Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (2024)

PROPERTY, SUBSTANCE

AND EFFECT

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PROPERTY, SUBSTANCE

AND EFFECT

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSAYS

ON PERSONS AND THINGS

Marilyn Strathern

Reprint

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ERIC HIRSCH

HAU Books

Chicago

First published 1999 The Athlone Press, London

Property, Substance and Effect, with a new introduction by Eric Hirsch, by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

Cover image: Pen drawing by Georgina Beier, property of Marilyn Strathern

Cover design: Daniele Meucci and Ania Zayco

Introduction: Working Through Other People’s Descriptions

Eric Hirsch

Concepts and Themes

The reissue of Marilyn Strathern’s Property, Substance and Effect provides an opportunity to look afresh at a collection of essays that were originally published eleven years after her seminal volume The Gender of the Gift (1988). In the intervening period, Strathern’s thinking had taken important new directions. What anthropological as well as wider political influences were at work in the chapters she assembled? In this introduction I highlight the themes and concepts that are the focus of Property, Substance and Effect. I contextualize the issues examined in its chapters and consider how Strathern’s analyses here connect with her previous and subsequent work. I also briefly consider how other anthropologists have elaborated the insights provided by Strathern in work that takes us into the twenty-first century. Published twenty-three years ago, how, in short, is Property, Substance and Effect relevant to readers today?

The subtitle of the book—Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things—is revealing and allows us to begin mapping out the themes and concepts of concern in the book. The first matter to note is that the distinction between persons and things is of concern to Euro-Americans.1 Why does this distinction matter? Ideas of property and property ownership organize much of Euro-American social life and maintaining the difference between persons and things is intrinsic to specifying property and ownership. By contrast, and until recently, such a division was of no relevance to Melanesians. This difference between Euro-American ways of thinking and Melanesian ones is associated with the way Melanesian persons perceive relations. All entities associated with persons in Melanesia are composed of relations and all relations derive from persons. What Euro-Americans perceive as things in the Melanesian context are perceived by Melanesians as versions of persons.

The distinction between persons and things that Property, Substance and Effect draws attention to is connected to another theme of central concern to the analytical framework deployed by Strathern. The chapters in this volume, as with Strathern’s earlier work and all her subsequent publications, deal with a binary contrast between Euro-America and Melanesia. And with respect to these contexts, she is interested in the perspectives and descriptions that inform their particular worlds. When people act in Euro-America or in Melanesia (or elsewhere) they act with respect to specific descriptions, such as a spoken or written account of a person, event or object. If particular descriptions are not available then it is not possible to act in the way those descriptions prescribe. This is a matter of logic, if nothing else. Descriptions and actions are intrinsically connected. Euro-American descriptions include ideas of property and property ownership and this influences the actions and perspectives of Euro-Americans. From a Euro-American perspective persons are distinct from things and this matters in determining which person or persons owns which thing or things. Melanesian descriptions and actions, as documented by anthropologists, are not informed by this distinction and ideas of property ownership do not figure in Melanesian perspectives. That is, until recently, and it is one aim of Property, Substance and Effect to examine the implications of this shift (see especially chapter 6).

Having said this, it is of course the case that what is attributed to Melanesian and to Euro-American perspectives and descriptions are already the perspectives and descriptions of Euro-American discourse. A principal theme in Strathern’s writing is a persistent struggle with the language of description.2 She observes that social anthropologists conduct their work through the descriptions of the people they engage with, either directly, in the course of fieldwork, or via descriptions in the ethnographic writings of other anthropologists: getting the descriptions right matters.

Nonetheless, and as noted, the descriptive language anthropologists use to describe Melanesian accounts and actions derives from the Euro-American world. This is an unavoidable fact of anthropology (see Geertz 1988). What Strathern does is place this reality front and center. This had been a concern of Strathern’s earlier research and it informs the pages of Property, Substance and Effect. So, for example, pointing to a dominant feature of Euro-American societies and economies, she states in The Gender of the Gift, a culture dominated by ideas about property ownership can only imagine the absence of such ideas in specific ways (Strathern 1988: 18). That specific way, she suggests, following Gregory (1982), can be a contrast between commodity exchange and gift exchange, each associated, for the purpose of description and analysis, with different societies and economies. The contrast between gifts and commodities is a Euro-American one, not a Melanesian one. Nevertheless, the contrast allows ethnographic material to be organized in different ways: To talk about the gift constantly evokes the possibility that the description would look very different if one were talking instead about commodities (Strathern 1988: 19). The point to emphasize again is that the contrast between Melanesia and Euro-America as much as that between gift exchange and commodity exchange is for descriptive purposes. That is, it is to generate a space, so to speak, where the accounts, actions and perspectives created by Melanesian peoples can be disclosed, while simultaneously making apparent that that disclosure must be through Euro-American modes of description.

The chapters in this book stem from this understanding of description and perspective as well as the model of Melanesian personhood illustrated by Strathern in The Gender of the Gift. Relations between Melanesian persons, in all their variety, are established through forms of transaction (gift exchange). Building on the ethnography of other Melanesianists, Strathern has demonstrated in significant detail that Melanesians, contrary to how it might appear from the established ethnography, actually hold their conventions in common.

These common conventions are based on the idea that persons are composed of relations and it is through relations that persons reveal their capacities: persons must in themselves be what they can become (Strathern 1988: 220). According to this perspective, then, persons must be able to accomplish the abilities they are imagined to have. So, for example, a girl can already be imagined as a woman as she can be seen to have within her the ability to give birth to children. But the capacity must be made visible in an appropriate form. In English this sounds like stating the obvious. The point, though, is that in ‘Melanesian’ (as it were) people work so as to make this apparent. They endeavor to reveal these capacities as objects of knowledge for themselves (Strathern 1988: 220).

Of course, the concept of relation used by Strathern, and anthropologists more generally, is a Euro-American notion. Melanesians do not speak explicitly about relations, as such. In its dominant Anglophone outlines the relation has two properties.3 The first of the concept’s properties is that it can be applied to any order of connection (Strathern 1995: 17). This is a property of scale. The relation has a second property to do with complexity. Complexity is a property because the relation requires other elements to complete it—a relation must be between this and that (Strathern 1995: 18). The complexity stems from the fact that the relation always summons entities other that itself (Strathern 1995: 18).

When the relation is applied by anthropologists to the elucidation of Melanesian materials such as the Melanesian person, the person can be revealed to act as the measure of all things; the person can appear in all forms of life—exist at any scale—from yams to humans to clan ancestors and so forth (see Wagner 1991). Strathern’s interpretation of relations stems from her analysis of Melanesian materials but she also seeks to make the idea of relations obvious with respect to the English/Euro-Americans. She makes this specific analytical move because of a distinctive feature of English and Euro-American perspectives regarding relations.

In writing about the English Strathern indicates that she is also writing about Euro-Americans more generally but from the perspective of her English context. She uses the contrast described with Melanesia in order to draw attention to the difficulty Euro-Americans have in conceptualizing relations.

On the one hand, and based on an understanding deriving broadly from the writings of Roy Wagner, Strathern suggests that Melanesians take relations as given. Relations are the vital supports for any living person (Leenhardt [1947] 1979). What Melanesians do is continually exert effort so as to differentiate persons from each other—from a certain set of relations—in order to have the capacity to act. On the other hand, Euro-Americans take individuality for granted, as a kind of natural condition. As a result of the taken-for-granted nature of individuality, the manner in which persons relate to one another becomes like a cultural enterprise. She suggests that representations of individualism are deep-seated in areas of Euro-American discourse and, like the notion of nature, individualism is a kind of cultural artefact (cf. Strathern 2020: 167–90).

A further aspect of the relational and transactional universe is examined in the present collection and that is the idea of substance. In Melanesian perspectives, substance is understood as the outcome of people’s actions, contained in a physical form (such as a pig or other kind of wealth) that they have created. The substance can be then be revealed as an object obtainable through exchange relations. Substance is thus implicated in the exchanges that people enact in order to produce and sustain relations: to make relations out of relations (see chapter 3). By contrast, something different is considered in the Euro-American context which speaks to the prominence of its property thinking. Here, human substance (such as components of the anatomy) is perceived to have the potential to be transacted as a commercial entity through transformations effected by biotechnology (see chapter 8).

As with property and substance found in the book’s title, the third and last concept of the title is that of effect. As it is deployed in the pages that follow, effect has a distinctly Melanesian resonance. Consider one of the first examples examined in chapter 2: adornments worn by Mt. Hagen dancers. Strathern describes a feather plaque displayed on the head as part of the dancer’s ornaments. The plaque as well as the other adornments (feathers, shells, and face paint) can be understood as bits of other persons attached to the dancer, summoning their presence. The description captures how the relations with other persons are foreshadowed in these decorations. The decorated assemblage will have an effect on others, exemplifying the dancer’s efficacy. Adornments make visible the support the dancer has had through relations with other persons. This is why Strathern suggests that the decorations are bits of other persons—the decorations display the support that enabled the dancer to perform. Yet, simultaneously, the decorations reveal how the dancer had to separate from these same relations in order to have the capacity to perform.

These exchanges are what Strathern refers to as the exchange of perspectives. There is reciprocity at work here whereby each person perceives themself from the point of view of the other. This might suggest a comparison with the Euro-American reflexivity of selfhood: I know who I am because you can see who I am. This is not, however, an exchange of gazes between persons as if the above dancer views the spectators and the view of his performance is returned to him. It is not, in Melanesia, a Euro-American perspective where each gaze is from an individual position onto the world. Euro-Americans, according to Strathern, do not have exchanges of perspectives. What they do have are collections of individually diverse perspectives on themselves and the world around them. By contrast, the idea of effects is essential to the exchange of perspectives that concerns Strathern: there is an exchange of effects between persons. The person views him or herself transformed through the effects he or she has on other persons. And the presence of other persons is the cause of one’s own actions. Thus, a pregnant mother and her unborn child have reciprocal effects upon one another—each grows and elicits the other—just as later the child and its clan will have mutual, reciprocal effects in growing one another (numerically increasing the clan size and the food on clan land which is growing the child). These effects are the product of reciprocal interactions; the concern of persons, as argued by Strathern, is not on being reflexive or on being focused on the self.

Persons and things; property, substance and effect; the ubiquity of relations; perspective and description: These are the key concepts addressed in this volume and they are applied to a range of issues arising in Melanesia, as well as Euro-America.

The Ethnographic Moment

The Melanesia (and specifically Papua New Guinea) that Strathern writes about in this book is the Melanesia she experienced when undertaking fieldwork at various times from the 1960s through the 1990s. The ethnographic material that forms the core of many of the book’s chapters is the outcome of her immersion in the social lives of the people whose descriptions and actions she attempted to capture in her fieldwork notebooks (as reported most recently, for this volume, in chapters 5, 7, and 9). Her second immersion is the one in which the anthropologist (Strathern) seeks both to grasp and re-create the sense of the accounts and practices of the people she was involved with in fieldwork. It is the movement between these fields—the field of fieldwork and the field of the study—that Strathern refers to as the ethnographic moment.

This moment is comparable to the relation (discussed above). What are related are the understood (at the time of observation in fieldwork) and the need to understand (what is examined at the time of analysis). However, this movement between fields occurs over different time scales. To illustrate this point I consider an example of description deployed by Strathern from her earlier research and a different descriptive lexicon from more recent writings.

Producers and transactors are the terms she used to mark the differences between women and men in the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea (PNG) following her fieldwork there in the 1960s. Production was the mode in which women’s work was valued by Mt. Hagen people, while men were judged locally as transactors. Men were also producers, but this was not valued by Mt. Hagen people in the same way the ability to engage in exchange relations were. As Strathern (1972: 135) notes:

For a man, his own involvement in production (e.g. clearing gardens) carries relatively little prestige. Industry alone does not lead directly to big-man status. Anyone can make gardens if he applies himself; it is simply a matter of hard work. Renown comes from being able to influence people, demonstrating power over exchange partners and one’s clansmen alike.

However, by the end of the 1970s this form of description was perceived by Strathern as inadequate. She changed her view due to transformations in anthropology, especially the influence of feminism and interest in gender identity which meant that new descriptive terms were required. Drawing on the extensive range of comparative Melanesia ethnography Strathern introduced the distinction between same-sex and cross-sex gender relations. She argued that a male or female person’s gender assumes a given or inactive androgynous state, known as cross-sex. In dealings with other persons, that is in engaging in action, a person’s gender identity is made uniform in a single-sex form. Previously it was sufficient to understand how the fame acquired by men derived from the influence they had over people and the ability to exhibit power over exchange partners as well as clansmen. Now, the ethnographic moment had changed, and a more fine-grained analysis of gender was required to understand these processes of influence and power. It was necessary, for example, to understand the transformed same-sex relations men assume in their exchange relations with other men, where their cross-sex relations with women are obviated at those moments. Men and women, depending on their particular actions, oscillate between being perceived in a cross-sex condition or a same-sex one.

To illustrate further the changes in forms of description consider the following examples from chapters 1 and 5 of the present volume. Strathern recounts being dazzled by the first Mt. Hagen ceremonial exchange event she witnessed in the mid-1960s where mounted pearl shells, heavy in weight, were being carried hurriedly by men as some form of gift exchange. At that time, competitive exchanges between clans were common. The increase in competitive exchanges was stimulated by the colonial suppression of interclan warfare and the influx of large quantities of pearl shells into the local economy, brought by Australians needing goods to trade with Mt. Hagen men. By the mid-1990s social life was, of course, different, but Strathern does not describe those differences directly. The ethnographic moment Strathern creates asks the following question: What does 1995 seem like from the perspective of descriptions that were valid thirty years before? While many anthropologists argue that historical change is crucial to understanding (e.g., Thomas 1991), Strathern adopts a different point of view and argues in turn that the categories of analysis used to understand other people’s descriptions and actions cannot themselves remain timeless. It is in this regard that she applies the categories of same-sex and cross-sex relations to describe the differences between now (mid-1990s) and then (mid-1960s), especially where the acquisition and circulation of money came to eclipse the dominance of pearl shell exchange in Mt. Hagen. The inflation of cross-sex relations she describes, with maternal kin in particular, provides an original take on the emergence of individually minded consumers some twenty years after PNG independence in 1975.

Of course, what is Euro-America, as much as what is Melanesia, is not fixed in time but transforms under specific conditions. Strathern (1975) early on considered an example of these transformations in PNG among Mt. Hagen migrants in Port Moresby. Such changes—the urbanization of Port Moresby, labor migration, and changes to courts and legal institutions, among countless other changes—were the outcome of Euro-American interventions. Strathern (1985) subsequently uses research among urban Mt. Hagen migrants to interrogate ideas of personhood and transactions informing Euro-American and Melanesian conventions and expectations of conduct. In doing so she examines the relations between a white masta4 and his hausboi5 and their differing perceptions of what wages (commodity exchange) and gifts mean given the two men’s different social backgrounds. Her discussion is informed by a reading of John Locke’s writings on property, domestic labor, and the master-servant relationship (see Tully 1980). This comparative exercise not only anticipates the core of the analysis elaborated in The Gender of the Gift but also that of The Relation first presented as an inaugural lecture in 1994 (Strathern 1995) and then expounded most recently in Relations: An Anthropological Account (Strathern 2020).

For Strathern, the ethnographic method as fashioned by social anthropology, with its demands of fieldwork immersion, is what enables such descriptions to be accomplished. As she emphasizes at the end of her first chapter—a chapter she entitles the ethnographic effect—ethnography allows the study of the immediate here and now from which anthropologists create their knowledge of the world. It is a mode of inquiry that has unpredictable outcomes in relation to realms of knowledge and social activity. And importantly, it permits the recovery of material that investigators did not know at the time they were collecting. Strathern’s take on ethnography and its effectiveness is in contrast with those accounts that are concerned with ethnography largely as a genre of writing (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986).

Global Property Regime

As the above examples illustrate, changes in Euro-American descriptions and actions came to hold an ever-increasing place in the style of anthropology practiced by Strathern. By the 1990s, for instance, new international policy instruments such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and especially an agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) meant that countries like PNG needed to reconsider claims to the ownership of all kinds of resources. This was not a voluntary move. It was a pressurized change intended to protect outside investment by introducing intellectual property provision. Powerful, developed countries via the World Trade Organization wanted intellectual property law to be standardized on a global scale. In contrast to developed countries, so-called developing countries were imagined to be prevented from catching up by their entrenched traditions. Aligned to this view was one that characterized such countries as having collective or communal forms of ownership, forms of ownership that were contrary to individualized ideas of property rights.6 These were highly charged political developments that captured Strathern’s attention.

At this time intellectual property had shifted from its primary existence in legal discourse to having greater public prominence in the media. And this shift, in turn, was connected to the expansion of new things—electronic and biogenetic—that could be owned. As a result, the sphere of patenting was expanded. PNG was thus compelled to standardize intellectual property law through legislation although concerns were raised by interested parties about the legitimacy of the legal categories. The legislation concerned with copyright and patent made no attempt to query whether such a conceptual framework was the best way to regulate often conflicting international, national, and local objectives. This enlargement was not without controversy and people from PNG were at the forefront of disputes. In 1996 a patent was granted to scientists associated with the US National Institutes of Health for a cell line that had been obtained from a blood sample of a Hagahai man from the Schrader Mountain area, PNG. There was widespread international condemnation of the patent as it was perceived to be commodifying human body parts and the patent was subsequently withdrawn. An earlier controversy in the United States concerned the patenting of a cell line from a surgically removed spleen that was upheld in court (see Rabinow 1996; and below).

It is in the context of this international expansion of property regimes that Strathern fixes her analytical attention on notions of property. Is the intellectual property model appropriate for the protection of rights and claims over intangible resources such as performances and sources of ancestral knowledge that originate in Indigenous cultures and are part of long-standing traditions? Can culture become a form of property (see also Brown 2003)? These issues were at the forefront of her concerns. On the horizon was a UNESCO initiative to create a standard-setting device concerned with the realm of intangible cultural heritage. How might these international changes be understood in light of the descriptions and actions coming from PNG ethnography?

Intellectual property rights as applied internationally require that persons and things, as discussed above, exist as separate entities. This is a necessary requirement for putting such rights into practice. This precondition appears uncontroversial from a Euro-American perspective but Papua New Guineans do not have the ideological necessity to separate things and persons. Again, what ethnography repeatedly discloses instead is that people divide people: difference is recurrently created in how Papua New Guineans conduct their social relations. And they conduct their social relations by dividing themselves from others through transactions (see the example above from chapter 2 for an illustration). Although Papua New Guineans appear to be preoccupied with things in how they exchange items of the same kind—pork for pork or money for money—what is disclosed by such transactions is not their thingness but their social origin and social endpoint. The transactions of things reveal people’s capacity to act, to transact: the things from a Euro-American perspective are just things, but from a Melanesian viewpoint are an index of a person’s capacity.

At this time, Strathern was concerned with how intellectual property rights would deal with Indigenous culture and intellectual property often referred to as traditional knowledge and what legal difficulties and local problems this might cause. Papua New Guineans are mainly concerned with regulating access to and use of this Indigenous knowledge so that laws can be implemented to protect such cultural and intellectual property. Related to this is the issue of economic profit arising from the use of traditional knowledge materials for which people want to be properly compensated. However, there is a problem with such a solution and that is the idea that this kind of intellectual property exists as a thing owned in a conventional Euro-American sense. The problem emerges because the property does not really have an intellectual aspect. Rather, traditional knowledge dwells in a social collective. No one person has the right to alienate this version of property; it inheres in the social formation (Kalinoe 2004: 43).

An important take on these matters that Strathern highlights is the contrast between dispersal or dissemination connected with cultural property and that connected with intellectual property. In order to claim that certain cultural knowledge belongs to a particular social formation or collective people in it may need to demonstrate that their cultural knowledge has been passed on from one generation to the next. The authenticity of cultural property, then, hinges on the fact that it has been passed on. Intellectual property is just the opposite. One can only claim intellectual property by showing that it has not been dispersed.

Property, Substance and Effect: Wider Influence

Fred Myers (2004) has drawn on Strathern’s analysis of intellectual property for his own study of the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika, who in the early 1970s requested the Australian government to investigate the use of Yolngu clan designs on a range of commodities which had not been authorized. Following Strathern, Myers discusses the inability of legal discourses of cultural property to apprehend the perspectives and concerns of Indigenous Australians with regard to their ideas of creativity and cultural expression. In contrast to Indigenous Australians’ perspectives concerning their cultural creations, Euro-American ideas of ownership are radically different—they are about individual ownership, whether that individual is a corporation, culture, or individual author. Myers (2004: 10) quotes Strathern’s succinct formulation (chapter 8) in this respect: Ownership gathers things momentarily to a point by locating them in the owner, halting endless dissemination, effecting an identity (p. 170, this volume). This idea of ownership is in conflict with indigenous Australian ideas of cultural creations.

As the above example suggests, the ideas and analysis in this volume have inspired scholars in their own studies. A simple Google Scholar search of Property, Substance and Effect will show that the book has been influential, cited by a wide range of scholars both inside and outside of anthropology. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to map that influence in its entirety. What I want to do instead is to briefly consider how some of the insights provided by the chapters in the book have been carried forward by a number of anthropologists (including Strathern herself) pursuing diverse areas of research. How might the reader new to Property, Substance and Effect perceive its relevance for contemporary times?

One interesting answer to this question is provided by Stefan Helmreich (2008). Since the publication of Property, Substance and Effect there has been a proliferation of developments in biotechnology in areas such as genomics, stem cell research, and reproductive technology as well as that of bioprospecting. The entangling of biotechnology with its commercialization has been examined by a number of researchers who are the focus of Helmreich’s publication. What is of interest to me is the genealogy of scholarship provided in his article. In the forking figure he presents, inspired by the diagram at the end of Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, one fork connects Strathern with a group researchers influenced by her thinking, including Sarah Franklin (2007), Cori Hayden (2003), and Charis Thompson (2005), among others.

Hayden, in particular, investigates an aspect of the new global property regime that was foreshadowed by Strathern. As I mentioned earlier, the UN-sponsored Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and specifically the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) required countries like PNG to introduce legislation concerned with the ownership of diverse kinds of resources. Hayden considers a similar issue in the context of Mexico, the site of her research. She frames the CBD and TRIPS as neoliberal innovations designed to facilitate or enforce the escalation and enlargement of capitalist markets and trade. Bioprospecting is the focus of her study and bioprospecting is meant to be a utilization of resources that is, in principle, in tune with the CBD. The goals of the CBD are realized through bioprospecting by conserving nature while converting plant material into information and thus into potentially valuable patents and drug therapies. The ideology behind bioprospecting weds ideas of sustainability with fair and equitable sharing of the profits arising from the use of genetic resources. The benefits stemming from nature are meant to be shared amongst the interested parties, for the most part being pharmaceutical companies, universities from the Global North, and Indigenous peoples from the Global South.

However, TRIPS runs counter to the principles and ideas contained in the CBD and requires intellectual property protection that is significantly different from that promoted by the CBD. As Hayden (2003: 95) argues:

TRIPS requires that member states recognise patents on microorganisms and the biological processes used to produce them; at the same time, it holds no requirement for benefit-sharing or even obtaining consent when companies patent compounds based on natural products from nations such as Mexico. And unlike the CBD, if member nations do not sign TRIPS, they are subject to trade sanctions.

Nations of the Global South are forced to abide by the intellectual property regime of TRIPS rather than the redistributive mechanisms of the CBD. However, and regardless of this potential conflict, an additional problem arises and the source of this problem reminds us of Strathern’s interpretation of the Euro-American distinction between persons and things that runs throughout Property, Substance and Effect. Bioprospecting can only operate if scientists are able to identify the benefit-recipients (persons) that are linked with their plants (things). But a problem arises when plant material is collected from places with no discernible local people, such as the sides of roads. Hayden (2003: 175) notes that plant ecologists find roads to be especially important for the spread of exotic species as they act as effective corridors along which plants move with great efficiency. When it comes to roadside flora it is virtually impossible to identify the local owners of plant life. The same holds true for flora obtained in markets which comprise a large proportion of bioprospecting collections. In this case, money changes hands and virtually all obligations end as a result (Hayden 2003: 144). In short, Hayden documents that bioprospecting plant collections have always been multiply authored and generally do not correspond to the Euro-American ideas of persons (as local benefactors) connected to identifiable things, so that proceeds from intellectual property can be shared.

Hayden’s study thus expands an important theme in Property, Substance and Effect concerning Euro-American ideas of property, whether it is intellectual, cultural, or more conventional things such as land. Property requires a boundary so that a network of relations is cut, the claims of other persons are severed, and a singular identity created. Property presupposes the existence of distinct persons and distinct things. At the same time, what Hayden reveals is that relations of various kinds pervade all aspects of the bioprospecting endeavor, and taking her lead from Strathern she states that ownership brings relations … to a stopping point, even if only temporarily (Hayden 2003: 224).

DNA sampling raises comparable issues to that of bioprospecting regarding benefit-sharing and patents involving donors and scientists. The complexity of these issues is examined in Michael Montoya’s study of DNA sampling among Mexican-Americans and its use for diabetes research. As for Hayden, Strathern also stimulates his understanding of these transactions. He is critical of the perspective which suggests that patent policy proposals should focus on the equitable material transfer agreements between donors and scientists (Montoya 2011: 155). Montoya perceives this as accepting the logic of possessive individualism that informs patent case law—the idea that cells or tissue were owned and could then be exchanged depending on the party’s relation to the biological substance.

It is certainly the case that biological samples have become like crops, land, and minerals where scientists use the metaphors of harvesting, extraction, and procurement to refer to the scientific techniques they deploy. The famous (or more likely infamous) case of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line that scientists immortalized from her cancerous cells in the 1960s and 1970s is a case in point (see Skloot 2010). Unquestionably, such language indicates certain suppositions about the human body, in particular, that the body can be divided into parts and the parts can be abstracted from the living humans and the social context in which they are situated.

Montoya argues that the above critical perspectives on DNA sampling, although important, fail to recognize the social relations that make possible the production and circulation of DNA samples (Montoya 2011: 155–56). Attention needs to be given, he suggests, to the actual social context of sampling and the social life of the sample. What is too often obscured is how the transactions at the core of sampling generate regimes of value. Instead, Montoya follows the insights of Strathern in this volume, where he argues that

[O]ne modality of making property out of bits of biological organism (animal or plant) requires the delinking of the product from its origins ... This enables the reassignment of ownership at each stage in the development of knowledge. This is not magic. It is the emergent form of property relations manifest in intellectual property rights discourses. (Montoya 2011: 156)

Bioprospecting and DNA sampling are two areas of research where ideas presented in Property, Substance and Effect have had considerable influence (see, for example, Fullwiley 2011; TallBear 2013). These two areas are ones that fall at the intersections of anthropology and science studies. Although Strathern does not see herself as a Science Studies scholar, many of her interventions in this volume speak directly to the concerns of this research area. One in particular is her analysis of Euro-American kinship systems and the connection between these forms of relations and that of science (see chapter 4).

Strathern observes that Euro-American kinship systems contain an array of fundamental suppositions concerning knowledge which makes what we call science very easy to contemplate. In particular, she argues, Euro-American kinship involves knowledge that can be externally verified by information relating to the natural world. Information about biological processes, in particular, is one source that provides persons with knowledge of how they are related to each other. These significant and in many ways ground-breaking ideas are further developed by her in a later publication (Strathern 2005). There she writes about embedded science. Her starting point is the claim made by scientists and policy makers alike that society is implicated in science. If science is in society, Strathern (2005: 33) asks, where is it? To answer that, one must first recognize that science did not emerge like an island from the sea: ways to conceptualise its descriptions and claims emerged through borrowings from other domains of life (Strathern 2005: 46).

The idea of relation is, again, central here. The Human Genetics Commission, for example, was a body that advised the UK government on the social and ethical aspects of genetics, including genetic testing, cloning, and other procedures connected with molecular medicine. Strathern notes that the commission advised that people should recognise the extent to which they are related (Strathern 2005: 46, emphasis removed). With this in mind, she asks why Euro-Americans need to acknowledge and inform themselves of the degree to which they, as people, are related. "And why, then, are they surprised when they discover that they are already related? (Strathern 2005: 46, original emphasis). In the present volume she suggests that Euro-Americans live out a scientific system of knowledge, where kinship is one amongst other objects of knowledge (cf. McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Given the centrality of the concept of relations to both scientific knowledge and knowledge associated with kinship, Strathern (2005: 46) proposes that Euro-Americans have a scientific kinship system."

To this point I have touched briefly on how ideas in Property, Substance and Effect have informed anthropological research in the Euro-American context. What about in Melanesia? Here, concepts articulated in this volume have been applied in different ways. One of the implications of the concept of effect is that it requires the person to appear—to become visible—in a particular form. In the concluding chapter of the book (which concludes chapter 1) Strathern reflects on the way she previously described (in Strathern 1988) how persons in Melanesia make visible the relations of which they are composed. She writes: I had no account (description) of the apparent need I imputed to these Melanesians to make relations visible (this volume, 247–48, emphasis removed). It was a blind spot. Effect is how she now understands the motive. A person sees what there is to be seen because the witness is in the correct social condition to register the effect. Another person, in turn, is the cause of the effect.

Based on her research in the Madang Hospital, located in Madang Province, PNG, Alice Street found that the patients as well as the medical staff were concerned with making themselves visible in distinctive ways. Her research expands the range of contexts in which the insights presented in Property, Substance and Effect are applied, especially that connected with effect. Street examines two technologies of visibility that are familiar in Euro-American medical contexts: government health cards and audit practices. In the PNG hospital setting she studied these technologies do not operate as they would conventionally in Euro-American institutions. That is, they do not act as tools of governance that fashion self-reflexive subjects who turn a normalising gaze inward on themselves (Street 2012: 2). In this context the state is largely absent, although also desired, both for the poorly resourced hospital medical staff, and its patients.

Hospital audit practices—such as a public open day—and government health cards are interpreted by Street as relational technologies. The power they are perceived to possess lies in their ability to

Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (2024)

Contents

Introduction: Working Through Other People’s Descriptions

Eric Hirsch