Anthropological Theory

http://ant.sagepub.com What makes a man? Rereading Naven and The Gender of the Gift, 2004
David Lipset Anthropological Theory 2008; 8; 219 DOI: 10.1177/1463499608093812 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/219

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://ant.sagepub.com Vol 8(3): 219232 10.1177/1463499608093812

What makes a man?

Rereading Naven and The Gender of the Gift, 2004
David Lipset University of Minnesota, USA

Abstract In this essay, I argue that the concept of masculinity that was rst developed in Batesons Naven, his 1936 monograph about ritual and society among the Iatmul, a New Guinea people, was an originary moment for the constructivist position that has come to hold sway, not only over masculinity studies in Melanesia in specic, but over masculinity studies in general. My thesis, however, advances a more denite claim: Batesons prescient view of gender did not come to theoretical maturity in masculinity studies, either areally, or more broadly dened, for another 50 years, when it was given new articulation by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988). In order to make the connection I see between these two books, I rst reread Batesons argument in Naven with regard to its view of Iatmul masculinity. I then turn to Marilyn Stratherns conception of gender in Melanesia, again with an emphasis on masculinity. After discussing my claim that the one gave rise to important dimensions of the other, I conclude by briey defending that assertion against a methodological challenge, that of Whig interpretation, which is inevitably raised against this kind of intellectual history. Key Words Gregory Bateson constructivism feminism gender masculinity Melanesia Marilyn Strathern

The value of centenaries, Northrop Frye once declared, is that they call . . . attention, not simply to great men, but to what we do with our great men. The anniversary punctuates . . . the scholarly and critical absorption of its subject into society (1963: 32). While his point is useful for the rereading of Naven (Bateson, 1936) that I shall do here in honor of Gregory Batesons 100th birthday, I nd the grammarians metaphor Frye employed, of centenary as punctuation mark, somewhat less so. Punctuation is far too synchronic a way of viewing the kind of an undertaking Frye proposes, which by its nature is historical and genealogical (Foucault, 1984; Nietzsche, 1956). We praise the passing but abiding presence of such men and women because they had a vision of the
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future or fought for us. But picking them out is usually a matter of hindsight rather than parsing. Indeed, I want to argue in this essay that a concept of masculinity that was rst developed in Batesons 1936 monograph about ritual and society among the Iatmul, a New Guinea people, was an originary moment for the constructivist position that has come to hold sway, not only over masculinity studies in Melanesia in specic (see Herdt, 1981, 2004), but over masculinity studies in general (see Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). The historical claim, however, that I entertain here is more denite: I want to show that Batesons prescient view of masculinity did not come to theoretical maturity in gender studies, either areally, or more generally dened, for another 50 years, when it was given new iteration by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988), a work that has been praised for espousing a far more subtle idea of personhood than most western theories allow because it provides a way of thinking about difference which does not immediately collapse into dualism (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994: 40). So as to draw the particular connection I see between these two books, I rst reread Batesons argument in Naven with respect to its view of Iatmul masculinity. I then turn to Marilyn Stratherns concept of gender in Melanesia, again with an emphasis on masculinity. After discussing my thesis that the one gave rise to important dimensions of the other and briey assessing it in terms of other inuences, I conclude by defending this claim against the criticism of Whig interpretation, for example, seeing the past as progressing teleologically towards an outcome, which is inevitably raised to challenge the kind of intellectual history the present exercise might be seen to exemplify.
MASCULINITY IN NAVEN

In a way, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson did multi-sited eldwork in the Sepik River region of colonial New Guinea in the 1930s (Lipset, 1980). Certain ethnographic points Mead made in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1963 [1935]), the well-known book she wrote from this research, were immediately disputed by Fortune (1939) and then by subsequent generations of ethnographers (Gewertz, 1981; cf. Gewertz, 1984; McDowell, 1991; Roscoe, 2003). So far as I know, however, neither her central claim about the diversity of gender stereotypy in the Sepik region (Lipset, 2003) nor Batesons account of contrasts between male and female ethos among the Iatmul people have been challenged (Morgenthaler et al., 1987; Stanek, 1983a, 1983b; see also Barlow and Lipset, 1997). Their overall constructivist view, that is to say, of gender-related phenomena in the Sepik, is reliable. The element of Batesons argument I now turn to because it is most relevant to my purpose in this essay is his sociological analysis of the transformations of Iatmul masculinity that took place during naven, the ritual practices for which he named his book. Let me discuss how I now read this analysis. From a jural point of view, the Iatmul culture privileged male authority. Village property was vested in competitive patriclans and their constituent lineages. Several marriage rules allied these groups, the most prestigious of which institutionalized a preference of a man for his paternal matrilateral kin, his FMBSD, which union was then legitimated by bridewealth gifts. At the same time, however, jural masculinity, read in terms of clanship and agnatic transaction, did not go uncontested. It was symbolically subverted by women, or more precisely, Iatmul masculinity was subverted by sacralized notions of motherhood (see also Silverman,
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LIPSET What makes a man?

2001), the principle symptom of which appeared during the naven rites staged to honor children, particularly boys, as they grew up. During naven, men change their appearances and behavior. They become women. In part, if not in whole, Bateson sought to explain these performances in his book, and, in so doing, simultaneously he sought to solve a sociological riddle posed by the middle-river Sepik people he named Iatmul. The riddle was kind of a high functionalist version of the riddle the Sphinx demanded Oedipus answer (about male identity) if he wanted to enter Thebes. Why, Bateson asked himself, did Iatmul masculinity not destroy Iatmul communities, which were relatively large by New Guinea standards, and throw them into chaos, given the degree of aggression he encountered among the men? If he wanted to enter the disciplinary city, what, in the nonteleological terms that held sway in this post-evolutionary day, could be said to solve this riddle? The answer was not man, but rather the way men, dressed as women, celebrated naven. Naven rites celebrated youth upon their rst performances of the skills possessed by competent adult men.1 The classicatory mothers brother could honor his sisters son for achieving any number of economic activities or military feats. Matrikin marked youth as they grew up and became full members of their patriclans.2 To do so, the mothers brother adopted certain features of the identity of a wife to his nephew. When the elder man changed clothes and role, the sisters sons identity changed as well. Not only did he skip a generation, by becoming the husband, he switched afnal relations with his mothers brother. The husband, formerly a bridetaker, became the bride, the subject of exchange, while the sisters son, as a member of the wifes patriclan, replaced him as bridetaker. To conrm this reversal, valuables that betokened bridewealth were given by the sisters son to the mothers brother, at which point both reverted to their everyday, jural identities. In addition to contextualizing the ritual in terms of Iatmul clanship, marriage and cosmology, Bateson argued that intense sentiments, or ethos, as often as not gave rise to egalitarian rivalries, tensions and conicts among men. This macho ethos had to be negated, or temporarily suspended, during naven ritual so that a man might acknowledge and salute the junior alter, rather than see him as a competitor. Now Bateson did not reduce this naven-ized expression of masculinity to an essentialist binary. The intelligibility of masculinity in Iatmul culture was not veried by, or founded in, nature, that is, in physical distinctions. Instead, he discovered, or encountered, a masculinity that was dened and then redened within and against wider cultural elds made up of looks, roles and accessories that were self-evidently appropriate to specic performances in specic circumstances by both sexes. Men appeared as old women in order to do things and show attitudes they would otherwise abhor. They became inferior and submissive and deferred the ethos they otherwise took for granted in their dealings with other men. The mothers brother, dressing and acting the part of a woman, married the sisters son, and pantomimed the sexual and parturitional roles both as wife and mother to him through the infamous nggariik gesture: the mothers brother would quickly slide the cleft of his buttocks down the shin of his nephew (Figure 1). Meanwhile, the fathers sisters took on the appearance of men. They aggressively and erotically attacked men, who ed like women (see Lipset and Silverman, 2005). Rather than being xed and stable, masculinity in Iatmul culture was susceptible to a labile
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Figure 1. Nggariik gesture, Tambunam village, 1999 (E.K. Silverman)

construction during this ritual. Made up of multiple relationships and dual genders, manhood, which otherwise tended towards belligerence and combativeness in everyday life, gave way to feminine appearances and roles during naven, before reverting to form. Was naven a celebration of the sisters son or a counterclaim in him against the patriclan? It was an expression of both and as such the Iatmul communities did not fall apart. Bateson abstracted his ethnographic answer to the functionalist riddle and devised a rather awkward amalgam of neologism and formalist terminology that were meant, presumably, for use elsewhere. Both provided empirical impetus, as well as an analytical
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LIPSET What makes a man?

momentum, that Marilyn Strathern carried forward in The Gender of the Gift (1988), a book I view as one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20th century.3 Why? Admittedly, its Us/Them mode of argumentation, opposing egocentric and sociocentric concepts of identity, as well as opposing gift and commodity exchange, has been criticized for being reductionist and essentialist (see Carrier, 1995; Kusserow, 1999). And, it has been criticized, quite properly, for being ahistorical and relying too heavily on ideology rather than practice (Carrier, 1991). Yet, at the same time, ethnographers throughout the world have been able to trawl the book for concepts to elucidate specic problems, pertaining to gender and person (see e.g. Niehaus, 2002; Snyder, 2002; Vilaca, 2005). Melanesianists have embraced the book for creating an entirely different analytic framework through which the gendered Melanesian subject, both in persons and objects, might be apprehended with less distortion by and interference from core western metaphors (Josephedies, 1991: 158; see also Foster, 1995: 24). Feminist theorists, moreover, have celebrated Strathern for creating a new, non-unitary model of embodiment and gendered difference that constituted a radical critique of western frameworks of gender (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994). Having touched (albeit ever so lightly) on the extent of its inuence, I now turn to how I reread its main arguments.
MASCULINITY IN THE GENDER OF THE GIFT

Like Naven, the ethnographic present of The Gender of the Gift is basically colonial, or late pre-capitalist New Guinea. That is, both books are set during relatively early stages of state control and market penetration. Strathern largely shifted the focus from riverine and seaboard Melanesia, which had preoccupied pre-war research, to the Highlands area.4 The Gender of the Gift featured the constructions of manhood, agency, embodiment and so on that were based in gender-exclusive institutions, the purity of which were understood as being compromised in magico-religious and political terms by the presence of womens bodies. After reviewing misogynist and antagonistic malefemale discourse among several Highlands groups,5 in male cults, marriage, work and property rights, Strathern concluded that such oppositional glosses had misunderstood gender relations in the Highlands. The western concept of the individual who possesses a unitary identity that was opposed to other . . . wholes and [stood out] against a natural and social background (1988: 57) promoted the idea that men dominated, oppressed and coopted women in these androcentric cultures. This view of a bounded identity, Strathern observed, arose from a commodity, that is, a capitalist, metaphor of property ownership. In the Highlands, no less than in Melanesia at large, gender was not dened by individual ownership and the self-determining instrumentalities asserted in market relations. Perhaps the key claim in Stratherns argument was that Melanesian masculinity is not singly sexed. Absent in this region is an either/or totalistic sexed identity (Strathern, 1988: 101). Absent is a concept of masculinity that might claim or try to exert autonomous control of possessions. Absent, in short, is a notion of self that can be understood in terms of a proprietary metaphor. As she concluded, [m]etaphors of possession have exhausted themselves in the ethnography of gender in this region (Strathern, 1988: 121).
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If no male/female binary informed gender in pre-capitalist Melanesia, there was no pursuit of, or insistence upon, difference. Mothers brothers could become wives, as in naven rites. A man might seduce his kula exchange partner in order to persuade her to give up a valuable (Malinowski, 1922). Women could become pregnant independently of intercourse (Malinowski, 1954). Men might menstruate (Hogbin, 1970; see also Lewis, 1980) and participate in birthing through the couvade (Poole, 1984). Breasts might be penises and vice versa (Forge, 1966). Semen could be mothers milk and vice versa. Fellatio might become a form of breast-feeding (Herdt, 1981). The sacred utes, the cosmological key to the powers of the male cult, originally belonged to women from whom they were dispossessed and in some instances are understood as both a mothers penis and as her breast (Gillison, 1993). This construction of masculine gender identity and, unlike Strathern, I am reluctant to call it androgynous6 rested on a different kind of binary, one that simultaneously encompassed elements of both bodies. Melanesian men were thus said to be made up of relationships and states that consist in same-sex and cross-sex relations. They were made up, that is to say, of malemale relations, such as between father and son, as well as malefemale relations, such as between mother and father. Borrowing a term from Marriott (1976), Strathern called such a concept of personhood dividual (1988: 13) rather than individual, a dividual being made up of plural relationships that meet at the self (see also Carsten, 2004; Leenhardt, 1979). This concept of identity is multiply constituted and only comes into being in a unitary, masculine body during moments in time that parallel, compete with, or complement those relationships they briey succeed to exclude. Strathern had succeeded to reverse the classic western identity problematic, in which society is constituted at the expense of individual freedom. In Melanesia, society comes together as a collective individual who is enabled and endowed with a single gender. In so doing, Strathern had rephrased, reinvented, or claried, it might be better said, the great, abiding, Durkheimian dichotomy that he posed in The Division of Labor (1991). I refer to the famous distinction between solidarities of likeness Durkheim contrasted against those based upon difference (i.e. organic v. mechanical). In Melanesia, the male body was a site, or a register, of action, a microcosm of relationships not dened at birth. The persons and embodiments of men are made manifest through incidents during which objects come to be displayed or transacted. Men, as men, are mobilized by deeds, ritual performances, or ceremonial exchanges. In the Melanesian image, a series of events is being revealed in the body, which becomes thereby composed of the specic historical actions of . . . others: what people have or have not done to or for one (Strathern, 1988: 132). The quality of the integration and unity of this kind of masculinity is contingent upon the social. Melanesian orthodoxy . . . requires that the differences must be made apparent, drawn out of what men and women do (Strathern, 1988: 184). In other words, male identity is not only plural in and of itself, but a man is the object of agency exerted by others who embody a composite of relations that are also cross- and single-sexed. Action, often being staged by single-sexed collectivities, may differentiate or eclipse the same- and cross-sex relations of which the dividual self is otherwise composed, at least for an instant. Action constitutes or denes persons, as circumstantial, single-sexed identities. Masculinity is thus conditional, rather than intrinsic. In precapitalist Melanesia, a man may result from ritual work, incantation and ceremonial
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LIPSET What makes a man?

exchange, rather than mere genitalia. What distinguishes males from females is not appendages or orices but the social relations in whose context they are activated . . . Difference . . . turns on interaction, not attributes (1988: 211). The making of men is therefore a reductive, or subtractive, process through which cross-sex relationships may be extracted from same-sex ones. This kind of processual personhood Strathern called partible (1988: 185). Put another way, man is made of relations that can be detached, disaggregated, or extracted, thus to be given away to others, in the form of personied objects, such as kula wealth, moka pigs, brides, food, blood, semen, or children, transactions that may differentiate men from women, as single-sexed categories. Since manhood is not pinned down in the self, men are not authors of thought and action. They are not a locus, or a subject, but a nexus. The (often ritual) attempt by men to view female attributes as detachable therefore cannot be construed as cooptation in Stratherns framework. The metaphors of appropriation or extraction result from the imposition of a unilateral notion of ownership where it does not belong. An idiosyncratic feature of popular Western concepts of property is that singular items are regarded as attached to singular owners (1988: 104). Rather, the acting subject is a node of relationships instead of a source of agency. Actor and action come to be viewed as unitary or bounded through moves that reduce the multiplicity of the self. A group of men may come to act as a homogenous body when staging a performance in unison. They then appear to be a collective individual, for example, who dances together in identical costume. What is more, the creation of masculinity that takes place in the name of ritual life or ceremonial exchange does not displace women or the domestic group. These activities may create an alternative single-sexed collectivity that remains contingent upon it, remains, that is to say, contingent upon an amalgam of same-sex and cross-sex relations. As a whole, I think that the regional signicance of The Gender of the Gift would seem to have consisted in the following four moves: (1) Strathern reread Highlands ethnography about male and female, (2) introduced a constructivist methodology largely derived from her synthesis of Seaboard ethnography (see e.g. Battaglia, 1983; Clay, 1977), (3) revised previous conceptions of Highlands gender, such as about male domination and sexual antagonism, in light of her framework and then (4) explained why analytical mistakes had been made in that literature in the rst place. Without wanting to diminish the singular creativity of Stratherns achievement, my contention is nevertheless that Batesons analysis of gendered imagery in Naven broke ground both for the ethnographic and theoretical project that Strathern then undertook and advanced, if not to conclusion, at least several meters further. That is to say, the books intellectual genealogy is not what the geneticists used to call a sport. It is not a mutant, not a discontinuity in the theorization of person, gender and society in Melanesia. The critical issue, of course, that now remains for me is to specify in as an exact way as possible what causal relationship I mean to invoke when I say that Naven broke ground for The Gender of the Gift.
MARILYN STRATHERNS BATESON

The main point I would like to make in this regard is this: Strathern herself cites Batesons Naven as one-half of the beginning of gender constructivism in Melanesian studies (1988: 70), the other half being Meads Sex and Temperament (1963 [1935]).7
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But in addition, she goes ahead and admits to a more comprehensive indebtedness to Batesons book: His classication of types of relationship complementary and symmetrical and his concern with the cultural logic of pairing, opposition and divergence, made modes of relating a theoretical problem (1988: 71). Now, the next time that she refers to Naven in The Gender of the Gift, which does not take place, it is true, for nearly 300 pages, she does so in a consequential way. During her critique of the use of the metaphor of domination as a distortion of Highlands malefemale relations, Strathern argues that these relations should rather be viewed as a displacement of cross-sex relations by same-sex activities, which thereby integrate a male collectivity into an individual embodiment. What is otherwise plural is made singular, a substitution which causes growth in the male body and agency. This effect is partly the consequence of what is already present in actors who possess same-sex relations. In a crucial sense, however, this differentiation is triggered by interaction rather than by actors understood as individuals. Strathern then cites Batesons idea that symmetrical and complementary relations may become increasingly differentiated through self-sustaining sequences of action he had dubbed schismogenesis (Bateson, 1935). In the former dynamic, self and other compete in identical fashion: for instance, two men ght. In the latter, the behavior of self and other differs: for example, deference to rank, the nurture of dependency, or male to female. What is more, via the pressure of a schismogenic process, the one provokes the other to increase his response. What did Strathern make of this framework? a premonition of her axial distinction. In effect, she announces, Bateson describes the two kinds of elicitatory interactions that gender difference creates in same-sex (symmetrical) and cross-sex (complementary) modes (1988: 335). That is, she saw in his framework an actionbased theory of gender relations arising from dynamic relationships rather than a xed binary, a framework she saw not just as an ancestor of her own framework, but as its apical ancestor. Of course, this lineage includes others. I already cited Durkheim as another kind of apical gure, but responding to Mauss (1968) classic work on the morality of giftexchange outside the West was no doubt a central motivation for Strathern. Among Melanesianists, Leenhardts notion of personhood in New Caledonia as a meeting point of relations is signicant. And Gregorys essays (1980, 1982), in which he contrasted gift-based systems of Melanesian ceremonial exchange, where the accumulation of social relations is more important than the accumulation of material resources, to marketrelated notions of alienable objects, debt and credit, form another outstanding member of this genealogy. However, the foremost gure whose name cannot be omitted has to be Roy Wagner, the magus of this group. In Wagners analogic view of Daribi kinship (1977), the world of relations is made up of ubiquitous kin relations, which are semantically identical to one another. Meaning thus results from acts that differentiate, interdict, inhibit, limit, disqualify, such as incest taboos and joking relations. Moreover, it was Wagners distinction between collectivizing and differentiating cultures (1972; see also Dumont, 1980, 1986) that was surely a precursor of Stratherns contrast between Melanesian dividual and partible persons, on the one hand, and western proprietary identity, on the other. Moreover, Wagners attempt to make his theory recursive and reexive no doubt inspired Stratherns own reexivity in The Gender of the Gift (Robbins, 2002).
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LIPSET What makes a man?

Marilyn Strathern developed a critique of the misplaced imposition of malefemale dichotomies on Melanesian ethnography in a critique that was based in a thoroughly constructivist view of gender in Highlands New Guinea. She did so with such conceptual force and clarity of exposition that Lisette Josephedies (1991) was led to proclaim that the book had ushered in a new Melanesian ethnography, in which major cultural differences could be recognized that would lead to renement in thinking about contrasts between western and Melanesian persons (see also Foster, 1995). While Josephedies triumphalist acclaim for Stratherns argument was, in my view, warranted, her appreciation of the intellectual roots of its conception of gender and person was lacking. Since then, The Gender of the Gift has come to be cast in a rather different light. Instead of a theoretical breakthrough, it has been viewed as a brave, nal and radical stand on the side of cultural difference in the context of an anthropology about to grow tired of detailed expositions of local symbolic worlds in all their particularity (Robbins, 2006: 172). Both within and without Melanesia, the theoretical as well as the areal moment of The Gender of the Gift may indeed have passed. George Marcus, ever oracular, has recently celebrated Stratherns turn in the region as having taken place during the era of Melanesian ethnography in its historical climax (2006). If such a metaphor for history is an apt one, disciplinary valuation of the region may well build up once again. Or, it may not. Given the books broad inuence upon constructivism in gender studies as well as, of course, on the theoretical analysis of personhood cross-culturally, its place in intellectual history is secure, whatever vicissitudes the future of Melanesian studies may endure.
NAVEN AS WHIG MASCULINITY?

In this rereading, I have not tried to preside over the death of the author of The Gender of the Gift, by denying or dispersing the distinctiveness of her theoretical imagination. The methodological critique of feminist and Melanesian anthropologies that Marilyn Strathern developed and the contrasts between Melanesian and western notions of personhood that she articulated are entirely unanticipated in anything that appeared in Batesons Naven.8 I must admit, however, that by pointing out the family resemblances between their respective concepts of masculinity, and respective constructivist frameworks, I may be guilty of doing the kind of thing that Herbert Buttereld condemned as Whig history also known as presentism in his 1931 study, The Whig Interpretation of History (1968; see also Stocking, 1969). Whig historians who approved of the British system of liberal parliamentary democracy assumed that the goal of parliamentary history was to perfect it and were likely to see the past as progressing towards this outcome. Buttereld saw two main problems with this approach to the past. In the rst place, it tended to encourage historians to look for, and then to over-emphasize, similarities between past and present, and so to fall prey to anachronism. In the second, they were prone to dividing up historical actors between those who favored progress (the winners) and those who did not (the losers). Doing so was a sure step on the road towards distorting the past in terms of the moral categories of the present, a mistake cultural anthropologists have known in other circumstances and terms. If I am guilty of rereading the past for the sake of a reigning theoretical champion, if, that is to say,9 partisanship has abridged and biased my rereading, I do not think that it
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has distorted or unbalanced it, either by imposing a false continuity, creating an anachronism, or skewing its genealogy. Coming to such a conclusion in honor of the centennial of Batesons birth does not misconceive and simplify the relationship between his view of masculinity along the middle Sepik and the ingenuity of the author of The Gender of the Gift. It rather acknowledges the ongoing ethnographic and theoretical salience of Naven, while it has enabled me to arrive at a more subtle appreciation of the inventiveness of Stratherns tour de force. As such, at least in the present context, I am perhaps inclined to take a more sanguine view of the dangers of Whig interpretation than the historians.
Acknowledgement

This article was originally given at a session held in honor of Gregory Batesons 100th birthday that was held at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (December 2004), Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks to Mischa Penn and the journals anonymous readers for subsequent criticism of it. Thanks to Eric Silverman for allowing the reproduction of his photograph.
Notes

1 The rites are also staged for girls and young women. 2 Today, these include returning from ones rst trip as a passenger on an airplane, buying ones rst outboard motor and matriculating from a course (Silverman, 2001). 3 Admittedly, Marilyn Strathern wrote The Gender of the Gift (1988) in response to several literatures: the interdependent concept of self and object in Mauss (1954), as an answer to Chris Gregorys contrast between reciprocal and capitalist forms of exchange in Melanesia (1982), as well as to 1970s and early 1980s feminist anthropology and nally to Melanesian ethnology. 4 The Highlands ethnography began to be collected after the Second World War. 5 Strathern discussed malefemale antagonism among Gahuku-Gama (Read, 1954), Mae-Enga (Meggitt, 1964), Bena (Langness, 1967, 1977) and Sambia (Herdt, 1981; see also Herdt and Poole, 1982). 6 See Strathern (1988: 1415, 122, 12532, 1845, 201, 205, 212, 215, 222, 262, 302). 7 Malinowski had quite a different view of the representation of gender in Sex and Temperament and Naven. Under the deft touch of another writer, he complained in his Preface to We, The Tikopia (Malinowski, 1936), the women of one tribe appear masculine, while in another males develop feminine qualities almost to the point of parturition. By contrast the present book is an unaffected piece of genuine scholarship (pp. viiviii). 8 Although quite a bit later in his career, Bateson did come to a sustained conclusion contrasting assumptions about the self, the divine and nature in the West with more holistic ones that he saw in cybernetics, Balinese art and Alcoholics Anonymous (see Bateson, 1972). 9 But also vice versa; I have reread Strathern for the sake of Bateson. This would be a kind of Whig interpretation of the present for the sake of the past.

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LIPSET What makes a man?

References

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DAVID LIPSET is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist (1980) and Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary (1997). Currently, he is nishing a new book, Modernity without Romance and Other Essays on Postcolonial Masculinity in Papua New Guinea. Address: Anthropology Department, University of Minnesota, 395 HHH Center, 301 19th Avenue S, St Paul, MN 55108, USA. [email: lipse001@umn.edu]

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