone, and is an eminent part of the human body (it is the place where a person’s life-force resides and from where it departs when the person dies); my question was whether chickens also have a vavafo. Once again, Korsia took some time to think and then replied: ‘All things, if alive, must have a vavafo’ (raha iaby, laha velo, tsy maintsy misy vavafo). The reason this incident is relevant to the argument I want to develop about Vezo kinship is that it nicely illustrates how in their inferential reasoning people may deploy knowledge (e.g., all living things share important characteristics that keep them alive; in some important respects, humans are like all other living things) that anthropologists are otherwise extremely unlikely to stumble upon. In this case, my questions caught Korsia off-guard, as it were, and prompted her to say what she would not normally choose to put into words – hence her surprise at hearing herself saying ‘human beings like chickens?!’ Note that the idea that, as living things, hu-

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man beings and chickens are in some important sense similar was inferentially useful – it enabled her to conclude that humans have lungs and that chickens have a vavafo – even if it contradicted the morally charged idea that people are not animals. In much more systematic fashion, I have made use of an inferential task to undertake a study of how Vezo people construe the process of biological inheritance. The methodology I have adopted was originally devised by developmental psychologists to explore North American children’s understanding of family resemblance and of the role that procreation plays in the transmission of properties from parents to offspring (Solomon et al. 1996). Like most tasks used by developmental psychologists, what I shall describe below as the adoption task was designed with the following consideration in mind: young children’s knowledge is systematically underestimated if it is assessed by verbal production tasks, since children are typically unable to self-reflectively describe what they know.8 Therefore, to establish that a young child (or prelinguistic infant) masters certain numerical, physical, psychological or biological concepts, developmental psychologists design experimental techniques that require participants to choose between different outcomes (by looking, pointing, reaching, answering simple forced-choice questions), but do not expect them to be able to explain why they do so. The experimenter infers from the child’s response the knowledge that the child must have (or lack) to come to that particular conclusion. In the case of the adoption task, participants are told a simple story about a baby born to one set of parents and raised by another. One of the birth parents is then attributed a certain property, while one of the adoptive parents is attributed another contrastive property. Participants have to answer the following question: once the baby is fully grown up, will s/he resemble the birth or the adoptive parent in that property? In other words, they have to make a simple similarity judgment. Crucially, the task presents participants with two distinct sets of properties: bodily properties on the one hand (e.g., having blond as opposed to dark hair), and mental properties, such as beliefs, on the other (e.g., believing that skunks can see in the dark as opposed to believing that skunks cannot see in the dark). If children judge that the adopted child will resemble the birth parent on bodily properties – because such properties are inherited through filiation – and the adoptive parent on mental properties – because such properties are acquired through learning and habituation – one can infer that they, like North American adults, have come to differentiate between two distinct causal mechanisms for the trans-

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mission of two ontologically distinct properties of the person. Only then can they be credited with a causal understanding of biological inheritance as distinct from social learning. The characteristics that make the adoption task an appropriate tool for working with children make it equally useful for working with adults, who are adept at systematizing and verbalizing their views about the world. In the case of Vezo adults, the advantage of using the adoption task to explore how they construe the process of biological inheritance was that it did not directly tap into their stock cultural knowledge. Notably, the adoption task sets out a hypothetical scenario – a riddle – which was intentionally kept as cultureneutral as possible. For example, the story was told in such a way that it did not evoke the social and moral setting in which Vezo adoption normally takes place (i.e., among close relatives), and the traits for the resemblance questions were chosen so as to be value-free (e.g., bodily characteristics that people considered neither desirable nor unattractive; beliefs that carried no obvious truth value). By virtue of their sheer oddness (see below), the resemblance questions participants were confronted with did not prime their beliefs about the plasticity of babies’ physiognomy or their narratives about the role of social relations in shaping the organic make-up of the person. Instead, participants were forced, as it were, to put their thinking cap on and figure out the answer to entirely new questions. As Korsia’s example above suggests, getting people to reason in this way may reveal knowledge that they possess and use, but which they do not normally choose to encode verbally. I am acutely aware that anthropologists used to more informal and open-ended interviewing techniques are likely to argue that the adoption task is methodologically flawed because, just like Rivers’s genealogical method, it imposes on the participants the ontological distinctions of the researcher – the dualism of sociality and biology, of organism and person, of birth and nurture. In this view, the finding that Vezo informants might reason in terms of these dichotomies would be a misleading fabrication, the inevitable outcome of a naïve methodology. Despite their rhetorical force, these criticisms are misplaced. The adoption task is undoubtedly constructed around these dichotomies, but it does not impose them on the participants. If participants do not differentiate between birth and adoptive parents, between birth and nurture, between bodily and mental traits, they can sail through the task blissfully unaware of the distinctions being probed, free to use a number of alternative, non-dualistic reasoning strategies (e.g., the ‘true’ parent is the one that generates, and the

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child will therefore resemble him on all traits; the ‘true’ parent is the one that adopts, and the child will therefore resemble him on all traits; the child will have whichever trait seems truer or preferable, irrespective of whether it is the trait attributed to the birth or adoptive parent; the child will resemble the adoptive parents on all traits because of its extreme malleability; etc.). That the adoption task does not have the magical power to impose dualistic categories onto a monistic mind is no vacuous speculation. When used with children, the adoption task has consistently failed to detect any differentiation between inherited and acquired properties, between birth and social parents, between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’.9 In other words, this task is a sensitive diagnostic tool; if participants are not ‘infected’ by dualistic reasoning, they will not test positive. As we saw earlier, explicit Vezo beliefs about babies’ looks seem to systematically blur the ontological distinctions for which the adoption task is designed to test. What happens, then, when Vezo adults participate in this task?10 The first thing to be said is that they were initially rather doubtful about the seriousness of the exercise. They were used to having me relentlessly asking all sorts of questions, but they were not prepared for questions of this kind: The father11 who generated the child (baba niteraky azy) believed that chameleons have 30 teeth, whereas the father who raised the child (baba niteza azy) believed that chameleons have 20 teeth. In your opinion, when the child is fully grown up, will he believe that chameleons have 30 teeth like the father who generated him or will he believe that chameleons have 20 teeth like the father who raised him?

During the piloting stage of the study, rumours spread around the village that I was wasting people’s time by asking silly questions. I suggest that most of the initial frustration was generated by the fact that adults assumed that I knew the answer to the questions I was posing, thereby making their contribution redundant and pointless.12 Aware of this problem, I introduced the task by pointing out that some of the questions I was about to ask could be answered in more than one way and that I was interested in the different opinions that people might have about them. I also added that I had been sent to do this job by my elders and teachers, and I asked people to be supportive of my efforts to advance my studies, as they had so generously done in the past. This appeal almost always managed to well-dispose adult participants. Nonetheless, at the outset they

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were visibly puzzled by the procedure, as they found the answers to my resemblance questions – whether about bodily traits or about beliefs13 – far too obvious. It was only halfway through the task – when they had realized that only some of the questions were about the adopted child’s physical appearance (vatany) while others were about his mind or character (sainy, toetsiny) – that they became more engaged. There were at this moment clear signs of recognition (e.g., ‘Now I can see what this is all about!’) as participants saw the point of what had seemed until then a pointless conversation. What they saw, halfway through the task, was that I was not trying to find out the obvious, i.e., whether babies get their looks from the parents who generated them (for those who were first presented with the set of questions about bodily traits), or whether people come to believe what they are taught by their parents (for those who were first presented with the set of questions about beliefs). Rather, what I was trying to find out was whether there is any difference between the way children come to have their parents’ looks and the way they come to share their parents’ beliefs. As I have argued earlier, nothing in the task forced them to get this point. Participants’ overall performance can be captured by analysing their individual judgment patterns. Following Solomon et al. (1996), participants were said to have shown a ‘differentiated pattern’ if they judged that the adopted child would resemble the birth parent on most of the bodily traits and the adoptive father on most of the beliefs; they were said to have shown a ‘birth parent bias’ if they judged that the adopted child would resemble the birth parent on all or almost all traits; they were said to have shown an ‘adoptive parent bias’ if they judged that the adopted child would resemble the adoptive parent on all or almost all traits. Finally, participants who did not show any of the above patterns were considered to have shown a ‘mixed pattern’. An overwhelming 77 per cent of adult participants showed a ‘differentiated pattern’.14 For this pattern of judgments to emerge, participants must have reasoned that bodily properties are inherited through links of filiation (hence the child’s resemblance to the birth parent), and that beliefs are transmitted through learning and teaching (hence the child’s resemblance to the adoptive parent). This finding suggests that Vezo adults differentiate between two causal mechanisms (one having to do with generating children, the other having to do with nurturing them) for the transmission of two distinct kinds of properties (bodily traits and beliefs). I take this as evidence that Vezo adults have constructed a concept of ‘biological

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inheritance’ as distinct from a concept of ‘social learning’ and, more generally, that they draw the ontological distinction between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’. I should clarify that the claim I am advancing here is not that the concepts of ‘biological inheritance’ and ‘social learning’ held by Vezo adults map exactly onto the equivalent set of concepts held by Euro-American adults. Given the different intellectual traditions and socio-economic contexts in which these concepts get constructed, this claim would be daft (for example, there is no evidence that Vezo adults are familiar with Western accounts of biological inheritance in terms of genetic coding). Nonetheless, I stand by the claim that Vezo and Euro-American concepts of biological inheritance and social learning are commensurable to one another, insofar as they play the same inferential role in adult reasoning about family resemblance. This is confirmed by the spontaneous justifications that participants offered in support of their judgments, which provide a more qualitative picture of their causal reasoning. To give a feel for this material, I present below some extracts from the protocols of a few participants who showed a ‘differentiated pattern’.15 Since the task was very repetitive, participants provided justifications only for a selection of their judgments; for each justification, the traits for which it was given are indicated in brackets. 23-Year-Old Male Informant [The father who generated the child believed that papaya is healthier than pineapple; the father who raised the child believed that pineapple is healthier than papaya.] He’ll be like the father who raised him because he grew up here [in the adoptive parents’ village], and his thoughts grew apart from the other father. [The father who generated the child was cross-eyed; the father who raised the child had straight eyes.] He’ll be like his father, because he is the one who generated him and for this reason the boy’s face will be like his.

49-Year-old Male Informant [The father who generated the child had roundish ears; the father who raised the child had pointed ears.] Like the father who generated him. When it comes to believing things, the child will follow the father who raised him, but when it comes to the ways of his body (fombam-batany) this will depend on the father who generated him. These things are determined by one’s blood (mandeha aminy ra).

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60-Year-Old Male Informant [The father who generated the child believed that cows have stronger teeth than horses; the father who raised the boy believed that horses have stronger teeth than cows.] Like the father who raised him because the thoughts of those who raise him have power/influence over him. They are the ‘owners’ of the child (tompony) since the child would not be alive if it were not for them. And yet the parents who generated him also have power/influence since if it weren’t for them he would not have come out onto this earth. [The father who generated him had pointed ears; the father who raised him had roundish ears.] Like the father who generated him, because that’s where the child gets his template (modely) from.

49-Year-Old Female Informant [The father who generated him had a flat appendix; the father who raised him had a roundish appendix.] He will look only like the father who generated him. In his body (am-batany), he will be like the one who generated him. [The father who generated him believed that chameleons have 30 teeth; the father who raised him believed that chameleons have 20 teeth.] Like the father who raised him because this is about his character (toetsiny) and not about his body (vatany), and he will believe like the father who brought him up because he hears his words.

These statements are significant for at least two reasons. First, they confirm that the coding of participants’ resemblance judgments captures something important about their reasoning strategy. What I call a ‘differentiated pattern’ does reflect the participants’ theoretically motivated distinction between two causal mechanisms for the transmission of two ontologically different sets of properties. Vezo adults could not have been more articulate in identifying the difference between a person’s character and ways of thinking, which are acquired through listening, looking, learning and growing up with someone, and the properties of the body, which are acquired through the ‘template’ that is passed on through procreation. Second, the justifications demonstrate that the conceptual knowledge Vezo adults resorted to when answering the resemblance questions is readily available to their conscious scrutiny and verbal elaboration. They did not find it in any way difficult to put their causal reasoning into words (as one might imagine they would if, for example, they were asked to reflect on certain aspects of their spatial or linguistic knowl-

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edge). In many ways, the justifications reveal that Vezo adults found the task somewhat obvious and the reasoning necessary to solve it positively transparent.

Erasing the Traces of Biological Kinship The results of the adoption task indicate that Vezo adults differentiate between the biological and the social processes that contribute to the making of the person. As noted, Vezo seem to find the difference between birth and nurture rather obvious and unworthy of much elaboration. What they find morally engaging, by contrast, are the ways in which they can strive to attenuate this difference and the divisive effects it has on the mapping of kinship. Encouraging children to eat and sleep in many different houses is one way; asserting that babies’ physiognomy is shaped by the actions of people other than the parents who generate them is another. It stands to reason that we cannot begin to understand the motivation behind these practices if we were to assume that Vezo ontology is blind to the difference that these ways of eating, sleeping and seeing are meant to mitigate. On this point, my analysis is similar to that of Firth regarding the Tikopia practice of ‘the adhering child’ (1963: 190–93). Firth reports that the Tikopia recognize that babies are particularly attached to their ‘real’ parents (‘the chief desire of the babe – its own parents’). To counteract this tendency, they deploy a number of mechanisms for ‘detaching’ children from their parents and making them ‘adhere’ to other members of the wider kinship group. Infants are taught not to turn towards their father or mother but towards the elders of the group. Before they can walk or talk, they are approached by members of the extended family who whisper to them: ‘You remember me. I am your father [e.g., in the case of a classificatory father]. When I go away, you come and seek for me. Do not cry for your parents, cry for me.’ Finally, children can be more permanently detached from their parents and made to ‘adhere’ to a different domestic unit because ‘it is bad for a child to adhere only to its parents.’ Firth points out that, as a result of these practices, it might seem that the individual family is not a real entity among the Tikopia, and that it has been supplanted by the wider kinship group. This impression, however, is misleading because it ignores that the strength of the wider kinship group is built up by people’s conscious efforts to weaken the individual family.

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A similar argument can be made with reference to my Vezo material. At first sight, it might appear that Vezo kinship transcends the distinctions between the ‘facts of biology’ and the ‘facts of sociality’, between physical and social identities, between organism and person. But this interpretation is misleading because it ignores people’s conscious efforts to work against the ties of biological kinship, to obscure the boundaries of their pedigrees, to attenuate the difference between birth and nurture in order to build a community in which children are generated, nurtured and moulded by a much larger network of relations than the ones demarcated by the ‘facts of biology’.16 During one administration of the adoption task, one of the few participants who showed a ‘birth parent bias’ (that is, he judged that the adopted child would resemble the birth parent in all properties) offered a striking justification for one of his judgments. He said that the adopted child would have pointed ears like his birth father because ‘in the case of human beings there must be a sign, a proof, that your child is yours’ (olom-belo tsy maintsy misy famantara io anakinao). Granted that such signs exist and will not go away, the majority of Vezo adults strive to erase them as best as they can.

Conclusion Largely as a result of the sustained attacks against the study of kinship, the assertion that the ontological distinction between biological and social processes is a peculiar feature of the Western intellectual tradition has become something of an anthropological axiom – selfevident, incontrovertible and ideologically correct (see, e.g., Bouquet 1993; Carsten 1995, 1997; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Ingold 1991; Schneider 1984; Strathern 1992). This claim has been central to the constructivist turn in the study of kinship, for it has been used to argue that non-Western ‘cultures of relatedness’ are insensitive to the distinction ‘between kinship as a biological, genetic, instant, permanent relationship, and social identity as fluid’ (Carsten 1995: 235). From this ontological standpoint, there is no intractable core to human relatedness; ‘kinship itself is a process of becoming’ (Carsten 1995: 223). As noted by Viveiros de Castro (this volume), these conclusions are presented as if they were ‘the result of non-Western ideas having been effectively used to challenge Eurocentric anthropological conceptions’. However, one could also legitimately argue that they

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stem from the very specific historical and cultural developments taking place in the West ‘independently of any enlightenment dispensed by anthropology’, such as the perceived destabilization of nature brought about by the new reproductive and biomedical technologies, and the current infatuation with ‘creativity’ and ‘self-fashioning’. Following Viveiros de Castro, I would suggest that insofar as the current hegemonic conceptualizations of kinship have been shaped by these historical and cultural trends, there is in principle no guarantee that they bring us any closer to the understanding of other people’s ‘cultures of relatedness’. And indeed, as I have illustrated in this chapter, they do not. The evidence I have presented has shown that the claim that Vezo people conceptualize the nature of both biological and social relations as fluid and processual, and that their ontology lacks the distinction between biological and social processes, is factually wrong. As I hope is clear, my intention is not to use this finding to dismiss the critique of the study of kinship and suggest that we revert to collecting ‘bodies of dry fact’ (Rivers 1914, quoted in Firth 1968: 19) through the genealogical method. Rather, my aim has been to use this finding to understand how my Vezo informants in Madagascar conceptualize, reflect upon, and manipulate human kinship. Quite simply, imputing a ‘non-dualistic’ ontology to them is not the way to do it.

Notes This chapter is based on research undertaken in Madagascar, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant R000237191) and the Nuffield Foundation (Social Science Research Foundation Fellowship, 1997–98). Data analysis was undertaken during a sabbatical year at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies, Harvard University, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Research Fellowship R000271254, 2002–05) and the Leverhulme Foundation (Study Abroad Fellowship, 2002–03). I wish to thank all these institutions for their generous support. The data presented in this chapter are part of a larger collaborative project between anthropologists and cognitive psychologists – Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics), Susan Carey (Harvard), Gregg Solomon (National Science Foundation) and myself. I am grateful to Sandra Bamford and James Leach for organizing an excellent session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans, and for giving me an opportunity to present the results of this project to a challenging anthropological audience.

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1. The term teraky is also used to refer to the act of generation of animals, plants, wells (which generate water) or communal activities, such as meetings, which can occasionally be judged to have been ‘productive’. 2. The reader might interpret the brief description of Vezo views on procreation as suggesting that only fathers transfer bodily substance to their children. This, however, does not seem to be the case. The most compelling evidence that women’s contribution of blood, food and ‘housing’ is equally, if not more ‘substantive’ than the contribution of men’s semen is the fact that, like other people in Madagascar, Vezo consider the children of two sisters as enjoying the closest possible relation, closer, for example, than that between the children of two brothers (for this reason, sexual taboos between the children of two sisters are the strongest and sexual relations between them are the most incestuous). When asked why such people are so close, Vezo informants say that it is because the children of two sisters were attached to the same umbilical cord and shared the same womb (i.e., the wombs of their respective mothers are treated as one and the same). From this we can infer that whatever it is that is shared by the children of two sisters that makes them so close – almost identical – to one another, must have originated and must have been transferred to them from their respective mothers. 3. The only context when this is admissible is when ancestral matters are concerned, such as the decision to perform the ritual that establishes exclusive rights over one’s children’s dead bodies (see Astuti 1995 for further details). 4. This behaviour is common throughout Madagascar (e.g., Bloch 1971: 83), and it extends to children’s sleeping arrangements. Bloch (personal communication) reports that during his fieldwork among the Merina in the highlands of Madagascar, a little boy got lost in the fields. However, since his parents assumed that he was staying with some other ‘parents’ and it would have been considered rude for them to look for him, it took some time before the extended family realized that he was actually missing. See Bloch (1986) for a general discussion of the way Merina construe biological ties and how they overcome their divisiveness through ritual means. 5. This is the view of McKinnon (2002) who, in her comments on my paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, stated that ‘systems like those of the Vezo … defy our dualisms altogether’. 6. I here adopt one of the philosophical uses of the term ontology, also commonly followed by psychologists, to mean the set of things whose existence is acknowledged by a particular theory or system of thought (see Lowe 1995: 634). For example, one of the intuitive theories studied by psychologists goes under the name of ‘naïve psychology’. Such theory construes persons as psychological beings (rather than as, e.g.,

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physical objects or biological entities) whose actions are caused and explained in terms of their mental states (e.g., desires, hopes, beliefs, etc.). Like other theories, ‘naïve psychology’ specifies the existence and the nature of the entities to which it applies – such things as mental states and mental processes as distinct from such things as physical objects and their mechanical behaviour. The ontology of ‘naïve psychology’ consists in this specification, and people who subscribe to the theory of ‘naïve psychology’ are thereby committed to its ontological distinctions (for more details see, e.g., Carey 1985: chap. 6; Wellman and Gelman 1992). The claim that Vezo people either make or do not make the distinction between ‘facts of biology’ and ‘facts of sociality’ is thus a claim about ontology, for it addresses the question of whether they hold an intuitive theory (in this case ‘naïve biology’) that commits them to the existence of such things as biological facts and processes as opposed to social facts and processes. Fo is commonly translated as heart, but the meaning of this term, in Madagascar and in Southeast Asia more generally, is much richer as it indicates the very root, origin, source of the entity to which it pertains. Adults are equally unable to reflect on certain domains of their knowledge, the best example being grammatical knowledge. Fluent adult speakers are obviously able to apply grammatical rules, but they are typically unable to state what these rules are. Children in Europe and the U.S. have not shown evidence of differentiated reasoning before the age of six or seven (e.g., Gimenez and Harris 2002; Solomon 2002; Solomon et al. 1996; Springer 1996; Springer and Keil 1989; Weissman and Kalish 1999; Williams and Affleck 1999), urban Tamil children in India have not done so before the age of twelve (Mahalingham 1998), and rural Zafimaniry and Vezo children in Madagascar have not before the age of thirteen or fourteen (Astuti, Solomon and Carey 2004; Bloch, Solomon and Carey 2001). The adoption task was first successfully used by Bloch among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar (Bloch et al. 2001). After adapting it to local circumstances, I used it with Vezo children, adolescents and adults (ranging from six to ninety years of age). By deploying several different versions that manipulated the identity of the birth and adoptive parents, I was able to explore two related issues: the way Vezo participants at different ages reason about the transmission of individual properties from parents to children, and the way they reason about the transmission of social group identity and species kind. For the purpose of the present discussion, I shall limit my attention to the data on Vezo adults’ understanding of biological inheritance. For the analysis of the entire data set, see Astuti et al. 2004. A control task was designed to establish whether participants might reason differently depending on whether the link of filiation targeted by the questions was paternal or maternal; there was no evidence of a

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systematic effect and therefore in what follows I ignore this variable. The fact that participants reasoned about the transmission of properties from father to son in the same way in which they reasoned about the transmission of properties from mother to daughter, confirms the point made earlier (see note 2) that Vezo regard women’s and men’s contributions to their children as equally ‘substantive’. I had encountered a similar problem when I asked people to tell me how babies are made (lit., ‘What is it that places the child inside the woman’s belly?’). My closest female friends were at first puzzled that I did not know, but after a few jokes to the effect of ‘have you not found this out yet?’ they answered my question, pretending, as it were, that I really did not know. When I returned to the field having had a son, one woman took me to one side and told me, ‘If you really didn’t know before coming here, we did a good job at teaching you!’ The study was balanced across participants according to a Latin-Square design in order to control for the potential confounding factors of whether the bodily traits were presented before or after the beliefs, and which value of a pair of features was attributed to the birth parent. Thus, half of the participants were first asked the questions about the resemblance on bodily traits, while the other half were first asked the questions about the resemblance on beliefs. Preliminary analyses conducted on these factors revealed no significant effects on the results presented below. Of the remaining 23 per cent, 6 per cent showed a ‘birth parent bias’, 3 percent an ‘adoptive parent bias’, and 13 per cent a ‘mixed pattern’. For the complete statistical analysis, see Astuti et al. 2004. The complete quantitative and qualitative analysis of all the justifications can be found in Astuti et al. 2004. A sample of complete protocols by adult participants who showed ‘differentiated’, ‘birth parent bias’, ‘adoptive parent bias’, and ‘mixed’ patterns can be found at ‘http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/vezo.pdf’. For a similar argument about gender identities among the Vezo, see Astuti 1998.

References Astuti, R. 1993. ‘Food for Pregnancy: Procreation, Marriage and Images of Gender among the Vezo of Western Madagascar’, Social Anthropology: The Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists 1(3): 277–90. ———. 1995. People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. ‘“It’s a Boy!”, “It’s a Girl!”: Reflections on Sex and Gender in Madagascar and Beyond’, in M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds), Bodies

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and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 29–52. ———. 2000a. ‘Kindreds, Cognatic and Unilineal Descent: A View from Madagascar’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–103. ———. 2000b. ‘Les Gens Ressemblent-ils aux Poulets? Penser la Frontière Homme / Animal à Madagascar’, Terrain 34: 89–105. Astuti, R., G. Solomon and S. Carey. 2004. Conceptual Development in Madagascar: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 69, no.3. Bloch, M. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. London: Seminar Press. ———. 1986. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. ‘Zafimaniry Birth and Kinship Theory’, Social Anthropology: The Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists 1(1): 119–32. Bloch, M., G. Solomon and S. Carey. 2001. ‘An Understanding of What is Passed on from Parents to Children: A Cross-cultural Investigation’, The Journal of Cognition and Culture 1(1): 43–68. Bouquet, M. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions on British Kinship Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carey, S. 1985. Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carsten, J. 1995. ‘The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi’, American Ethnologist 22(2): 223–41. ———. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2000. ‘Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Firth, R. 1963 [1936]. We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia, abridged by the author. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1968. ‘Rivers on Oceanic Kinship’, in W.H.R. Rivers (ed.), Kinship and Social Organization. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, no. 34. New York: The Athlone Press, pp. 17–36. Franklin, S. and S. McKinnon. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Giménez, M. and Harris, P.L. 2002. ‘Understanding Constraints on Inheritance: Evidence for Biological Thinking in Early Childhood’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 20(3): 307–24. Ingold, T. 1991. ‘Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human Evolution’, Cultural Dynamics 4(3): 355–78.

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Leach. E. 1958. ‘Concerning Trobriand Clans and the Kinship Category “Tabu”’, in J. Goody (ed.), The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, no. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 120–45. ———. 1961. Rethinking Anthropology. London School of Economics Monographs in Social Anthropology, no. 22. New York: The Athlone Press. Lowe, E. 1995. ‘Ontology’, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 634–35. Mahalingam, R. 1998. ‘Essentialism, Power and Representation of Caste: A Developmental Study’, Ph.D. dissertation. Pittsburgh, PA: Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. McKinnon, S. 2002. Comments for the panel entitled ’The Genealogical Model Reconsidered’ organized by Sandra Bamford and James Leach, Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans. Needham, R. 1962. Structure and Sentiment: A Test Case in Social Anthropology. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Rivers, W.H.R. 1914. The History of Melaneasian Society, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1968. ‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry’, in W.H.R Rivers (ed.), Kinship and Social Organization. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, no. 34. New York: The Athlone Press, 97–109. Schneider, D. 1968. ‘Rivers and Kroeber in the Study of Kinship’, in W.H.R. Rivers (ed.), Kinship and Social Organization. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, no. 34. New York: The Athlone Press, pp. 7–16. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Solomon, G. 2002. ‘Birth, Kind, and Naïve Biology’, Developmental Science 5(2): 213–18. Solomon, G., S. Johnson, D. Zaitchik and S. Carey. 1996. ‘Like Father, Like Son: Young Children’s Understanding of How and Why Offspring Resemble Their Parents’, Child Development 67(1): 151–71. Springer, K. 1996. ‘Young Children’s Understanding of a Biological Basis for Parent-offspring Relations’, Child Development 67(6): 2841–56. Springer, K. and F. Keil. 1989. ‘On the Development of Biologically Specific Beliefs: The Case of Inheritance’, Child Development 60(3): 637–48. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, P. 1999. ‘No Substance, No Kinship? Procreation, Performativity and Temanambondro Parent-child Relations’, in P. Loizos and P. Heady (eds), Conceiving Persons: Ethnographies of Procreation, Fertility and Growth. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 68. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 19–45.

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Weissman, M. and C. Kalish. 1999. ‘The Inheritance of Desired Characteristics: Children’s View of the Role of Intention in Parent-offspring Resemblance’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 73 (4): 245–65. Wellman, H. and S. Gelman. 1992. ‘Cognitive Development: Foundational Theories of Core Domains’, Annual Review of Psychology 43(1): 337–75. Williams, J. and G. Affleck. 1999. ‘The Effects of an Age-appropriate Intervention on Young Children’s Understanding of Inheritance’, Educational Psychology 19(3): 259–75.

Chapter 10

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his chapter attempts to relate three anthropological arguments about kinship. Each concerns the thorny problem of how to bypass our all-enveloping cosmology of nature and culture when describing the very province of human experience on which this dualism is supposed to be ultimately grounded. In the modern Western tradition, as we know, kinship is the primal arena for the confrontation of biological nature and cultural nurture, animal instincts and human institutions, bodily substances and spiritual relations, real facts and legal fictions, and so on. Indeed, this has been so, supposedly, ever since humans became what they are, for this divisive predicament is precisely, we are asked to believe, what makes humans into what they are: Homo sapiens (Linnæus) is Homo duplex (Durkheim). It is certainly no accident therefore that the most momentous anthropological reflection on nature and culture took kinship as its defining problem (Lévi-Strauss 1967), just as some of the most enlightening ethnographic accounts of this opposition in modern EuroAmerican settings turned to the same object (e.g., Schneider 1968; Strathern 1992b). Neither is it any coincidence that many, perhaps all, of the foundational dichotomies of the anthropology of kinship are simply particular refractions of the nature/culture schema: ma-

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triarchy and patriarchy, descriptive and classificatory, affect and right, domestic and public, filiation and descent, genealogy and category, consanguinity and alliance, and so forth. Likewise, the recent sea changes in the Western reflexive economy of nature and culture (Latour 1991; Serres 1990), some of them directly engaging human procreation,1 could not fail to have profound repercussions upon anthropological discourses concerning kinship. In sum, insofar as anthropology remains essentially a disquisition on nature and culture, one is tempted to quip that it is forced to choose between studying kinship and studying nothing. Of the three arguments that follow, the first concerns the possibility of imagining a relation between kinship and bodiliness irreducible to ‘biological’ categories, ethno- or otherwise. The second addresses the complementary problem of how to devise a non-jural conception of kinship relatedness. Combined, the two arguments amount to a sort of ‘no nature, no culture’ (Strathern 1980) approach to the subject. Finally and conversely, the third argument advocates a partial reclaiming of this much-maligned opposition for heuristic and comparative purposes.

Foreign Bodies A few years ago, I received an e-mail from Peter Gow reporting an incident he had witnessed during a recent visit to the Piro of Peruvian Amazonia: A mission schoolteacher in [the village of] Santa Clara was trying to convince a Piro woman to prepare food for her young child with boiled water. The woman replied, ‘If we drink boiled water, we get diarrhœa.’ The schoolteacher scoffed, and said that the common infantile diarrhœa was caused by drinking unboiled water. Unmoved, the Piro woman replied, ‘Perhaps for people from Lima this is true. But for us native people from here, boiled water gives us diarrhœa. Our bodies are different to your bodies’ (Gow pers. comm.).

Gow sent me this anecdote as direct evidence for my perspectival account of indigenous ontologies (Viveiros de Castro 1998a), which proposed rethinking the frequently reported Amerindian ‘relativism’ as a natural or ontological relativism rather than a cultural or epistemological one: different kinds of persons, human as well as nonhuman, are distinguished by their bodies or ‘natures’, not their spirit or ‘culture’ (which is one and the same across the whole multiverse

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of persons). A multinaturalism, then, is suggested instead of the multiculturalism propounded by modernism. However, rather than expressing a peculiarly Amerindian ontological tenet, the Piro woman’s reply might be construed as an apt illustration of Robin Horton’s general thesis (1993: 379ff) concerning the cognitive style of traditional societies, which argues that all such peoples are afflicted with ‘world-view parochialism’. Devoid of the imperative of universalization intrinsic to the rationalized cosmologies of Western modernity, traditional worldviews seem to manifest a spirit of all-pervasive tolerance that, truth be known, is nothing more than a deep indifference towards other, discrepant worldviews. The ‘relativism’ of the Piro would simply suggest that they could not care less how things are elsewhere. The woman in Gow’s anecdote would seem to find a natural soulmate in the person of the Zande man who Evans-Pritchard overheard saying of Europeans: ‘perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are’ (1937: 540). ‘Perhaps’ they are – I mean, perhaps the Piro woman and the Zande man were expressing the same parochialism. But perhaps not. There are cogent reasons for rejecting a theory such as Horton’s: the fact, for instance, that the relativistic outlook of many traditional societies – and this is certainly the case in indigenous Amazonia – is not merely intercultural, as he intimates, but also intracultural, and sometimes thoroughly reflexive. In the final analysis, such an outlook may prove totally indifferent to the alternative of either indifference (the Piro mother) or intolerance (the mission schoolteacher): indeed, I am persuaded that Amerindian ideas are refractory to any notion of culture as a system of ‘beliefs’ – culture as a religious system, if you will2 – and hence cannot be reliably described through the use of theologico-political concepts. This said, the main reason for rejecting a Hortonian interpretation of the Piro dialogue is not so much the mildly ethnocentric notion of parochialism, but the very ethnocentric one of worldview. For such a notion assumes a ‘one nature, many cultures’ ontology – a multiculturalism – that happens to be the self-same ontology implied in the schoolteacher’s position. Thus the debate is over before it has even started. As Gow observed in the same e-mail: It would be tempting to see the positions of the schoolteacher and the Piro woman as representing two distinct cosmologies, multiculturalism and multinaturalism respectively, and to imagine the conversation to be a clash of cosmologies or cultures. This would, I think, be

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a mistake … [T]his formulation translates the conversation into the general terms of one of its parts, multiculturalism. The co-ordinates of the multinaturalist position of the Piro woman are systematically violated by the analysis. This is not, of course, to say that I believe that infants should be fed with unboiled water. It is, however, to say that ethnographic analysis cannot proceed if it is already decided what the general meaning of the encounter could be.

Like the schoolteacher, we (Gow, myself, and very likely the reader) do not believe that Piro infants should be given unboiled water. We know that human beings are made of the same stuff, over and above cultural differences; for there may be many worldviews, but there is only one world viewed – a world in which all human children must drink boiled water, should they happen to live in a place where infantile diarrhoea is a health hazard. The Piro may deny this fact, but their cultural ‘view’ cannot change the way things are one iota. Perhaps we know this to be the case. What we do not know, however, as Gow points out, are the ontological presuppositions of the Piro mother’s reply. Perhaps this is another instance of Roy Wagner’s paradox (1981: 27): imagining a culture for people who do not imagine it for themselves. Be that as it may, it is certainly the case that, to continue to paraphrase Wagner (1981: 20), the schoolteacher’s misunderstanding of the Piro mother was not the same as the Piro mother’s misunderstanding of the schoolteacher. Let me venture another reading of this incident. The argument of bodily difference invites us to determine the possible world expressed in the Piro woman’s reply. In order to determine this possible world, there is no need for us to contrive an imaginary science-fictional universe endowed with another physics and another biology. Instead, what we must locate is the real problem that makes possible the world implied in the Piro woman’s riposte. For there undoubtedly is a problem, and this problem has nothing to do with the quality of Santa Clara’s water supply and everything to do with the relation, both bodily and political, between the mother, the schoolteacher and the child. At a certain point in Art and Agency, Alfred Gell remarks that the Frazerian theory of magic is wrong not because it invokes the notion of causality, but, rather, because it ‘impose[s] a pseudo-scientific notion of physical cause and effect … on practices which depend on intentionality and purpose, which is precisely what is missing from scientific determinism’ (Gell 1998: 101). He concludes by saying that, ‘Frazer’s mistake was, so to speak, to imagine that magicians had some non-standard physical theory, whereas the truth is that ”magic”

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is what you have when you do without a physical theory on the grounds of its redundancy, relying on the idea … that the explanation of any given event … is that it is caused intentionally’ (1998: 101). Gell’s point can be transposed analogically to ‘kinship’. In other words, we can say that the problem with kinship is like the problem with magic: classical anthropological renditions of non-Western forms of kinship are wrong not because they invoke the causal notion of reproduction, but rather because they presuppose a pseudoscientific notion of biological causality. The mistake we have to avoid here is imagining that Amazonian peoples (for example) entertain some nonstandard biological theory, like, say, Lamarckian inheritance or homuncular preformation, whereas the truth is that Amazonian kinship ideas are tantamount to a nonbiological theory of life. Kinship here is what you have when you ‘do without’ a biological theory of relationality. Returning to the Piro argument to the effect that their bodies are different, we may observe, then, that it should be taken neither as the expression of an outlandish biological view (an ‘ethno-biology’); nor – should I add ‘of course’? – as an accurate description of an objective fact; namely, the anomalous biological makeup of Amerindian bodies. What the argument expresses is another objective fact: the fact that the Piro and Western concepts of ‘body’ are different, not their respective ‘biologies’. The Piro position derives not from a discrepant ‘view’ of the same human body, but from concepts of bodiliness and humanness that differ from our own, and whose divergence both in extension and intension from their ‘homonymous’ counterparts in our conceptual language is precisely the problem. The problem is not that Amazonians and Euro-Americans give different names to (or have different representations of) the same things; the problem is that we and they are not talking about the same things. What they call ‘body’ is not what we call ‘body’. The words may translate easily enough – perhaps – but the concepts they convey do not. Thus, to give a recursive example, the Piro concept of body, differently from ours, is more than likely not to be found within the ‘mind’ as a mental representation of a material body without the mind; it may be, quite to the contrary, inscribed in the body itself as a world-defining perspective, as is any other Amerindian concept (Viveiros de Castro 1998a). Peter Gow saw the anecdote as an apt illustration of my hypothesis about corporeality being the dimension Amazonians privilege when explaining the differences among kinds of people, whether those that distinguish living species (animals and plants are people

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in their own sphere), those that set human ‘ethnic groups’ apart or those that isolate bodies of kin within a larger social body.3 If this hypothesis is correct, then the Piro mother’s reply, rather than expressing a weird biological theory, encapsulates a kinship theory that is fairly characteristic of Amazonians. Bringing my correspondent’s ethnography (Gow 1991) to bear upon this particular incident, we may construe the Piro woman’s reply as meaning: our bodies are different from your bodies because you are not our kin – so do not mess with my child! And since you are not our kin, you are not human. ‘Perhaps’ you are human to yourselves, when in Lima, say, just as we are human to ourselves here; but it is clear we are not human to each other, as our disagreement over children’s bodies testifies. On the other hand, if you become our kin, you will become human, for the difference between our bodies is not a (‘biological’) difference that would prevent or otherwise advise against our becoming related – quite the opposite, in fact: bodily differences are necessary for the creation of kinship, because the creation of kinship is the creation of bodily difference. As Gow argues (1997), to be human and to be kin are the same thing to the Piro – to be a person is to be a relative and vice versa. But this is not a simple equation: the production of relatives (consanguines) requires the intervention of nonrelatives (potential affines), and this can only mean the counter-invention of some relatives as nonrelatives (‘cutting the analogical flow’ as Wagner would say), and therefore as nonhuman to a certain critical extent, since what distinguishes consanguines from affines are their bodily differences. If the body is the site of difference, then a difference is required in order to make bodies by means of other bodies. Hence, Amazonian kinship is not a way of speaking ‘about’ bodiliness, that is, about biology, ethno- or otherwise, but the other way around: the body is a way of speaking about kinship. Perhaps biology is what we get when we start believing too much in our own ways of speaking.4 Note that the Piro woman did not say that her people and the Limeños had different ‘views’ of the same human body; she appealed to the different dispositional constitution of their respective bodies, not to different representational contents of their minds or souls. As it happens, the soul idiom cannot be used in Amazonia to express differences or recognize contrasts. The world is peopled by diverse types of subjective agencies, human and nonhuman, all endowed with the same general type of soul, i.e., the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of a similar soul implies the

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possession of similar concepts (that is, a similar culture), and this makes all subjects see things in the same way, that is, experience the same basic percepts. What changes is the ‘objective correlative’, the reference of these concepts for each species of subject: what jaguars see as ‘manioc beer’ (the proper drink of people, jaguar-kind or otherwise), humans see as ‘blood’; where we see a muddy salt-lick in the forest, tapirs see their big ceremonial house, and so on. Such difference of perspective – not a plurality of views of a single world, mind you, but a single view of different worlds – cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the common original ground of being; the difference is located in the body, for the body is the site and instrument of ontological differentiation. (Accordingly, Amazonian myths mostly deal with the causes and consequences of the species-specific embodiment of different pre-cosmological subjects, all of them conceived as originally similar to ‘spirits’, purely intensive beings in which human and nonhuman aspects are indiscernibly mixed.) The meaning of kinship derives from this same predicament. The soul is the universal condition against which humans must work in order to produce both their own species identity and their various intraspecific kinship identities. A person’s body indexes her constitutive relation to bodies similar to hers and different from other kinds of bodies, while her soul is a token of the ultimate commonality of all beings, human and nonhuman alike: the primal analogical flow of relatedness (Wagner 1977a) is a flow of spirit. That means that the body must be produced out of the soul but also against it, and this is what Amazonian kinship is ‘all about’: becoming a human body through the differential bodily engagement of and/or with other bodies, human as well as nonhuman. Needless to say, such a process is neither performable nor describable by the ‘genealogical method’. This does not mean, though, that the soul has only negative kinship determinations. A consideration of soul matters brings us back to magic. Gell’s remarks on magical intentionality suggest that we can do more than analogically transpose anthropology’s problems with magic to its problems with kinship. Perhaps the problem of magic is the problem of kinship; perhaps both are complementary solutions to the same problem: the problem of intentionality and influence, the mysterious effectiveness of relationality. In any case, it seems useful to ask ourselves whether magic and kinship have a deeper connection than that usually acknowledged in contemporary anthropological theorizing. This would help explain why it is precisely these two themes that lie at the root of our disciplinary ge-

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nealogical tree: the ‘animism’ and ‘magic’ of Tylor and Frazer on the one hand, the ‘classificatory kinship’ and ‘exogamy’ of Morgan and Rivers on the other (Fortes 1969: 10ff.). The reader will recall the hypothesis expounded by Edmund Leach in ‘Rethinking Anthropology’, according to which: in any system of kinship and marriage, there is a fundamental ideological opposition between the relations which endow the individual with membership of a ‘we group’ of some kind (relations of incorporation), and those other relations which link ‘our group’ to other groups of like kind (relations of alliance), and that, in this dichotomy, relations of incorporation are distinguished symbolically as relations of common substance, while relations of alliance are viewed as metaphysical influence. (1961: 20, emphasis removed)

In sum: consanguinity and physics on one hand, affinity and metaphysics on the other.5 Note that what Leach calls metaphysical or mystical influence need not exclude bonds of ‘substance’; on the contrary, it may be exerted precisely through such links (the maternally transmitted flesh and blood of the Kachin, for example). Or take Wagner’s famous analysis of Daribi kinship: it is because mother’s brother and sister’s son share bodily substance that the former exerts a permanent influence of a ‘mystical’ nature over the latter.6 Note that Leach’s hypothesis is not invalidated by the Daribi; according to them, fathers and sons also share bodily substance, but this does not involve any spiritual power of the former over the latter. So the correlation between bonds of alliance and magical influence does seem to obtain among the Daribi, since the mother’s brother is a consubstantial of the sister’s son, but also an affine of the latter’s father, who must pay his wife’s brother to counter the latter’s influence over the sister’s son. In short, it is not so much ‘bodily substance’ and ‘spiritual influence’ as such that seem to be opposed, but what Leach defined as ‘relations of incorporation’ and ‘alliance’, or, as I would prefer to envisage them, relations based on similarity and relations based on difference.7 In Amazonian kinship, the first defines a quality I will call, for comparative purposes, ‘consanguinity’, and the second the quality of ‘affinity’. Leach’s correlation is perfectly valid for Amazonia, as long as we rephrase it by saying that the body is the consanguineal component of the person and the soul is the affinal component. What we have here, then, is not so much a case of a person’s affines exerting a spiritual influence over him, but, rather, of the spiritual dimension of the person himself having affinal connota-

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tions, i.e., being such an influence rather than suffering it. Hence this is not the same as saying that Amazonian consanguinity involves shared ‘physical substance’ while affinity involves some other type of substance – a spiritual one, say – or a kind of immaterial influence of mental-intentional rather than causal-mechanical type. In fact, the distinction between a world of physical objects and a world of mental states is meaningless in Amazonian and similar ontologies (Leach, this volume; Townsley 1993). Instead there is a single analogic field of influence, to use Wagner’s terms: a continuous field of magical forces that continually convert bodies into souls, substances into relations, physics into semantics, ‘social structure’ into ‘religion’ – and back again. In brief, there is a single world but a double movement. Accordingly, while the Amazonian process of kinship essentially concerns the fabrication and destruction of bodies, individual souls are never made but always given: either absolutely during conception, or transmitted along with names and other preconstituted principles, or captured ready-made from the outside. A living person is a composite of body and soul, internally constituted by a self/other, consanguine/affine polarity (Kelly 2001; Taylor 2000). This dividual entity is decomposed by death, which separates a principle of ‘affinal’ otherness, the soul, from one of ‘consanguineal’ sameness, the dead body. Unalloyed consanguinity can only be attained in death: it is the final result of the life-process of kinship, just as pure affinity is the cosmological precondition of the latter. At the same time, death releases the tension between affinity and consanguinity that impels the construction of kinship, and completes the process of consanguinization, i.e., de-affinization, which such a process effectively comprises (Viveiros de Castro 2001). As was the case with the ‘body’ of the Piro anecdote, it is quite clear that Amazonian consanguinity and affinity must mean something very different from our homonymous notions. This was precisely the reason I decided to establish such a homonymy – to create a relation between the Amazonian and the Western heterogenic conceptual fields, a relation based on their difference, not their similarity. Note, then, that this relation is reciprocal but oriented, since it is within Amazonian and ‘similar’ symbolic economies (like the Melanesian one recently described by James Leach [2003]), as opposed to what might be called our own folk-modernist ontology, that difference can be a positive principle of relationality, meaning both disjunction and connection (Strathern 1995a: 165), rather than a merely negative want of similarity.

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Gift Economies and Animist Ontologies Let us tackle more directly the question of the possible co-implication of the two founding problematics of anthropology, kinship and magic. Could there be a hidden affinity between, say, prescriptive marriage and magical causation? Are the two Tylorean neologisms required by primitive (i.e., paleologic) cultures, ‘animism’ and ‘cross-cousin’, expressing ideas that are, in some obscure way, germane? Put simply, does one have to practise magic to believe in mother’s brother’s daughter’s marriage? In order to sketch the positive answers I obviously intend for these rhetorical questions, I believe we need an additional, mediatory concept in order to determine this relation more clearly. Such a concept is that of the gift. Let us start with C. Gregory’s definition: ‘Gift exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between persons who are in a state of reciprocal dependence’ (1982: 19). This is as good a definition of gift exchange as of kinship pure and simple – taken in its affinal dimension, obviously, but also in its filiative one, for while the prototype of gift exchange in this definition is marriage exchange (‘the supreme gift’, etc.), procreation or generational substitution can also be conceived as a process of transmitting inalienable things – body parts and substances, classically, but also memories, narratives, connections to land (see Bamford, this volume) – that create persons who thereby belong in a state of reciprocal dependence. Marriage exchange is conceptually prototypical because all gift exchange is an exchange of persons – a personification process: ‘[t]hings and people assume the social form of objects in a commodity economy while they assume the social form of persons in a gift economy’ (Gregory 1982: 41). If the first definition of gift exchange made it synonymous with kinship, this one makes the concept of gift economy virtually indistinguishable from the notion of animism (Descola 1992) – the label traditionally applied to those ontological regimes in which, precisely, things and people assume the social form of persons. Perhaps, then, gift exchange, kinship and animism are merely different names for the same personification process – the economic, political and religious faces of a single generalized symbolic economy, as it were – just as commodity production, the state and the ‘scientific revolution’ form the pillars of our own modernist symbolic economy. The connection between gift economy and animism is acknowledged in Gifts and Commodities, albeit somewhat in passing. After mentioning Mauss and alluding to the ‘anthropomorphic quality’ of

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gifts (1982: 20, 45), Gregory summarizes the theoretical rationale for such anthropomorphization as follows: ‘the social organisation of reproduction of things-gifts is governed by the methods of reproduction of people. The latter is a personification process which gives things-gifts a soul and a gender classification; thus the reproduction of things-gifts must be organized as if they were people’ (1982: 93). This passage rounds off a paragraph about the importance of magic for the material production (i.e., productive consumption) process in gift economies (1982: 92). Animism, then, would be the cosmological corollary of the gift, and magic the technology of such a cosmology. If the reproduction of gifts supposes they are people, or human-like agents, then magic is the proper way to produce them, for magic, as Gell noted, is the technology of intentionality. But instead of taking animism as the ideology of the gift economy, as Gregory may be construed as saying, I prefer to turn the formula back-to-front: the gift is the form things take in an animist ontology. This way round – gift exchange as the political economy aspect of the semiotic regime or dispensation of animism – seems preferable to me, since I believe Gregory’s formulation derives in the last instance from the commodity perspective: it privileges ‘the economy’ as the projective source of form for all human activity. Production, whether of things through productive consumption or of people through consumptive production, is the all-embracing category; human reproduction (kinship) is universally imagined as a kind of production, the better, one might say, to retroproject primitive, gift-oriented production as a kind of human reproduction. (‘Material production’ seems to play the same role in political economy as ‘biogenetic kinship’ in anthropological theory.) I believe the perspectival distortion of gift ‘economies’ generated by apprehending them from a commodity-derived standpoint is also responsible for a conceptual slippage in Gregory’s analysis between the personification process of consumptive production and the personification process involved in ‘giving things-gifts a soul and a gender classification’. The notion of personification does not have the same meaning in the two cases – indeed, the first is a ‘social form’ phenomenon, the second an ‘as if’ one. Here I am intrigued by Gregory’s appeal to analogical modalization when discussing magic (‘the reproduction of things-gifts must be organized as if they were people’), whereas before, when describing the predominance of consumptive production in gift economies, he uses the concept of ‘social form’ (‘things and people assume … the social form of persons in a gift economy’). There is surely some kind of difference between

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the ‘social form’ of something and its ‘as if’ properties; a difference of epistemological form, so to speak – or of theoretical economy. I prefer to see gift exchange, kinship and animism as different names for the same personification process, a process that is neither an ‘as if’ phenomenon nor exactly (or exclusively) a ‘social form’ one. The ‘as if’ supposes an extensionist semiotics of literal and metaphorical meanings, while the notion of social form raises the question: ‘social’ as opposed to what? To ‘phenomenal’, assuredly (cf., Gell 1999: 35ff.); but here perhaps we come a little too close for comfort to our familiar nature/culture schema. My interest in the relations between kinship and magic has its proximate source in a series of conversations with Marilyn Strathern, especially a discussion we had in 1998 in Brazil about intellectual property rights (IPR). In an interview she gave to Carlos Fausto and myself (Strathern et al. 1999), I introduced the IPR theme with the somewhat imprudent suggestion that the concept of ‘right’ is the form the relation takes in a commodity economy. In a regime where things and people assume the form of objects, relations are exteriorized, detached from persons in the form of rights. All relations must be converted into rights in order to be recognized, just as commodities must have prices to be exchanged; rights and duties define the relative value of persons, just as prices define the exchange rate of things. The question that ensued was: what would be the equivalent of the notion of ‘right’ in a gift economy? Strathern observed that this way of phrasing the problem would imply (in order to preserve the translative inversions between gift and commodity regimes) looking for the substantial or thing-like correlation of the gift. At the time none of us found this a very promising line of inquiry, and the subject was dropped. When she picked up the topic again in a recent paper, Strathern (2004) zeroed in on the debt as the gift-economy correlative of right, in accordance with Fausto’s answer to my question during our conversation of six years ago: ‘gift is to debt as commodity is to right’. Noting that this answer had been more or less anticipated by Gregory: ‘The gift economy … is a debt economy’ (1982: 19), Strathern then proceeded to sketch a wonderfully illuminating contrast between the intrinsic temporalities of rights (which anticipate transactions) and debts (which presuppose them). While fully accepting the heuristic potential of the right/debt contrast, I venture to suggest another candidate for the conceptual role of anti-right. In the passage of Gifts and Commodities cited by Strathern, Gregory actually understands that gift is to debt as com-

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modity is to profit: ‘The gift economy, then, is a debt economy. The aim of a transactor in such an economy is to acquire as many giftdebtors as he possibly can, and not to maximize profit, as it is in a commodity economy. What a gift transactor desires is the personal relationships that the exchange of gifts creates, and not the things themselves’ (1982: 19). If profit is the commodity correlative of debt, the gift equivalent of commodity prices would be ‘classificatory kinship terms’ (1982: 16, 67–68). Gregory is referring here to the relations of prescriptive marriage exchange between certain ‘classificatory’ kinship positions that index whole groups as transactors. While prices describe cardinal value relations between transacted objects, kinship terms describe ordinal rank relations between the transactors themselves. All the elements of my problem are now deployed. Kinship relations have traditionally been conceptualized by anthropology as jural relations: descent has always been a matter of rights and duties, not of natural filiation, and alliance was prescriptive, or preferential, or else a matter of choice – a whole juridical metaphysics was erected around ‘primitive kinship’; no need to rehearse this story.8 Now, in a commodity economy (where things and people assume the form of objects) relations between human beings are conceived in terms of rights, which are, in a sense, prices in human form.9 This makes the notion quite inappropriate to a gift economy, where kinship relations are not detachable from people as our rights are. By the same token, in a gift economy (where things and people assume the form of persons) relations between human beings are expressed by classificatory kinship terms – in other words, they are kinship relations. But then, relations between things must be conceived as bonds of magical influence; that is, as kinship relations in object form. The objective world of a gift ‘economy’ is an animistic ontology of universal agency and trans-specific kinship relatedness, utterly beyond the grasp of the genealogical method – a world where yams are our lineage brothers and roam unseen at night, or where jaguars strip away their animal clothes and reveal themselves as our cannibal brothers-in-law. As Strathern once observed with pleasant irony, many nonliterate people, meaning those who happen to abide by the dispensation of the gift, ‘appear to see persons even where the anthropologist would not … [a]nd kinship may be claimed for relations between entities that English-speakers conceive as frankly improbable’ (1995b: 16). Indeed, it appears that when these people talk about personification processes, they really mean it.10

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The modern language of rights is rooted in the early modern Big Split between the Hobbes world and the Boyle world – in other words, the moral-political and natural-physical domains.11 Our commodity economy is equally grounded in this dual dispensation of social form versus natural force (exchange-value and use-value). Nonmodern gift economies, however, having no truck with such dualities, must operate on the basis of a unified world of form and force; that is, a ‘magical’ world, ‘magic’ being the name we give to all those ontologies that do not recognize the need to divide the universe into moral and physical spheres – in kinship terms, into jural and biological relations. I would vote for magic, then. Commodity is to jural right as gift is to magical might. So I was looking for the ‘substantial’ or thing-like correlation of the gift, after all, but it was less a thing than a force, less like a material substance and more like a spiritual principle (or perhaps a social form). Or, to put it differently, I was merely looking for the way the debt is theoretically reified. The answer is that it is reified as the spirit of the gift, of course: as the hau, the archetypal embodiment of that ‘anticipated outcome’ that makes up the ‘æsthetic trap’ of the gift economy (Strathern 1988: 219ff.).12 There is no need to recall that The Gift is, among other things, a study on the prehistory of the notion of the right, and that the ‘general theory of the obligation’ that Mauss (1990 [1950]) saw as the ultimate aim of his essay derived the juridical bond (le lien juridique) created by the transmission of a thing from the animate character of that thing. No need to remember, either, that the hau is a form of mana, or that hau and mana are ‘species of the same genus’, as Mauss says somewhere. In this sense, the hau of The Gift is just a special case of the mana of Outline of a Theory of Magic: the latter is taken to be the ancestor of the modern notion of natural force, just as hau-concepts are thought to lie at the root of our idea of contractual obligation. Gregory notes a further contrast between commodity and gift-exchange: ‘Commodity-exchange – the exchange of unlike-for-unlike – establishes a relation of equality between the objects exchanged … [T]he problem is to find the common measure … Gift-exchange – the exchange of like-for-like – establishes an unequal relation of domination between the transactors … [The problem here is:] who is superior to whom?’ (1982: 47–48). He cautions that the ‘precise meaning of “domination” is an empirical question’. Indeed it may mean many different things; but I believe it means, first and foremost, what Leach and Wagner refer to as ‘influence’ – magical influence, for influence is the general mode of action and relation in

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a world of immanent humanity. As their common etymology suggests, what the analogical ‘flow’ carries is ‘influence’. Immanence is fluid.13 I am afraid all the above comments on the gift, animism and kinship will have struck the reader as tiresomely obvious. Perhaps they are. My point was simply to call attention to the need to put back together what was pulled apart early in the history of our discipline and has seldom been reassembled since: magic and kinship, animism and exogamy. Introducing the notion of magic into the discussion is intended, in part at least, to temper our obsession with ‘biology’ – whether for or against – when it comes to theorizing about kinship. We have long known that an anthropological theory of magic will not work if it starts out from the premise that magic is no more than mistaken physics. Neither is it helpful to imagine kinship as a weird biology. And likewise, there are strong reasons for not framing our conceptualization of kinship relations in general with the help of the notion of right. Kinship is not ‘primitive law’, for the very same reason it is not ‘natural law’. Kinship is magic, for magic is kinship.

An Amazonian Critique of Some New Approaches to the Study of Kinship There is a famous passage in the Elementary Structures of Kinship where Lévi-Strauss contrasts the sociological properties of the ‘brother’ and ‘brother-in-law’ relations. Alluding to what is arguably the primal scene of structuralism, the collective affinization of a foreign band by the Nambikwara group with whom he was staying, the author writes that although the Nambikwara may occasionally use the ‘brother’ idiom to institute bonds with nonrelatives, the ‘brother-inlaw’ idiom is far more consequential: [T]he whole difference between the two types of bond can also be seen, a sufficiently clear definition being that one of them expresses a mechanical solidarity … while the other involves an organic solidarity … Brothers are closely related to one another, but they are so in terms of their similarity, as are the posts or the reeds of the Pan-pipe. By contrast, brothers-in-law are solidary because they complement each other and have a functional efficacy for one another, whether they play the role of the opposite sex in the erotic games of childhood, or whether their masculine alliance as adults is confirmed by each providing the other with what he does not have – a wife –

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through their simultaneous renunciation of what they both do have – a sister. The first form of solidarity adds nothing and unites nothing; it is based upon a cultural limit, satisfied by the reproduction of a type of connection the model for which is provided by nature. The other brings about the integration of the group on a new plane. (1967: 554– 55, here citing the English translation of 1969: 483–84)

In short, the brother relationship is natural while the brother-inlaw one is cultural. The motif pervades the Elementary Structures: consanguinity (filiation plus siblingship) is a natural given that must be limited by constructed affinity; culture or society is instituted by the normative occupation of the spaces left unguarded by natural law (mate choice as against heredity). Even as he devalues ‘blood kinship’ as a model for sociality, LéviStrauss nevertheless reasserts the robust modern Western cosmology of consanguinity as the given and affinity as the constructed (see Wagner 1981) – i.e., as the ‘nature’ and ‘law’ aspects of kinship, respectively (Schneider 1968). Indeed, he treats the distinction between consanguinity and affinity in very much the same way Fortes and so many other anthropologists before him (Delaney 1986) – not to mention Freud – conceive the difference, internal to consanguinity, between motherhood and fatherhood: the first term of each pair is associated with naturally given immanence, the second with culturally created (and culture-creating) transcendence.14 In the best tradition of Euro-American modernity, therefore, Lévi-Strauss restates the image of civil society as emerging from the sublimational displacement (the ‘enterprising up’)15 of natural solidarities. Is there no big difference, then, between ‘descent theory’ and ‘alliance theory’ (Schneider 1965, 1984)? Not exactly, for structuralism did accomplish a conceptual breakthrough. Although associating consanguinity with nature and affinity with society, Lévi-Strauss’s alliance theory amounts to a conception of kinship in which affinity is as much given as consanguinity. Furthermore, in the exemplary case of elementary structures, affinity is given in exactly the same way as consanguinity; that is, as a permanent, internal and constitutive interrelationship between the partners to the marriage exchange – even if this inherence is a deed (a ruse) of culture rather than a fact (a given) of nature. But such a breakthrough was not really destined to take root in the discipline, for the whole anthropology of kinship was to be shaken to its foundations in the decades following the structuralist spring (or was it an autumn?). Prescriptive marriage, for instance, was theoretically exposed as an idealized cover-up (‘etic’ and/or

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‘emic’) for real-life strategies, calculations and interests – these being the current conceptual upgrades of the perduring ‘choice’ motif. Constitutive alliance has been driven back to its traditional regulative status, the pre-given domain it regulates having now become for the most part ‘the Political’ – this being the postmodern (no offence intended) ersatz of transcendent nature. Alliance was reconstrued as sitting squarely within the domain of the constructible. More importantly, an idea such as the one expressed by Lévi-Strauss when he asserted that the sibling relationship is natural, or at least that its model is provided by nature (i.e., given), would today be flatly rejected. The whole of kinship – brothers just as much as brothersin-law – is now seen as constructed, or rather as a ‘process’ of construction that leaves no room for notions of the given as a natural or social ‘structure’. Consider, for instance, the following remark from a contemporary Amazonianist. Arguing for the phenomenally constructed character of Amazonian parenthood, my colleague Laura Rival invokes ‘the current understanding of kinship, no longer seen as a social identity given at birth and fixed in a set of structural positions, but, rather, as a process of becoming’ (Rival 1998: 628).16 The given, the fixed and the structural are thereby lumped and dumped together in the capacious dustbin of disciplinary history. We know much better now (Carsten 2000b). But do we really? What guarantees that our current understandings, of kinship or whatever the subject may be, are more in line with, say, Amazonian understandings? In the particular case of parenthoodfiliation as a constructive process, rather than a given structure, one could argue that the new understanding is the end result of nonWestern ideas having been successfully employed to challenge Eurocentric anthropological conceptions. But one could just as easily argue that Western views themselves have changed, and this independently of any enlightenment dispensed by anthropology. Perhaps, rather, it is a number of specific historical developments, such as the new reproductive technologies and certain general cultural trends like the current infatuation with ‘creativity’ (Leach 2004) and ‘selffashioning’, that explain anthropology’s sudden realization that nothing is ‘given at birth’. If this is so, we are in no better position than our anthropological forebears, as far as non-Western understandings are concerned. Be that as it may, the purpose of this chapter is not to dispute the current insights of anthropology. I harbour no anti-constructionist feelings, and am not going to start appealing now to ‘intractable’ or ‘indisputable’ facts of life. My point is simply that there is no a priori

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reason for supposing that Amazonians share our understandings – past or present – of kinship. There is particularly no reason for supposing that all aspects of what we call kinship are understood by Amazonians as equally constructible or ‘processual’. Rival’s generic mention of kinship glosses over possible differences internal to this province of human experience. My argument should by now be obvious. Let us take one of the major conceptual dichotomies of Western kinship practice and theory, the consanguinity/affinity dichotomy of Morganian (and structuralist) fame, and combine it with Wagner’s distinction between the innate and the constructed, as formulated in The Invention of Culture (Wagner 1981). This procedure generates four possible cases. The Standard Model Consanguinity is the province of the given: it is an innate, passive property of the human relational matrix, its essential bodily substrate. Affinity is active construction: it is differentiating choice, affective or political, and inventive freedom. This is the Western standard model, the well-known cosmology of nature and law, status (substance) and contract (code), theoretically universalized by many as ‘human kinship’. In its comparative developments, this model implies that the cultural constructions placed upon consanguineal relations are severely limited, oscillating around a powerful natural attractor represented by maternity, sibling solidarity and the nuclear family. Affinity, on the other hand, is supposed to vary more freely, ranging from primitive compulsory marriage to modern love-based unions; it reveals itself as ‘intractable’ only in its negative connection to consanguinity, that is, in the incest prohibition. The standard model conceives consanguinity as an internal relation derived from procreation (see Bamford, this volume). The procreative links and resulting corporeal similarities among ‘blood’ kin are (or were until very recently) conceived to make up the unchangeable, ineffaceable, originally constitutive aspects of a person’s identity insofar as s/he is thought of ‘in relation’ to other persons.17 To use the biological metaphor, kinship is primarily a genotypic, rather than phenotypic, property of persons. The genotype (the body as substance) is ontologically deep-sealed, unmodifiable by any of the active relations through which the phenotype (the body as subject) engages with the world. Affinal connections, on the other hand, are purely external, regulative relations between alreadyconstituted persons, binding reciprocally independent partners. So ‘biological’ continuities are our own concrete metaphor of internal

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relatedness, while real (i.e., social) relations are seen as external and regulative (Schneider 1984: 188). This is a drastic simplification, of course (Carsten 2001). When it comes to modern Western conceptions of kinship, ‘biology is never the full story’ (Edwards and Strathern 2000: 160), and genetic transmission still less so (Edwards, this volume). Lived consanguinity always evinces a complex interdigitation of ‘social’ and ‘biological’ dimensions, and the latter are just as likely to be accepted as rejected as the basis of a relationship. Still, the simplification holds to a very important extent, for there are limits to the combinations of social and biological attributes inherent to our cosmology. A choice always exists as to whether or not biology is made the foundation of relationships, but there is no choice about making relationships the foundation of biology – this is impossible. The code of conduct may prevail over substance, but it cannot create substance. It is admissible for the relation not to proceed from substance, but not for it to precede substance. An adoptive son may be more of a ‘son’ than a natural one, but there is nothing that can make him a natural son. Biological connections are absolutely independent of social relations, but the reciprocal does not hold. Even though biology may not be destiny, or the full story, it will always be necessity, because it is history; through it, time is irreversibly inscribed in the body: ‘contained within the bodies of living human beings is a protracted history of procreative events extending back in time from the present to the remote past’ (Bamford, this volume). If consanguinity embodies the procreative causes of kinship, affinity is an effect of marriage or its analogues. And it is precisely as a consequence of conjugality that affinity can be said to be constructed. The true ‘construction’ is conjugality, the outcome of choice; the affinal kin resulting from conjugality are ‘given’ a posteriori, as the spouse’s consanguines or as consanguines’ spouses. Hence the possibility of situating, in the standard model, affinity along with consanguinity on the side of the given, in contrast to freely ‘chosen’ constructed relationships, such as love, friendship, spiritual kinship, etc. Hence also the contemporary tendency to separate conjugality from affinity, in order to root more firmly, as it were, the former on the soil of affective choice. ‘I did not marry your relatives’ – this was a formula frequently voiced in my country a generation ago, when it sounded amusing because of its wishful, utter counterfactuality; nowadays, however, it is beginning to ring ever more true. To summarize, let us say that the kinship content of the given, in the standard model, is a constitutive relation of consubstantial sim-

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ilarity inscribed in the body and resulting from procreation. The form of the constructed is a relation established by free choice, expressing the spiritual complementarity of the individuals entering into it; such complementarity (or difference), embodied in conjugality, results in procreation. Put together, these two dimensions of given substance and constructed choice are the condition of possibility of the ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’ found at the root of human sociality. The Constitutive Model Here both dimensions are seen as given, the first naturally (and thence socially, once sanctioned by culture), the second socially (but also in a sense naturally, since it evinces the essence of human sociality). This corresponds in effect to the structuralist conception of ‘primitive’ kinship, especially as expressed in the concepts of elementary structure and prescriptive marriage: both the consanguineal and affinal areas of an elementary kinship structure are treated, by the persons abiding by it, as ‘given at birth’. In such a model, affinity is not created by marriage, but the other way around: we do not see as affines those whom we marry, but, rather, marry those whom we have always seen as affines (or construe as having always seen as affines – since we marry them now). Now, one might wish to emphasize – were one willing to conflate constitutive and regulative understandings and read the model in a ‘prescriptive’ key – the debt of the structuralist model to the traditional view of primitive society as a rule-dominated, no-choice universe, as well as to the ‘Durkheim-Saussure hypothesis’ (as it were) which sees human action as the automatic enactment of a transcendent set of cultural instructions (a cultural genotype of sorts). But one could also argue – and with much more reason, I think – that this model displays a thoroughly relational or nonsubstantivist view of kinship, since it implies ‘that persons have relations integral to them (what else is the specification of the positive marriage rule?)’ (Strathern 1992a: 101).18 Above all, we can observe that although both dimensions of kinship are ‘given’ in this model, they are not given in the same way and at the same logical time. The LéviStraussian concept of the incest prohibition means strictly no more (nor less) than this: affinity is prior to consanguinity – it comprises its formal cause. There are no consanguines before the inception of the idea of exchange; my sister only becomes a ‘sister’ when I apprehend (or anticipate) her as a ‘wife’ for someone else. Men do not ‘exchange women’, and women are not there for exchange: they are created by exchange. As are men. Indeed, as a matter of fact (or rather, a matter of right), it is never a case of some people (men) ex-

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changing some other people (women): marriage is a process whereby people (men and women) exchange kinship relations, as Lévi-Strauss suggested a while ago (1983 [1956]: 91),19 or perspectives, as Strathern put it more recently (Strathern 1988: 230 et passim, 1992a: 96–100, 1999: 238–40). The Constructive Model Both dimensions are treated here as the result of socio-practical processes of relating; that is, they are conceptualized as equally constructed by human agency. Kin ties are not given at birth – not even birth is given at birth (see Rival 1998 on the couvade). Instead, they are ‘created’ or ‘produced’ by purposeful acts of feeding, caring, sharing, loving and remembering.20 The overwhelming theoretical emphasis rests upon the socially created nature of consanguineal relations, in particular the parent-child ties; it is considered unnecessary to argue that affinal ties are also socially created. This constructionist model seems to be the currently dominant anthropological understanding of kinship; it has also been attributed, causally or consequentially, to many – perhaps all – non-Western peoples. It has largely emerged as a reactive inversion of the preceding position, although it could be argued that it is as old as anthropology itself, having been adumbrated by authors as different as McLennan and Durkheim. But it has also reacted to some contemporary competing understandings of kinship in (then) socio-biological and (now) psycho-evolutionary terms, which propound a particularly imperialistic version of the given: genotypic consanguinity not only determines phenotypic behaviour vis-à-vis ‘relatives’, it also governs ‘affinal’ choices (i.e., mating) in the best interest of gene replication. Partisans of the constructionist model devote much attention to ‘optative’ and ‘adoptive’ relations, as well as to extra-uterine, postnatal modes of creating or validating bonds of consubstantiality. Adoptive kinship, milk kinship, spiritual kinship, commensality, coresidence and so forth are shown to be considered by many peoples as equal to, and often more valued than, relations based on the sharing of prenatally produced bodily substance. Kinship, in short, is made, not ‘given by birth’ (Carsten 2000a: 15; Stafford 2000: 52). Note that ‘kinship’ here essentially means consanguinity – filiation and siblingship – not affinity. The latter seems to be already regarded as a kind of ‘fictive consanguinity’, and as I remarked earlier, the question of the possibility of something like a ‘fictive affinity’, that is, a relation of affinity not based on a ‘real’ marriage alliance, fails even to see the light of day. Apparently, to argue that affinity is socially constructed would be deemed redundant – a telling presupposition.

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The primary target of the constructionist model is the notion of biologically given relatedness. It aims to show that, when it comes to kinship, ‘the world of made’ is as good as, and often better than, ‘the world of born’. But under closer scrutiny, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the equation at the base of the Western standard model still remains in force – the equation between ‘biological’, ‘given’ and ‘non-negotiable’, on the one hand, and ‘social’, ‘constructed’ and ‘optative’, on the other. The notion of ‘substance’ may have been theoretically extended from the sphere of the given to that of the constructed (Carsten 2001) – but that is about it. Biology (‘sex’, ‘birth’, etc.) is still the given in the constructive model; it simply carries less value than the constructed (‘gender’, ‘feeding’, etc.) dimensions of kinship. Some peoples may even entirely ignore the given, entertaining a ‘nothing is given, all is made’ type of ontology – but no people would have something other than biologically grounded consanguinity as the given.21 Why not, though? Nowadays, social constructionism’s dominance is under siege on multiple fronts. The model just evoked is being hit by a volley of criticisms, the more hostile of them coming from the camp of those I would dub ‘natural instructionists’ – cognitivistic-minded anthropologists, their associates and fellow-travellers. Virtually all of the criticisms, however, amount to restatements of the old modernist ontology of natural universals and cultural particulars. ‘Kinship’, ‘gender’ and ‘person’, among many other concepts, have been victimized by these somewhat reactionary reconstructions. In the face of the ‘nothing is given’ banner waved by the constructionists, these reactions content themselves in reaffirming the universal content of the given, ‘given’ certain universals – be they physico-material (‘nature’), psycho-cognitive (‘human nature’), or phenomenological (the ‘human condition’). Back to case one. In total disagreement with these rejections of the social constructionist stance, I assume that what is prehistorical and generic is that something is always presupposed as given, not its specification. What is given is that something has to be given – that some dimension of human experience must be constructed (counterinvented) as given.22 And that is about it. One possibility is left, given the parameters chosen ‘by construction’, for the present experiment. The Amazonian Model The remaining possibility is the converse of the first one. Here we find affinity as a given, internal and constitutive relation, and con-

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sanguinity as constructed, external and regulative. This, I suggest, is the value distribution present in the Amazonian relational world. If the privileging of the fraternal idiom in our own model of sociality (we are all brothers in something; sociality is fraternity writ large) derives from the given character of consanguinity for ourselves, then the analogous privileging of the affinal bond by Amazonians would point to affinity as the given dimension of kinship there. Likewise, if affinity is seen as constructed in our social tradition, then consanguinity has a good chance of standing as the non-innate dimension of Amazonian kinship. If all this happens to be true, then Lévi-Strauss was not correct in arguing that the brother relationship is natural, i.e., given and socially sterile, while the brother-in-law one is cultural, i.e., constructed and socially fecund. As far as Amazonians are concerned, I would say that the opposite is true: affinity is natural, consanguinity is cultural. (It is precisely because affinity is seen as a natural given by the Nambikwara, I would argue, that they treated it as socially fecund, resorting to it when constructing a relation with the foreign band.) I am stretching the meanings of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ here, to be sure; but that is the whole point of this exercise. Amazonian affinity cannot be ‘natural’ in exactly the same sense as our consanguinity – that is, given as a deep-sealed organismic condition, although it does entail important bodily determinations.23 It is not a given in the Elementary Structures sense, either, although it does incorporate ‘prescriptive alliance’ as one of the possible consequences of a wider cosmopractical structure. Affinity is the given because it is lived and conceived as an ontological condition underlying all ‘social’ relations. Affinity, in other words, is not something that comes after prior natural relatednesses; rather, it is one of the primordial givens from which the relational matrix ensues. It belongs as such to the fabric of the universe.24 If we wish to continue to think of affinity as cultural or conventional, we must also realize that ‘human’ culture, for Amazonians (and others), is a trans-specific property, belonging to the province of the universal and the ‘innate’ – or what we might as well call the natural.25 By the same token, Amazonian consanguinity is experienced as constructed, but not only (or always) as an instituted set of jural categories and roles, a ‘social structure’. Consanguinity is constructed more or less along the lines of the current understanding of kinship: in the phenomenal sense of being the outcome of meaningful intersubjective practices. It is ‘culture’, then – it is, for example, history (Gow 1991). This has nothing to do with choice, as in our own notions of the constructed. Humans have no

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option but to invent and differentiate their own bodies of kin; for this, too, follows from the conventional givenness of affinity.26

Epilogue Let me conclude by insisting that consanguinity and affinity mean very different things across the four cases summarized above. In each configuration they highlight possibilities that are downplayed or subsumed by the meanings they assume in the other configurations. Hence, my decision to stick to these two words in the face of a lived world quite foreign to the constellation of ideas we express by them was not taken just for the sake of the debate – much less because I believe ‘that our words consanguinity and affinity have some universal value’ (E. Leach 1961: 27) – but in order for us fully to appreciate the extent of such foreignness. Indeed, I think that one of the most rewarding anthropological experiments is the antiFregean trick of forcing unfamiliar ‘references’ onto familiar ‘senses’, the subverting of the conceptual regime of everyday notions – making the right mistake, so to speak.27 To my mind, this sort of controlled equivocality is the stuff of which anthropology is made. And this, after all, is what ‘kinship’ is all about. The reader will have noticed that my two intermediary cases (the ‘constitutive’ and the ‘constructive’) were not directly associated with culturally specific instantiations. They are theoretical constructs developed within anthropology by a sort of internal dialectic that took off through a negation of the Western viewpoint. Perhaps one might find ethnographic examples of these two cases, though I suspect this task would be far from easy. If my general argument is correct, the opposition between consanguinity and affinity – as with any conceptual dualism not submitted to deliberate, reflexive equalizing – is inherently unstable and tends to fall into a marked/unmarked distribution: you cannot have both affinity and consanguinity as given, or both as constructed.28 Such asymmetry can be seen even within the theoretical constructs that apparently impose the same value upon both poles: the structuralist ‘constitutive’ model obviously privileges affinity as the truly interesting ‘given’, since the model reacts against an artificialist and individualist conception of sociality; while the constructive model tends to concentrate on consanguinity as the critically interesting ‘constructed’, for the model opposes naturalized views of kinship. Therefore, should the symmetrical character of the relation between the ‘Western’ and the ‘Amazonian’ models look

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a tad too neat, I invite the reader to see the latter as an analytical cross between the structuralist model, from whence it draws the notion of affinity as the given, and the constructionist model, from whence it draws the idea of consanguinity as processual construction. But there is a critical subtext here. I take the constructive model to be a particularly strong version (a terminal transformation of sorts) of the standard model, since it does ‘no more’ than extend to consanguinity the constructed status traditionally given to affinity in modern Western kinship ideology. Thus the constructive model would be describing (or prescribing) what we might call, in Lévi-Straussian terms, a post–complex kinship system, where the element of ‘choice’, which in complex systems characterizes only the affinal dimension, ideally defines the consanguineal one as well. This seems to be largely in phase with recent transformations in the Western culture of kinship (Strathern 2001), since we have now begun to be able to choose (or imagine we can, and perhaps must choose) both the kind of children we want to have, thanks to the new reproductive technologies – the transcription of the old nonliterate ‘analogical kinship’ into the digital genealogical alphabet of DNA – and the kind of parents and siblings we prefer, by way of the new optative solidarities and alternative families. We can now offer ourselves the luxury of two entirely different genealogies, one consisting of (biological) relatives without (social) relatedness, the other of relatedness without relatives.29 Having divided the world into what one is obliged to accept and what one can/must choose – a very peculiar cultural reading of the formal distinction between the given and the constructed – our contemporary social sensibility has become obsessively impelled by a desire to expand the latter domain. Indeed, we seem to have finally arrived, having succeeded so well that our predicament is now one of being obliged to choose (Strathern 1992a: 36–38). And there we have our own postmodern given; a sort of dialectical vengeance.30 The contrast has thereby become absolute, between our state of forced choice and the ‘choosing to be obliged’ characteristic of giftbased socialities. In a way, the constructive model represents the final hegemony of consumptive individualism, which has taken possession of the intrinsically anti-individualist (because relational) field of kinship. This expansion of the sphere of constructiveness of human kinship has, to my mind, an essential connection to our ‘own particular brand of magic’ – technology, the wellspring of the ideologically central character of cultural enterprises like the new reproductive technologies or the Human Genome Project in our present civilization. Kinship still has its magic.

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Conversely, I believe the Amazonian model is only accessible by way of a theoretical construct that emphasizes the givenness of affinity in human kinship – the ‘constitutive’ model. Or rather, I see in the Amazonian model an image of a pre-elementary system, since one might argue that the classic (Lévi-Strauss 1967) concept of ‘elementary structures’ held that marriage exchange relations necessarily take place between groups defined by a rule of consanguineal recruitment. In truth, my ‘Amazonian’ schema may be taken as a radical version of the structuralist constitutive model – as I remarked above, what does the concept of ‘incest prohibition’ ultimately mean, if not the idea that all consanguinity must be a consequence of affinity? If this is the case, then we can start to understand why incest is often associated, in Amazonian languages and cosmologies, with processes of metamorphosis – that is, the transformation of the human body into the body of an animal. Kinship, in Amazonia, is a process of constructing a proper human body out of the primal analogic flow of soul-matter in which humans and animals interchange their bodily forms unceasingly. Incest inverts this process (Coelho de Souza 2002), ‘unrelating’ us to other humans and taking us back to where we came from – the precosmological chaos described by myth. But this, in the appropriate context, is exactly what magic and ritual are supposed to do.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Marilyn Strathern, James Leach, Sandra Bamford, Marcela Coelho de Souza, Peter Gow, Susan McKinnon and David Rodgers for variously inspiring, causing, shaping, improving, supporting, criticizing and otherwise debugging this essay.

Notes 1. See, for example, Edwards et al. 1999, Franklin and Ragoné 1998, Strathern 1992a. 2. See Ingold (this volume), Tooker 1992, and Viveiros de Castro 1993. 3. No metaphor is intended in these two phrases, ‘bodies of kin’ and ‘social body’; I mean them literally (Viveiros de Castro 2001). 4. See Schneider 1968: 115 and Wagner 1972: 607–8. 5. Here I am disregarding Leach’s additional distinction between ‘uncontrolled mystical influence’ and ‘controlled supernatural attack’.

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6. See Wagner 1967: 63–66. The author defines influence as ‘any relationship of dominance or control among souls’ (pp. 46–47), but remarks (p. 61) that the notion covers ‘natural’, ‘social’ and ‘supernatural’ agencies (see also p. 218: ‘the notion of “influence” is applicable both to social structure and religion’). 7. We cannot oppose relations of group incorporation (or ‘unit definition’, Wagner 1967: 184-185 et passim) to relations of intergroup alliance (‘unit relation’) in Amazonia because this region abounds in alliance-based collectives, where the definition of group ‘units’ is based on the marriage alliance relations internal to these units. As Overing (1975) has classically demonstrated for Amazonia, group endogamy is in no way incompatible with two-section terminologies, affinal alliance, prescriptive marriage and other appurtenances of ‘elementary structures’. Besides, it is crucial to distinguish, in Amazonia and other similar contexts, between consanguinity as a substantial condition (the fact of being cognatically related through ties mediated by procreative acts) and consanguinity as a relational determination (the fact of being a terminologically parallel or non-affinal relative). In all endogamous systems, elementary or not, one marries ‘consanguines’, i.e., cognates (the mother’s brother’s daughter, say); in no elementary system, endogamous or otherwise, does one marry consanguines, i.e., nonaffines (the father’s brother’s daughter, say). 8. A story the reader may find in any good introduction to the anthropology of kinship, like Holy 1996. 9. The formula is merely a transformation of something Marilyn Strathern casually remarked to me, some years ago: ‘the individual is the object in human form’. 10. See also Strathern (1999: 239): ‘[Melanesian] convention requires that the objects of interpretation – human or not – become understood as other persons; indeed, the very act of interpretation presupposes the personhood of what is being interpreted’. Pages 12–14 of the same collection contain some decisive remarks on the role of magic in a relational ontology. For an insightful connection of IPR to magical conceptions, see Harrison 2002. 11. Latour 1991; Serres 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985. 12. For an interpretation of the hau that builds on the Strathernian notion of anticipated outcome (how to make the effect cause its own cause), see Gell 1998: 106–9. 13. I am alluding here to Wagner 1967 (influence), 1981 (immanent humanity), and 1977a (analogical flow). 14. See McKinnon 2001 for an inspiring comparison between Morgan and Lévi-Strauss’s ‘origin myths’ of kinship. 15. Sensu Strathern (1992a), as in McKinnon 2001. 16. Rival is citing Carsten 1995: 223. 17. Contrast with Bamford’s subtle observation (this volume) concerning

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19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

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the Kamea: ‘Unlike many Euro-Americans, Kamea make a sharp distinction between what goes into the making of a person in a physical sense and what connects them through time as social beings.’ And what, one may ask, is a positive marriage rule if not the kinshipterminological inscription of the æsthetic of the ‘anticipated outcome’ (Strathern 1988)? Kinship relations, it should be noted, not kinship rights (‘over people’, ‘over the reproductive capacity of women’, etc.). The ‘production’ idiom is evoked here simply to recall its role as a variant of the ‘construction’ idiom, the main difference being that ‘production’ builds that much-frequented metaphorical bridge between ‘kinship’ and ‘political economy’, sometimes allowing the former to be derived from certain politico-economical givens. See Bamford, 2007: 58–9: ‘Despite the novelty of these newer formulations … they continue to rest upon two underlying ideas: first, that kinship is a bond of substance; and second, that it unites two or more people in a “physical” relationship.’ I believe I’m following Wagner (1981) here. For a similar criticism of the constructive model, see J. Leach 2003. Cannibal determinations, for instance; see Viveiros de Castro 1992. It is worth remembering that the protagonists of the major Amerindian origin myths, as abundantly illustrated in Lévi-Strauss’s (1964–1971) Mythologiques, are related as affines. Our own Old World myths seem to be haunted, on the other hand, by siblingship and parenthood, particularly fatherhood. Not to put too fine a point on it, we had to steal culture from a divine father, while Amerindians had to steal it from an animal father-in-law. ‘Mythology’ is the name we give to other people’s discourses on the innate. Myths address what must be taken for granted, the initial conditions with which humanity must cope and against which it must define itself by means of its power of invention. In the Amerindian worlds, affinity and alliance/exchange, rather than parenthood and creation/production, would thus comprise the unconditioned condition. See Viveiros de Castro 1998b; Wagner 1977b. The reader is asked to note that, although I have been using a Wagnerian frame (adapted from The Invention of Culture) here to redistribute the Lévi-Straussian ‘affinity/consanguinity’ pair in relation to the contrast between the ‘given’ and the ‘constructed’, the resulting inversion is not identical to the inversion proposed by R. Wagner himself in The Curse of Souw (Wagner 1967) for the equivalent pair ‘exchange/ consanguinity’. In the latter book, the relevant parameters are the functions of ‘unit definition’ and ‘unit relation’, not the given and the constructed. To paraphrase the editors’ description of the theoretical task of Relative Values (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 7), my purpose is also ‘to open

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up’ the categories of consanguinity and affinity and ‘examine how [they] can be put to use in ways that destabilize the “obviousness” of [their] conventional referents, while expanding the scope of [their] purchase as well’. 28. ‘The precipitation of one [semiotic] modality [i.e., literal or figurative] by the other follows from the fact that their complementarity is essential to meaning. And the interpretive separation of one modality from the other, assuring that the actor’s intention will conform to the lineaments of literal or figurative construction, but not both, or neither, or something else, emerges as the crucial factor in the construction of human experience’ (Wagner 1977b: 392, emphasis added). 29. ‘Relatedness without relatives one might say’ – Strathern 2002: 44. The contrast with the relatives without relatedness of the new optative families is my own authorship. Here Strathern is discussing, via J. Dolgin, the practico-ideological generalization of the concept of genetic kinship, which establishes entirely ‘a-moral’ links between individuals; the latter have now simply become the carriers of infra- and supraindividual biological units. The relatedness without relatives of biokinship contrasts both with the ‘traditional’ family founded on the naturalization of cultural norms and with the contemporary optative family based on affective choice. This post-modern fission of ‘kinship’ – again, of consanguinity – has an interesting parallel in the fission of affinity one finds in Amazonia, where ‘affines without affinity’ stand in opposition to an ‘affinity without affines’ (Viveiros de Castro 2001: 24). 30. As Sartre would have phrased it, our human ‘essence’ consists in being ‘condemned to freedom’. Of course he was not thinking of self-customized late-capitalist productive consumption, but history also takes its own liberties.

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———. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone. ———. 2001. ‘Emergent Properties’, Robert and Maurine Rothschild Distinguished Lecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. ———. 2004. ‘Transactions: An Analytical Foray’, in E. Hirsch and M. Strathern (eds), Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Strathern, M., E.B. Viveiros De Castro and C. Fausto. 1999. ‘No Limite de uma certa Linguagem: Entrevista com Marilyn Strathern, Mana 5(2): 157–75. Taylor, A.-C. 2000. ‘Le Sexe de la Proie: Représentations Jivaro du Lien de Parenté’, L’Homme 154–55: 309–34. Tooker, D. 1992. ‘Identity Systems of Highland Burma: “Belief”, Akha zan, and a Critique of Interiorized Notions of Ethno-religious Identity’, Man 27(4): 799–819. Townsley, G. 1993. ‘Song Paths: The Ways and Means of Yaminahua Shamanic Knowledge’, L’Homme 126–28: 449–68. Viveiros de Castro, E.B. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. ‘Le Marbre et le Myrte: De l’Inconstance de l’Âme Sauvage’, in A. Becquelin and A. Molinié (eds), Mémoire de la Tradition. Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie, pp. 365–431. ———. 1998a. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–88. ———. 1998b. ‘Dravidian and Related Kinship Systems’, in M. Godelier, T. Trautmann and F.E. Tjon Sie Fat (eds), Transformations of Kinship. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 332–85. ———. 2001. ‘GUT Feelings about Amazonia: Potential Affinity and the Construction of Sociality’, in L. Rival and N. Whitehead (eds), Beyond the Visible and the Material: The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–43. Wagner, R. 1967. The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and Alliance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1972. ‘Incest and Identity: A Critique and Theory on the Subject of Exogamy and Incest Prohibition’, Man 7(4): 601–13. ———. 1977a. ‘Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example’, American Ethnologist 4(4): 623–42. ———. 1977b. ‘Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualizations of the Innate: A Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective’, in T.P. BaylissSmith and R.G. Feachem (eds), Subsistence and Survival: Rural Ecology in the Pacific. London: Academic Press, pp. 385–410. ———. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LIST

OF

CONTRIBUTORS

Rita Astuti is Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Vezo of Madagascar, and her writings have focused on issues of gender, ethnic identity, and kinship. In her more recent work, she has combined anthropological and psychological methods to explore how Vezo children construct the adult understanding of the social and supernatural world. She is the author of People of the Sea (Cambridge 1995) and Constraints on conceptual development (with G. Solomon & S. Carey, Blackwell 2004). Sandra Bamford is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Papua New Guinea and the West, with an emphasis on kinship, gender, landscape, environmentalism, globalization, and biotechnology. In addition to having authored several journal articles and book chapters, her most recent publications include: Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (University of California Press 2006) and Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis and Social Change in Melanesia (Carolina Academic Press 2007). Her most recent research focuses on the institution of foster care in North America and what it reveals about recent shifts in state policy regarding what it means to be an “appropriate” parent. Rebecca Cassidy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Sport of Kings: kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket and Horse People: Thoroughbred culture in Lexington and Newmarket. She is currently conducting research on betting shops in London.

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List of Contributors

Hilary Cunningham is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. A scholar on the anthropology of borders, her work also encompasses a focus on transboundary security regimes, including an interest in biometrics, biosecurity, and environmental politics at borders. She has published numerous articles and book chapters, which includes her work on transborder activism in the American southwest, God and Caesar at the Rio Grande: Sanctuary and the Politics of Religion. She is currently working on a manuscript titled, The Global Border: Mobility and Enclosures in New World Orders. Jeanette Edwards is Professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester University. She has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the north of England and has published widely on kinship and new reproductive technologies. Author of Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England (Oxford University Press 2000) and co-editor of European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology (Berghahn Books 2009), she recently co-ordinated a Europeanfunded project on ‘public understanding of genetics’ (http://www .socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/pug). J. Teresa Holmes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at York University in Canada. Her teaching and research interests include historical anthropology, critical kinship studies, tourism studies, and colonial and postcolonial culture. Her essay in this volume is part of her ongoing work on issues of kinship, power, and identity in colonial Kenya. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland. He has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history, on the role of animals in human society, on issues in human ecology, language and tool use, and on environmental perception and skilled practice. He is currently writing and teaching on the comparative anthropology of the line, and on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book is Lines: A Brief History (Routledge 2007). James Leach is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His field research has

List of Contributors

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been in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea, on kinship and place, creativity, artistic production, ownership and cultural/intellectual property. Publications include Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea (Berghahn Books 2003) and Rationales of Ownership. Transactions and Claims to Ownership in Contemporary Papua New Guinea (co-edited with Lawrence Kalinoe, Sean Kingston Publishing 2004). His recent fieldwork in the UK is on personhood, trademarks, copyright and patents; and on knowledge production and exchange. Gísli Pálsson is Professor at the University of Iceland. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Manchester, England (1982). Currently, he is the representative for Anthropology on the Standing Committee for the Humanities under the European Science Foundation (ESF). Gísli has written on a variety of issues, including biomedicine, the new genetics, biobanks, genetic history, arctic exploration, property rights, language, fishing communities, environmental discourse, and arctic history. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, and the Canadian Arctic. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives; The Textual Life of Savants: Ethnography, Iceland, and the Linguistic Turn; Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse; and Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. His latest book is Anthropology and the New Genetics (Cambridge University Press 2007). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro teaches anthropology at the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro. He was Simon Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (1997–98) and Directeur de Recherche at the CNRS in Paris (1999–2001). His publications include From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (University of Chicago Press 1992) and A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia (CosacNaify 2002).

INDEX

A Acquired knowledge, innate knowledge (distinction), 211 Actions narrative. See Pomo patuki Actor-perceiver, immersion (environment context), 197–198 Adhering child. See Tikopia Adopted children, appearance (vatany), 225, 227 Adoption, task. See Vezo tool appropriateness, characteristics, 223 Adoptive relations, attention, 257 Affinity consanguinity, relationship, 256–257 cosmological precondition, 245 quality, 244–245 substance involvement, 245 African Political Systems (Fortes/ Evans-Pritchard), 52 Aghedaat, horses (reputation), 41 Agnatic descent importance, 52 values, 52 Agnation genealogical relations, 56 genealogy/segmentary lineage model, relationship, 51 Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), 169–170

Alien ontological categories, imposition, 216 Alliance magical influence, bonds (correlation), 244 perspective, 253 theory, difference, 252 Amazonians affinal bond, 259 body, perspective, 241–242 human culture, trans-specific property, 259–260 model. See Kinship American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Schneider), 8 Amerindian relativism, rethinking, 238–239 Ampela ro tena tompony. See Children Anazeh Bedouin, lineage purity, 41 Animal bloodlines, qualities (passage), 61–62 Animal pedigree, models, 17 Animism dispensation, 247 ideology. See Gift economies notion, 246 semiotic regime, 247 theme, 243–244 Animist ontologies, 246 Anthropological accounts, genealogical assumptions, 13

Index

Anthropological institute (Mannfraedistofnun), establishment, 91 Anthropological theory, reliance, 3 Anthropology genealogical method, 1 problematics, co-implication, 246 Anthropomorphization, theoretical rationale (Gregory summary), 247 Antigone. See Prometea Arab horses (Arabian horses) Allah work/gift, perspective, 44 blood, inheritance, 38–39 domestic blood, representation, 39 history, 32–33 moral qualities, 44 pedigrees, 45 rejection. See Urban Arab horse status, ambivalence, 39 strength, 43–44 weedy sprinter, emphasis, 39–40 Arborescent culture, 24 Armstrong family, tree, 31f Art and Agency (Gell), 240–241 Artificial life simulations, 11 Ascot founding, Queen Anne (involvement), 29–30 relationship. See Royal family winners, Stockwell male line. See Royal Ascot winners Astuti, Rita, 16, 19 Asurung (blood), meaning, 186 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), evolution, 116 Attribution, theory, 24–25 Authentic landlords, 64 Axis of transformation, 119–120 B Babies. See Water babies appearances (shaping), social relations (impact), 218 facial traits, 218 looks, 217

273

compliments/appreciation, 218–219 physiognomy, plasticity, 223 relating, practice, 218 resemblances, 219–220 Vezo beliefs, 224 Bamford, Sandra, 15, 18 genealogical imperialism, 139 Barazas. See Public meetings Bastard horses, production, 35 Batek women (Pahang, Malaysia), wayfaring example, 204 Bedouins Arabs, purity, 42 horses, breeding (knowledge dispersal), 43 lineage purity. See Anazeh Bedouin pedigrees, recordation, 42–43 presence, 40–41 reciter (rawi), accuracy, 43 written pedigrees, usage, 43 Belonging. See Family public understandings, 102–103 Bergson, Henri, 206 imagery, 209 Big Split, rights (modern language), 250 Binding, 199–200 Bio-age, appearance, 15 Biogenetic connection, impact, 145–146 Biogenetic relationships, tracing, 32 Biogenetic substance, inheritance, 163 Bioinformatics contesting/regulating, 130 relationships, 113–114 Biological classification, problems, 106 Biological continuities, 254–255 Biological inheritance. See Madagascar concept, Vezo construction, 225–226 process, study, 222

274

Biological kinship social kinship, contrast, 9, 14 traces, erasing, 228 Biological specification, addition, 189 Biology commercialization, 134 dualism, 223–224 facts, sociality facts (distinction), 216, 220, 224, 229 obsession, reduction, 251 perspective, 255 Biomedial project. See Book of Icelanders encrypted version, relevance, 103 Biomedical knowledge, 86 Biomedicine, private domain (impact), 86–87 Biosociality, 86 Birth parent bias. See Vezo Blood admixture, 40–41 agnathic relations, 55 connections, focus, 89 groupings, notion. See Oneblood groupings importance, 50 introduction. See Foreign blood kin, similarities, 254–255 kinship, devaluation, 252 locality, distinction (failure), 39 meaning. See Asurung patrilineal connections, 51–52 perspective, 243 purity, notion, 40 ties, impact. See Lineal blood ties understanding, 186 Bloodstock industry, pedigree (importance), 27 Blood ties, tracing, 32 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen/Anne, 39–41 Bodies differences (Piro perspective), 238 naming, differences, 241

Index

Bodily substance, opposition, 244–245 Bohm, David, 199 Book of Icelanders biomedical project, 93 biomedical use, 86 characteristics, 90 children, father linkage, 103 construction, continuation, 91–92 database, establishment, 129 deep genealogy, 95 designers, legal hurdles (avoidance), 100 digital form, 98–99 encrypted form, 105 focus, 84 genealogical database, empty spaces, 92 interest, 97–98 launching, 100–101 linkage analysis, 95 media coverage, 96–97 online availability, 96 online genealogical database, 12 Pálsson examination, 17 password, providing, 100 publication/free distribution, 100 scribes/collectors, genealogical enthusiasm, 85 Book of Settlement (Landnámabók), 90 Bounded social group, natural purity, 61–62 Bouquet, Mary, 4, 61 English folk model, 138 Boyd, Robert, 195 Breed, boundaries (policing), 26 Breeding emphasis, 4–5 encouragement, legislation, 33–34 evidence, detection, 49 indicators, 41–42 recordation, 28

Index

Brother/brother-in-law relations, sociological properties, 251–252 Bruce, Sanders, 37 Burke, Jason, 140 Butters family, tree, 31f Byerley Turk (horses), 34 C Cannon family, tree, 31f Capital, enclosures, 111 Carsten, Janet, 10 Cassidy, Rebecca, 15 Celera genetic samples, usage, 121 human genome, working draft completion, 117–118 Children. See Tikopia family resemblance, understanding, 222 identity/culture/upbringing, impact, 149–150 parents, connection (conception/gestation), 217 physical appearance. See Adopted children resemblances, 219–220 source/owner (ampela ro tena tompony), 217 Choice, analysis (reasons), 186 Clan-based tribal populations, 57–58 Clan populations, authenticity, 63 Class-based distinctions, 5–6 Classification, division, 199 Classificatory kinship, theme, 243–244 Classificatory knowledge, 196 storied knowledge, relationship, 197 Classificatory project, mutual reinforcement. See Genealogical model Classificatory system, impact. See Relationship Cognatic kinship, 187 Cognation, notion, 187

275

Cohen, David, 70 Collins, Jane, 124 Colonial Kenya, kinship, 50 Colonial policies/practices, archival documentation, 51 Commodity exchange, 250–251 jural right, relationship, 250 Commons, claim, 131 Community identity, construction, 70 Community relations, descentbased tribal framework, 64 Complex-process metaphors, distinction, 197 Complex-structure approach, 198–199 Complex-structure metaphors, distinction, 197 Conception assistance, 138 manner, knowledge, 151–152 Conceptual beginnings, 3 Conceptual knowledge, classificatory knowledge, 196 Connected points, network, 207f Consanguineal relations, 257 Consanguinity affinity, relationship, 256–257 kinship, relationship, 255 model, 254 motif, 252 physical substance, sharing, 245 quality, 244–245 Constitutive model. See Kinship Construction, analysis (reasons), 186 Constructive model. See Kinship strength, 261 Consubstantial similarity, constitutive relation, 255–256 Consumptive production, personification process, 247 Containment. See Kamea Corporeality, hypothesis, 241–242

276

Crabbet Stud, dispersal, 40 Creation, ethnography, 101 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 206 Creativity analysis, reasons, 186 infatuation, 253 physical becoming process, separation, 185–186 Critique of the Study of Kinship, A (Schneider), 9, 185 Cross-cousin, 246 Cross-cultural research, 8 Cultural content, transmission (non-genetic means), 194 Cultural elaboration (life facts), 9 Cultural knowledge, usage, 223 Cultural organism, phenotype, 195 Cultural property, 86 Cultural transmission dual inheritance model, 195f lines, 208–209 Culture acquisition, 194 anthropological reflection, 237–238 artifice, 185–186 impact, 149–150, 193–194 notion, beliefs system, 239 student initiation, 12 Culture-creating transcendence, 252 Culture-type, phenotype, 195 Cunningham, Hilary, 15, 17 D Dala, reference, 69–70 Darley Arab (horses), 34 Darwin, Charles, 6, 112 resurgence, 208 Day family, tree, 31f Debt, commodity correlative, 249 de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, 14–16, 152, 185 deCODE blood samples, collection, 129

Index

copyright laws, violation (accusations), 131 ethnographic material, 16 founding, 128 Genealogia Islandorum, challenge, 99 genetics, 84, 92 claimant argument rejection, 99 work, initiation, 93 health records transfer/linkage, prohibition, 124 information, social construction, 92–93 pharmaceutical research, data usefulness, 129–130 project, results, 95–96 proposal, public responses, 132 Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analyses, impact, 121 capitalization. See Human DNA dominant metaphors, 112 sequences, patent, 117 Descendants, ancestor tracing, 182 Descent Darwinian model, 119–120 indigenous relations, colonial interest, 58–59 Luo genealogies, linear structure, 60 theory, difference, 252 Descent-based tribal framework. See Community relations Desert horses, purity (preservation), 41 Diagonal, 141–142 accommodation, 152 Differentiated pattern. See Vezo Directed genetic mobilities, 134 Disciplinary genealogical tree, 243–244 DNA Mystique, The (Nelkin/Lindee), 111 Dolly, genealogy, 32 d’Osma, Prospero, 35 Durkheim-Saussure hypothesis, 256

Index

E Edgar, Patrick Nesbitt, 36–37 Edwards, Jeanette, 15, 17–18 Élan vital. See Vital force Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss), 251–252, 259 Endowment, 123 English folk model, 138 English genealogical imagination, isomorphic characteristic, 152 English horses, stocks (usage), 33–34 English mares/stallions, description, 38–39 English pedigree, connotations, 61–62 Entangled lines, meshwork, 207f Entitlement, legitimization, 168 Epidemiological analyses, power, 94 Epistemology, usage, 19 Espólín, Jón, 90 Espólín (software), 91 Essence. See Received essence becoming, 188–189 mutability, 189 Ethno-biology, 241 Ethnographic emplacements, 3 Ethnography, science status (establishment), 6–7 Euro-American folk model, 138 Euro-American kinship configurations, 171 European lineage imagery, ideologies (impact), 88–89 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., overcrowding argument, 68 Evolution, Bergson perspective, 208 Evolutionary tree, refiguration, 106 Exogamy, theme, 243–244 Experience, temporalization, 87 Experimental systems, technologies (involvement), 85 Explicate order, 199

277

F Facts of biology, facts of sociality (distinction), 216, 220, 224, 229 Familiarity, importance, 140–141 Family belonging, 151 orientation, relationship difficulty, 147–148 resemblance prediction, 140–141 understanding. See Children traits, notion, 150–152 Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur), 90 Family trees anthropological understandings, 169 concept, 168 early uses, 4 exploration, 12 imagery, success, 87 implications, change, 127–128 layout, forms, 87 metaphor, 89 presence, 86 rival metaphors, 89 role, 61 transformation, 89–90 usage, 87 forms, 87 Fertility services access problems, eugenic implication, 145 concern, 144–145 Fiefs, automatic inheritance system, 4 Field of nurture, 188 Filiation, 257 Fixed birth, defining moment, 105–106 Folk-modenist ontology, 245 Foreign blood, introduction, 39–40 Foreign bodies, 238 Franklin, Sarah, 13, 118–119 Frisk Software genealogical database construction, 92

278

genealogical information program, development, 90–91 Geneologia Islandorum, challenge, 131 information, social construction, 92–93 G Galli, Cesare, 45 Gametes mixture, problems, 142 usage. See Kin gametes Garamut, usage. See Rai Coast Garden ritual. See Rai Coast Geertz, Clifford, 193 Gell, Alfred, 240 Genealogia Islandorum, challenge, 99, 131 Genealogical based colonial models, lack of fit, 51 Genealogical bestowal, Darwin notions, 112 Genealogical claims, attention, 146 Genealogical connection, nature (impact), 186 Genealogical data, legal framing (shift), 98–99 Genealogical database, construction. See Icelanders Genealogical framework change, 17 usage, 5–6 Genealogical grid, mapping, 215 Genealogical imperialism, 139 Genealogical inheritance, cultural understandings, 113 Genealogical intermediary, term (change), 126 Genealogical knowledge, activation, 152 Genealogical line, 206 Genealogical machine. See Online genealogical machine operation, 97 Genealogical method, development, 8

Index

“Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry, The” (Rivers), 168 Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry, The (Rivers), 2 Genealogical model. See Rai Coast adoption, 3 attribution, theory, 24–25 classificatory project, mutual reinforcement, 197 core, 196 defining, 3 mode, thinking (persistence), 185 popularization, 24 reality, 185 triumph, 208 Genealogical paradigm, examination, 2 Genealogical position, 196 Genealogical profile, diagonal, 141–142 Genealogical records, discovery (difficulty), 127 Genealogical relationships, establishment, 95 Genealogical Society, founding, 90–91 Genealogical thinking basis, 15 importance, 60–61 persistence, 2–3 universality, Euro-American cultural assumptions, 60 Genealogical tree, transformation, 89–90 Genealogies agnation/segmentary lineage model, relationship, 51 biblical imagery, 5–6 classification, relationship, 193 Euro-American assumptions, 18–19 generative dimension, 123 role, 61 social definition, kinship terminology, 189

Index

usage, 59, 62 General Stud Book (GSB), 25 pedigree standard, usage, 36–37 publication (1791), 36 Generations sequence, 210f skipping, 138 Generative kinship network, 182 Generative network, spatial distribution, 189 Genes capitalization, 125 pharmaceutical products, 126–127 conception, Nature publication, 122–123 conceptualization, discussion, 124–125 cultural understanding, 113 genealogy (relationships), bioinformatics (usage), 113–114 horizontal transfer, 106 impact, 111 metaphysical concept, 208 mobility, importance, 125 pool, homogeneity, 128–129 replication, 257 summoning, 150 units, ideas, 113 variation, compensation, 129 Genes, information mobile pieces, 115 notion, 112 units, 124–125 direction, 125–126 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 169–170 advisability, 169 usage, controversy, 160 Genetic analyses, power, 94 Genetic capitalization, eugenic promise, 125 Genetic codes, carry, 126 Genetic commodities, 115 Genetic diversity, biological understandings, 121

279

Genetic flexibilities, 124 Genetic inheritance rules, 112 unfolding, 126 Genetic make-up, impact, 140–141 Genetic mobility, 113–114, 124. See also Directed genetic mobilities experience, 127 generation, 127 horizontal/vertical trajectories, 114 management, biotechnology promises, 125 Genetic origin, knowledge, 151–152 Genetic stake, implication, 146 Genetic technologies, development, 118–119 Genetic transmission dual inheritance model, 195f lines, 208–209 notion, 211 perspective, 255 Genomic industries, niche potential, 132 Genomic technologies, ethical/ political issues, 113 Genotype, phenotype (distinction), 195, 199 Gift and Commodities, 246, 248–249 Gift economies, 246 aesthetic trap, 250 animism ideology, 247 debt economy, 249 notion, equivalence, 248 perspectival distortion, 247–248 Gift exchange, Gregory definition, 246 Gifts anthropomorphic quality, 246–247 logical corollary, 247 magical might, relationship, 250 Gillespie, Charles, 208 Global biodiversity, preservation, 171

280

Godolphin Arab (horses), 34 Gow, Peter, 238–241 human/kin argument, 242 Graded races, recordation, 28 Gregory, C., 246 Growth, autonomous development, 187–188 Guided rediscovery, 203 H Half-brothers, relationships, 144 Hall family, tree, 31f Harris, Paul, 139 Hau concepts, 250 Health Sector Database, 94, 127 construction, 94 patient consent, presumption (doctor opposition), 131 public debates, 98–99 Henry VIII, military campaigns, 33–34 Hinya avaka. See One-bloodedness Hobley, C.W., 57–58 cultural logic, consideration, 60–62 results, 60 tribal population breakdown, 63 Hoffman La Roche, contract, 93, 95 Holmes, Teresa, 15, 16 social differentiation theme, extension, 17 Homo duplex, 237 Homogenous identities, colonial state invention, 70 Homology, establishment, 197 Homo sapiens, 237 Horizontal assemblage, 120, 124 space, direction, 125–126 Horizontal genealogy, 118 Horses breeding, 35–36 exportation, prohibition, 34 history. See Arab horses military purposes, 34 performance, quantification (absence), 41

Index

physical examination, usage, 41 production. See Bastard horses purity, preservation. See Desert horses quality (representation), pedigrees (usage), 28–29 stocks, usage. See English horses Horses, interrelated activities, 25–26 Horton, Robin, 239 Hourglass (pariwah) drums, usage. See Rai Coast Human/animal excellence (combination), inevitability/ rightness (stress), 29 Human artifice, nature (relationship), 175 Human beings capacities, 194 environment, disparity, 160 Euro-American perceptions, 15 examination, 237 gift economy relations, 249 Gow argument, 242 Human bloodlines, qualities (passage), 61–62 Human culture, trans-specific property. See Amazonians Human DNA, capitalization, 114 Human genealogies, depiction, 208–209 Human genetic variation, database (creation), 1 Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), 1 bacteria acquisition, 106 themes, 2 Human Genome Project (HGP), 116 DOE/NIH sponsorship, 116 draft sequences, 117 history, 115–116 human genome working draft completion, 117–118 launch, 117 Human genomes analysis, 114

Index

horizontal/vertical readings, tension, 125 map, production, 120 mapping project, initiation, 115–116 working draft, completion (Celera/HGP announcement), 117–118 Human kinship, 152 Human life, indexing, 91 Human pedigree, models (development), 16–17 Human sociality, nonhuman world (separation inability), 14–15 Human species, microphylogeny (creation), 1–2 Human thinking, organization (skill-set), 125 I Iceland ancestry/applications, contesting, 111 genealogical histories, cultural commentary, 132–133 genealogical records, deCODE appropriation (Geneologia Islandorum challenge), 131 genetic records, genealogical information (combination), 127–128 health information, proprietization, 131 health records (utilization), deCODE (exclusive rights), 130 Health Sector Database, 127 medical records centralized database, creation, 130 genealogical information, combination, 127–128 population genetics, 128 Icelanders authoritative digital genealogy, complexity, 107 families, identification, 95

281

genealogical database, construction, 91 parents, connection (absence), 102 people, relationship, 95 Icelandic kinship, ethnography (creation), 101 Icelandic Supreme Court, Genealogia Islandorum case, 99–100 Iconic gene, impact, 111 Ideal human, questions, 133–134 Identity, impact, 149–150 Immutable mobilities, 112–113 Implicate order, 199 Inauthentic tenants, 64 Incest commonness, 189 possibility, 142–143 prohibition, concept, 262 Indigenous communities, jodak/weg lowo (importance), 66 Indigenous culture, preservation, 7 Indigenous ontologies, perspectival account, 238–239 Inferential reasoning. See Vezo Informal interviewing techniques, usage, 223–224 Information recipients, diachronic sequence, 208–209 Ingold, Tim, 15–16, 126 Euro-American assumptions, 18–19 genealogy insight, 123 Inheritance, inevitability, 149–150 Initiated men (tambaran). See Rai Coast Innate knowledge, acquired knowledge (distinction), 211 Intellectual property, 86 Intellectual property rights (IPR), 248 Interbreeding, problem, 4–5 International Stud Book Committee, regulations, 26

282

Inuit (wayfaring example), 205 Invention of Culture, The (Wagner), 254 J Jarvis family, tree, 31f Javanese tree image, 5f Jockey Club, racing management, 38 Jodak attraction, ability, 66 differentiation. See Musanda Luo historical status, establishment, 68 importance. See Indigenous communities relations, historical evidence, 71 relationships, creation, 70 transformation. See Owner of the land Judgment patterns, 225 Jural right, commodity (relationship), 250 K Kaapu. See Rai Coast Kachin, flesh/blood (maternal transmission), 244 Kager clan, membership, 57 house, Kager elder image, 72 rights, claims, 63–64 story, significance (understanding), 67–68 Kager elders historical ties, emphasis, 67 recorded testimony, 69–70 Kager Luo land/authority claims, Wanga occupation, 63 presence, 66 Kager people land rights, agitation (increase), 67 Wanga people, connection, 66 wuon lowo identity, claim, 66

Index

Kamea (Papua New Guinea) ancestor stories (tambuna storis), 165–166 ascent, relationships, 168 characteristics, 161 containment, 164 environment, social significance, 166 geneaological model, understanding, 171 generational discontinuity, conception, 161 Hawo, examination, 167–168 kin conceptions, nongenealogical basis, 161–162 land claims, 165–166 life, genealogy (reconception), 168 male initiation, 166–167 patrilineality, 161 personhood, Western formulation (contrast), 162–163 research, 160–161 siblings, relationship, 141 social relations cultivation, 164 ongoing construction, 168 witch, discovery, 167 yangwa trees, cultivation, 167 Kandingei (Papua New Guinea), story example, 200–201 Kavirondo knowledge, 59 local populations, heterogeneity, 64–65 Kin gametes, usage, 141 Kin (Gow argument), 242 Kin groups, relationship. See Luo society Kinship. See Cognatic kinship; Colonial Kenya; Human kinship; Madagascar Amazonian model, 258 access, 262 Amazonian process, 245 anthropology, foundational dichotomies, 237–238

Index

assumptions, 215–216 biology, 8–9 complication. See Luo kinship constitutive model, 256 constructible/processual equality, 254 construction, 253 constructive model, 257 critique, 2 defining, relatedness (notion), 10 diagrams, 86 Euro-American conceptualizations, 10–11 fixed birth, defining moment, 105–106 Gell perspective, 241 genealogical thinking, vertical classificatoin, 152 Icelandic notions, implication, 98 information, availability, 59–60 knowledge, 175, 180 life-process, 245 logic, vision, 18 Luo understandings, 71–72 magic, connection, 243–244, 248 meaning, 243 medicalization, 86 metaphors, knowledge, 12 nano-essays, 237 nature, understandings (epistemological gaps), 56 nature/law aspects, 252 network. See Generative kinship network nonsubstantivist perspective, 256 online availability, 96 problematics, co-implication, 246 procreative causes, 255 public understandings, 102–103 reactionary reconstructions, 258 relational perspective, 256 relations assumptions, 215 conceptualization, 249

283

standard model, 254 structure, consanguineal/affinal areas, 256 studies, 9–10 advancement, 13–14 Amazonian critique, 251 critique, 214 system, 52 thinking, importance, 60–61 ties, emotion-filled content, 146–147 universal basis, deconstruction, 9–10 Western conceptions, 255 Western imageries, 87 Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard), 52–53 Kin web, 84 Kiramung, usage. See Rai Coast Knowledge acquisition, 203 differences, 18 functioning, transition, 195–196 integration, 193, 199 making, organization, 13 movement, relationship, 199 pedigrees, 1 perpetual formation, 210–211 personification, 182 status, examination, 19 taken-for-granted ordering, 19–20 telling, ability (relationship), 203 transmission, absence, 18 usage. See Vezo Koyukon (Alaska), stories (example), 201–202 Küchler, Suzanne, 178–179 Kuper, Adam, 52 L La Lignée de Sainte Anne, 88f Land-grabbing, 65 Landlords. See Authentic landlords right, 65

284

Langkawi, social relations, 10 Large-scale medical databases, construction, 85–86 Lateral movement. See Transport Laxness, Halldór, 91 Leach, James, 14, 15, 244 kinship systems, comparative study, 214 substance, impact, 18 symbolic economies, 245 Leader family, tree, 31f Legitimacy, official arbiter, 58 Lehilahy ro fotoran’ ateraha. See Men Life following. See Way of life nonbiological theory, 14 Like-for-like, exchange, 250–251 Lindee, Susan, 111, 118 Lineage imagery, ideologies (impact). See European lineage imagery Lineage model, 51–52. See also Segmentary lineage model Lineage theory, 51–52 Lineal blood ties, impact, 53 Literal/metaphorical meanings, extensionist semiotics, 248 LoDagaa, colonization, 58 Luo communities, social identity (heterogeneity), 70 Luo elders, house request, 71 Luo genealogies of descent, linear structure, 60 Luo kinship, complication, 53 Luo peoples Bantu-speaking groups, intermarriage, 63 colonial roots, 50–51 historical anthropological research, 54 Luo society kin groupings, relationship, 55 partial hidden histories, 56 structural truth, 55 Luo stories, examples, 57 Luo tribal areas, overcrowding, 68

Index

Luo tribal relations, documentation, 58 Lutz, Catherine, 124 M Machine. See Online genealogical machine definition/etymology, 85 operation. See Genealogical machine Madagascar allocutions, 217 biological inheritance/kinship, 214 Rivers arrival, 216 Magic analogical modalization, 247–248 kinship, connection, 243–244, 248 nano-essays, 237 problematics, co-implication, 246 theme, 243–244 Magical causation, prescriptive marriage (affinity), 246 Magical forces, continuous field, 245 Magical influence, alliance (bond correlation), 244 Magical might, gifts (relationship), 250 Magicians, non-standard physical theory (imagining), 240–241 Malangan ceremonies. See New Ireland Malkki, Lisa, 139 Manhattan Project of Biology, 116 Mankind, genealogical unity (rejection), 53–54 Markham, Gervase, 35–36 Marriage exchange partners, internal/constitutive interrelationships, 252 prototype concept, 246 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Volosinov), 202

Index

Master genealogy, development. See Natural world Maternity, recession, 124 McCall, Susan, 141–143 McKinnon, Susan, 13 Medawar, Peter, 194 Meiotic distances, establishment, 95 Men, pregnancy source (lehilahy ro fotoran’ ateraha), 217 Mendel, Gregor, 112 Mendelian genetics, rubrics, 126 Meshwork. See Entangled lines network, distinction, 206 Message content, transmission (non-genetic means), 196 Microphylogeny, creation. See Human species Middle Ages, world (genealogical view), 105–106 Mixed native populations, problem, 65 Mixed population, 64 Mobilities. See Immutable mobilities expression, 112–113 impact, 111 premise, 125 Modes of relating, 3 Molecular biology, impact, 121 Mora, Israel, 140, 159, 168 exhibit, controversy, 159–160 personal connections, display, 169 Moral landscapes, innocence, 132–133 Morgan, Nicholas, 35–36 Movement, knowledge (relationship), 199 Multinaturalism, suggestion, 239 Musanda Luo, jodak/weg lowo (differentiation), 65 Mutagenesis, species boundaries (noninvolvement), 170–171 Mutual genetic make-up, 126 Mutually supportive genealogies, 28–29

285

Mythic beings (patuki), teaching. See Rai Coast Myths, knowledge, 184 N Names (paru), teaching. See Rai Coast Nash, Catherine, 138 Native mares/stallions, description, 38 Natural instructionists, impact, 258 Natural relations, genealogy (recorder), 6 Natural selection, theory (proposal), 112 Natural world, master genealogy (development), 6 Nature, anthropological reflection, 237–238 Nature/culture schema, refractions, 237–238 Navarre kings, family tree inclusions, 89 Negative kinship. See Soul Nejd Bedouins, stallions, 43–44 Nekgini Pomo patuki perspective, 181 speaker control, concern, 183 Nelkin, Dorothy, 111, 118 Network. See Connected points; Generative kinship network meshwork, distinction, 206 point-to-point connections, absence, 206 spatial distribution. See Generative network New Ireland, malangan ceremonies, 178–179 New reproductive technologies (NRT), 139 conception/genetic origin, knowledge, 151–152 concern, 144–145 Noble savagery, idea (pursuit), 40 Non-dualistic reasoning strategies, 223–224

286

Nongenealogical social realities, understanding, 14 Non-Western societies, genealogical framework (exportation), 17 Novikova, Natalia, 202 Nuer, The (Evans-Pritchard), 52 Nuer community life, ethnographic descriptions, 52–53 Nuer lineage system, depiction, 73f Nuer society, Evans-Pritchard analytic models, 53 Nurture. See Field of nurture O Objective correlative, change, 243 Odhiambo, E.S. Atieno, 70 One blood, Kamea notion, 141 One-bloodedness (hinya avaka), 163 One-blood groupings, notion, 163 One-blood relationship, 163f Online genealogical machine, 84 fine-tuning, 100 Ontologies, consideration, 19, 220 Open-ended interviewing techniques, usage, 223–224 Openness/transparency, EuroAmerican preoccupation, 151–152 Optative relations, attention, 257 Organic world human social life, relationship, 15 organization, 11 Organisms cultural message, 195 endurance, 208 Organism-to-be context-independent specification, 188 information, insertion, 208 Origin myths, reproduction, 60 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 6, 208 Outline of a Theory of Magic, 250

Index

Ova, donation (possibility), 143 Owner of the land, identity (wuon lowo), 57, 66 becoming, 67 process, 68 rights, assertion, 66 being, 68 jodak transformation, 69 relations, historical evidence, 71 P Palem. See Rai Coast association. See Siblings history, 182 wealth, 182 Palem konaki. See Rai Coast Pálsson, Gisli, 17, 113 Iceland writings, 128 Pangga. See Sorcery Papua New Guinea. See Kamea; Rai Coast Parenthood-filiation, constructive process, 253 Parents adoption, usage. See True parent properties, transmission, 222 Pariwah drums, usage. See Rai Coast Parkinsoin’s disease, deCODE mapping project, 96 Parochialism, ethnocentric notion, 239–240 Partial hidden histories. See Luo society Particular universalism, 185 Paru ancestor names, 182–183 teaching. See Rai Coast Patriarchy, symbolic expression, 32 Patuki. See Pomo patuki knowledge/mythic character, relationship, 182 narrative, guarding, 182 palem origination, 180–181 Pedigree. See Tribal pedigrees aspects, 28

Index

connotations. See English pedigree diagrams, juxtaposition, 29 focus, 8 ideas, expression (maintenance), 32 imagery, importance, 27 implications, 25 implicit logic, expression, 29 mechanism, 26 models, development. See Human pedigree public discussions, avoidance, 37 recordation, usefulness, 39 revealing/obscuring. See Rivers standard, usage, 36–37 thinking importance, 61–62 trace, demonstration, 62 usage, 28–29 writing, 35 absence, 38 Pel-patuki. See Rai Coast Permanent unilateral descent groups, segmentary system, 52 Person, ontologically properties (transmission mechanisms), 222–223 Personhood constituent elements, 123 notions, focus, 123 Western conceptions, 11 Personification process, 247–248 Pharmacogenomics, 128–129 Phenotype, genotype (distinction), 195, 199 Physical becoming process, separation. See Creativity Physical relation, unification, 14 Physical substance, sharing. See Consanguinity Piggott family, tree, 31f Piro (Amazon) bodily difference, argument, 240, 241

287

body naming, differences, 241 perspectives, 242–243, 245 cultural view, stability, 240 ontological presuppositions, 240 parochialism, expression, 238–239 Playing Dead (Weibe), 205 Point-to-point lateral movement. See Transport Pomo patuki, actions narrative, 180–181 perspective. See Nekgini Population-based research, deCODE interest, 128–129 Population genetics. See Iceland Positive role model, providing, 149–150 Post-Darwinian technoscience, 124–125 Potter, Beatrix, 62 Power, external source (notion), 84–85 Pre-cosmological subjects, embodiment, 243 Predetermined entities, connection (absence), 200 Pre-Islamic oral traditions, 43 Prescriptive alliance, incorporation, 259 Prescriptive marriage impact, 252–253 magical causation, affinity, 246 Primitive cultures, Tylorean neologisms, 246 Primitive kinship, juridical metaphysics (construction), 249 Primitive people, anthropological accounts, 8 Primitive societies organization, 60–61 structuralist model, impact, 256 study, 62 Privilege, legitimization, 168 Process, idea (understanding), 198 Processing, equivalence, 198

288

Prometea (cloned horse), 45 Antigone (queer sister), 45–46 Proper persons, growing, 139 Property doctrine, 86 Public meetings (barazas), 63–64 Purity natural type, 170 notion, 40 R Racial opposite, 124 Racing sport integrity (improvement absence), GSB (impact), 38 Racing sport, emergence, 36 Radix Jesse, 4 Rai Coast (Papua New Guinea) anthropological accounts, 184 cognatic kinship, 187 connections, mechanisms, 183 garden harvesting, 178 garden ritual, 184 genealogical model, 184 hamlet units (palem konaki), 177 hourglass (pariwah) drums, usage, 178 initiated men (tambaran), 178 mutable essence, 175 mythic beings (patuki), teaching, 178 names (paru), teaching, 178 place, future, 184 residential group (palem), 176–177 generative system focus, 177 origination, 180–181 skin (taki), image, 180 slit-gong (kiramung/garamut), usage, 178 spirits (kaapu), 176–177 taro deities (pel-patuki), 178–179 transmission, significance, 175 Rawi, accuracy. See Bedouins Ray, John, 170 Reading National Geographic (Lutz/Collins), 124 Received essence, 187–188

Index

Reciprocal dependence, 246 Recognition, importance, 140–141 Regeneration, notion, 188 Reite action, 181 assumptions, difference, 189–190 genealogical connection, 187–188 human beings, growing, 188 knowledge, concern, 181–182 land, sharing, 180 taro planting, 178–179 villagers, kinship (importance), 186 Relatedness abstraction/objectification, 152 basic information, obtaining, 6–7 culture, relationship, 185 dichotomy, 123 history, 123 idiom, blood (usage), 163 imagining, non-genealogical approach, 159 notions, 10 alternatives, 51 naturalization, substance (impact), 160 processes, 185 understanding, substance (impact), 18 Relating, socio-practical processes, 257 Relationality, biological theory, 241 Relationship classificatory system, impact, 216 dichotomy, 123 systems, differences, 216 Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Franklin/McKinnon), 13 Reproductive abilities, concern, 144–145 Re-temporalization/re-spacialization, involvement, 15–16

Index

“Rethinking Anthropology” (Leach), 244 Richerson, Peter, 195 Rickaby family, tree, 31f Ringers, containment, 37–38 Ritual confederations, creation, 178–179 Ritual production, 183 Rivers, W.H.R., 2–3, 61, 168 anthropological enquiry, genealogical method, 216–217 arrival. See Madagascar genealogical method Schneider attack, 215–216 Vezo relationship, 220 pedigrees, revealing/obscuring, 214 Rootedness, problems, 138–139 Rose, Hilary, 113, 132 Royal Ascot winners, Stockwell male line, 33f Royal family Ascot, relationship, 30 trees, linkage, 30–31 Royal Stud, mares (naming), 35 Rubin, David, 197 Running Rein Derby (1844), 37–38 S Schneider, David, 8–9, 50 demonstration, 60–61 Euro-American folk model, 138 Science and Genetics interactive website, 126 Secret names, knowledge, 184 Segmentary lineage model genealogy/agnation, relationship, 51 theoretical premises (questions, absence), 53 Segmentary lineage societies, 50–51 Segmentary lineage system, standard model, 54

289

Segmentary system. See Permanent unilateral descent groups Self, Western conceptions, 11 Self/other, constitution, 245 Senses, references (impact), 260 Settler groups, search, 138–139 Severus, Septimus, 32–33 races, staging, 26 Sexual intercourse, core symbol, 8 Shipton, Parker, 68 Siblings connections, 144–145 palem association, 182 Siblingship, 257 Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNIPs), 121 Skin (taki), image. See Rai Coast Skúlason, Fridrik, 92–93 Slit-gong (kiramung/garamut), usage. See Rai Coast Social constructionism, dominance (attack), 258 Social differentiation, theme (extension), 17 Social form phenomenon, 247–248 Social identity formation, blood (agnathic ties, impact), 55 heterogeneity, 70 stories, relationship, 56 Sociality dualism, 223–224 facts, biology facts (distinction), 216, 220, 224, 229 model, blood kinship, 252 Social kinship, biological kinship (contrast), 9, 14 Social learning, concept, 226 Social person, notion (defining), 62 Social relations breakage, 139 conflation, 190 maintenance, 183–184 trickiness, 142 understanding, change, 10–11

290

Social scientific investigation, organization, 13 Social structure, 259–260 Socialty, indigenous forms (revelation), 7 Socio-cultural principles, addition, 189 Sorcery (pangga), victim, 162–163 Soul, negative kinship, 243–244 Species boundaries consequences, 169–170 involvement, absence, 170–171 Spencer, Herbert, 112 Sperm donation implications, 146–147 opposition, 151–152 problems, 139–146 information, impact, 152 substitution, possibility, 145–146 Spirit, flow, 243 Spiritual influence, opposition, 244–245 Stallions. See Nejd Bedouins advertisements, 37 focus, 35 Standard model. See Kinship Stefansson, Kari, 128 centralized database proposal, 129–130 Stefánsson, S.E., 95 Storied knowledge classificatory knowledge, relationship, 197 integration. See Wayfarer Stories identification, 199–200 knowledge, 184 life, relationship, 200f meanings, attachment, 203 relating, process, 200 Storytelling, educative functions, 203 Strathern, Marilyn, 6, 118 openness/transparency, EuroAmerican preoccupation, 151–152

Index

Stud book, production, 37 Subjective agencies, 242–243 Subject/object distinction, utility (questioning), 15 Substance inheritance. See Biogenetic substance notion, 258 opposition. See Bodily substance sharing, 187 transmission, 188 Superweeds, production, 170 Symbolic economies (Leach description), 245 Symbolic texts, interpretation, 112 T Tabu (Trobriand word, interpretation), 214 Taki, image. See Rai Coast Tambaran. See Rai Coast Tambuna storis. See Kamea Taro deities (pel-patuki). See Rai Coast Taxonomic tree, translation, 196–197 Technosciences, 113. See also PostDarwinian technoscience Temporary cultivators, 65 Temporary occupant/tenant, standard administrative label, 65 Tenants. See Inauthentic tenants Things-gifts reproduction, social organization, 247 Thoroughbreds, 25 Arab horses, importance, 39 catalogue page, example, 27f custodians, examination, 26 history, initiation, 23 pedigrees, format, 27 quality/essence, 38–39 superiority, claim, 39 written pedigrees, failure, 44–45 Tikopia, adhering child, 228 Time continuum, exploration, 159 Toddlers, relating (practice), 218

Index

Towers, William Sidney, 36 Traits impact, 156 notion. See Family Tranon’ zaza. See Womb (house of the child) (tranon’ zaza) Transactors, domination (unequal relation), 250–251 Transformation, axis, 119–120 Transmission dual inheritance model. See Cultural transmission; Genetic transmission lines, 209f metaphor, 194–195 non-genetic means. See Cultural content; Message content thinking, ordering, 19–20 Transport, 193 example, 204f idea, example, 204–205 lines, 209f point-to-point lateral movement, 209–210 wayfaring emphatic distinction, 204 relationship, 202 world understanding, 205–206 Trans-specific kinship relatedness, 249 Tree of Jesse, 4 Tree of the Jarvis/Butters/Leader/ Hall families, simplification, 31f Tribal authenticity, regulation (discursive strategy), 63 Tribal model conceptual dominance, 64 logic, 66 Tribal naturalization, colonial practices, 59 Tribal pedigrees, 57 focus, 62–63 Tribal populations authenticity, 63 breakdown, 63

291

documentation, 58 identification, 60 Tribal representatives, designation, 63 Tribal territories, hereditary leaders, 59 True parent, adoption (usage), 224 Turnbull, David, 198 U Undesirables, exclusion, 38 Unilateral cross-cousin marriage, Homans/Schneider analysis (Needham attack), 215 Universalism. See Particular universalism return, 185 Universalization, imperative (absence), 239 Upbringing, impact, 149–150 Upton, Roger, 40, 41 Urban Arab horse, rejection, 42 V Vatany. See Adopted children Vertically integrated knowledge, 199 Vezo adoption, task, 222–223 Astuti analysis, 16 beliefs. See Babies biological inheritance process, study, 222 biological kinship, traces (erasing), 228 biological/social processes, differentiation, 228 birth parent bias, 229 conscious scrutiny, 227–228 construction. See Biological inheritance cultural practices, ontology, 220 differentiated pattern, 225–226 inferential reasoning, 221–222 judgment patterns, 225 kinship mapping, impact, 228 knowledge, usage, 221–222

292

males, examples, 226–227 ontology, disallowance, 220 social learning, concept, 226 verbal elaboration, 227–228 Vital force (élan vital), metaphysical delusion, 208 Volosinov, V.N., 202 W Wallace, John H., 36–37 stud book, production, 37 Wanga dominance, 63–64 Water babies (zaza-rano), 218 Wayfarer, storied knowledge (integration), 206 Wayfaring, 193 continual moving around, 209–210 example, 204f idea, example, 204–205 transport emphatic distinction, 204 relationship, 202 world understanding, 205–206 Way of life, following, 203–204 Wealth creation, opportunity, 26 Weg lowo importance. See Indigenous communities

Index

Weg lowo, differentiation. See Musanda Luo Weibe, Rudy, 205 Well born man, ancestor/descendant perspective, 4 Well-bred native, 62 Western standard model, 152 Widdecombe, Anne, 139, 145 Womb (house of the child) (tranon’ zaza), 217 World genealogical view, 105–106 interpretation, natural way, 19–20 World-view parochialism, 239 Written pedigree, 4–5 failures, 44–45 Wuon lowo. See Owner of the land Y Yangwa trees, cultivation. See Kamea Yapese kinship, studies, 215 Z Zande, parochialism (expression), 239 Zaza-rano. See Water babies