Kapferer Stratherns New Comparative Anthropology

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StrathernS new Comparative

anthropology

Thoughts from Hagen and Zambia

Bruce Kapferer

Marilyn Strathern, recalling her Hagen ethnography, asks challenging questions

about the character and potential o anthropological generalizations grounded in

comparative ethnographic knowledge. In taking a new look at the issue o com-

parison, Strathern aims to overcome all sorts o dualisms (or simple binarisms),

distorting oppositions, and simple negative inversions (whereby what is dened

as distinct is requently presented as the obverse o Euro-American realities).

The biurcation o dierence that she stresses opens the potential o partial con-

nections rather than absolute distinctions: dierences that separate can also be

integral with other aspects that establish connections through similarity. Strath-

ern emphasizes the multiplicity o perspectives (akin to Alred Schutzs multiple

realities?) and reuses notions o coherent and discrete totalities or unities that

characterized comparisons in the highly relativist anthropology o yore. Thisarticle o Stratherns, as also her recent work as a whole, pushes beyond the nega-

tive dialectics o modernism versus postmodernism versus poststructuralism that

have governed anthropological and sociological debate and discussion, though

less extensively than in philosophy and the humanities. I note, however, a lean-

ing in her orientation toward the current technologically infuenced discourse

Common Knowledge 17:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2010-041

2011 by Duke University Press

104

S y m po s i um : C om pa r a t i v e R e l a t i v i s m


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5o the posthuman. A major reerence o her article is to the neorealist positions

o John Law, Annemarie Mol, and especially Bruno Latour (who similarly stress

connectivities rather than separations), as well as to Eduardo Viveiros de Castros

perspectivism. With regard to the last, she makes a distinction, on the one hand,

between perspectivalism or perspectivism the multiple positions o human and

nonhuman within a single open, networked, horizontal eld and, on the other

hand, the multiplicity o perspectives that are potential within a specic onto-

logical context and that are united through the commanding viewpoint o the

anthropologist.

Ontology (as Graham Harman has reminded us recently) is used in a great

many dierent ways. One usage conceives o all human beings as united in the

one ontology as a act o their common embodiment. The dierentiation within

human being, or the dierences that are ethnographically demonstrated between

human beings, are such within the one ontology, every dierence expressing adimension o an ontological universal. So Jadran Mimica, whose Iqwaye research

Strathern cites, is able to show how the apparently unique Iqwaye approach to

numbers evidences an embodied human imaginary with general ontological pos-

sibilities, one that is likewise maniested in advanced mathematics. Another orm

o ontology which, according to Strathern, is that o perspectivism in Eduardo

Viveiros de Castros sense involves a more discrete embodied orientation that

is cosmologically dened and enclosed. These dierent orms o ontology need

not be mutually exclusive, which I think is Stratherns impression also (though she

is ambiguous on this point), or she contests the idea that perpectivalism in the

broad, primary sense makes comparison irrelevant and pointless. She claws her

way back to the importance o comparativism (and to a more restricted concept

o ontology) or the uses o anthropologists, in the ace o apparently radical new

perspectivist and neorealist directions in anthropology that, or the most part, are

casting questions o ontology aside. Strathern can be understood as combining

the two notions o ontology to which I have reerred, the ormer underpinning

connectivities that do not necessarily erase a more restricted sense that Stratherns

approach to comparison would reveal. Unlike many anthropologists, Stratherndoes not necessarily equate ontology with culture, a confation that is a actor in

the dualistic relativism (biurcation?) that dogs much anthropological compari-

son and is still apparent in some who are trying to develop alternative approaches.

Thus she suggests that the risks o a dualism are evident in Viveiros de Castros

perspectivism (as applied to Amazonia), as well as in Simon Harrisons discussion

o ethnic confict, which occupies much o Stratherns essay. In it, she takes an

important step toward restoring comparison to a central place in the anthropo-

logical project, while avoiding some o the pitalls. At this point, I would like to

place Stratherns discussion in the context o other arguments relating to anthro-

pologys comparative project and to more specic ethnographic concerns about


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1. Louis Dumont,Homo Hierarchicus: The Cas te System

and Its Implications(Chicago: University o Chicago Press,

1980);Essays on Individuali sm: Modern Ideology in Anthro-

pological Perspective (Chicago: University o Chicago Press,

1986); The German Ideology: From France to Germany and

Back (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1994).

2. See also Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason

(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1976).

ethnicity and urbanism. Her revitalization o anthropological comparison has

some resonance with the work o Louis Dumont, although her general approach

more explicitly acknowledges that o McKim Marriott, Dumonts major critic.1

Dumont tried, as Strathern does, to steer a dicult course between the Scylla

o relativism and the Charybdis o universalism a universalism that, albeit, is

imbued with an ideological and normative individualism (o Euro-American post-

Enlightenment provenance) that has been essentialized in much political philoso-

phy, as well as in anthropological ethnography.2 In a similar spirit to the body o

Stratherns work, which depends on Melanesian materials, Dumont attempted

to develop conceptualizations, based on his ethnographic work in India, or a

comparative anthropological methodology.

Dumonts concept o hierarchy (and encompassment) and Stratherns

approach to the partible person (related to Marriotts concept o the dividual)

are comparative principles. Although initially grounded in their Indian and Mel-anesian ethnography, these concepts are, in dierent ways, then reconceptualized

as abstract universals. The concepts are both concrete and general, distinguishing

and connecting demonstrating irreducible ethnographic specicity and, simul-

taneously, a unity through the dierence. Thus, in Dumonts analysis, diverse

practices in India are, in their various concrete ways, expressive o hierarchy.

On the surace, this situation diers rom that in Europe. However, the surace

contrast or opposition that his comparative method reveals also discloses a deeper

unity. Hierarchy is suppressed in accordance with egalitarian and individualist

value but has continued to show its eects in racism and in notions o homoge-

neous national communities and unity in identity (extreme instances being seg-

regation in the United States, apartheid, and Nazi racist essentialism). Strathern

conceives o Melanesian dividualism as a principle that permits interconnections

precisely because the person or individual is not conceived as a coherent inte-

grated entity prior to the relations that people come to orm with others. As

Dumont argues about India, Strathern eectively argues that the individual as

value does not exist in Melanesia, but rather exists as a partible being relationally

constituted, and that this understanding has general orce or sociological under-standing beyond Melanesia.

The comparativism o Dumont and Strathern are very dierent rom previ-

ous attempts in anthropology, or they stress principles and processes that simul-

taneously connect as they separate. They promise an anthropology that is able to

demonstrate the continuities despite dierences among human beings (though


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107Strathern seems more reticent than Dumont about the continuities) and to deal

with the signicance o both. Anthropology is divested o the spoiling reputation

whereby its comparative and ethnographic work is assigned a positive rather than

negative role.

Apart rom their similarities in purpose or spirit, the perspectives o

Dumont and Strathern are distinct. Dumont is very much a ormalist in the tradi-

tion o Durkheim and later Lvi-Strauss, although Dumont aims to escape what

he considers to be their Eurocentrism. Dumont is a holist or whom the part can

only be conceived through its relation with the whole. Strathern is wary, I think,

o such holism placing parts and wholes into more dynamic relation, the parts

being points or the emergence o new wholes or assemblages. In contrast with

that o Strathern, Dumonts position might be seen as ar more static, although

this is not necessarily the case.3 While Dumont can be described as a tradition-

alist (i not an Orientalist, committed, as some critics claim, to homogeneousorders), Stratherns viewpoint is more open and contemporary. Nonetheless, it is

useul to raise a ew questions that Dumont might have considered in relation to

Stratherns approach, i only to expose some potential risks.

Methodologically, she aligns hersel with increasingly dominant social sci-

ence approaches, such as actor-network theory, as well as with the dividualist

orientation o Marriott. Both in some ways accord with her Melanesian eth-

nography, which indicates that the person is not a coherent integrated singular

individual, but rather partible, a point o dierentiation that can be plugged into

or unplugged rom a variety o relations that cross over what may appear as di-

erences and separations and that a previous comparative anthropology may have

held to be unbridgeably distinct. Actor-network theory, at least in the work o

Latour (which bears some resemblance to Manuel DeLandas assemblage theory,

which in turn has its kinship to Stratherns perspective), is set unabashedly within

the contemporary Euro-American re-imagination or re-ontologization o the

nature o existence as conceived in a world o digitalized technology, cyberspace,

and virtuality.4 Dumont, I surmise, would see this development as blatantly

individualist, rooted in the conceptualizations o recent history (and its utur-isms). Marriotts individualism, or example, is presented as a shit away rom the

individual as value, a concept that, as Dumont explains, is at the root o Euro-

American social scientic thinking and that is seen to be centrally involved in the

ailure o comparative and generalist objectives. But I think that Dumont would

3. See Bruce Kaperer, Louis Dumont and a Holist

Ant hropology, in Theory and Practice in Anthropology:

The Holist Approach, ed. Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt

(New York: Blackwell, 2010), 21338, where I argue that

Dumonts hierarchical conception posits a logic o dier-

entiation in which hierarchy is a dynamic rame or the

continual actualization o new potential.

4. Bruno Latour,Reassembling the Social : An Introduc-

tion to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxord: Oxord University

Press, 2005); Manuel DeLanda,A New Philosophy of Society:

Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Contin-

uum, 2006).


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see Marriott (and, by extension, Stratherns notion o the partible person) as an

expansion o the individual-as-value idea and as a orm o hyperinvidualism. Thus

the individual is no longer a coherent entity (or a unitary sel) but is broken down

into a composite set o dividuals, each o which eectively acts like an individual

rom which a variety o dierent social assemblages can be generated.

Whether or not this critique o Marriott is air, it does seem that Strathern

sustains Western authority while appearing to destabilize it with her compara-

tive Melanesian ethnography. Furthermore, her destabilization may not be as

radical as it at rst appears, since she is discovering in Melanesia directions that

were already present, i suppressed, in Western philosophical and social thought.5

There could be a return to the comparative anthropology o old, despite the radi-

cal appearance. The ault o early comparative anthropology was to discover the

West in other systems, which, or all their apparent strangeness, ended up reveal-

ing and conrming ideologically embedded dimensions (at least, in Dumontssense) o the world rom which the anthropologists mainly came. Dumont largely

avoided this trap by insisting on a thorough critique o his own historical sit-

uation, which he regarded as crucial or developing an authentic comparative

understanding that had real generalizing potential. Strathern is also critical (in

her present article, as in much other work), but in a more tentative and subdued

way; and here a comparative binarism could be creeping in the back door. An

example would be her suggestion that a cosmo-ontology o the Iqwaye sort, as

described by Mimica, may be underpinning the relationalities o Hageners.

As a demonstration o her argument, Strathern describes the complex,

dierentiating, even ractalizing way in which Hageners carve up their reali-

ties to establish the multiplicity o their relations. She claims no originality or

her observations, which to me resonate with those o Max Gluckmans Rhodes-

Livingstone Institute (RLI) researchers in what is now Zambia. Rather like the

situation in Hagen as Strathern denes it, in Zambia migrants to town rom rural

areas developed many novel, situationally relevant, and thereore constantly di-

erentiating and shiting categories, in terms o which their social relations were

dened and through which new social assemblages were created that crossedover thoroughly separate social and cultural orders, or what in other situations

would have been regarded as such. The urban practices o Zambians, like those

o Stratherns Hageners, involved a thorough consciousness o social and cultural

dierence (they behaved like anthropological comparativists o the past), which

they used to generate new social and cultural categories in terms o which people

who would have been considered separate could orm new unities. Dierence

was engaged to produce communality. In urban Zambia, relations, oten feeting,

5. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul

Patton (London: Continuum, 2004); The Fold: Leibniz and

the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993).


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9were constituted in and through the category, which expressed a virtual relation

in terms o which actual relations were ormed. Such dynamics can be widely

attested, especially in the current conditions o migration and urbanization and

in the context o what some commentators are reerring to as contemporary cos-

mopolitanism. Stratherns critical take is that such globalizing intermixture may

mask persisting ontological dierences that (i I understand her argument) may

underpin the new associations and relations ormed. Further, Strathern would

disagree with the urban/rural division and separation that marked the RLI per-

spective and or which these researchers were criticized by many anthropolo-

gists at the time. ( J. Clyde Mitchell, the key urban anthropologist o the RLI

group, eventually attempted to overcome the dichotomization with his network

approach, which is distinct rom that currently being popularized by Latour.)

However, Stratherns resolution o the conceptual divide seems to replace

a horizontal distinction with a vertical one. That is, the ontological dimensionso relations in migrants villages persist into urban space as the occluded base

o relations in town. Playing on Gluckmans extremist position (which opposed

town situations to rural tribal situations), Strathern conceives o the Hageners as

simultaneously tribesmen, their tribal ontological roots, as it were, still deeply

relevant, i suppressed, or the relations that they are orming in town.

The RLI point is, o course, more complicated than I have so ar repre-

sented it. Mitchell, or example, did not conceive o Zambian urban lie as an

integrated totality.6 As he saw it, lie fowed through a diversity o events and

situations, in which relations were being constantly recreated. These relations

were in accordance with the maniold perspectives o participants whose motivat-

ing conditions, rather than ontological undamentals (ideological constructions

being preerable in this case), were predominantly those o the political economy

o the colonial and postcolonial order (in both urban and rural spaces).

Here I would suggest (still in the context o the RLI situationist perspec-

tive) that Stratherns argument intimates a dimension o social/societal integra-

tion more than she might otherwise preer. The event-centered and situational

approach that the RLI researchers experimented with (in explicit reaction againstnotions o the inherent unity o society) is more fuid and oriented toward poten-

tial (that is, toward the production o something entirely original). This is so

despite their privileging o structure and their antagonism toward individualist

psychologism, which is always a risk, though not a necessity, o an orientation that

stresses ontology o the restricted and even cultural kind that Strathern sees as

relevant to the Hageners.

6. J. Clyde Mitchell, Social Networks and Urban Situations:

Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns

(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1969);

The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among

Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia (Manchester, U.K.:

Manchester University Press, 1956).


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The RLI point or Zambia, as distinct rom Stratherns observations

about Hagen, would be that rural ontologies would be suspended or radically

transormed or created entirely anew in urban zones, while in rural areas, i not

suspended, they would increasingly be suppressed and, in eect, changed. Fur-

thermore, the similarities and dierences, the ractionalizing dynamics o com-

parison and association engaged in by Hageners in urbanizing contexts, as well

as the power o certain anthropological and sociological concepts, are thoroughly

connected to wider political orces that might systematically push aside the rel-

evance o local ontologies.

Stratherns kind o questioning goes to the heart o what makes anthropol-

ogy important. But her approach continues to maniest the diculties o the

biurcated orientation integral to anthropological comparison, which attempts

to discover generalities or universals through the examination o what appears

on the surace to be ethnographically based dierence. Strathern exempliesthe potential contribution o an anthropology that discovers a common human-

ity through the study o dierence, a program that can eectively explode the

apparent separations o dierence through the very study o dierence. Strathern

shows how anthropological ethnography can decenter dominant (which usually

means metropolitan) theory, but doing so is rendered problematic when the con-

ceptual apparatuses o description and their assumptions are thoroughly those

o some dominant theory. This obstacle is likely to be an enduring one or any

sort o anthropology, but some o the dangers or risks may be reduced through a

critique (which is not necessarily a rejection) o the conceptualizations engaged

(including those that anthropologists might derive rom their particular eth-

nographic experience). I have reerred to Dumont, who may appear outdated

to many o us today. He attempted a rigorous investigation o his own realities

simultaneously with his exploration o people who on the surace appeared to live

outside them. His comparative methodology was developed as a kind o internal

experimental method or the testing o both particular and general conceptual

and theoretical assertions. Vital to this method is a concern to develop a thorough

and continuing critique o the historical grounds o ones own understanding, onethat is sensitive to the very descriptive concepts through which both dierences

and similarities are determined. Stratherns work is in line with such a project

but, in my view, insuciently recognizes some o the ideological or ontological

underpinnings that may be shaping aspects o her exciting and always illuminat-

ing venture.

Kapferer Stratherns New Comparative Anthropology

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