A community of critics?

Thoughts on new knowledge*

M S University of Cambridge

Social anthropology is used to terrains shifting under its feet. Things observed from afar suddenly
become near, and the knowledge economy is an example. This article considers the place of
anthropology as a discipline in a world where creativity becomes an adjunct of productivity,
interdisciplinary collaborations become a paradigm for innovation, and everyone is valued for
their expertise. How to lead a critical life emerges as a new kind of problem.

For some years I carried round an issue of the American Anthropological Associations
General Anthropology. It had a startling message I did not know how to think about.
This was in a study of the way classes discuss controversial issues (Trosset ), and
the startling message was that tolerance is an obstacle to discussion. The author was
commenting on the general assumption that people need to feel safe in order to discuss
freely. A typical situation is the open microphone passed around for everyone to speak,
with all secure in the knowledge that no one will be challenged for their beliefs, some
positive value has to be seen in each view, and when they talk people will express views
that belong to them. Commitment to diversity goes hand in hand with a high value
placed on comfort. If this is tolerance, how can it be an obstacle?
There are echoes here of what has been called a recognition space in the inter-
action of Australian law and Aboriginal law,1 an arena where Euro-Australian law is
prepared to recognize Aboriginal claims to land. This recognition space is not about
supporting substantive indigenous understandings; it simply acknowledges the admis-
sibility of such claims in the Australian courts. Nothing larger is ceded. So it does not
endorse the reasoning or rationale of Aboriginal law, but only the fact of these claims.
It is not, however, because of its narrowness that Weiner (), the anthropologist
reporting on Australian recognition spaces, is uneasy. What is the source of his unease?
Recognition space, Weiner argues, implies the notion of culture as an object occu-
pying a specific (conceptual) domain. Recognition becomes an after-thought to what
already exists, a means of communication across a divide already there. Yet ontologi-
cally one cannot distinguish between a difference that emerges within a culture and a
* The Huxley Memorial Lecture, given to the Royal Anthropological Institute, December .

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difference that emerges between two cultures. Why not start, Weiner says, with one
world, wherein peoples, languages and more-or-less well understood laws contin-
gently and praxically exist, and posit as our subject matter the differentiating activity
that emerges from it and results in such categories as indigenous and non-
indigenous? (Weiner : , my emphasis).
As to the problem of tolerance, the unease here is because everyone talks and
nothing is argued. The classroom defracts opposed interests into so many personal
points of view. While you can hold a viewpoint and relay it, you cannot argue from
one. In order to argue, you need to have detached yourself from divided yourself off
from competing positions that you might otherwise (in some other life) have occu-
pied. We might say that division is the essence of argument. Tolerance embodied in
the roving microphone is no tolerance at all if there is nothing to cede.
Different as these cases are, in neither does the substance of peoples positions have
to be conveyed. Substance seems all in the very different kind of encounter that Hirsch
(: ) draws from Galisons notion of trading zones:

What happens when an H-bomb designer, a logician, an aerodynamical engineer, and a statistician
sit down together? Whatever else they do they do not found a League of Nations with simultane-
ous translators (or their scientific equivalents) perched over the assemblage in metaphorical glass
booths. No: they work out an intermediate language, a pidgin, that serves a local, mediating capac-
ity (Galison : ).

This image of practical people getting on with their work, rolling up their shirtsleeves
(to keep with the s imagery), and being inventive about their means of collabora-
tion is all too compelling. It is one of spontaneity, not contrivance. Peoples activities
are governed by the problem they have to hand; they do not stand on ceremony but
get down to business.
Galison presents simultaneous translation and trade pidgin as contrasting ways of
managing distinct identities. The former creates value in the speakers (or what they
represent), whether through techno-legal instruments of recognition or through an
ethos of tolerance; the latter finds value in the objects of transaction, including lan-
guage, defined by their usefulness or by their ability to communicate. However, I want
to suggest that this second, down to earth, transactional paradigm is quite as prob-
lematic as roving microphones and technical spaces for recognition. We should be
quite as uneasy.
No one would want to diminish the value of tolerance or deny the legal accom-
plishment of recognition; the issue is the way in which their management suppresses
or displaces division. The same has become true of the once honest trade of collabo-
ration. Trading zones should be micro-managed! The last couple of decades has seen,
not least on the part of the UK government, increasingly explicit moves to create arenas
for spontaneous synergy and to generate innovation out of boundary-crossing, not
least in the name of knowledge. Creativity is seen to lie in the ability to combine ele-
ments from many sources to the benefit of business and education alike (Leach :
). Trading zones, now signs of the creative, are seen as not robust enough to be left
alone and must be actively encouraged.
Social anthropology seems particularly well placed to assess some of the implica-
tions of such micro-management, and I contrast a managerial model of knowledge
creation with a research model. Here anthropology exists within a field of disciplines,

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and this is where Huxley will come in. I hope the reader unfamiliar with UK institu-
tions will find enough information to satisfy ethnographic appetite.

Management models and research models

On the face of it, the so-called knowledge economy appears made for research. Evi-
dence-based policy-making goes hand in hand with a Euro-American understanding
of the world as full of uncertainties (Barnett ; Power ; Strathern ). These
uncertainties are not just political or economic but epistemological: we do not know
enough more research is needed. Researchers themselves know that the more they
apply knowledge, the more problems proliferate, especially through the engine of tech-
nology that turns scientific knowledge into useful products. They become suddenly
uncertain about usefulness or about (say) the ethical or social consequences ahead.
Research itself is an engine for turning diverse uncertainties into epistemological
ones, for seeing gaps in information, and for creating the very premises of doubt on
which knowledge-seeking rests. When knowledge takes the form of information (the
knowledge economy), Euro-Americans produce a sense that it can be quantified,
whether in terms of sufficiency (how much is needed) or through multiplying differ-
ent compartments of it. Each new context creates new reasons to doubt that we know
what we are doing, and new scope for research.
Consider the contemporary relationship between research that comes out of uni-
versities and society. It is scientific research in particular that attracts questions, partly
because of the massive nature of public funding and partly because of its potential for
far-reaching practical consequences. Together these create a new arena (agora, see
Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons : ) concerned with rendering productive the flow
and consumption of knowledge. Questions about ethical or social implications are
raised not to understand these processes for their own sake but to seek normative pre-
cepts by which to act or give advice. One of the most important axioms of the knowl-
edge economy is that action must be predicated on information, and from this can be
extrapolated the more general principle that knowledge is worthwhile to the extent
that it can be used. Information must thus be made useful if it is to inform policy. This
is where management comes in.
The knowledge economy that is made for research is also made for management!

The public sector represents the biggest single resource for the creation of value-added informa-
tion content and services. And yet, knowledge management often falls by the wayside, displaced
by other more urgent legislative demands. However, implementing a KM [knowledge management]
strategy now will actually enable you to meet these legislative demands faster and more effec-
tively Underpinning all of these challenges is the biggest challenge of them all: culture and change
management. You need to find a successful way of re-engineering and distributing knowledge to break
through old barriers and reach a new plateau of knowledge sharing. But how can you instigate such
cultural change and where do you begin? Our speakers have been involved in key projects designed
to seek out knowledge, manage and organise a knowledge-sharing culture and improve cost and time-
effectiveness (from conference on knowledge management for the public sector, Ark Group ).

Knowledge management is a burgeoning academic discipline (e.g. Morey, Maybury

& Thuraisingham ; Newell, Robertson, Scarborough & Swan ). When it
involves knowledge that members of an organization share, distribute, and indeed
create about themselves as an organization we can say that managers are like
researchers, producing primary information in the field.3 They filter it, knowing

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what should be thrown away and what kept according to their own disciplinary
protocols.
At the same time, knowledge managers may be dealing with information initially
produced elsewhere, as technical know-how often is. Here managers have no option
but to take what is already created and to control its distribution and consumption.4
Indeed the need for management is generated when people become conscious of spe-
cific kinds of information belonging to specific domains that are produced off-stage.
We have a name for information produced off-stage when it appears as an already exist-
ing specialism expertise. Expert knowledge comes already filtered. Of course, other
peoples expertise may be endlessly questioned, side-stepped, and compared, but it
cannot be rectified. One can choose what to take from it, but a non-expert is precisely
one who cannot judge in terms of the quality of the information itself what can be
thrown away and what should be kept.
Now a large part of the research process consists in throwing away things blind
alleys, dead devices, strained conclusions and the researcher is constantly experi-
menting with how arguments do or do not fit. It is important to keep an open mind
in order for new combinations to form against the background of epistemological
doubt that drives research in the first place. The researcher seeks certainty, confident
of finding new sources of uncertainty and sure that one research programme will lead
to another. But to arrive at either, one may have to explore avenues that prove worth-
less, to abandon projects, and to discard theses. Only some ideas get taken on. The
dead end comes not from failure to manage information, but from being unable to
combine ideas, materials, analyses, and so forth, so as to produce credible outcomes
(Hirsch ). Much of the activity of research lies in distinguishing between power-
ful and weak combinations in the light of everything else that is known. The researcher
turns into a manager, however, when boundaries of expertise are crossed and research
has to be presented to those who do not share that everything else.
So there is a difference between the goals of research and those of knowledge
management. Classically, management seeks to reduce uncertainty.5 Creativity lies in
ensuring the best outcomes for all; in management terms everyone could get an A.
Since everyone can theoretically get an A, mismanagement is inevitably blamed for
failure. The manager is then forced to become a researcher who determines from the
evidence what, according to the relevant management model, seems inefficient or
superfluous and thus discardable.
What a back-to-front mishmash the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) turns out
to be! This government-led audit of research activity in UK universities that deter-
mines the future allocation of public funds encourages academics to be managers of
their relations with the outside world when they should be thinking about research.
Scholarly reasons for publishing are subordinated to strategy and competition and, in
the early RAEs, to the message publish as much as you can, and above all do not throw
anything away. It encourages something closer to research on what should probably
be managed insofar as it appraises an institutions output with reference not to its
diverse contributions to the distribution and consumption of knowledge but in terms
of its relation to the RAEs own paradigms of excellence.
Management is something we all do all the time the routines of life would be
impossible without it but these days managerial practice is explicitly a specialism
(even if managers are becoming less visible, Fournier & Munro ). It is embedded
in techniques such as those of the roving microphone and the recognition space, both

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of which contain (control) situations that might otherwise be explosive. Managements

approach to an uncertain future is to try to secure a future free of the dangers of the
present. By contrast with knowledge in a research environment, where every failure
yields more information, here we come up against the perception, all too real in busi-
ness and enterprise, that failure constitutes a risk to the organization.
Management cannot fail, but it can be good or bad, and organizations can fail. To
the risk of (organizational) failure, risk management would seem to be the answer.
However, as Power () suggests in his second broadside the first was the precur-
sor The audit society () these days the challenging issue is how to contain the
growth of the risk management of everything. Over the past decade in the UK, risk
management became a ubiquitous model for administrators. It threatens, however,
to immobilize institutions and expertise alike. For what is at stake is not only trust
(ONeill ) but, in Powers words, the cultivation of honest opinion and profes-
sional truth: The risk management of everything reflects the efforts of organisational
agents to offload and re-individualise their own personal risk. The result is a poten-
tially catastrophic downward spiral in which expert judgement shrinks to an empty
form of defendable compliance (Power : ).
Power says, in terms that could almost describe the research model of knowledge
creation, that we need a new political and managerial discourse of uncertainty. A new
politics of uncertainty would allow professional competence to flourish and expert
judgement to be trusted while, in legitimizing failure, enabling a proportionality of
response to erroneous decisions (: ). At present, however, the risk management
of everything poses major risks to a society in which the most pressing and most
unpredictable problems cannot be solved without the effective marshalling of expert
knowledge and judgement (: ).
In short, a management model of knowledge creation disseminating materials,
guiding their consumption, and producing information strategic for organizational
success is inappropriate as a total response to risk. In Powers view, far from man-
aging expertise, it threatens to displace expertise altogether. If what is needed is the
effective marshalling of expert knowledge and judgement, we have come by another
route to our pidgin-speaking party of professionals rolling up their sleeves and getting
down to problem-solving. In the case I want to develop, however, management has got
there already, and it instantiates the risk it poses that of pre-emption.

Interdisciplinarity: origin or outcome?

It should be clear that I do not oppose management to research in any totalizing way.
I certainly do not suggest that the research model axiomatically creates free spirits and
creative thinkers. Each is a point in a particularly Euro-American oscillation between
the condition of knowing through investigation (research) and the condition of asking
what is to be done with that knowledge (management).6 Each gestures to a particular
kind of work. What invites us to look at them apart is how each gets built into insti-
tutions and technologies, becomes the ruling paradigm for certain kinds of activities,
and provides those activities with their rationale.
What university people have learned to call the research university is also the
managed university. Here I take on board Brenneiss challenge (: ; see
Lederman ) to engage ethnographically with the institutional contexts in which
anthropologists principally work. The university is expected to house not just institu-
tional managers but also research managers.7 This is encapsulated in new ways of

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conceiving the organization of knowledge itself. The practice of cross-disciplinary

engagement, canonically taken as interdisciplinarity, is the case I take up. By contrast
with multi-disciplinary encounters, which align different voices and provide simulta-
neous translation, there is with interdisciplinarity a promise of a pidgin, an epistemic
transfer, affecting the very knowledge base on which one works (Mansilla & Gardner
; Rhoten ).
I refer to interdisciplinarity in the abstract because its most powerful grip lies in the
very idea of it.8 It combines in itself two sets of values that Euro-Americans, and espe-
cially those of the British sort, find compelling. On the one hand is all the creativity
contained in the idea of crossing boundaries with the innovative possibilities of making
connections. On the other hand are the shirtsleeves, the logic of marshalling of experts
to talk with one another to solve problems, and the practical sense of addressing issues
that cannot be handled by one approach alone. It is an unbeatable combination. Need-
less to say there is also a great pull to imagine that disciplinary boundaries can be tran-
scended altogether, as in the coinage transdisciplinarity (Gibbons et al. ; Nowotny,
Scott & Gibbons ).
For, rather as existing cultures get in the way of development, existing disciplines
get in the way of interdisciplinarity. The Advisory Council for Science and Technology
Policy (in The Hague) bluntly asserted that among the bottlenecks hindering the
growth of cross-disciplinary research is [c]ultural differences and differences of
approach between disciplines (AWT : ). Whereas the knowledge manager would
manage cultural change to get reality in line with the vision, in the current situation
the researcher must sustain those other presences (the disciplines) without which the
interpolated nature of the new activity would not be visible. What in the ordinary
process of scholarship and research helps keep the practice of interdisciplinarity sep-
arate from its parent disciplines is the hybrid seen as the outcome of transactions.9
Yet why must interdisciplinarity be seen to be on everyones agenda these days? Why
its new visibility? Why is it explicitly taken up by all the UK Research Councils (see
DTI a; b)? Why does it seem like a new rationale for re-grouping departments
or re-conceptualizing teaching? Re-grouping, especially in the natural sciences, is
routine, but today re-grouping is not enough; interdisciplinary effort must also be
stimulated. To initiate and support cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary initia-
tives is a stated objective of the Research Councils UK (DTI b: . (vi)).
To what microscopic degree? The Advisory Council for Science and Technology
Policy suggests that the Netherlands government intervene by funding more interac-
tion, building up networks, developing comprehensive multi-area research questions, and
identifying thematic areas where multidisciplinarity will flourish. It adds suggestions
as to how to manage this through secondment and selective funding. But these are
rather more than suggestions. Under the heading Several alternatives for developing
more comprehensive research questions, we find Incorporate compulsory mechanisms
into the funding conditions that will ensure that comprehensive research questions are
actually formulated and maintained (AWT : , emphasis mine). The situation
will be managed through administrative measures (policy workers should be trained
to develop comprehensive research questions, AWT : ) and the scope of inquiry
will be driven by the desire for the ensuing research to be multidisciplinary. Themes
direct the researcher to problem-orientated types of questions that then become com-
prehensive by virtue of the many disciplines brought to bear.10 It is then possible to
monitor whether questions really are comprehensive.

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[B]y now of course the popular maxim is that all good social science is interdis-
ciplinary (Cohen-Cole : ).11 This comes from a survey of social science
carried out in the States; the date is . Another moment of micro-management: we
have been here before! An important standard for evaluating the quality of a piece of
a work being the extent of its interdisciplinarity,12 in the s government and private
organizations alike pushed social scientists to become more interdisciplinary. Publi-
cations that championed the maintenance of disciplinary integrity were swamped
by the calls for interdisciplinary collaboration, integration, and unification (Cohen-
Cole : ).13 If this was a moment when social science was legitimating itself, inter-
disciplinary explanations of society displayed the useful knowledge that social science
could bring to bear on pressing problems in the post-war world. Above all there was
a belief in the link between the integration of society and the integration of knowl-
edge. Those who shaped their research with an interdisciplinary problem focus and
had broad theoretical questions common to all the social sciences were avant-garde;
clinging to standardized fields was being traditionalist (Cohen-Cole : ). It
was no accident that Galisons depiction of the disciplines trading with one another
(the shirtsleeves) evokes this period. The new knowledge had to be managed.
Before this period, interdisciplinarity was unlikely to have been labelled as such, so
could not be the sign of integrative potential that it became. However, managing inte-
gration across disciplines has its antecedents. We might even think of T.H. Huxley in
such a light (Beer : ).14 In the s Huxley wrote of the influence that Darwins
Origin of species had had on him. He prefaced his exposition of Darwins work by
remarking that it was not an easy book to read, more like an intellectual pemmican
a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the
ordinary medium of an obvious logical bond (a []: ). That difficulty gives
him opportunity, he said, to occupy the humble office of an interpreter (a []:
), a role facilitated by his own mix of interests.
Interconnections are the subject of Huxleys work. His own combination of exper-
tises zoology, botany, general biology, and the burgeoning anthropology of the time
was not trumpeted as interdisciplinary, but he was trumpeting the way in which
everything organic and inorganic was related (b []). That organic matter itself
returns at the end of life to the inorganic is true of every living form. From the lowest
plant to the highest animal including man himself the difference between the
highest and the lowest being simply in the complexity of the developmental changes,
the variety of structural forms, and the diversity of the physiological functions (b
[]: ).
For Darwin and Huxley, the fact that everything can be related also posits a uni-
verse in which everything can be known (Beer : ). This drive took a particular
form in the search for evidence of undivided human ancestry;15 the notion of ances-
try was already pared down to a lineal connection (Beer ). The search was for one
distant progenitor, the common parent. (Two would, after all, spoil the genealogy, con-
stituting a problem neatly solved by ideas about intrabreeding, self-reproducing species
which produce two parents of one kind.) Darwin, Beer writes, does away with the
sexual pair as an initiating origin: [T]he originary parental dyad is figured as the one,
sexually undifferentiated and irretrievable: the single progenitor (: ). These
assumptions posed research questions.
However, the anthropologists who were writing in the s or thereabouts then
had a problem to manage the question of affinity in marriage. The facts of human

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procreation, including the differentiation of male from female parent, posed a problem
as to what the originary form of human organization might be (Stocking : ).16
Doctrines of primitive promiscuity and (later) exogamy were part of a sequence of
solutions ranging from the postulate that sexual differentiation made no difference to
the homogeneous nature of social organization to assertions that it served the perpet-
uation of unified groups.
It must be obvious that I have managed this account to produce a particular
outcome. None the less, mapping a contrast between undivided pasts that look to
multiple futures and undivided futures that reconcile multiple pasts onto the two
models of knowledge creation enables me to cast interdisciplinarity in a particular
light. It allows me to specify the different representations of growth implied, and how
the models are intertwined.
For interdisciplinarity has it both ways. It can offer diversity as at once foundational
to an enterprise and as innovative exploration. To hope future combinations will unify
what were once distinctly diverse or divided origins multiple disciplines speaks of
a management model of knowledge creation.17 A specifiable outcome is sought. To
hope to the contrary that new combinations will divide and proliferate what had once
been a union or origin in common in other words create new disciplinary possibil-
ities is closer to a research model. Here outcomes are multiple, indeterminate. In the
first, diversity is pressed into problem-solving; in the second, problem-solving gener-
ates more diversity.
Is that all? If there is a sense of disappointment here, is it that the formula seems to
exhaust everything one might wish to do?

The critic
To the gift and the Indian gift in its different forms (Laidlaw ; Parry ) let me
add another, the Fijian gift. There is a moment in the course of Fijian gift-giving when
the givers side subjects itself to the gift-receivers evaluation, and quietly hopes that
the other side will respond positively (Miyazaki : ). Motionless, the givers
spokesman holds the object in front of him until a recipient steps forward and takes
it. In this moment of hope, the gift givers place in abeyance their own agency, or capac-
ity to create effects in the world (Miyazaki : ). There is hesitation; ritual partic-
ipants regard gift-giving as risky, always seeing in the act its possible failure (Miyazaki
: ). What in other social contexts may be an evaluation that takes place after
the event, or is not visible until a return gift is made, is here brought forward into the
act of hand-over.
So what is this sudden leap of mine into a quintessentially anthropological account?
Partly, after all these generalities, to engage with the relief of the specific; partly to
convey what it feels like being at home in ones discipline. What is quintessentially
anthropological is not that it is a Pacific island or that in this account from the mid-
s the object being handed over, a whales tooth, has a long cultural history. Rather,
it is that the evocation of the Fijian gift puts this gift alongside many others, sum-
moning a lineage of analyses that no one but an anthropologist would rehearse. The
ethnographer goes on to do something with the iconography of gift-giving not quite
like anything before. Its antecedents in anthropological writings give the Fijian gift its
newness.
Once the recipients accept the gift they may immediately deny the importance of
gift-giving among people and offer the item to God. At the moment at which the givers

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hope is fulfilled by the recipients, it is replaced by a second hope that Gods blessing
will fall on everyone. It is this replication that Miyazaki () takes as his anthropo-
logical problematic. He goes back to Torens () original insight into the way that
Fijian and Christian ritual work together, not as different forms but (in his words)
as versions of a single form unfolding in time (Miyazaki : ).18 This includes the
manner in which people cease to emphasize their own actions and deliberately look
to others for their response. Fijian participants experience the fulfilment of their hope
as the capacity repeatedly to place their own agency in abeyance: [T]he hope produced
in this process surface[s] as the replication of a hope fulfilled (Miyazaki : ).
In short, hope recurs. Miyazaki sees a parallel in the anthropologists hope of an ade-
quate analysis and the possibility of fresh knowledge.19
So what has this got to do with anything? Well, it has everything to do with creat-
ing knowledge, with the difference between management and research models, with
origins and outcomes, and with interdiscplinarity and the discipline of social anthro-
pology. The Fijian gift contains an unexpected significance when the anthropologist
calls that hesitancy a moment of evaluation.
Evaluation is simultaneously a management tool and a research tool. Risk assess-
ment is all about evaluating, measuring, judging possible outcomes, and is, indeed,
second nature to systems of audit and accountability. So evaluation is often taken as a
crucial step in the chain of scrutiny that leads from fact-finding to decision-making.
However, evaluation is equally central to research processes that choose what shall be
kept and what discarded or, in other words, that sort the poor data from the rich. That
kind of scrutiny is second nature to the researcher or, more accurately, entails deploy-
ing a primary nature, the researchers disciplinary identity. Disciplines offer a power-
ful framework for evaluation criticism.
Disciplinary criticism has affinities with, but is not the same as, self-evaluation for
purposes of better management. On the one hand, I am sure that managers (and
researchers acting as managers) are told to be critical of themselves as well as of others
in order to improve things. The point is that the desired outcome is already specified
in the goals of the organization, and goals work best when everyone agrees on them:
[M]anagement activities are inseparable from goal setting (Reinhardt : ). On
the other hand, researchers (and managers acting as researchers) criticize retrospec-
tively, in relation to the canons of their discipline. A discipline is a body of data, a set
of methods, a field of problematics;20 it is also a bundle of yardsticks, that is, criteria
for evaluating products and maintaining standards. Knowing that the canons may be
constantly changing and that outcomes are uncertain can be taken as a sign of life as
much as the reverse. Disciplines live in the prospect of their own renewal, and often
do not care too much the form that will take.21 It follows that here there is no desired
outcome only the hope that there will be one. I can criticize Miyazakis concept of
the gift, but there is no ideal version for which to strive. Rather, the aim of criticism
in research is to re-multiply, re-divide, the outcomes of any one particular argument.
Criticism bifurcates; it makes a single account multiple again. Unitary in its argu-
mentative focus, the lineage (of writings on the gift) summoned by putting Mauss,
Gregory, Parry, Laidlaw and Sykes () alongside Miyazaki speaks to diverse con-
clusions continuing to fuel debate. More emphatically, disciplines look to disagreement
as points of growth. In fact disagreement serves to overcome one of the problems that
Miyazaki sees in constructing an anthropological account of the Fijian gift, that is, a
problem in the kind of knowledge that the anthropologist might wish to make out of

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it. He observes the temporal orientation of hope to a future that the anthropologist
can only deal with through retrospective description by putting hope back into the
past. The possibility of describing hopes prospective momentum is drowned in the
knowledge of whether it was fulfilled (Miyazaki : ). This enacts a kind of fore-
closure. By comparison, the researchers (academics, scholars) hope, that there will be
an outcome to their labours, is given impetus through practices of disagreement. In
looking to colleagues for criticism, they look for life. For the instruments of self-
renewal, the papers they write and the books they generate, allow disagreement to
remain unclosed. The disagreement, the opening out to further futures, can be left just
as that.
This points to one way in which Powers agenda for uncertainty is already built into
disciplinary practice. However, there are some interestingly new difficulties in our path.
What makes things difficult these days is precisely the striving after renewal. It is not
that anyone outside them is particularly bothered by the fate of disciplines but rather
that the goal for replenishment is knowledge in communicable form, as information
or evidence (as in evidence-based policy) that can be put to use as the driving ingre-
dient of the knowledge economy. The shirtsleeves knowledge pressed into the service
of problem-solving is the image to which I keep returning. There is pressure for dis-
ciplines to seek a kind of instant renewal by communicating with other disciplines.
Here the tool becomes also a sign (Riles ). Interdisciplinarity that shows an open-
ness to different fields is also seized on as a sign of a willingness to subordinate disci-
plinary interests to the finding of common solutions.
It is probably fair to suggest that interdisciplinary collaborations work best not as
tools (means) in research, but as representations (signs) of desired ends in knowledge
management. These social practices differentiate between two kinds of experts. In a
research model they will be using their expertise instrumentally as Galisons scientists
imagined themselves. While everything they do has its appropriate disciplinary origin,
it will be just bits and pieces that turn out to be tradable and useful. Under a man-
agement regime, however, it is much more likely that their expertise will have repre-
sentational status; they will be called on as though they represented their discipline as
a whole. So sitting around a table at a policy or ethics forum, experts from diverse dis-
ciplines will speak as representatives of their discipline; with no other anthropologists
present, it becomes possible to give an anthropologists view. Plenty of challengers,
perhaps, but exit the critic. A multidisciplinary group can of course collaborate with
little interest in the backgrounds of one anothers contributions; diversifying points of
view is not the same as dealing with disciplinary difference. However, even if an inter-
est in disciplinary difference is the hallmark of interdisciplinary collaboration, where
representatives do indeed reflect on the contributions they are making, the critic may
still be hard to discern. Why? Perhaps we should return to the power of interdiscipli-
narity to proliferate outcomes and origins alike.
Now it is not the critic alone who becomes shy in the face of interdisciplinarity;
so too does the managerial evaluator. This has been the subject of comment, as I
note first.
Something very interesting happens to evaluation. As indicated elsewhere
(Strathern a), the sign becomes a yardstick; interdisciplinarity evoked as a measure
of innovation obscures attempts to apply evaluation procedures to itself. The result
is the lack of available criteria to assess interdisciplinary work on its own terms
(Mansilla & Gardner : ). Evaluating interdisciplinary endeavour is not the same

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 Marilyn Strathern 201

as evaluating the degree to which a problem is solved or benefit created. Asked about
the outcomes of the collaboration itself, researchers rely on indirect indicators such as
publications, numbers of patents, or whether the interdisciplinary team will apply for
funding a second time round. Measures that directly address epistemic dimensions of
interdisciplinary work (e.g. explanatory power, aesthetic appeal, comprehensiveness)
[are] rarer and less well articulated (Mansilla & Gardner : -).22 In the manage-
ment view, then, interdisciplinarity runs into some of the problems that bedevil
attempts to justify government support for the creative arts in terms of contribution
to public well-being (Selwood ). What impact do cultural programmes have? How
can evidence of their impact be captured within the frameworks of specific projects?
Attempts at qualitative assessment have tended to focus on the directly observable, for
example surveying participants expressed satisfaction. Asking can culture [as in cul-
tural programmes] be shown to have an impact [on peoples lives]? is like asking if
interdisciplinarity can demonstrate epistemic effect. How does one show that some
difference has been achieved?
This is our management model (of the creation of knowledge). Among the reasons
why the demonstration is so difficult is perhaps the way the single outcome, the inte-
grated collaboration, is impossible to measure against its own diverse origins. There is
little against which to evaluate the effectiveness of interaction as such when the whole
point was that there was no pre-existing relationship, only diverse starting points, and
interchange was always a hope for the future.
Can we reverse the sequence and suggest that, in contexts of interdisciplinary
research, criticism becomes obscured for the opposite reason? Can we assert that the
expectation of multiplying outcomes, of keeping the inter in interdisciplinarity,
compromises the ability to criticize? Constructing disciplines as entities with singular
origins makes criticism possible, but it cannot be criticism of the interdisciplinary
effort itself. Instead it seems that interdisciplinary effort would discard those origins.
I re-engage the point that openness to different fields indicates willingness to subor-
dinate disciplinary interests, but apply it now to the research model. The single
starting point, the agreed-upon canon, can be no measure of the combinations and
cross-overs that point to future growth. Impatience is the usual reaction. Disciplines
simply get in the way, as traditional cultures everywhere are held up as impediments.23
Barriers seem obsolete.
However, collaboration and criticism are intertwined in ways more complex than
sketched here.

The community
Interdisciplinary collaborations seem to promise innovation and creativity by means
other than criticism. Instead of generating disagreement and multiplying future pos-
sibilities by informed comment from within, interdisciplinary conversations hold out
the hope of new sources of synergy. Hope is still there. Indeed hope regenerates exactly
as Miyazaki argues it does for those Fijians whose ancestral land is now the city of
Suva. The people of new Suva (Suvavou) make indeed must make constant return
to the issues of land compensation. Repeating their efforts, each new effort requires
them putting to one side their knowledge about what happened the previous time. As
the ethnographer says: How have Suvavou people kept their hope alive for generation
after generation when their knowledge has continued to fail them? (: , my empha-
sis). It does not matter how successful previous attempts have been, institutional

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202 Marilyn Strathern

knowledge is constantly disappearing and people return to the same points of depar-
ture. I gestured towards this in recalling the post-war momentum for interdisciplinary
research and the mix of management and research models to which anthropologists
have (unwittingly as managers, eagerly as researchers) returned in almost identical
terms today.
Yet let us look a bit more closely at the researchers faculty for criticism. It is a social
faculty. A further element in the Fijian encounter prompts the thought that, in that
moment of hesitation as the gift is given but not received, when agency is suspended,
could we not say that the giver desires to be divided from the receiver and, thereby, not
to be assimilated but to be acknowledged as a separate social person? Now could we
not also say that the capacity that the division (re-)enacts is the very capacity to sep-
arate ourselves not from an other but in the first place from ourselves? In any event,
this is a social faculty before it is anything else.24 Anthropologists divide themselves off
from anthropologists and multiply their positions precisely because they have common
origins. The same could be said of the whole company of disciplines that make up
academia. The community in my title could refer to the collectivity (so to speak) either
of one or of many disciplines.25
In a sense, disciplinary divisions could not be more different from divergences in
points of view. Criticism exploits these divisions in a very different way from the kind
of collaboration that would subordinate them to the task in hand. First, divisions are
evidently at work in the way that disciplines propagate; they breed through cleavage,
whether by the rational calculation that old categories no longer hold things together
or through acrimonious wranglings and rifts. Here division operates as a mode of
multiplication that generates new forms. Second, divisions can be the impetus to col-
onization. Each may see something of value in the other but wish to appropriate it for
his or her own agenda: that is, it already no longer belongs to the other person alone,
as my rendering of the Fijian gift already takes it away from its location in the ethno-
graphers account. Third, in the kinds of twenty-first-century exhortations to inter-
disciplinarity that we have been considering, division becomes a sign of failure to
communicate, of failure to create a wider community either incorporating the public
or with other disciplines. Here disciplines are accused of failing to cross the divide
between esoteric and common knowledge. A frequent rhetorical elision in govern-
mental and other public statements is that between dealing with materials in an inter-
disciplinary way and being able to communicate to anyone (stakeholders).26
However, the divisions that a critic envisages are none of these. Rather, they are (seen
to be) created in the course of interaction itself.27 Recall the recognition space and
Weiners admonition that anthropologists take as their subject matter the differentiat-
ing activity that emerges from inhabiting one world in which categories such as
indigenous and non-indigenous are clearly the outcomes of encounters. If, as Viveiros
de Castro (: ) says, the procedures characterizing anthropological investigation
are conceptually of the same kind as those to be investigated, then what turns out to
differentiate people are the radically distinct problems that they think they have.28 By
the same token, the critic would have a different relation to the discourse under
scrutiny than the proponent of it; united by an interest in a particular work, critic and
proponent are not simply differentiated by problems they conceive but, in their inter-
dependency, are specifically divided from each other by these problems.29
Whether within persons or between them, the impetus to divide ourselves from
ourselves is a social one. Those second selves emerge as others and this movement is

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 Marilyn Strathern 203

recapitulated in the yielding of ones own agency to the one who is now othered. This
gives a further strand to the critic.
When the Fijian gift-givers spokesman fell silent, he placed their agency in the
hands of the recipients, who would reveal its effectiveness. So they [Suvavou people]
experienced the fulfilment of their hope as the capacity repeatedly to place their own
agency in abeyance (Miyazaki : ). Surrender before appropriation; here is hope
for engagement. Does something akin to such hope feed into the interactions of critics?
Could we then think of the critic as someone whose willing suspension of agency, a
division of self from self, allows him or her to be captured by someone elses work?
Critics find themselves drawn precisely by their own interest into other peoples
agendas.30 Engagement does not proliferate or multiply; it does not to look to stan-
dards and requires no evaluation. To argue with an idea is to be captured by it. In this
kind of engagement, one can be captured more than once.
This is where I see hope for interdisciplinary endeavour. In this era of expertise, the
very idea of traversing disciplinary boundaries uses institutional terms to speak of
possibilities that lie in being captured by anothers concerns. For it also makes visible
the interest of those who are identifiably other to the discipline in hand.31 The anthro-
pologist has been here before too; engaging ones interest in other peoples agenda is
crucial to the enterprise of fieldwork-based research. In interdisciplinary work I see a
replication of the anthropologists hope in the ethnographic moment (cf. Miyazaki &
Riles : ).32 Each interdisciplinary encounter points to a fresh encounter in a
terrain only uncertainly mapped. It is the obviousness of the uncertainty that is impor-
tant here. The constant shortfall of knowledge that never gets beyond recognition
spaces holds out the hope that one can always re-engage.
This is why I have kept with this one account (on Fiji). Whether in order to agree
or disagree, the possibility of re-engagement is ipso facto critical. A new problem is
conceived. Exactly because anthropologists never exhaust the information they collect,
ethnography has the remarkable capacity to outlive the particular uses made of it.
There is one caveat. If we think of future engagement predicated upon the hope for
it, our two models of knowledge creation will raise their heads. It is a short step to
asking how best to manage it or to build such hope into research protocols. I do not
think that we should necessarily do either. Re-engagement needs to be re-engagement,
a matter for the future that the present should leave undefined. Yet how can one not
plan ahead? How can one not make a virtue out of engagement? One way might be
by imagining that one has to protect (cherish) it as though it were knowledge to be
protected from itself.33 Presumably knowledge best not acted upon is best put into
abeyance. So perhaps the answer is to not treat these observations as knowledge at all.
Perhaps rather than specifying the faculty for hope, that is, hope for engagement, we
might just want to say that engagement is a faculty. This would make everything very
simple. For nothing more is implied beyond each act of engagement, insofar as each
contains the possibility of re-engagement without specifying what it would be. The
future remains indeterminate, and it is simply the possibility that is (already) enacted
in the present; one can meet again, come back to the data, revisit the analysis. We
just need to keep that as routine as possible. Relations(hips) secure the promise of
re-engagement.
So let me make another return to land claims, Aboriginal this time, and to a clear
interdisciplinary moment. A remarkable piece of ethnographic elucidation is to be
found in a lawyers commentary on anthropological advocacy (Edmond ).

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204 Marilyn Strathern

Edmond is concerned to show anthropologists that once they are in court they have
ceded interpretative space. This is largely an unwilling or unacknowledged surrender;
the point is that the roles of expert witness and advocate are procedural, and not open
to anthropologists to define.34 Rather, they will be assigned certain duties of care that
the court may in effect lay open to dispute by the parties concerned. For litigants will
seek to deploy the kind of evidence that the anthropologist brings in terms of (always
disputable) points of law. The anthropologist, of course, may well look upon the court
transcript as though it were information collected in an interview that is subject to the
canons of scholarly verification; the anthropologist may, in short, treat it as though it
were a research finding (after Riles ; ). Although this is often the basis of their
complaints, judges in truth do not distort anthropological knowledge, for it is not
placed before the courts as knowledge in which they need to have any informed inter-
est. Edmond calls this the legal colonization of anthropology.35
Yet there is a note of interdisciplinary hope here, couched in the invitation to re-
engage proffered after his recognition that anthropology is subject to that legal colo-
nization. Edmond quotes an Australian jurist who claimed the last thing I would wish
to encourage in humanist witnesses is obsequiousness towards lawyers There are
good social reasons for treating the legal systems normative and adjudicatory author-
ity with respect, but none for endowing it with intellectual authority (: ).
Anthropologists have an important obligation publicly to criticize legal processes if
they feel that their work is misunderstood or that claimants are treated unfairly:
[S]ustained and consolidated criticism of legal rules, procedures and doctrines, as well
as findings, may find fertile ground among judges and other attentive publics
(Edmond : , emphasis omitted). The law courts are not, however, the place for
it; a public space of sorts (the agora) is.
In conclusion, the lawyer asks how anthropologists might respond to the terms of
their colonization. One response would be to lay out what the claim to intellectual
authority would look like. The first step might well be showing that the issues at stake
have been argued over, even fought over, by anthropologists. While there are huge areas
of common ground and shared assumptions in their discipline, anthropologists
engagement with one another in profound disagreement is a crucial part of their work.
(More pointedly, agreement and disagreement must go hand in hand for either to have
any intellectual purchase.) Although anthropologists have always done this, these days
perhaps call for them to stop being defensive about it and make of it a virtue. For they
may best validate the role of public critic by being known as critics of themselves. So,
sustained criticism, yes. Consolidated criticism, Im not so sure. However, if anthro-
pologists know themselves as a community of anything, a community of critics is as
good a rubric as any.

NOTES
The focus on divisions was prompted by a session convened by Bill Maurer at the American Anthro-
pological Association meetings in Chicago, and a discussion with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro at the
Association of Social Anthropologists Decennial in Manchester. For a fruitful interchange, I must thank Rena
Lederman, whose book Anthropology among the disciplines is in preparation. Hirokazu Miyazaki and
Annelise Riless influence will be apparent, but here I should thank them for their intellectual hospitality.
Christina Torens perspective has, as usual, been invaluable, as have Eric Hirschs and James Weiners
comments.
Among the benefits from interdisciplinary conversations at the University of Cambridge, I mention those
at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) and the inspiration of

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 Marilyn Strathern 205

Ludmilla Jordanova. Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin, James Leach, and Andrea Stckl have opened up a
dialogue about expertises that I do no more than note. Finally, this is a contribution to an ongoing project,
Interdisciplinarity and Society, undertaken with Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (ESRC grant RES--
-) as part of the ESRC Science in Society Programme led by Steve Rayner.
1
Weiner refers to Noel Pearsons The concept of native title at common law, from the Australian Human-
ities Review (), as the source of the phrase. He suggests that the anthropologists cultural account is in
effect a recognition space: accounts of those portions of a culture for which a fair translation can be achieved
in another language.
2
Thus Australian lawyers do not have to concern themselves with the substance of Aboriginal law; they
just give Aboriginal lawyers the space with which to deal with what only they know.
3
This is what Wheatley (: ) argues when she suggests that KM must learn from the organizational
failures of the past. It would be a mistake to imagine knowledge as an industrial product; on the contrary,
knowledge must be managed as a person is, for (we are told) it is created by persons in engagement with
the world and thus with one another. Knowledge creation is the phrase used.
4
How does knowledge flow within this organization? How do you develop the right culture for
knowledge sharing? (Ives, Torrey & Gordon : ). Du Gay comments that contemporary managerial
discourse approximates to a system of charismatic authority (: ).
5
This is true above all when managers introduce into training regimes deliberate devices to unsettle people
so that they learn to deal with moving targets (Martin ) and thrive on chaos (du Gay : ).
6
In the latter, knowledge is seen as integral to the capacity to act, as a form of information ready to apply
to decisions and actions (Ives, Torrey & Gordon : ).
7
Today researchers should be their own managers (Fournier & Munro ) or dedicated managers are
deployed to stimulate research activity where there might have been none before (Strathern b). Behind
these developments is the politics of the new public management and entrepreneurial governance of the
last two decades (du Gay : ).
8
Inter(or multi)disciplinarity means specific things to specific disciplines across the arts, humanities, and
social sciences, not to speak of the natural sciences or the clinical domains (Latimer in press). Rabinow
(: ) contrasts the way the funding and facilities regimes necessary to natural science can act as cen-
tralized policing mechanisms, by contrast with interpretative communities among the humanities, where
different types of argument can prevail without sanction.
9
Parties to transactions distinguish themselves from each other before obtaining what of each others
resources they value. Alternative models include () knowledge-sharing, as appears in the KM literature, and
() learning from other disciplines not in order to produce a hybrid but to enhance ones sense of ones
own.
10
The Council therefore advocates an approach that facilitates the development of integrated questions.
The parties involved should seek each other out at an early stage and formulate the key question together
(AWT : ).
11
I am most grateful to Jamie Cohen-Cole (Princeton University) for permission to cite from his
Ph.D. dissertation. The points in this paragraph come from an unpublished draft.
12
The term had such cachet that Ford Foundation officials used it in evaluating grant proposals as they
would have used other positive descriptors such as well conceived (Cohen-Cole : , emphasis
removed).
13
Cohen-Cole () archly notes that interaction was always discussed in the positive terms of cross-
fertilization, never cross-sterilization.
14
Osborne () gives modern-day interpreters a special place in his typology of mediators, a role he
regards as diagnostic of the knowledge economy.
15
The connections (missing link) they pursued entailed the investigator trying to make connections
between apparently isolated (unique) pieces of data. In the lecture from which I have been quoting, Huxley
makes the case for ontogeny, arguing that every living thing begins its existence with the same primitive
form, the egg, which signals the true unity of organization of the animal kingdom (b []: ).
16
Some came to believe that everything lay in finding the origin of a single custom (marriage) (Stocking
: ). Similar divergent starting points continue to fuel analysis. McKinnon (: , ) describes
how Morgan sought to distinguish a clear line of succession to the nuclear family from the promiscuous
relations he imaged for primeval man, while Lvi-Strauss took the family as the unit that had to differenti-
ate itself through exchange and create multiple possibilities for human organization.
17
Undivided outcomes means not that different voices in a team are merged but that orientation to a
joint project (problem-solving) takes precedence. Clearly there are communal and other perceptions of

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206 Marilyn Strathern

collective ownership, in the case of academic knowledge often linked to ideas about the public domain, that
fly in the face of the notions described here.
18
He follows Torens argument that the Fijian church is not simply a local rendering of Christianity but
institutes ritual processes through which Fijian chiefship (the land) is also made visible. Toren explores
parallels in Fijian meals, including the ways in which chiefs dispense kava, and the ubiquitous imagery of
the last supper.
19
It is important that he cites earlier discussions on the abeyance of agency, anthropological antecedents
including Battaglia (ambiguation), Brenneis (indirection), Marcus (rhetorical manipulation), Herzfeld
(structural nostalgia), and Keane (avoidance) (Miyazaki : ).
20
Devons and Gluckmans formula remains to be bettered: Different disciplines may study the same
events, and even some of the same regularities in those events, but they look for different kinds of inter-
dependencies between the regularities, i.e., for different kinds of relations (: ).
21
Anthropology is no longer a singular discipline, if it ever was, but rather a multiplicity of practices
engaged in a wide variety of social contexts (Moore : ); diversity belongs to the future, and to the whole
series of new questions that can be anticipated.
22
Interdisciplinary work has been defined as purposeful means to a cognitive or practical goal (under-
standing, solving a problem), with the stipulation that disciplinary lenses be integrated in mutually infor-
mative networks of relationships rather than simply juxtaposed (Mansilla & Gardner : ; cf. Strathern
b).
23
Including the culture of organizations, which gets in the way of new practices of knowledge-sharing:
This cultural issue is the main obstacle to implementing knowledge management (Ives, Torrey & Gordon
: ).
24
A social faculty with several specific histories, one being the splitting of the self that Hoskin ()
unfolds in terms of the particular modern (Euro-American) development of the self-examining self lying
at the heart first of perspectivalism and then of regimes of accountability. Intersubjectivity (e.g. Toren :
) also has its own, somewhat divergent, history.
25
Community is not a word I use lightly. An extreme example is the collectivity of authors in Closed
systems and open minds (see Devons & Gluckman ), who happen to take as their common theme the
limits of disciplinary navety. The fact that the contributors to this volume were associated with one depart-
ment (the then Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology at Manchester, its intellectual links with
economics Devons was an economist and political science prompting the theme), and presented many
of the papers together at the Association of Social Anthropologists meetings in Edinburgh, does not in
itself create a community. I see that community in the unremitting criticism with which they approached
one anothers work, each argument in turn being thrashed out at seminars, and then held out to public view.
The conclusion evaluates the chapters one by one and in both positive and negative vein, at times merci-
lessly detailing errors and difficulties for scrutiny. Communities are not about being nice.
26
Interdisciplinarity is often taken as the first move towards general intelligibility (Strathern a: -
). In a managerialist regime, academics must not be seen as having an ultimate purpose different from
the publics at large, no more than (in the new wisdom) science should separate itself from society. The
overall onus is to communicate. The public will bring different viewpoints, but the communication can
entertain a common purpose. So at the heart of the appeal to overcome division we find the re-creation of
a division between the public (lay persons) and whatever it is (from experts) that they are supposed to assim-
ilate. This includes a cynical parallel division between what is produced for colleagues and what is produced
for the media.
27
Not that there is any conclusion that could not be pressed into the service of management (here, see
Newell, Robertson, Scarborough & Swan : - passim on managing communities of practice, where
the community approach sees it [the management of knowledge work] as the product of social interaction.
28
This evokes Huxleys arguments (b []), later elaborated in terms of comparative anatomy, that
the same creatures inhabit different bodies at different locations, with the forces bearing down on them
having different effects.
29
In the light of the earlier discussion about managerial approaches to problems, I note that Viveiros de
Castro () identifies as a common orientation in anthropology the idea that there are generic problems
in the world to which cultures are specific solutions. By contrast, he invites us to imagine a generic equiv-
alence in problem-solving capacity being applied to distinct and specific problems.
30
I read Munros () account of deferral between submission (as of a research project) and evaluation
(an organization giving permission for research to proceed) as an unwilling surrender. A more deliberative
submission, not caring to know, emerges from Konrads () account of predictive genetic testing; people

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 Marilyn Strathern 207

suspended between diagnosis and the manifestation of symptoms have to deal with how much they and
their relatives know.
31
Anthropologists success in multidisciplinary [interdisciplinary also implied] settings may have posi-
tive ramifications for the continued vigour of anthropology as a discipline (Gooberman-Hill : ).
32
They come to a conclusion very similar to mine, although theirs is couched in an argument about expert
knowledge rather than interdisciplinarity.
33
Following Konrad, this is closer to not caring to know than asserting the right not to know. As Miyazaki
says, [H]ope cannot be argued for or explained; it can only be replicated (: ).
34
That does not mean to say they will not be disputed by lawyers (Edmond himself gives an alternative
view of the expert as a reasonable professional as against the expert as advocate).
35
His argument applies at least in the context of native title and heritage legislation in Australia, where a
hegemonic, though loosely bound, (legal) system [is] coming into contact with a less powerful and even
more loosely affiliated set of knowledges and practices (anthropology) Through its attempts to interpret
and understand societies and their cultural practices, professional anthropology is now itself subject to
appropriation and legal colonization (Edmond : ).

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Rsum

Lanthropologie sociale a lhabitude que le terrain se drobe sous ses pieds. Les objets que lon observe de
loin se rapprochent brusquement, comme lillustre lexemple de lconomie des connaissances. Lauteur
considre la place de lanthropologie comme discipline dans un monde o la crativit devient une annexe
la productivit, o les collaborations interdisciplinaires sont un passage oblig vers linnovation et o
lindividu est valu en fonction de ses comptences. On voit se poser un nouveau genre de problme :
celui de cultiver lesprit critique.

Marilyn Strathern is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB RF, UK.

J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) , -

Royal Anthropological Institute