An Interview With Marilyn Strathern - Kinship and Career - 2014

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Janet Carsten
An Interview with Marilyn Strathern: Kinship and Career
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413510052
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Interview
An Interview with
Marilyn Strathern:
Kinship and Career
Janet Carsten
University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
The interview was conducted in September 1996 in Cambridge. Marilyn Strathern
(MS) and Janet Carsten (JC) had been colleagues at the University of Manchesters
Department of Social Anthropology until September 1993, when Marilyn Strathern
left to take up the William Wyse Professorship at the University of Cambridge,
where she remained until retirement in 2008. Janet Carsten joined Edinburgh in
October of the same year, where she is presently Professor of Social and Cultural
Anthropology. (Supplementary questions, reflecting back on the earlier interview,
were put to Marilyn Strathern by the editors of the special issue in 2013.)
Keywords
choice, England, feminism, kinship, NRTs, Papua New Guinea, Marilyn Strathern
JC: First of all, Marilyn, could you say something about how you got
interested in anthropology in the rst place.
MS: Well, I think it was a combination of both what was going on at
school and what I was doing in my spare time at home as a teenager.
I grew up in south-east England, north-west Kent, in a valley system that
the Romans had in fact occupied, which meant that virtually in every-
ones backyard were Roman remains. And I, through the local Historical
and Natural History Society, at about the age of 13 I think, had the
opportunity to go digging, and this actually became a weekend occupa-
tion right until I was about 18 or 19 in fact, my rst vacation [at
university] I spent digging in Jersey with [Charles] McBurney.
1
But
while I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed excavating, and picked up
quite a bit of knowledge, as one does at that age, I knew I didnt want
Corresponding author:
Janet Carsten, University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Science, Chrystal Macmillan Building,
Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: Janet.Carsten@ed.ac.uk
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org
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to be an archaeologist. Im afraid I was a very serious and pompous
person; in fact my mother said that I hardly smiled in my teen years,
so I think that things have improved. And I think that I had, as many
people did then, rather grand ideas about studying well, it was then
called mankind, society and the world very generally and when I heard
about anthropology and what the scope of anthropology was, this I am
afraid tted my rather superior ideas. Now, although like most people
Id heard of Frazer, in fact it was because at school we were doing the
18th century, and that included thinking about Rousseau, that is, being
in the company of people who were also talking about grand ideas about
society; and I suppose it was that that encouraged those interests. The
two came together, obviously, in the combined possibility of doing
archaeology and anthropology in Cambridge, and I came up with the
idea that I would pursue archaeology in the rst year and continue in just
anthropology.
JC: Lots of anthropologists describe some sort of dislocation in their
backgrounds, either their own backgrounds or their parents, which
they would connect to their interest in anthropology. You always seem
to me kind of quite quintessentially English, and unusual in that respect,
to many anthropologists. Would you say that there is anything in your
background that connects with the fact you took up anthropology?
MS: Well, both my parents were quite radical and independent thinkers.
My mother travelled widely before the war, we had Left Book Club
books in the house . . . I was exposed to the range of political possibilities
about and in societies through her. My father under other circumstances
might have been in university, but instead cultivated an extraordinary
range of skills from poetry to Darwinian theory to breeding moths for
genetic reasons. And there was both a liberalism and a breadth to the
kind of ideas that I was exposed to. I mean I grew up in a house full of
books, and you know, needed, so to speak, no encouragement. But,
where the uprootedness comes, I think, is in how I needed to create a
track of my own, and I think that the archaeology was just that doing
something that was my own distinctively . . .
JC: You were a graduate student in Cambridge. Did you have a sense of
being isolated, as a woman, and being surrounded by such great male
gures of anthropology, or was that . . .
MS: Not at all, despite the fact that my mother was a sort of pre-feminist
feminist, that is, in the 1950s she was giving WEA [Workers Educational
Association] classes on women in society, women in art, and so forth, or
perhaps because of it, I had this taken-for-granted mode of not thinking
there was anything particularly special about being a woman. It wasnt
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
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really until the feminist debate got o the ground in the late 60s/early
70s, when as you know I was castigated for gender blindness, that
I began thinking these things through. I really took it for granted, and
I think again that my home background assisted, that there was nothing
particular about being a woman.
JC: I can understand that . . . As a graduate student, do you now see
particular people as having had a special interest, or at the time did
you feel you were particularly inuenced by particular people?
MS: I was very inuenced by the debate that was then active between
Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach.
2
This was in the early 60s, and each
of them would be lecturing. There were two lecture rooms the north
lecture room and the south lecture room my memory now makes a
narrative out of that, as though one were lecturing in one and one in
the other . . . and we students went from north to south [rooms], but of
course that was not quite how the timetables were arranged.
Nonetheless, one was in a department where one felt that there were
active issues being debated and that was very stimulating. I think I
learned a tremendous amount from Meyer Fortes, but, and perhaps
theres a lesson there, because he was head of the department, I suppose
I somehow regarded him as orthodox, although he was in fact . . . look-
ing back, I think that there was a tremendous originality to what he
was doing; nevertheless, you know what students are . . . I think in that
context I thought of Edmund as heterodox and in that sense attractive;
but theres no doubt that Edmund, who was at that point introducing
British anthropology to structuralism and The Elementary Structures of
Kinship [Le vi-Strauss, 1969 (1949)] . . . had things to say that appeared
fresh and novel, and he ran a seminar on Malinowski, a seminar that
lasted the entire term, which was a tremendous learning experience,
going over a single persons work again and again, and that really
made a distinct impression. My supervisors were Esther Goody
3
and
Audrey Richards.
4
Esther inspired me, from the point of view of teaching me attention to
detail on the one hand, and on the other hand impressed on me a sense of
work that writing and composing and analysing and commenting and
teaching are, so to speak, jobs that have to be done, that these things
dont just ow, and I think I have always been grateful for that. She was
also my PhD supervisor, and Paula Brown
5
was a sort of overseas con-
sultant and eldwork advisor . . .
JC: I wanted to go on to ask you a little bit about eldwork and perhaps
start with the obvious question, to which most people do not have a very
interesting answer, but perhaps you are the exception: what made you
choose to do eldwork in New Guinea?
Carsten 3
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MS: Well, New Guinea, I suppose because it wasnt Africa . . . And the
highlands of New Guinea were at that point being opened up to eld-
workers, and their very rst ethnographies Salisbury and Marie Reays
work
6
were being published, and this seemed a new fresh place.
JC: Did you actually enjoy eldwork, at least broadly speaking?
MS: Well, I returned last year (1995) for a couple of months, both with a
small project to do and also to see people again, and enjoyed that
unequivocally and emphatically, but I think that is part of growing
older also that is, I think I enjoy more things about living in general
at my age now than when I was 24 or 25. I thought at the time I was
enjoying eldwork and I think I did: I like being out of doors, I rather
like all the practical side of it, which links up with my liking archaeology,
which of course also took one out of doors, and also has a kind of
practical component. I enjoyed . . . No, I was going to say I enjoyed
nding out things and so forth, but actually thats post-eldwork.
JC: Indeed.
MS: I wouldnt not have done eldwork for anything. I feel really pri-
vileged to have been in a situation where it was actually my job to nd
out other peoples ideas and values, modes of relating and so forth, in a
way that presented me also with an intellectual set of issues to tease out,
because I found in the interim since rst doing eldwork, you know right
up to now, that whenever I return to my New Guinea material, I get
a . . . its a sort of almost breeze, its the kind of exhilaration that arrives
from engaging with it even though of course I know that its self-
created to a large extent even though its all ltered through anthropo-
logical models and so forth, the point is that behind it . . . does lie other
peoples engagement with their own social circumstances that one is
being asked to reect on, and I just nd that combination quite enthrall-
ing. It really does give me some lift working with that material. At the
time, of course, because one was really there, and because one was really
involved, interactions had all the stress and tension that, as it were,
incomplete transactions do. I mean, I think one of the reasons why
going back to the material is rewarding is . . . because it is in a sense I
dont mean not complete, but not part of relationships that are neces-
sarily ongoing, and I say that because the nature of transactions with
people there cant be collapsed into any simple recollection: it was won-
derful company or an irritating set of demands. Relationships were con-
stantly being negotiated, and became at times, you know, tense, and I
was at times, you know, unhappy, depressed and all the rest, all the
emotions that accompany any sort of interaction. But the short answer
is . . . Yes! One would be a fool not to.
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JC: Marilyn, Ive been asked to interview you about kinship, and the
rst, sort of obvious, question: would you describe your work as being
basically about kinship or do you see it quite dierently?
MS: I dont think I would mind being described like that because I do
think that I held on to issues to do with kinship through the years when it
really wasnt prominent on the anthropological agenda; but you have to
realize that coming out of the Cambridge department in the 1960s meant
that studying kinship was a way to study society, and that in looking at
kinship relations one was also looking at political and economic life,
religion, and so forth, and this was very much how it was taught. So,
one took it for granted that kinship was a means to understanding social
congurations in general. Now, as you know, Ive rather mischievously
extended that from the kinds of societies to which it was thought to
principally apply, namely the kinds of horticulturalist and pastoralist,
largely non-state societies, to wondering whether kinship in fact might
not also be a route to thinking about, in aspects of . . . well, if I refer to the
cultural conguration as English, youll know what I mean, but like
everyone else, I have tremendous problems with specifying the cultural
area, though usually I sort of gloss it as Euro-American. I think its
important to use a gloss in order to be reminded of the distinctiveness
of the materials ones dealing with, and of course no single gloss serves.
Anyway, After Nature [1992], as you know, was asking questions
about late 20th-century society through taking up kinship,
mischievously, because of course, the assumptions are that kinship in
western after Talcott Parsons that kinship in western societies occu-
pies a place that is . . . that might be central to peoples personal lives, but
by that very same token is marginal to broader social concerns. In doing
so, of course, I had to dene kinship rather liberally, as to do with a set of
issues about the formation of relationships against a background of a
primal distinction between biological process on one hand and social
constructs on the other. Anyway . . . it was an exercise; it was also an
exercise intended as a . . . well, it was written at the height of
Thatcherism, and it was intended as a critique that did not so to speak
absolve the critic. In other words, my question was: How have we pro-
duced a Prime Minister who says that there is no such thing as society?,
and the answer has to include that weve all conspired to produce this
gure. It therefore should follow, and if ones theories of culture are
correct it should follow, that wherever one looks, so to speak, in
English society, one would nd echoes of the presumptions and values
that sustained a gure like that. And I took kinship as an unlikely
domain, but nonetheless was able out of those materials to produce a
description that showed how, when people went around with these kinds
of ideas in their heads about how people are related to one another, they
could also countenance that kind of Prime Minister.
Carsten 5
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JC: One of your reviewers, now. . . I think as far as I remember, I think it
was in the Guardian . . . described the outlook of After Nature as being
bleak, or lugubrious, or. . .
MS: Melancholic.
JC: . . . melancholic, was it? Well, it obviously stuck. Would you like to
comment on that? Why, I mean. . .
MS: Yes, there are two very dierent reasons, I suppose. One is that it
was a critique written from a rather depressed point of view, because it
did seem to me that the kind of values that were being promulgated in
the mid-1980s werent actually going to go away, whatever government
was following, that we were in the midst of a cultural revolution,
and. . . what were being turned around were actually notions about
public good and civil society that were the notions that had made
possible the expansion of the universities in the 60s and so forth,
that had supported the kinds of enquiries that anthropology in turn
was making about the nature of public life in other contexts, and so
forth. These presumptions may have been being upturned for good
purposes, but I do sometimes think that whatever advantages or
gains come from revolutions, they are always uncertain, whereas the
traumas and diculties [which they bring] for people are always certain.
I dont think of it [my standpoint] as just nostalgia. Though of course
the book is also about nostalgia, and I wouldnt exclude myself, but it
was a commentary on not just the fate, so to speak, of a particular kind
of society, but also the ways of conceptualizing society that it [the
revolution] had given rise to.
Its terribly unfashionable, of course, to be nostalgic, precisely because
nostalgia gets criticized on all grounds, criticized on all sides for senti-
mentalism, romanticism, and so forth, and . . . I even get that amazingly
in relation to The Gender of the Gift [1988] . . . but what an emotional
reaction such as nostalgia does is sharpen ones critical faculties in certain
directions, and I think all I was doing was just commenting on some of
the wider, well, it seemed to me, intellectual changes that were also in
train. I realize that this is an odd way to put things, because Im sure
most people would prefer to have a sort of positive and expansive and
enlarging view of their discipline or their circumstances, or whatever. But
I just wanted to add something about the second point I was going to
make . . . You know, everyone has dierent abilities some people are
optimists and some people are pessimists, and optimists are able to use
their optimism and harness it. Well, pessimists are also able to use their
pessimism and harness it; and I would count myself as a professional
pessimist. Which actually, I nd a . . . really, well sort of . . . productive
and creative position to be in.. . .
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JC: OK, What about the intellectual inuences in your work on kinship?
I suppose Schneiders
7
is the obvious one, but. . .
MS: Yes . . . Well, perhaps I should say a bit about that. Coming back to
Britain after having spent time in Papua New Guinea and in particular
becoming involved with Audrey Richards and the Elmdon project,
8
I thought there was a role for anthropology in commenting on cultural
issues in kinship, in a eld that was otherwise really very much akin to
the sociology of kinship, and of course specically, the sociology of the
family. That was the time, in the late 70s, in which American cultural
anthropology was beginning to make its inuence felt. And I suppose
that I was part of this, in discovering in David Schneider attention to
some of the fundamental issues to do with nature and culture, that [here]
seemed to be an approach to cultural issues in kinship. These things have
their cycles, and Im not saying that this is now my present position, but
at the time David Schneiders work seemed to be a breath of fresh air,
and certainly it was inuential.
JC: OK. In the early 80s it looked very much to some people, I think, as
though kinship was dead, or moribund, as a subject, and that hardly
seems the case now. What do you think contributed to the revitalization
of the study of kinship in anthropology?
MS: Well, possibly there are two rather dierent routes, and two dier-
ent answers. One is the route that I see your own work, for example,
taking, which stems out of an interest in personhood, which itself was
produced by, one might almost say, a kind of exhaustion of the possibi-
lities of exploring institutions as dominated the 1960s, which was dier-
ent from the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s, which was akin to a
number of the issues that were raised by feminist scholars, but also inde-
pendent of them. . . . And the concept of the person appeared to present a
key to describing the connections between relationships on the one hand,
and values and ideas on the other, which was almost tantamount to the
same conguration that the notion of society itself oered. I see the
person as an extremely powerful heuristic for drawing together many
of the elements anthropologists otherwise distributed in dierent ways.
And given the nature of the materials that anthropologists are dealing
with, I think their own relation to it is an excellent case in point: there is
no way in which one can come to grips with ideas about the person that
dont take [into account] the formation of the person, in terms of pro-
creation and reproduction, and the network of relations within which
persons nd themselves, [in short,] . . . no way one could discount kinship.
The point is that [it was] unlike, for example, the place of kinship in
Marxist anthropology, where it becomes caught up in debates about
infrastructure and superstructure and so forth, so that kinship itself
Carsten 7
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doesnt oer a fresh analytic approach it merely is, so to speak, a
domain of relations that tends to be encompassed by the model.
Whereas what the notion of person did is force the reconceptualization
of what we might mean by kinship, so that it fed back into the existing
assumptions about kinship, provided a new focus of critique . . . And
thats my [rst] answer.
The second answer is: that while the family has always been in crisis in
Euro-American culture, I mean its part of its denition, just as commu-
nities and villages are always disappearing . . . there have been some inter-
esting new crises to do with the advent of the new technologies and
assisted conception, that have, to my mind, revealed kinship as a subject
of study as distinct from the institution, as distinct from the family. In
kinship, one is talking about the formation of intimate relationships, one
isnt talking about institutional or social forms or groupings or units as
such. Here I get a bit solipsistic, because . . . its not the case necessarily
that anthropology would have fallen on this area of debate if there hadnt
been one or two anthropologists who saw the potential, perhaps, for
applying notions of kinship to it. Ive often said that what were
seeing, in the popular debates that surround many of the circumstances
in which people nd themselves put in the context of the new reproduct-
ive technologies, is a culture commenting on itself, because what it
brought into view was all sorts of pre-existing suppositions and values.
And indeed what is brought into view is the very basis of the way in
which the procreative process is described, so that the categories avail-
able to people for describing their relations in talking about what makes
up a child and how they are connected to it, or to a child, is very literally
being analysed, that is, taken apart piece by piece and put together in a
variety of new combinations. I think its a tremendous opportunity, for
anthropology, to witness new cultural forms in the making, in the very
area which it also made its own namely, kinship.
JC: Do you think anthropology has a particular contribution to make to
the debates about new reproductive technologies, and how would you see
that contribution?
MS: Well, there are several answers one could give to the question about
anthropologys contribution. The rst is of course that the debate doesnt
exist out there [as an abstract reference point], it only exists where these
issues are being debated, and I think for anthropology to bring the
debate home, so to speak, and make it an object of intellectual exercise
in terms of understanding processes of cultural change is itself of value.
But that of course is of value to anthropology. The debates carried on in
a variety of contexts and with a variety of suppositions. There is certainly
a role for anthropology here to carry on conveying one of the funda-
mental messages it is able to formulate, namely the diversity of the
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arrangements under which people do anything, and that goes for this
area as for any other. And in fact Peter Rivie` res very early article in
Anthropology Today [1985] is about this context of the [Warnock] report
9
that had just been published. What he detected was a degree of anxiety
and. . . well, not so strong as hysteria, but . . . he addressed the degree of
concern with which people were contemplating the new arrangements,
pointing out that the ethnographic record yielded many examples of
diverse ways in which people reproduced themselves through children,
and regenerated themselves. But you can detect a hesitation in my voice
at saying that is anthropologys principal contribution, because I think in
a way it is almost too easily wheeled on. And I say this in the context
where it is a political stance; that is, where one is already occupying an
interested position in these debates in saying that human cultures are
innitely diverse and there is no problem in contemplating, as it were,
the most bizarre kinds of arrangements, because this is one of the polit-
ical positions [it is possible to adopt], and the political position is that of
choice: the position is one, basically, of deregulation, that this [NRTs] is
an area where people should be allowed to exercise their choices. And of
course, on a one-to-one basis, in actually thinking about individuals and
the particular lives they follow, its a very powerful argument. Indeed the
issues of how one would even wish to introduce regulations in these areas
are themselves extremely problematic. But the fact that things are prob-
lematic is not in itself reason for not trying to deal with them, or think
them through, and I would actually see the anthropologists role in this
instance as, not one of [reiterating a notion of] innite human diversity,
but rather pointing out the ramications and consequences of what seem
to be individual decisions but that in fact do have repercussions.
Now, again, Im not saying that these repercussions and so forth are
not to be welcomed, or, Im not saying that one shouldnt welcome the
directions in which societies are changing and so forth, but it does
happen to be the case that peoples actions have consequences not only
on those . . . with whom they are in immediate contact. They [also] have
what one might say are counter-consequences, that is, they raise possi-
bilities, and those ideas then become part of the repertoire with which
everyone thinks. It is impossible now to think about issues of procreation
without bearing in mind that its always possible to resort to assisted
conception and other kinds of means; which in many, many cases may, of
course, be benecial, but in other cases, as we know, puts tremendous
pressure on people who feel that they somehow owe it to themselves to
pursue [all possible] means. One of the things that intrigues me is how
living in a culture that so values choice and regards technology as
enabling, that with justication looks on the way it can improve circum-
stances for individuals, nevertheless makes other things impossible. The
whole debate, for example, about anonymity in assisted conception
arrangements is pre-empted by the contemporary value put on openness
Carsten 9
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that takes away the opportunity for ignorance. Now, that sounds odd in
a sense, but its because we have for so long lived with a situation in
which it was lack of choice that constrained people and where, as is still
of course true in many areas, ignorance is the problem and not know-
ledge. Yet we have to think rather seriously about the problems that
choice brings and the problems that knowledge also brings; and it is
from this perspective that an anthropologist can comment on arrange-
ments in other societies, where people have rather careful procedures,
and in fact very often procedures for concealing things from themselves.
And we might look rather closely at these and not simply assume that
openness is desirable.
JC: How do you see the future of kinship studies, if you do see it?
MS: Well, I was going to say . . . ask . . . any questions, except any ques-
tions about the future.
JC: All right. . .
MS: Im quite hopeless about the future.
JC: Thats a pessimistic answer?. . .
MS: But, I could actually say something about knowledge that follows
on from what I just said about openness.
JC: Um-hmm. . .
MS: Which is that I see the same issue in fact facing us as knowledge
consumers and producers in academia, that we have and necessarily so,
Im not denigrating it ridden on the crest of the knowledge wave, so to
speak, the notion that you improve what you know by nding out, by
adding to what you already know, nding out more, and we have devel-
oped technologies in fact for producing and reproducing and storing
knowledge. I think that the issue of how one reduces the amount of
information that is available is also a rather sort of teasing and perplex-
ing intellectual problem. We all get a bit of it in the context of teaching
and what we do with students, but I think there is actually a much wider
issue here: what one does with the possibilities of ever-increasing infor-
mation to which one has access, when all we seem to be doing is enhan-
cing our means of access.
JC: That connects to what youve written about kinship in another
way . . . the endless possibilities of bilateral kinship, [the problem of]
how you get a cut-o point.
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MS: Oh crikey, Janet.
JC: So, the next lot of questions were really about feminism, and I think
you would always describe yourself as a feminist, but what kind of fem-
inist do you see yourself as?
MS: I am seen as an academic, rather than activist, feminist. And that
means, in the university context, that my concern is to reiterate the con-
tributions that feminist scholarship has made in thinking about debates,
especially in anthropology of course, but insisting very strongly, and it
still needs to be insisted, that these are contributions to the intellectual
project. But not as an activist, in the sense that I dont in fact have a
particularly well thought out [political] position that would translate into
university dealings, except in a sort of modest way: while in the context of
making appointments and the conduct of meetings and so forth, just
being aware of gender issues. But, as I think you know. . . I am sensitive,
but I am not terribly sensitive. It took me ages to appreciate the position
[that women academics often have to occupy]. I think Ive been protected
as well. . .
JC: What intellectual inuences are there behind your feminism?
MS: The biggest intellectual inuence in fact was my own mother . . . I
referred earlier to the adult education classes she was taking in the 1950s,
which made me take for granted the fact that dealing with the aairs of
women was unexceptional and respectable, and in fact that made me
rather slow to get into the debates which all arose, of course, from
people not taking it for granted. The rapid education I had in that was
supplied by Annette Weiner,
10
and I . . . remain forever grateful to
her . . . partly because she took me to task on ethnographic grounds, in
other words the rst ght was in relation to the interpretation of
anthropological materials. And I think it was this that led me to see the
tremendous importance of being clear about the [intellectual-political]
position one was occupying, and the long-term benet of that was my
being able to use feminism as a point of view or position. That is, espe-
cially in The Gender of the Gift, it has the role of constantly reminding me,
as author, that apart from just being an anthropologist and critic and
analysing this material, I also occupy a position that has a counter-point
in the rest of the world that I inhabit. . . . [I]t serves as a reminder that one
is bound to be taking a position in relation to ones work that one may not
be aware of it makes one aware of that position.
JC: Which sort of brings me to the next question, which is that you are of
course also a great deconstructor of not only feminism but feminism
partly, and I wonder if that brings you into kind of conict of loyalty
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there, between your allegiance of feminism and your propulsion to ana-
lyse it at the same time?
MS: Well, I think that if I were an optimist, yes, because I would have to
align myself with things that I saw as unproblematic, whereas one of the
things I think being a pessimist does is enable one to be critical and
analytical of the circumstances one is in, without despairing, completely,
because despair isnt a threat. One is living through and using despair
constructively, so that, in fact, I would say that I criticize/analyse what I
love or adhere to. I like being English, I appreciate being part of and a
contributor to feminist scholarship, and its on the basis of what I [posi-
tively] value that I, well, I wouldnt go so far as to say that there is an
obligation to be critical towards what one values, but there is absolutely
no conict between being critical and valuing something. You will see
that is in fact my strategy in writing After Nature: being critical and not
[positively] valuing Margaret Thatcher meant that I had to actually go
out and seek my source of critique in something that I do value. Theres a
lot of myself written into that book and a lot of things that I am familiar
with and have tremendous aection for, but I had to be critical of what I
liked, because that gave me a purchase in articulating what I didnt like
about the current regime. I couldnt have addressed Thatcherite politics
directly and criticized [them] because that would simply detract [rehearse
the same issues].
JC: My own mother used to say rather succinctly pessimists are always
right.
MS: Im glad we had that bit of the conversation, that actually puts
my . . . I hadnt thought about it before, but that puts pessimism in a
productive light.
JC: I wanted to ask you about something that may or may not be a
somewhat painful subject, which is the subject of writing, that is painful
to many of us; I wanted to ask you whether, well its obvious that many
people, including students, nd reading your work quite demanding and
dicult. I wondered if you could say anything about your writing style. . .
to help them along, or. . .?
MS: Well, the rst thing to everyone out there is Im sorry! I hope that
the diculty is not being obscure in order to confuse, for its not some-
thing I have [complete] control over. I am aware that it is problematic
and Im aware that some pieces are more problematic than others. At the
same time, everything I do at the time seems to be an incredible simpli-
cation and reduction, and though the outcome is complex, I never strive
for complexity. Im always striving for clarity. If I were to put a kind
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interpretation on it, it would be that the basic materials with which we
deal are complex and the practice of anthropological narrative, which is
to constantly show the relations between relations, is a complexifying
process. And, from one point of view, I make no apologies at all for
any of us being complex. In fact there are too many people happy to go
around simplifying things, and I think that introducing at times the
modicum of complexity in ones writing pales beside the real complexities
existing in any social situation, and if all anthropology is doing is just
pointing out that something a little bit more complex than was thought
rst of all, that seems to me an excellent thing to do. And, from that
point of view, I apologize not at all for complexity. What I apologize for,
I think, is putting a burden [on the reader]. In other words, one ought to
be able to make that complexity reveal itself. So, what I have to apologize
for is the burden that is put on the reader who nds it dicult. I can add
two comments, and theyre related. One is that no reader ever gets from a
work what the writer intends, because in assimilating work they are
taking it in and they reproduce it. Its not a case of replication, it is
reproduction, that is, a re-working of materials, and in that sense I
prefer the kind of presentation of ideas that does not tell you what he
or she has to get from them. I suppose that if the stu appears to be a bit
complex, it is because I havent insisted on the ultimate clarifying lines,
because that is not me . . . it would be me if I were capable of writing
clarifying lines! [So] I have to think of something else. I enjoy the fact
that people seem to get very diverse things out of my work . . . and I
would hope that because theres no one line to follow that actually
frees people to take what they will out of it.
The second point is related to that, which is simply that there have
been several occasions where people have said to me, you know, Your
work is impossible, its far too complex, I cant follow it, but isnt it
interesting! And, I suppose that I get some comfort from the fact that
theres enough there for somebody to get out of it something of their
own. . . . A third point, now I come to think of it, is that apart from the
division of labour that there has to be between scholars Im not deni-
grating, how could I, people who write with tremendous clarity, I mean
theres absolutely a place for them theres a place for other kinds of
people as well. I think theres room for dierent versions of scholarship,
in the same way as in teaching. While theres denitely a place for produ-
cing material thats instantly assimilatable, I think theres actually a very
strong case for [also] producing material that isnt instantly assimilatable.
Now in the case of readers, Im sorry for the burden the work puts on
them, but in the case of students, I would actually turn that around and
say that one of ones jobs is actually to introduce students to a degree of
complexity that cant be assimilated unless they work on it. In other
words, it is the work they do on what theyre given which is their learning
process. It would be absolutely hopeless if everything that students did
Carsten 13
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were like that, there has to be a degree of assimilability, Im not saying
thats not important, but Im saying that there is also a role for present-
ing stu which simply cant be consumed unless it is worked on, and
working on it takes time. And, it may well be that it is not until, say, the
end of a lecture course of several weeks that students may nally realize
what was going on at the beginning.
JC: Sometimes several years. And [then if one] comes back to it . . . I cant
think why it was ever so dicult . . . its very interesting. I think your work
has that eect, you read it once and think I cant understand this, and
then some years later you think, Why was it so dicult? . . .
I nd that when I think about you in Edinburgh . . . I quite often
do . . . I very often think of you in your garden in Manchester, although
I probably didnt see you in your garden in Manchester that often,
compared to those corridors in the Roscoe Building. What about the
role of your garden?
MS: Well, I often look back with some amusement at how totally uninter-
ested I was in gardening as a child, or even I suppose as a young adult. I think
gardening has taken its [place]. Of course in. . . Port Morseby gardening was
impossible, so I have only had a garden since coming back to England in
1976, but I think in the context of running a household, and also doing
academic work, the garden is neither. So, if one looks at oneself at all, as
it were between the work and the house, somehow the garden is an escape
fromboth. I do like being outside, and do like getting my hands dirty: I dont
wear gloves. I like seeing things grow. I weed rather than dig, it satises my
liking to have things orderly. That is, a lot of my gardening, Im afraid, is
imposing order . . . I dont plant from seed, and I very rarely buy in plants.
What I am in fact doing is weeding, cutting, trimming, pulling out weeds so
that [other] plants can grow, delighting in plants . . . Oh, and pruning
them. . . In other words, I suspect a lot of the organization that is necessary
in other parts of life, but shouldnt be too intrusive, in the garden actually
becomes aesthetic. . . . That one can clean up bits. But of course the pleasure
of the garden is that, providing one has a modicumof skill, and I only have a
modicum, Id never refer to myself as a gardener, that the garden doesnt
mind. It bounces back, in fact it looks rather nice when youve been in the
garden, and provided one doesnt make a complete botch of it, [one knows] it
will grow. Which I think is more than anyone could look for in life [at
large] . . . It is not under control. Gardening is attention and organization
and ordering, yet what one is ordering, what one is doing, one isnt changing
beyond repair. On the contrary, the stu beams back at one, grows back at
one. And I cant think of any other realm in which that occurs.. . .
JC: Well, there you are . . . I got you to give an optimistic answer if ever
there was one.
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A Brief Reflection on the 1996 Interview: Some Additional
Questions Put to Marilyn Strathern in 2013
Q: You mentioned in the 1996 interview that writing and composing and
analysing and commenting and teaching are, so to speak, jobs that have
to be done, that these things dont just ow a lesson that you drew
from feedback on your work from Esther Goody. Is there anything fur-
ther you might like to say about how this understanding of academic
work has been reected in the way you have taught others, or anything
more about your own experience of academic writing?
MS: I had a certain facility or ease with writing, and what Esther did was
make me see that this facility was not everything. I couldnt just rely on
it, and it certainly was no cause for complacency. Part of the implication
was that it would cover up the work [of scrutiny, analysis, criticism] that
needed to be done. Among students I have supervised, I have been aware
of occasionally bringing a uent writer up short. But far more common
has been sharing another kind of experience about academic writing
indeed to the point of writing about it for a discussion series run by the
Durham Department of Anthropology.
11
Q: You also spoke in the earlier interview about pessimism. Are you still
a pessimist and do you think your more recent publications reect that?
More provocatively are you really a pessimist at all? We nd, for
example, your commitment to anthropological surprise to be really
quite optimistic about the possibilities for the production of new know-
ledge. Though we suppose you are writing against an increasingly dom-
inant theory of knowledge that narrows knowledge production down to
pre-specied ends.. . .
MS: On professional pessimism not quite the same (I hope!) as personal
pessimism. There are two parts to this.
One: I suspect I said that partly as protest against what was for a long
time the culture of enhancement in Higher Education (everything must
be constantly improved; success must be shown to be success [look like
success]; everything gets better and glossier exactly the narrowing-
down of knowledge production to which you refer), by pointing to the
fact that either optimism or pessimism can be a source of energy. So from
that point of view there is, in fact, no dierence between them (being
glossy guarantees nothing)! It is the energy, however it is derived, that
enables one to go forward / carry on / contemplate new knowledge, and
continue to be interested in what people do. To say things are interesting
sounds banal, but I cant think of a term that more captures the sense of
being captivated by the interesting things people put in ones path. That
goes on being the case.
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Two: Professional pessimism, because whenever I look on the black
side I am also conscious that it accompanies an argument or an intellec-
tual stance that does not quite sit with my disposition for most of the
time, namely, feeling quite cheerful, but that can have a galvanizing eect
(see above). From Fourth or Fifth Form days at school, I would dwell on
how horrible things might be (these were the 1950s, the times of CND
[Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]). Looking back on it now, I may
have been picking something up from the many moods that followed the
Second World War, the guilt of being out of it perhaps. That then
translated into / was kept alive by a continuous series of imaginings of
other possible or actual horrors. [My earliest cinematic screen experi-
ences were of newsreels (I was four in 1945) possibly why for years I
was unnerved by suspense on lm.] So that stance had a grounding in a
very real world, but it was an intellectual stance insofar as it entailed a
distance or being at a remove from what was imagined, and thus also
entailed an act of contemplation. I think that still goes for the present
horrible prospect of global warming. (I have learnt to curb constant
negative remarks on sunny weather!)
Q: Could you say something about how Kinship, Law and the Unexpected
[2005, KLU] builds on and departs from After Nature [1992, AN]? Do the
two works reect dierent moments in Euro-American life?
MS: After Nature was written in the rawness of the Thatcher years, but
also from the possibility of saying something about how anthropology
had come to embrace a specic mode of kinship thinking. On the rst
point, I guess then I was using some of the fears people expressed about
technological interventions in reproduction, what the social conse-
quences might be, to point to the consequences of other things going
on at the time as well. It caught a deconstructive moment that has since
largely passed from anthropology. (A pity that Thatchers legacy has not
faded as quickly.) Despite all the technological developments and legis-
lative changes, a dozen years later many of the social and ethical ques-
tions about family life (to use the vernacular) that were posed right at the
beginning of the NRTs were still being posed. So in one sense KLU was a
continuation. (It did not re-write AN the way AN had re-written the
Elmdon book
12
or The Gender of the Gift re-wrote Women in Between
[1972].) However, there were also divergences: KLU sought to develop a
new line of enquiry on kinship thinking that some ruminations on the
relation had rst opened up in 1994.
13
It was also more explicit on the
role that knowledge plays in English/Euro-American kinship. Finally, in
hazarding some generalizations about the particularity of anthropologys
relational quest, it also took a longer view. [Returning to the second
point] I would like to hope this last was freed up by my having dealt
with the social-construction-of-biological-facts model in AN.
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Q: Could you say a few words about what you have been working on
since retiring from the Cambridge department?
MS: For a while I was still working on some ramications of the audit
culture; subsequently, being chair of a working party for the UK Nueld
Council on Bioethics (on incentives in the context of the donation of
body parts) turned an earlier engagement with medical technology into
a dierent eld of enquiry, and a dierent kind of (non-research) enter-
prise.
14
Left to their own devices, my thoughts have since gone o in two
directions: Melanesia and English kinship. Maybe it is only one the two
somehow live o each other! Certainly, the relation wont leave me
alone, and at the present moment I am pursuing some tantalizing sug-
gestions initially aired in KLU thrown up by the scientic revolution,
so-called.
Acknowledgements
A part of this interview was previously published as Marilyn Strathern on Kinship,
EASA Newsletter 19, March 1997, pp. 69. Janet Carsten expresses her gratitude to
Gorden Gray for transcribing this interview.
Notes
1. Charles McBurney (19141979) was an eminent American archaeologist.
2. The debate largely concerned the status of descent theory in the anthropo-
logical analysis of kinship. Where Fortes focused on the jural order,
Leach . . . emphasized the gap between this ideal order and the statistical
norm; where Fortes argued for the priority of descent over relations based
on local contiguity, Leach insisted on the over-riding significance of local
organization and property relations. Kinship groups only endure, he claimed,
because the estates associated with them endure, and kinship relations are
merely an idiom for talking about property relations. It is not the jural norms
which really constrain behaviour, but rather the material interests of individ-
uals (Fuller and Parry, 1989: 12). For further details of the dispute, which
assumed mythological proportions especially in the common-room talk of
outsiders, see Tambiah (2002: 52, 197208).
3. Esther Goody was a specialist on West Africa and is now Reader Emeritus in
Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
4. Audrey Richards (18991984) was a British Africanist anthropologist who
taught at numerous universities. She was lecturer at Newnham College as well
as director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Cambridge.
5. Paula Brown (19252009) was a renowned ethnographer of the Papua New
Guinean Highlands. She held positions at the University of California, Los
Angeles, the Australian National University and SUNY Stony Brook. Paula
[Brown Glick] became part of a group that included Richard Salisbury,
Mervyn Meggitt, DArcy Ryan, Ralph Bulmer, Marie Reay, Bob Glasse
and others who established themselves as pioneering ethnographers of
Highland Papua New Guinean societies and eventually became heads of
Carsten 17
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anthropology departments in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Papua
New Guinea, the US and Canada (Levine, 2009: 47).
6. See Note 5. See also Hays (1992) and Anderson (2009: ch. 1).
7. David M. Schneider (19181995) was a vanguard American anthropologist
of kinship. His publications include American Kinship (1980 [1968]) and A
Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984).
8. The Elmdon project was a collaborative study of kinship in an Essex village
carried out by Marilyn Stratherns undergraduate cohort, and later students,
at Cambridge.
9. Published in 1984, the Warnock Report examined the ethical and legal issues
raised by the advent of new reproductive technologies such as in vitro
fertilization.
10. Annette Weiner (19331997) was an influential Melanesianist scholar who
was often critical of Stratherns work and legacy in the anthropology of
Melanesia. Key texts include Women of Value, Men of Renown (1976) and
Inalienable Possessions (1992).
11. See http://www.dur.ac.uk/writingacrossboundaries/writingonwriting/mari-
lynstrathern/.
12. See Strathern et al. (1981).
13. See Strathern (1995, 2005: ch. 3).
14. See Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2011).
References
Anderson W (2009) The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into
Whitemen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fuller C and Parry J (1989) Petulant inconsistency? The intellectual achievement
of Edmund Leach. Anthropology Today 5(3): 1114.
Hays TE (ed.) (1992) Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the
Papua New Guinea Highlands. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Le vi-Strauss C (1969 [1949]) In: Needham R, trans. Bell JH, von Sturmer JR and
Needham R (eds) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Levine H (2009) In memoriam: Paula Brown Glick. Anthropology News
(September): 478.
Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2011) Human Bodies: Donation for Medicine and
Research. London: NCOB.
Rivie` re P (1985) Unscrambling parenthood: The Warnock Report. Anthropology
Today 1(4): 26.
Schneider DM (1980 [1968]) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schneider DM (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Strathern M (1995 [1972]) Women in Between: Female Roles in a Male World:
Mount Hagen, New Guinea. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Originally pub-
lished in 1972, London: Academic Press.
Strathern M (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems
with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Strathern M (1992) After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strathern M (1995) The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale (Pamphlet no.
6). Cambridge: Prickly Pear.
Strathern M (2005) Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a
Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strathern M, with Richards A and Oxford F (1981) Kinship at the Core: An
Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-west Essex in the 1960s.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tambiah SJ (2002) Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Weiner AB (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in
Trobriand Exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Weiner AB (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-Giving.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the
University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Heat of the Hearth:
Kinship and Community in a Malay Fishing Village (Clarendon Press,
1997) and After Kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and editor
of Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ghosts of Memory: Essays on
Remembrance and Relatedness (Blackwell, 2007) and Blood Will Out:
Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows (Blackwell, 2013).
Marilyn Strathern is former Mistress of Girton College Cambridge and
the former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University
of Cambridge.
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