The Art of Anthropology

Essays and Diagrams

Alfred Gell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780485196603
• eBook ISBN: 9781000324464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Art of Anthropology collects together the most influential of Gell's writings, which span the past two decades, with a new introductory chapter written by Gell. The essays vividly demonstrate Gell's theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of current anthropological enquiry. A central theme of the essays is Gel's highly original exploration of diagrammatic imagery as the site where social relations and cognitive processes converge and crystallise. Gell tracks this imagery across studies of tribal market transactions, dance forms, the iconicity of language and his most recent and groundbreaking analyses of artworks.Written with Gell's characteristic fluidity and grace and generously illustrated with Gell's original drawings and diagrams, the book will interest art historians, sociologists and geographers no less than anthropologists, challenging, as it does, established ideas about exchange, representation, aesthetics, cognition and spatial and temporal processes.

CHAPTER 1 STRATHERNOGRAMS, OR, THE SEMIOTICS OF MIXED METAPHORS

Marilyn Strathern is one of today's best-known and most influential anthropologists, but there is reason to doubt whether her work is always well understood. Her writings are conducive to scholarly abuse, that is, citation for effect rather than sense, and the picking-out of little snippets of ideas from here and there, without any real reference to the structure of the argument from which these snippets are drawn. The secondary literature on Strathern is beginning to mount up; with special issues of anthropology periodicals being devoted to her, and theses being written about her. But to the best of my knowledge there are no summaries or digests of her ideas to which a student can turn for guidance, as they very easily can find summaries of the ideas of Geertz or Malinowski or Levi-Strauss. One reason for this is that there are three distinct but intertwined aspects to her academic persona: there is Strathern the contemporary cultural critic concerned explicitly with feminism and rather less explicitly with postmodernism; secondly there is Strathern the meta-anthropologist, concerned with knowledge practices and the author of an anthropology of anthropology; and finally there is Strathern the straight anthropologist, an activity in which she has a formidable track record. When Strathern gets written about, it is Strathern the feminist or Strathern the postmodernist or Strathern the meta-anthropologist who gets written about, not Strathern the straight anthropologist. Some of the things which have been written about Strathern are very good: the published critiques by Margaret Jolly (1992) and Lisette Josephides (1991) spring to mind, and especially an unpublished thesis by Huen (1993). These works, though, are all essentially cartographic, trying to situate Strathern in the context of the intellectual field, the map of knowledge. What the enquiring student is not going to get from them is some clue as to how to make sense of fieldwork data, that is, how to anthropologize in the Strathernian way, rather than how to identify Strathern's position in the intellectual firmament. I think this is a pity, and that something should be done to codify and operationalize the interpretative strategies she brings to bear on ethnography, so that everybody can put them into practice, if they so wish. The key text for this purpose is GG (The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988)) and, moreover, GG read in a particular way. Actually GG contains long passages which are about feminism and meta-anthropological problems. I am not concerned with feminism, since no male can be expected to discuss feminism without dissimulation. I also leave aside meta-anthropology, though I have always shared what I take to be her view of the very hybrid character of ethnographies as literary texts. I am also not going to say anything about Strathern's more recent work on English kinship and new reproductive technology. My quarry in this presentation of her ideas is Strathern the Melanesianist, the interpreter of Melanesian social and symbolic practices.

The Gender of the Gift, her anthropological magnum opus, is an infernally difficult book to read, as it must also have been to write. Paradoxically, the reason why it is difficult is not that it is rambling or incoherent, but because it is systematic and rigorous, requiring one to keep numerous different ideas going in one's head simultaneously. After a page and a half, saturation point is reached and mental indicators reading 'OVERLOAD - CONDITION RED!!' flash on, making progress slow and painful. What's the problem? I thought at one time it was her writing style, and that something could be done by dividing each sentence in half, then attaching the first half of each sentence to the preceding one, and the second half to the succeeding one, and in that way one could produce a series of sentences each of which was on one topic, rather than each being precariously suspended between two topics, as I felt was usually the case. But I have since changed my mind; it is not the manner in which she writes, but the content of what she says, that is difficult to understand.

But I do have one criticism of Strathern's presentation of her ideas in GG. The anthropological ideas she is interested in exploring are, if not pictorial, then frequently formal, but she hardly ever uses graphics to express them. Until Strathern herself provided me with irrefutible evidence to the contrary, I imagined that she was one of those people (of whom there are many) who panic when asked to draw something. Actually, Strathern can, and does, draw for pleasure, but not for public consumption. Drawing happens not to be her mode of anthropological communication; and this is no doubt compounded by the fact that, just at present, anthropology is going through a non-diagrammatic phase, after the excesses of diagram-making which marked the heyday of structuralism. Levi-Strauss, Leach, and also, I would say, Fortes, were masters of graphic means of expression in anthropology. But today's anthropology comes from the very un-diagrammatic mind of Clifford Geertz, and the intellectual icons of the day are such dreadfully verbal authors as Derrida, Ricoeur, Heidegger and so on, none of whom ever drew anything, or, probably, wanted to. We are in a moment of verbalism, in which the graphic impulse is checked on ideological grounds, because graphics are associated with science, high-tech, and particularly, engineering (Leach's original discipline) and engineering is, from the standpoint of the cultural studies mind-set, Disciplinary Enemy No. 1.

I do not think that Strathern participates in this anti-formalism; she is far far closer to Levi-Strauss than to deconstruction, appearances notwithstanding. Moreover, her closest anthropological ally, Roy Wagner, uses graphics extensively, and it is also worth noticing that Bourdieu, another creator of contemporary anthropology, uses diagrams and graphics very effectively as well.

The virtual absence of a diagrammatic channel of communication in GG is particularly puzzling in that, as one reads this text, images of forms, relations and transformations continually materialize before the mind's eye, and one has the strongest impression that while Strathern was writing, she likewise spent a lot of the time seeing forms, relations, and so on, in her mind's eye (as well as scenes from Melanesian life). Indeed, she has since told me that she does use a series of diagrams as schemata in the process of writing, but that she eliminates them subsequently since the text has to stand by itself (pers. comm.). She also remarks that diagrams can give a spurious logic to texts which are, in fact, discursively incoherent, a point which is well taken. In this essay, I want to supply the missing graphic channel of expression to the argument of GG. Of course, Strathern's point about coherent-looking diagrams accompanying incoherent texts should not apply here. The text of GG is certainly not incoherent, difficult though it may be.

My aim is to attain graphic coherence, doing justice to Strathern's textual coherence; though of course I am also writing an expository text of my own, which has to be coherent as well. In fact, I see my task as somewhat akin to the making of a TV adaptation of some long and complicated novel, with a view to assisting the dissemination of the text in a more easily assimilated (verbal/visual) format than the original. I can only record that, in practice, I have found this task as intellectually demanding as any that I have attempted as an anthropologist. Meanwhile, I am uneasily aware that many students of anthropology are even more put off by diagrams than they are by difficult, abstract, texts. I once had to teach kinship theory to a clever student who blandly informed me that she did not even bother to glance at the (to my mind, ultra-clear) diagrams in Robin Fox's Kinship and Marriage because they were too horrible and difficult-looking. For such individuals, perhaps, my text alone may be of some use, but I am not sanguine about this. Seriously diagram-averse persons might save time by simply turning directly to Strathern's text.

First let me outline what I believe is the theoretical stance taken in GG. I think it is fair to say that GG is written from an idealist standpoint: that is, it describes a world in which the real is an idea, or a system of ideas, signs, and so on, rather than a collection of objects about which we, or the Melanesians, have ideas, or of which our ideas can be taken to be representations. Idealism is an old and respectable philosophical doctrine, but Strathern is not a philosopher and she is not advancing her idealism as a solution to philosophical problems. Idealism is, in her work, a heuristic for dealing with the problems of ethnographic analysis, so she offers no defence of idealistic ontology or epistemology as such. However, I think it is useful to think of Strathern as an idealist, and I was encouraged somewhat in this belief by hearing Henrietta Moore, in a lecture, refer to Baudrillard as a proponent of 'idealist semiotics'. The Strathern of GG seems to me to be on quite a parallel track to Baudrillard, despite the fact she is dealing with the conventionally archaic (Melanesia) and he is dealing with the conventionally hypermodern (TV ads).

There are two aspects to Strathern's idealism. Firstly, she describes the world as an array of signs. The perceptible world is the vehicle of meanings. Meanings, however, do not originate in the perceptible world, but in the code or system which encompasses the perceptible world, which is culturally produced and reproduced. Thus material things and bodies are not isolable things-in-themselves, but exist only in so far as they convey, or encipher, meaning deriving from the code. Because of this they have, in themselves, no fixed identities or essences as real entities, but can assume limitless identities according to their shifting articulation to the code. Secondly, and deriving from this, I detect a specific idealist thesis underlying GG, which concerns the concept of relations, which plays a basic role in Strathern's scheme. Idealists hold that all relations are 'internal', that is, participate in a system/code; and that there are no 'external' relations, that is, relations between objects which are theoretically independent of one another. In realist ontology, the world consists of a collection of things which exist independently of one another and which enter into external (e.g) causal relations. These objects can have internal relations, in the sense that the front cover of a book is internally related to the back cover of the same book, but the relation between one book and another book is treated as an external relation. In idealist philosophy (notably Bradley's) it is argued that it is mistaken to assume that one can divide relations into external and internal in this way, and that all relations between objects, or between objects and subjects are internal (like our front and back covers of a book), and in particular, the relation between the perceiver and the thing perceived is an internal relation, whereas for realism it is an external relation. The whole of GG is about various types of internal relations, particularly ones which seem counter-intuitive from a western point of view. In the frame of reference of GG, the contrast I have just alluded to between 'internal' and 'external' relations, coincides with the opposition between 'gifts' - which participate in, and generate, 'internal relations', and 'commodities' which participate in and generate 'external relations'. In Melanesia, 'the gift' prevails: in the West, the commodity economy.

GG is not a philosophic defence of idealism, however, but a text in which idealism is deployed as an interpretative heuristic. The book is constructed around an imaginary opposition between 'Melanesia' which is represented (as representing itself) in idealist terms, versus 'the west' which seeks to represent itself in 'realist' terms. It would be just as possible to represent the west's own self-representations from an idealist standpoint (as the Baudrillard example shows, and perhaps also Strathern's own work on modernity) but the architecture of GG depends on this contrast being maintained. Conversely, it is possible to interpret Melanesian ethnography on the assumption that Melanesians think about certain (ostensible) 'gift' transactions in 'commodity' terms; indeed I have myself published an essay precisely along these lines (see Chapter 2). However, if the latter path is chosen, it is not possible to arrive at any of the insights provided by GG, whatever else may be achieved thereby. And since the insights of GG, not some alternative work written from a different point of view, are at issue here, we can resist the temptation to enter into what would, in any case, be a very empty debate.

The Melanesia of Strathern's discourse (or mine) is not a 'real' place, which either idealists or realists could visit for the purposes of finding proof-positive of their own views and refutations of their opponents'. The 'Melanesia' of GG is not the actual nation states of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and so on, but a manner of speaking, or more precisely the site of certain problems of expression and understanding, peculiar to the cultural project of anthropology, which is (almost) exclusively a 'western' project, like it or not. It is important to underline the fact that 'Melanesia' stands for an intellectual project rather than a geographic entity because the methodological usefulness of Strathern's interpretative technique is not restricted to (geographic) Melanesia, as opposed to Africa, America, Asia or anywhere else. It has got nothing intrinsic to do with the totally artificial and internally discontinuous ethnographic area which happens, for mostly rather bad reasons, to have been christened 'Melanesia'. Perhaps the best way to think about Stratheern's Melanesia, especially for those who feel rather resistant to postmodernist relativism on other grounds, is to think of Melanesia as the anthropological equivalent of Abbot's Flatland: that is, the setting for a sustained thought experiment. As Strathern pointed out to me (pers. comm.) neither realists nor idealists can obtain visas for Flatland, yet both may take profitable if imaginary trips there.

Though 'Melanesia as the site for thinking through the consequences of idealist interpretative strategies is a mythical place, the detailed working-out of Strathern's scheme is undoubtedly carried on in terms of ethnographic particulars derived from the regional literature of Melanesia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Notes on Seminar Culture and Some Other Influences
• 1 Strathernograms, or the Semiotics of Mixed Metaphors
• 2 Inter-Tribal Commodity Barter and Reproductive Gift Exchange in Old Melanesia
• 3 The Market Wheel: Symbolic Aspects of an Indian Tribal Market
• 4 Style and Meaning in Umeda Dance
• 5 The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology
• 6 Vogel's Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps
• 7 On Coote's 'Marvels of Everyday Vision'
• 8 The Language of the Forest: Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda
• 9 Exalting the King and Obstructing the State: A Political Interpretation of Royal Ritual in Bastar District, Central India
• The Published Work of Alfred Gell
• Index