Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Materiality

Technology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:57:05 +0000

Woman operating machinery in a Philippine textile mill, 1960. Picture by Harrison Forman.

Wageningen University

Initially published 21 Jul 2025

Abstract:

Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship’. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows anthropologists, among others, to think of technology beyond the machines of Western industrial-capitalism and engage with technologies across time and space—from stone tools to smartphones to satellites—and across human and non-human actors. Anthropologists have also promoted vernacular definitions of technology that emphasise technological effectiveness as understood by the actors involved in creating and using it. This has led them to challenge the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘technology’ itself, highlighting concepts such as ‘technological systems’, ‘technical ensembles’, or ‘technics’, each time focusing on the complex interaction between technical objects such as tools, technical actions such as gestures, and the milieu or context in which technologies are embedded. Seeking to understand this complexity, anthropologists have highlighted that technologies have a rhythm that entangles diverse actors, resonates within particular milieus or contexts, and challenges the subject-object divide. Focusing on rhythmic resonance is one of several ways in which the study of technology offers unique insights into the dynamics that render some societies and their technological systems more resilient than others.

Introduction

The anthropology of technology covers a variety of enquiries into the social life of action-upon-matter, be it the action of weaving a basket or of typing on a keyboard to arrange bits into digital texts. Technologies have been an essential part of being human for as long as humans have existed. The use of technology was even thought to be the distinguishing feature of humanity, until tool use—a central feature of many technologies—was witnessed amongst great apes, crows, and octopi, among others (cf. Joulian 1994). By some estimates Kenyanthropys platyops, who lived about 3.5 million years ago in current-day Kenya, were among the first hominids to use stone tools beyond the Homo genus (Harmand et al. 2015). Since then, tools and more broadly human-driven actions-upon-matter have proliferated. They have also exponentially increased in complexity and in transformative capacity, accelerating changes of not only the human condition but also the condition of earth itself. This happened to the point that particularly geographers (cf. Larsen and Harrington Jr 2020) as well as anthropologists (cf. Mathews 2020) have come to debate if humanity’s capacity for action-upon-matter has so radically changed the world that it warrants its own epoch, the Anthropocene, ‘a new planetary era… in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and process’.

Anthropologists engage with technology across this vast spectrum of action, across time and space, and increasingly also across species and beyond humanity. From stone tools to ballistic missiles (Latour and Lemonnier 1994), the scope is as wide as the human and more-than-human experience itself. It is this vastness that defines the anthropology of technology and its complex, fluid, and expansive engagement with ‘technology’ as a gateway for understanding society as a whole, a powerful lens into the study of everything.

What is ‘technology’?

So what is ‘technology’? Unsurprisingly perhaps, anthropologists have no simple, or comprehensively agreed upon, definition. Technically, ‘technology’ refers to the ‘-ology’ or study of tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship,’ or more broadly, for the ‘art’ of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ (cf. Coupaye 2022b). In many ways, anthropologies of technology employ this understanding as a starting point. They are variously concerned with how people purposefully do things, how they make them, and with how such doing and making shapes, and is shaped, by broader societal dynamics (Naji and Douny 2009). However, the devil here lies in the definitional technicalities.

In English, ‘technology’ only really emerged as a term in the nineteenth century. It rose to prominence as a catch-all for scientific and engineering knowledge that is being industrially produced (Marx 1997). This association with industrial production facilitated the rise of ‘technology’ as a prominent noun, or category of things, that is deeply associated with ‘modernity’. Simultaneously, the perceived link with industrial modernity, and the utopian promises surrounding industrial technologies (Moore 1990), enabled technology to be thought of as profoundly ‘agentive’, i.e. of producing effects in its own right. For example, by frequently promising to change the world, technology appears capable of acting autonomously, of ‘determining the course of events’ (Marx 1997, 968) without any substantive human involvement. When we insist on its agentive capacity, technology tends to project a veneer of neutrality and modernity (cf. Sigaut 2002). It promises to act on its own and to do so in a highly deterministic fashion, i.e. to bring about reliable, predictable change ‘according to principles of mechanical functioning that are entirely indifferent to particular human aptitudes and sensibilities’ (Ingold 1997, 131). It also promises to perform according to its designers’ intents, largely irrespective of the context in which it is being used (cf. Orlikowski 2007).

Anthropologists have variously studied such industrially-produced technologies, be they smartphones (Hobbis 2020; Tenhunen 2018), robotics (Deturche 2019; Gygi 2018), or plastics (Dey 2023). However, they have also challenged the modernist focus on industrial production and its ‘ethnocentric potential’ (Sautchuck and Mura 2019, 4), i.e. the risk of unwittingly universalising our understandings of technology even though they are specific to our own time and circumstances. Instead, many anthropologists have proposed conceptualising technology in the widest possible sense. They have suggested we focus on our interactions with objects whenever we try to secure some desired result in a creative and roundabout manner, i.e. when we use ‘a certain degree of circuitousness in the achievement of any given objective’ (Gell 1988, 6; emphasis in original).

Such interactions with objects can include the aforementioned tools at various scales, from dresses (Richards 2009) to eel traps (Lemonnier 2012) to military checkpoints (Hammami 2019). Yet, tools themselves are not sufficient or even necessary components of technologies. Instead, anthropologists have emphasised that actions-upon-matter are, first and foremost, tied to ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1973) such as swimming and whistling but also the handweaving of baskets (Bunn 2022), moving through space while using a mobile phone (Nova et al. 2012), or ‘growing materials’ as part of biofabrication (Cristi 2023). Such techniques may vary in their ‘degree of technicality’, meaning ‘the number and complexity of the steps which link the initial givens to the final goal which is to be achieved’ (Gell 1988, 6), yet the degree of technicality is, from an anthropological perspective, a point of investigation and does not indicate what counts as ‘technology’ and what does not.

Anthropologists of technology are also rarely concerned with the perceived rationality of given technical actions, the ‘given objective’, as implied in the industrial definition of the term. Instead, they tend to focus on ‘vernacular [i.e. locally, context-specific] efficacy [that] takes into account all acts considered appropriate by the actor, whether they are aimed at matter or at intangible entities or substances’ (Coupaye 2022a, 42; emphasis in original). Consider for example how the Abelam people of Papua New Guinea grow and consume yams. Here, yams are anything but ‘just’ food, but are in fact symbols of society itself, and thus they are ‘not only grown, they are also “made”’ (Coupaye 2018, 17). Yams are centrepieces for social and cultural reproduction: their phallic properties semiotically represent and constitute masculinity and male hierarchy, and their ability to produce desired effects are closely embedded in relationships between spirits and humans (Coupaye 2013).

Based on this vernacular embedding, anthropologists have proposed an expanded understanding of technology that recognises technics, at various scales, as part of a multi-faceted ‘technological systems’ (Lemonnier 1989). Often embedded in particular, perhaps anachronistic, national research traditions, anthropologists have variously debated the specific boundaries of technology-focused terminologies including the difference between ‘techniques’ (French approaches) and ‘skills’ (English approaches) (cf. Brunn and Wahlberg 2022; Coupaye and Douny 2010; Sautchuk and Mura 2019). Still, roughly speaking, they agree that technological or technical systems usually involve (1) ‘technical objects’ like spears, dresses, or smartphones; (2) ‘technical actions,’ like the gestures used for basket weaving, which can either be ‘effective’, from the vernacular point of view of the actor, or ‘traditional’, based on historical dynamics of transmission and change (Coupaye 2021a, 49); and (3) their ‘milieus,’ such as the presence of spirits for the Abelam (Coupaye 2013) or the tropical ecologies of the Solomon Islands that undermine the durability of digital materials (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2021). ‘Milieu’ is here ‘summarised as a global field in which an entity (living organism or technical object) is immersed and with which it interacts but also upon which its existence depends’ (Coupaye 2021a, 51).

By emphasising the enmeshment of these three technical features, some anthropologists not only reject modernist definitions of ‘technology’ but also the distinction of subject- or object-centric engagements with technology. They focus on techniques, or technical actions, to highlight the fluidity of subject-object relations, and to consider technologies as relations between movements. To them, it is conceivable that humans as well as non-humans ‘are their movements’ rather than ‘beings that move’ (Ingold 2011, 168; emphasis in original). ‘Techniques’ here emerge as the contextually-embedded, vernacular, and malleable binding agent between subjects, objects, and their milieus. They thereby stress the connections between humans and the rest of the living world, the denial of which is common in modernist and agentive engagements with technologies (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 400). Simultaneously, the ‘technical’ is more than the ‘material’ (Latour 2014) revealing how even a bodily action upon its own self-as-matter is culturally inflected and connected to larger social processes.

Accordingly, ‘technology’ can be understood as a lens into everything social. Studying it creates new empirical sensibilities and allows for perceiving and dealing with relations and processes that go beyond the usual topics and methods of the social sciences (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 5). Thus, anthropologists have variously shown the complex interplay between how societies make technologies and how technologies make society, or ‘that human and social reality is as much as a product of machines as of human activity’ (Escobar 1994, 216). Anthropologists have, in their engagement with this technology-society dialectic, highlighted the fluid rhythm of technologies that entangles diverse actors beyond the subject-object divide, asking how technical rhythms resonate within particular milieus or contexts. Moreover, they have asked what rhythmic resonance may teach us about the resilience of some societies and their technological systems.

The rhythms of technologies

Several anthropologists have uncovered and showcased the ‘rhythmic dimensions of technical relations’ (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 10; cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Stiegler 1998). Take the technical actions involved in breadmaking such as kneading, for example. Kneading involves forming and orienting an elastic gluten structure that is necessary to contain air produced during fermentation processes within bread. Effective kneading requires repetitive, or rhythmic, actions that include the stretching, lifting, and folding of usually ball-shaped dough. It is the consistency and particular patterns of the rhythm that distinguishes a ‘great’ baker (or a great kneading machine) from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one, according to culturally specific norms. Rhythmic kneading entwines the baker’s body (or kneading machine) in a particular way with the dough, its various ingredients, as well as the surface on which the kneading takes place. Thus, it plays a central role in the broader technical actions that bring bread into being. Multiple actors are at play in these processes. For example, while the baker, with or without the use of machines, may attempt to ‘control’ the behaviour of yeast, as a key ingredient, it is the yeast itself that acts based on and in response to various factors, including its age, the surrounding temperature, and the kneading rhythms. Yeast operates, in this case, according to its own particular rhythm within the broader technological system involved in making bread. Such a rhythmic plurality also marks how guide dogs engage their human counterparts (von der Weid 2019) or how the Dogon in Mali consider the sheen from wild silk as being imbued with a living force (Douny 2013).

By recognising the agency of non-human actors, such as yeast, in technological systems, the anthropology of technology supports broader efforts aimed at transgressing common epistemic dichotomies, including that of nature vs. culture or human vs. non-human (e.g. Descola 2013, Vivieros de Castro 2004; Vilaça 2016). It foregrounds the role of rhythmic techniques in human attempts to ‘control’ or ‘manipulate’ non-human actors, but also the non-human actors’ resistance to, and diverse engagement with, such attempts. For example, the technical processes involved in extracting latex from rubber trees involves applying a toxic chemical solution of ethrel and water to the ‘last cut’ of a tree in order to prolong the sapping period. The ratio of ethrel to water, and the frequency of its use, are interpreted in a moral framework in the relationship between employer and tapper. Bad employers use lower ratios and apply more frequently than their more perceivably benevolent counterparts. Latex extraction thus includes attempts at controlling or, in this case, ‘taming’ trees through working rhythms that maintain this tamed status over multiple days. These rhythms, in turn, account for the characteristics of the rubber tree as an agentive being while also reflecting the rhythmic relations between tappers and their employers (Di Deus 2019). Thereby latex extraction reveals ‘a complex interactive human-plant dynamic’ (Die Deus 2019, 17) that ‘[surpasses] a purely metaphorical dimension of the idea that plants have “agency”’ (Di Deus 2019, 18).

As implied in the tapper-employer relationship, the rhythmic dimensions of technical actions are not necessarily harmonious, equal, or deterministic. On the contrary, anthropologists contend that technologies and their rhythms are not fixed but open to allow for context-specific adaptations (cf. Fisch 2018; Simondon 2017). In other words, the rhythms of technical actions are inherently flexible. They allow for a continuous renegotiation of the relationship between the actors involved, including not only humans, animals, plants, or spirits but also machines. This holds true for various technological relationships, whether these involve bakers and dough, workers and rubber trees, or machine-centric technological systems such as Tokyo’s commuter train network. Michael Fisch (2018), for example, has shown how Tokyo’s commuter train network operates reliably, whilst working nearly always ‘beyond capacity’ (2018, 1). It works not because of a strict, inflexible, and controlling insistence on having ‘zero errors’. Instead, its tight schedule is made possible because Tokyo’s train system is open to rhythmic changes between the humans that operate and use it, as well as its machines, from subtle and finely tuned infrastructural configurations to abrasive techniques of employees shoving passengers into cars before doors close. Regularity in technical systems such as the commuter train network can, thus, emerge through irregular flows between various actors.

Studying technology’s more fluid rhythms thus confronts the myth that technologies are functional because they are external to humans and non-human actors. It challenges the ‘rational linear determinism’ (Coupaye 2022a, 37) of modernist understandings of technology and foregrounds the importance of studying complex socio-technical entanglements.

The resonance of technologies

The rhythmic movements that underlie technologies further generate resonances between technical objects, technical actions, and their milieus. For example, among the Panará in southern Amazonia, hunters’ use of particular weapons such as firearms resonates with ‘the territory, or the land (terra)’ (Bechelany 2019, 20) that they move through. By how a firearm is positioned next to the hunter’s body while moving through the forest, the firearm facilitates circular movements of the hunter, ‘guiding him to always walk towards the same side, taking him back to the point from whence he started off’ (Bechelany 2019, 8). Simultaneously, firearms as a ‘thing of the whites’ (Bechelany 2019, 8) embed the hunt in broader Panará relationships with ‘the whites,’ because firearms, including ammunition, need to be purchased. Firearms, thus, resonate differently than bows in Panará lifeworlds. Bows facilitate different movements through space and, as self-made hunting tools, creating a less dependent relationship with ‘the whites’. Resonances surrounding the ‘technical ensemble’ (Simondon 2017) of the hunt, thus, reveal something bigger about the Panará than ‘just’ how they hunt. They show shifting relationships between the Panará, animals, other (white) humans, and their territory.

Anthropologists of technology have further argued that similar to technical rhythms, technological resonances are not predetermined. Technical actions or objects may be designed to achieve particular goals. However, the achievement of such goals is never guaranteed. A mobile phone may be designed to allow for telecommunication, but telecommunication may not be the dominant function that is being used, if it is at all. Among the Lau speakers of Solomon Islands, for instance, mobile phones were, in 2014 and 2015, used most frequently as flashlights or calculators (Hobbis 2020). Reasons for such deviation from designers’ intent and objects’ primary tendencies are diverse. They depend on context and are rarely explainable solely through arguments that focus on people’s need for resources. When the Lau, an Indigenous language group of approximately 15,000 people in Solomon Islands, needed to make a phone call in 2015, their access to the necessary monetary funds to pay for, and make, phone calls was limited. This facilitated a ‘metered mindset’ (Donner 2015) with many Lau choosing to use mobile phone functions that did not incur additional expenses such as the aforementioned flashlights, which served as primary light source at night in off-grid villages (Hobbis 2020). Simultaneously, money alone did not explain a general reluctance towards making phone calls: phone calls were also discouraged due to perceived possibilities for immoral actions such as the facilitation of extramarital affairs (Hobbis 2020).

In other words, as particular technical actions or objects interact with, or better resonate within, a specific milieu, the actors involved situate these actions and objects in the interests, needs, and values of the milieu as reflected in the Lau’s concerns with the immorality of mobile phones. Technologies may, thus, have some built-in ‘tendencies’ (Leroi-Gourhan 2013), meaning they are likely to be used for a particular purpose (e.g. phones have a tendency to be used to make phone calls). However, anthropologists of technology have shown that usage patterns are not predetermined. Instead, there is substantive diversity in how people engage with technical objects such as mobile phones or how they engage in technical actions, from fire management (Fagundes 2019) to mathematical techniques (Vilaça 2018). Put another way, technologies resonate in unique ways in particular milieus, and technological capacity is only one of multiple factors that determine how they are produced, used, and discarded.

While technologies always ‘have reciprocal relationships with the social systems to which they belong’ (Lemonnier 1989, 156), the degree of such resonance is not always the same. Some technologies, specifically some technical objects, resonate more intensely than others in a given context. As ‘compositional objects’ (Hobbis 2020)—objects that uniquely connect diverse actors within specific milieus through particular technical actions—they have a unique ‘blending power’ (Lemonnier 2014) or ability to engage with processes of social reproduction and enable to share ideas and build social relations. They do so, for example, through their origin myth, and physical modes of use (Lemonnier 2014, 538). These objects may be exceptional in their visibility such as Gawa canoes (Munn 1977) or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw totem poles (Boas 1955), but they may also be seemingly ‘mundane objects’ (Lemonnier 2012) such as pottery among the Marakwet of Kenya (Derbyshire et al. 2020) or yams among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea (Coupaye 2013).

Insofar as they seem mundane, compositional objects can disappear into the background of everyday life, remaining ostensibly insignificant. Yet, they can be anything but inconsequential. The mortuary drums of the Ankave of Papua New Guinea are a good example. When playing and hearing the drums during a mortuary drum beating ceremony, the Ankave have been shown to witness their recently deceased relatives leave the Ankave ‘realm of the living’ (Lemonnier 2012, 72). As this happens, those present at the drum beating ceremony recall their mythic origins and in so doing the drums invoke a whole network of associations in the minds of the participants, ‘connecting cannibal monsters, shamanism, the various origins of illnesses and the ways to cure them, the management of mourning, the representation of life, and the proper conduct in the presence of maternal kin’ (Lemonnier 201, 72–3). The drum beating ceremony, as a technical ensemble marked by redundancy, emphasis, and technical resonance, communicates what words could not about a key dynamic of Ankawe lifeworlds. It brings into being highly idiosyncratic key values and key characteristics of social relations, such as ‘the unspeakable status of maternal kin as gentle life-givers and detestable killers and cannibals’ (Lemonnier 2012, 75). During the ceremony, the drums serve as ‘perissological resonators’ (Lemonnier 2012, 127), i.e. as objects that can achieve something in social relations that words seem unable to do (Weiner 1983).

There are some technical objects that can resonate perissologically across diverse contexts. They are ‘supercompositional’ (Hobbis 2020, 217) in that they ‘bridge social networks and cultural meanings on a sociocultural and technological level’ (Ketterer Hobbis and Hobbis 2024, 5). Smartphones seem to have such a capacity. ‘As purely technological system they are assemblages of constituent materials that act on matter’ (Hobbis 2020, 217), no different in principle from, for example, a hammer (cf. Lemonnier 1992). However, they are special compared to other compositional objects in that their sociality and cultural meaning-making are built into them at a technological level. Smartphones are designed to facilitate social relationships through, for instance, the call function or through social media apps. In addition, they condense cultural meanings through their capacity to store, consume, and produce material cultures such as music (Hobbis 2020). People may choose not to use these social and cultural features of smartphones, yet they still resonate in contextually-specific ways (cf. Horst and Miller 2006; Tenhunen 2018). Hence, some technical objects such as smartphones are particularly interesting for uncovering resonances that are both context specific and that occur in ‘shared worlds’, allowing us to ‘take account of the evident and effective connections between peoples—even those who seem very different from one another’ (Hirsch and Rollason 2019, 10).

The resilience of technologies

Anthropologists of technology also speak to the broader study of continuity and change, as for example in religious conversions (cf. Macdonald 2020) or non-modern people’s encounters with modernity (cf. Robbins and Wardlow 2005). In doing so, they often focus on the idea of resilience, highlighting that technological systems are marked by ‘both stability and transformation’ and that their change is never fully chaotic (Redman 2005, 72) but usually governed by ‘technological choices’ (Lemonnier 1993). Such choices are made by persons or groups of people at all stages of technological processes including design, production, consumption, and disposal. This necessarily challenges deterministic narratives in broader technological discourses and research which often predict ‘rupture’ with a status quo following the emergence, development, or adoption of new technologies.

One good example for such resilience is the adoption and adaptation of data-driven digital technologies. Dominant discussions on digital economics in media studies and adjacent fields suggest that digital technologies, especially smartphones, by design spread the values and practices of capitalism to anyone who uses them, because the data that they collect can be commodified and used to advance capitalist interests (cf. Couldry and Mejias 2019; Sadowski 2020). In other words, societies that have long resisted absorption into industrial-capitalism such as Indigenous hunter-gatherers in Amazonia or horticulturalists in Melanesia, are thought to unavoidably become more, if not completely, industrial-capitalist as a result of their embrace of the smartphone (Hobbis 2021). However, longstanding economic systems and values are much more resilient. Rather than simply assimilating to the economic values embedded in digital designs and submitting to data-driven commodification, Solomon Island horticulturalists have decided to adapt, for instance, Facebook buy-and-sell groups in such a way that they extend and strengthen longstanding reciprocal systems of exchange (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). More so, they undermine the capitalist business practices of urban brick-and-mortar retail stores, while obscuring and disrupting the commodification of their individual data (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). Similarly, in neighboring Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, Melanesian mobile phone users have resisted the capitalist economics of international copyright laws to continue longstanding music sharing practices as ‘a constituent part of social relations’ (Stern 2014, 2). Here, music tasks and sharing networks increasingly expand beyond immediate kin, enabled by mobile phones (Crowdy and Horst 2022). In other words, because of digital technologies, Melanesian systems of circulation, sharing, and exchange are changing, but this change is resilient. It builds on existing systems and values, rather than simply dismantling them.

Anthropologists of technology have engaged with this resilience by interrogating context-specific knowledge or ‘social representations’ (Lemonnier 1989) regarding the choices and constraints of particular technologies (Lemonnier 1992). These social representations are crucial for understanding why some technologies succeed, and others fail, and why success and failure are disconnected from the modernist focus on technological tendencies for performing an intended task. Studying social representations allows us to understand the resilience of particular ways of making and doing things as contextually more ‘effective’ even if not more ‘efficient’. Consider, for example, the commercial failures of some airplanes, such as the Mitsubishi MU-2. The Mitsubishi MU-2 was, in terms of its performance as a machine, superior to its competitors (Lemonnier 1989). However, it encountered two problems in its social representation: It had an unusual shape, and its design ‘required new piloting procedures’ (Lemonnier 1989, 167). Because of these problems with social representation, this particular type of airplane not only failed to achieve its commercial potential, but also shaped design possibilities over the long term. Once a particular design fails, it is unlikely to be re-introduced. ‘Designers themselves, at least most of them, only produce machines that fit their own representation of what [a technology] should look like’ (Lemonnier 1989, 168). An already-failed design is basically the opposite, a context-specific representation of what a technology should not look like.

Of course, technological choices also reflect context-specific power relations. As designers or funders of particular technologies that are being developed or implemented decide on their design, they not only consider material functions ‘but also [consciously, or not] express and coercively reinforce beliefs about the differential allocation of power, prestige, and wealth in society’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 283). For example, when Indonesia launched its first satellite system in 1976, it not only served the purpose of transmitting telephone and TV signals, but also advanced the political visions of government actors, engineers, and entrepreneurs within the Suharto regime (Barker 2005). Satellites were here discursively embedded in nationalist struggles, the defeat of Japanese and Dutch colonialism, and the promise of a unified Indonesia through control over ‘electronic media’ with ‘communications signals [passing] as the truest and purest medium for the new nation’ (Barker 2005, 711). These nationalist unification discourses gave shape to Indonesia’s satellite programme ever since. They were the reason why a particular satellite system was developed, why Indonesia became the first so-called ‘developing country’ to have its own satellite system, and they have informed how satellite technologies in the country have evolved since (Barker 2005). Simultaneously and importantly, these nationalist satellite discourses were closely aligned with pre-existing localised discourses surrounding technology and nationalism, rather than creating a fundamentally new techno-political system. Satellites in Indonesia, thus, exemplify the resilience of broader socio-technical dynamics, even when seemingly fundamentally new technologies are introduced in a particular context.

Technological change also opens up opportunities for challenging dominant systems, as the practices and discourses surrounding adoption and adaptation processes are rarely, if ever, unified. Instead, they are sites of ‘technological dramas’ that allow for the renegotiation of (power) relationships around new technical objects and related technical actions through ‘user appropriation, user modification, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations, as a series of counterstatements in a historical discourse’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 285). For example, as mobile phones are being integrated into the contested milieu of religious conversions to Pentecostalism in Kinshasa, they have become a new battleground over morally acceptable femininities and intimate relations (Pype 2016). In rural India, access to smartphones among Bagdis, the lowest caste group, has facilitated an uneasiness among elites, alongside a somewhat contrarian pride in lower classes over inclusion in hi-tech India (Tenhunen 2022, 348–9). Importantly, though, these contestations exist by no means outside of particular, context-specific social representations. Instead, they all reflect broader societal dynamics, such as those surrounding Pentecostal conversion. Each actor inside of these technological dramas ‘[infuses]’ technologies ‘with their own logic’ (Mahias 1993, 158) seeking to assert their own respective vision for new technological futures, that are inevitably both stable and transformative, resilient in a context of change.

Finally, anthropologists of technology have variously highlighted how resilience is visible in the continuities of some technologies, and specific technical objects and actions, across long periods of time. Lithic technologies, for instance, not only predate the existence of Homo sapiens (Harmand et al. 2015) but are present today, in the technological systems surrounding pestle and mortars in kitchens, laboratories, and pharmacies. Similarly, dry stone masonry, commonly used in medieval architecture across the British Isles as well as medieval Great Zimbabwe, continues to exist as a construction technology, with new dry stone trends emerging in urban locales or as feature of tourist spaces (cf. Mhairi 2015; Sagiya 2022). Such resilient technologies persist even when seemingly ‘better’ technical objects or actions are available. A group of Amazonian lake fishermen, for instance, agreed to, and even pushed for, a ban of nets to catch the Pirarucu fish, even though nets combined with motor boats are much more efficient at catching Pirarucu than the longstanding combination of canoes, paddles, and harpoons (Sautchuk 2019). This rejection of the net and resilience of the harpoon is at least partially due to the rhythmic relations between harpooner and fish and how these rhythmic relations resonate within a broader ‘(harpoonmorphic) subjectivity in these lakes’ (Sautchuk 2019, 188). By choosing the ‘effective’ harpoon over the ‘efficient’ net, fishermen sought to maintain broader human-non-human relations expanding far beyond the technical object itself. They reveal the fundamental entanglements between rhythm, resonance, and resilience.

Conclusions

The anthropology of technology continues to make significant contributions to understandings of human-non-human relations. By carefully dissecting the complex meanings of ‘technology’, anthropology demonstrates how dangerous it is to conflate ‘technology’ with ‘hi-tech’, i.e. with ‘advanced’ tools and machinery. Such conflation is widespread, as when hearing someone say ‘I hate technology’, when what they are really saying is ‘I hate digital technology’. Anthropologists study ‘technology’ in all its diversity, without imposing hierarchies such as ‘low-tech’ and ‘hi-tech’ from the start. This allows for valuing and thinking critically about how old, even ancient, technological systems continue to contribute significantly to lives around the world. It also enables the use of the notion of ‘technology’ as a jumping off point to intervene in broader, interdisciplinary debates on what the term ‘technology’ may mean. Anthropologists of technology tend to recognise that the technical always entails an interplay between material, conventions, and beliefs, often according to vernacular values and logics.

By searching for the interplay between constraints and choices through a focus on actions-upon-matter, anthropologists’ understanding of ways of being, social continuities, and change are unavoidably grounded in the materialism of technical systems: to open up a wine bottle without a corkscrew, for example, clever means must be devised (Lemonnier 2014). Investigating technologies through an emphasis on action-upon-matter opens up insights into a quintessential part of the anthropic—that is to say, human—experience. While economic anthropology has (and critiques) Homo economicus, the self-interested, rational person (cf. Yan 2020), the anthropology of technology has Homo habilis: the ‘handy’ person, a point in physical anthropology wherein our distinctive humanity was established through tool use. A better name may be Homo transformatio, the ‘transforming’ person, because, that is what technology, and being human, is really about: transformative processes through actions-upon-matter that rhythmically and resiliently resonate with and between human and non-human actors, and that continuously shape and remake the world.

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Note on contributors

Geoffrey Hobbis an anthropologist and assistant professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group, Wageningen University. His research uses the anthropology of technics to understand emerging digital cultures and societies with a current focus on the digital transformation of non-industrial economies and diverse markets.

Geoffrey Hobbis, Assistant Professor, Wageningen University, Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-8644-6916

Stephanie Ketterer is an anthropologist based at the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University. She is also affiliated with the Department of Knowledge Infrastructures, University of Groningen. Her research brings together anthropologies of technics, infrastructures and the state, with a current focus on contested data infrastructures in rural environments.

Stephanie Ketterer, Associate Professor, Wageningen University, Sociology of Development and Change, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-7038-7413

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Architecture

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:29:07 +0000

The interior of a traditional Japanese house in Takayama, Japan. Photo by David A. LaSpina, 2009

Marcel Vellinga Jorge Tomasi

Oxford Brookes University, Universidad Nacional de Jujuy

Initially published 29 Feb 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24architecture

Abstract:

Anthropologists have shown an interest in architecture since at least the end of the nineteenth century, though not to the extent that may be expected given the prominent position that architecture plays in all human societies. Notwithstanding their relatively marginal position within the discipline, anthropological studies of architecture have made some significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamic and mutually constitutive relationships between architecture, culture, and environment. These contributions include the practice of making and its central role in the development of architecture over time; processes of change and how to understand and deal with them; and anthropology’s contribution to the study of architecture as a professional discipline. The anthropological study of architecture, defined as a continuous process of designing, making, and dwelling, requires a holistic approach that considers the diverse material, social, and symbolic registers of architecture, as well as its various scales. Such an approach can pave the way for more collaborative projects between anthropologists and architects that can explore the characteristics and possibilities of both existing and new forms of designing, making, and dwelling. Thus, this entry looks at the history of anthropology’s relationship with architecture to contribute to current debates about how both disciplines can forge new practices through making.

Introduction

Architecture is part of the history and everyday life of humanity. Not only do people live within architecture, they exist with it, progressing through life in a process of mutual constitution (Bugallo and Tomasi 2012). The very experience of living or dwelling ‘in, at, on, or about’ (Oliver 1987, 7) architectural environments and structures on a daily basis has led to a certain difficulty in comprehending what architecture is: it is difficult to define something that is so evident that it has become naturalised. Academic and professional discourse on architecture has tended to dissect the concept itself, separating the practices and experiences of, on the one hand, creating architecture and, on the other, using it. In the process, it has generated a rupture between its ‘material’ and ‘social’ or ‘immaterial’ aspects. As with the study of material culture in general, the anthropological challenge has been to dissolve a deeply ingrained dichotomy between subject and object (Miller 2005), and to focus instead on architecture as a totality, looking at its diverse material, social, and symbolic registers, as well as its various scales (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Vellinga 2007; Buchli 2013).

Architecture, of course, can be defined in many ways. In this entry we approach architecture as a physical entity, constituted as a process and shaped by the amalgamation of sets of diverse material elements. These material elements, in turn, are produced using a series of technologies and are arranged in such a way that they conduct the flow of physical forces towards the ground, regulating and distributing the energies of the physical environment. For example, the relationships between beams, columns, and walls must be balanced so as to allow the structure of a building to support the load of a roof. The type of relations between these material elements and their intrinsic conditions emerge from a diverse set of environmental and cultural variables, and from a range of material, spatial, and technological choices and options, mediated by possibilities, restrictions, and socially constituted preferences (Bourdieu 1977; Lemonnier 1993). The arrangement of the material elements shapes three-dimensional forms, generates textures, and delimits and characterises places, creating interior and exterior spaces of diverse character. One might consider that, ‘the spaces of dwelling are not already given, in the layout of the building, but are created in movement. That is to say, they are performed’ (Ingold 2013, 85; emphasis in original). The arrangement of the material elements emerges from the ideas, needs, and expectations of a society. Social actors participate in the production and reproduction of architecture—inculcating societal norms as much as enabling disruptive and transformative actions within the physical entity (Bourdieu 1977).

Our focus in this entry on the physical existence of architecture is not accidental. On the contrary, it is based on the observation that both anthropology and architecture need to take this material condition seriously: as, indeed, do the people who produce, inhabit, or otherwise experience architecture. For anthropology, this involves looking at the way in which materiality participates in the shaping of life and engaging with the very making of things. For architecture, it implies an understanding that the objects that are designed and built are part of social networks, and that their production cannot be reduced to individual creativity.

Anthropologists and architecture

In general, anthropologists have tended to study architecture as ‘a way into’ a society or culture. Houses (or, more rarely, other building types) have been of interest because they allowed the anthropologist to study and understand social relationships, cultural values, and symbolic meanings; the cultural context was normally the real focus of attention, rather than the architecture per se. In this respect, anthropologists have approached architecture differently from architects, for whom the cultural context (when it is considered in the first place) has been mainly a means to understand architecture and inform future design (Vellinga 2016). This different perspective may have contributed to the overstated claim that anthropology has never paid attention to architecture. Rather than being uninterested in architecture as such, for much of the twentieth century anthropology showed little interest in the material aspects of architecture and was more focused on its ‘intangible’ features. What lay ‘beyond’ a building (that is, the cultural values, beliefs, and relationships that a building expressed or embodied) was seen to be more important than the skilled practices that enabled its design and construction, or the material features that resulted from them.

The central question, more often than not, has been ‘how are they [built forms, built environments and constructive processes] imbued with cultural significance at all levels (material, symbolic, social)?’ (Amerlinck 2001, 3). To answer this question, anthropologists for a long time tried to ‘read’ buildings as texts, documenting how age, gender, power, or status relationship were symbolically reflected in design features, spatial layouts, or decorative elements.

This perspective on architecture goes all the way back to the beginnings of anthropology as an academic discipline. Most famously, Lewis Henry Morgan’s classic Houses and house-life of the American Aborigines (2003) argued that extended family households, which Morgan believed to be typical of pre-colonial Native American societies, practiced what he called ‘communism in living’—a communal way of life that found expression in the design and spatial layout of multi-family houses found across the continent. For instance, the Haudenosaunee or ‘people of the long-house’ constructed a variety of houses up to 100 feet long, with a central hallway giving access to subdivisions about seven feet long, with shared fire pits to accommodate up to twenty families. Of course, how architecture was read could differ between anthropologists. To Morgan (1877), the design, materiality, and construction of pre-colonial Native American buildings were indicators of the comparative social evolutionary status of the societies concerned. On the other hand, to Pierre Bourdieu (1973), the Kabyle house in Algeria illustrated the way in which the cultural characteristics of a specific society, like notions of purity and pollution, were objectified in the spatial layout of homes. Traditional Kabyle houses were divided by a low wall that created two distinct, oppositional spaces. The larger one, about two-thirds of the area, was elevated and was reserved for humans, especially guests. The smaller, darker part was the place for animals, but also where sexual intercourse and childbirth took place.

Many other ethnographic studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included information on settlement patterns, building forms, and spatial arrangements around the world to help gain an understanding of social structures and cultural value systems. For example, Raymond Firth studied the Tikopia houses in the Solomon Islands, noting that, even though ‘the external aspect [...] has little to recommend it’, an analysis of its spatial arrangements ‘will lead us immediately to some of the most complex features of the native social organization’ (1961, 75). Gender and status relationships were expressed through the allocation of spaces, the names of building elements, and seating arrangements, amongst other things. Altogether, anthropologists have provided an extraordinarily rich ethnographic record of the various ways in which architecture is intricately related to cultural values, social identities, and political or economic relationships.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in the anthropology of architecture, especially in the study of houses. In line with more general anthropological perspectives at the time, much of this work was concerned with the analysis of symbolic meanings as expressed in architectural form, spatial organisation, or methods of construction. For example, various anthropologists commented on the fact that traditional houses across insular Southeast Asia were anthropomorphised structures, with particular building elements (doors, façades, posts) symbolically referred to by their inhabitants as body elements (eyes, face, legs). This practice reflected a widespread tendency in the region to see houses as living entities (Waterson 1990). In the Amazon region, anthropologists noted that Indigenous longhouses expressed distinct gender relationships through the allocation and ceremonial use of spaces, with a clear axis separating a male end at the front of the house from a female end at the back (Hugh-Jones 1979). In all these instances, architecture was studied as an object, independent from any human interaction.

From the 1980s onwards, many anthropologists have been critiqued for treating buildings as fixed and finished objects and for ignoring the dynamic and contested nature of meanings and human behaviour, especially in the case of symbolic studies that treat buildings as ‘microcosms’ or structural models of cultural and cosmic orders. The process of ‘making’ architecture has commonly been ignored, whilst meanings have generally been assumed to be intrinsically present in buildings and to already exist prior to their objectification in architecture. In so doing, the agency of people (as designers, builders, and inhabitants, and as members of a community or society) and their ability to change or adapt architecture was disregarded at the same time as social and cultural relationships and identities were essentialised. In other words, ‘an illusion of certainty and uniformity’ was created that misleadingly suggested that buildings can ever be complete, and that architectural symbolism is arranged in exclusive and orderly ways (Ellen 1986, 28).

This renewed anthropological interest coincided with an increasing attention in architectural circles in the contribution that anthropology could make to the field of architecture; not just in relation to the so-called traditional or ‘vernacular’ architecture of the world (Oliver 1979), but to architecture as a design discipline (Toy 1996). An interest in the architecture of ‘Others’, the traditional subject of anthropology, had of course always been present in architecture (see Vitruvius 2012, Laugier 1977 and Semper 1989). However, the interest now shifted towards what anthropology could contribute to the discipline in terms of theory and methodology, and how both disciplines could collaborate more closely.

Building on the late-twentieth century studies that aimed to document and analyse specific building traditions around the world (mainly, though not solely, in southeast Asia and Latin America), attention began to shift to more thematic and theoretical issues during the early twenty-first century. Discourses around materiality, consumption, and agency gave rise to an increased interest in the anthropology of the home and on what goes on ‘behind closed doors’, inside architecture (Miller 2001; Daniels 2010; Pink et al. 2017). Expanding beyond the narrow focus on houses and homes, anthropologists also explored the processual nature of architecture and the way in which it may play a part in processes of political contestation, ethnic identification, or social gentrification. For example, among the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the construction of increasingly larger and more decorated traditional houses, using modern materials and technologies, was shown to help renegotiate long-established social status relationships, revealing the active, rather than passive, role played by the house in the constitution of society (Vellinga 2004). Conversely, Melanie van der Hoorn (2009) studied how the active destruction of unwanted buildings helped redefine national identities, both in times of conflict (as during the siege of Sarajevo in former Yugoslavia from 1992 till 1996) and post-conflict (such as after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In line with similarly burgeoning interests in the relationship between anthropology and design, studies of craft, skill, and technology began to explore the role of ‘making’ and design in architecture (Ingold 2013), while ethnographic studies of architectural firms aimed to analyse the culture of professional architectural practice (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019). Much of this work involved collaborations between anthropologists and architects. Altogether, it has given rise to ongoing discussions about what architecture is, about how it can be studied from an anthropological perspective, and about how the relationship between anthropology and architecture should be conceptualised (Amerlinck 2001; Jasper 2019; Stender et al. 2022). The publication of a number of textbooks that aim to introduce the anthropological study of architecture, written by both anthropologists and architects, indicates that the subject finally ‘arrived’ in anthropological discourse at exactly the time when anthropological approaches, in parallel, have entered architectural discussion and practice (for example, Buchli 2013; Lucas 2020). As will be seen, however, the characteristics and scope of this disciplinary ‘encounter’ still require exploration.

Making architecture

The word ‘architecture’ comes from the Greek words arkhi, meaning ‘master’ or ‘chief’, and téktōn, meaning ‘carpenter’ or ‘builder’, referring to the skills for making a building. ‘Architecture’, then, as a concept, refers to the physical process that constitutes a building. A building is formed through the transformation of materials and their particular arrangement in space, using a variety of technologies, and by actions that emerge from the ways in which the physical skills of the craftsmen join with the materials (Ingold 2013). Understanding architecture as a physical process implies a recognition of ‘making’ as a practice that is sustained over time. Buildings are not made after they have been designed and before they are used—the process of constructing them is continuous. Unlike architects, anthropologists problematise the distinction between design, construction, and use (RIBA 2020). For example, a 1998 ethnography of Aymara communities in Bolivia proposed that the act of building houses is an ‘art of memory’, whereby relationships with the ancestors of the household group are reproduced and strengthened through the process of making and the songs that are sung during the building process (Arnold 1998). Once the buildings are made, they continue to be adapted, repaired, or extended.

A concern for manual building practices and crafts was very prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly due to the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement and in particular William Morris’s position in favour of artisanal work and the collective experience of production, in contrast to the alienation of mechanised production systems emerging from the Industrial Revolution (Sennett 2008). In anthropology, an early interest in the practices involved in the creation of buildings was shown through the documentation of building materials and techniques (Boas 1966; Malinowski 1935). Later, a more systematic approach towards an ‘anthropology of technology’ emerged in France around the figure of anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1935; 1968), whose concept of ‘total social facts’ encouraged anthropologists to see technology and social phenomena as deeply intertwined. Building on Mauss’s writings, anthropologists began to see technical practices such as sawing, cutting, binding, or moulding as embodied thoughts rather than mere mechanical actions. André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) introduced the concept of ‘operating chain’ (chaîne opératoire), a methodological tool for the analysis of processes of making. More recently, this concept has been problematised for its sequential and fragmented character. Instead, some anthropologists propose an understanding of making processes as flows: ‘an unbroken, contrapuntal coupling of a gestural dance with a modulation of the material’ (Ingold 2013, 26).

The process of decision-making has also been at the centre of anthropological enquiries into making, starting discussions of the social and cultural reasons for ‘technological choices’. Pierre Lemonnier (1992; 1993) proposed this framework as a critical counterpoint to prevalent ideas of ‘technological determinism’, the notion that technology is a primary influence on social relationships. As in other fields, the use of the notion of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977)—the habits, skills, and tastes through which people with shared cultural backgrounds perceive and experience the world—has been proposed as a way to overcome the apparent dichotomy between the unconscious reproduction of structural patterns and purely subjective action. Specifically, anthropologists have shown that builders have margins of action within a wide, though not infinite, universe of available options that emerge from the material conditions of the actions and demands that produce them. They choose from these options based on their habitus. Thus, within the multiplicity of ways of making in a given place, it is possible to recognise ‘family resemblances’ among different procedures (Dietler and Herbich 1998). Roof structures in traditional Indonesian houses, for example, are made in a number of ways, resulting in distinctive roof forms in different parts of the archipelago that are far from identical, but that are nonetheless closely related to one another (Waterson 1990).

The collective nature of making has also been prevalent in recent anthropological thought. The apprentice-style ethnographic work of Trevor Marchand, who worked as a novice under the expert guidance of master builders in Yemen (2001) and Mali (2009), and who used this specific learning experience to collect ethnographic information, has shown the importance of training and knowledge transfer in the development of craftsmen’s practical skills, know-how, and values around discipline and commitment. Marchand’s work shows the importance of action in ethnographic research, as opposed to pure verbal communication, in a context in which ‘the builder's apprenticeship served to enhance concepts and judgements regarding space and assembly through training, practice, and inhabiting the “process of making”’ (Marchand 2001, 243). By actively producing mud bricks, constructing walls and ceilings, and sculpting roof crenelations, Marchand gained first-hand knowledge of construction practices—knowledge that would be difficult to gain otherwise or to convey in words alone.

Collective or collaborative making is also explored anthropologically, focusing not so much on the relations between the craftsmen but on their relationship with the materials. The actions of the builder operate with the material, rather than on it, insofar as their forces meet in mutual recognition. Materials and builders are in a continuous and sensitive movement within a shared process of making, ‘like melodies in counterpoint’ (Ingold 2013, 107). Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold invite anthropology to engage in what they call ‘correspondence’ with materials and architecture: to participate ‘in building relationships and making things’ so as to enable both disciplines to grow based more on improvisation rather than on innovation (2013, 148).

Architecture and change

In keeping with recent attention to making and collaboration, recent scholarship has shown how architecture is not static, but is instead a creative and ever-evolving process through which people—as active agents, and using their past experience, knowledge, skills, and crafts—create environments that become places for dwelling or other purposes. Architecture evolves in line with changing cultural contexts, as well as dynamic environmental contexts (which were hitherto largely ignored in the anthropological study of architecture), and with current needs, ambitions, and requirements. In most instances, this process involves material construction, and it is this material aspect of architecture—the fact that it is made of stone, wood, steel, or earth—that often gives the impression that it is fixed and ‘concrete’. In reality, the materials that architecture is made of are as fluid and temporal as the cultural relationships that it embodies and the environments that encompass it (Ingold 2007). In time, the mechanical or chemical properties of architecture may transform in response to temperature fluctuations or physical forces; they may move, harden, or disintegrate, for example. In response to such material changes, as well as to larger environmental or cultural transformations, buildings may be adapted, moved, conserved, restored, or demolished. Consequently, at no point in time is architecture ever truly complete or finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014).

The dynamic nature of architecture is not only evident from the material-making process, but is also manifested in the activities that take place within it. Early anthropological studies, especially those that regarded architecture as an embodiment of cosmological relationships, often described spatial patterns of use in a rather static way, correlating particular activities (and the categories of people that performed them) with certain buildings or particular parts of them. Thus, a kitchen might be identified as the domain of women who use it to cook, or a monastery as the exclusive preserve of the members of a religious order. A famous example of this approach is provided by Clark E. Cunningham’s study of the Atoni house in Indonesia (1964). Postulating that a house is ‘a mechanical model of the cosmos as conceived by a people’ (66), Cunningham argued that the use of space was strictly defined in terms of a number of dualist oppositions (male-female, high-low, old-young) that determined who could use which space at what time and for what purpose. Often, as in the case of the Atoni, such patterns were seen to be customary or traditional and were believed to have been handed down from times immemorial. As such, they were implicitly perceived as fixed and repeated in the same way in the same location.

Recently, anthropological scholarship has put more emphasis on the dynamic and changing nature of the activities that take place in architecture. The things that people do in or around buildings (cooking, meeting, working, worshipping, cleaning, socialising, sleeping, and so on) are processes through which everyday life is continuously constituted and reproduced (Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Daniels 2010). While human activities will often be regulated and rather routine, they are never exactly the same every time they are performed, nor do they always take place in the exact same place—even if the people who perform them think or say they do. At the same time that environmental and cultural contexts change, so too will the activities that take place in or around architecture be adapted through continuous modifications and improvisations. In their study of energy demand reduction initiatives in the UK, Sarah Pink et al. (2017) showed that people might sometimes move their activities to different parts of a house to enable them to do two things at the same time: for example, a kitchen would be used to prepare food but might simultaneously also become a place to catch up on an urgent work email. New mobile digital technologies have played an important part in this, enabling people to more easily ‘move’ through buildings as they live out their lives. Functions of spaces may change, furniture and other objects may be rearranged, and activities may be relocated in response to events, challenges, or opportunities, making architecture ‘an ongoingly changing digital, material, sensory, emotional and atmospheric environment’ (Pink et al. 2017, 70).

Of course, the on-going changes in the things people do are intimately related to changes in the material aspects of architecture. ‘The most fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there, but is always going on’ (Ingold 2001, 172; emphasis in original). This has led to the adoption of a ‘dwelling perspective’ as opposed to a ‘building perspective’ in the anthropology of architecture. The latter is the perspective of the architect, where a building is designed and constructed and consequently used. From this point of view, a building will be ‘finished’, and ready for use, once the design and building stage are over. A dwelling perspective, on the other hand, sees the design, construction, and use of architecture forming a continuous process of ‘dwelling in the world’ (Ingold 2001, 185). As people dwell, their activities take place in the context of architecture, which partly defines them but is also defined by them; in the process, architecture, in its material form, may be designed, constructed, inhabited, adapted, renovated, conserved, abandoned, or demolished, as needs, opportunities, or requirements change, as part of an on-going process. These changes are creative and meaningful even if they are not always recognised as such, and often have no clear beginnings or endings. The dynamic nature of dwelling impacts the use and meaning of the architecture and forms part of its on-going state of becoming. Architecture, as such, does not have a clearly defined starting point, nor is it ever finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014); it is ‘a process that is continuously going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment’ (Ingold 2001, 188).

The continuous nature of architecture raises questions about how to deal with change. Changes may be manifold and take many forms that may interrelate in all kinds of ways. Physical alterations to architecture may or may not combine with changes in use or shifting meanings. They may raise questions or concerns about identity, heritage, and authenticity, or they may be applauded and encouraged as signs of development and progress (Orbaşli and Vellinga 2020). The way in which communities deal with such changes can reveal the significance of architecture in their lives. Anthropologists have studied architectural change in a number of contexts. Most of them have considered the impact of modernity on traditional buildings in the form of, for instance, new materials or technologies, and studied the ramifications of change in terms of status or gender relationships (Schefold et al. 2003). They have also studied architectural change in relation to heritage management and conservation. For example, a study of the city of Djenné, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mali, identified contrasting perspectives on how the city’s building heritage should be managed: that of the local participants, to whom the city is an everyday place to live in, and that of (international) heritage experts, who regard it as universal heritage to be preserved (Joy 2012). Similar discrepancies in perspectives have been identified all over the world (Tomasi and Barada 2021). Interestingly, the development of new architectural forms as a result of processes of cultural change (for example, multi-generational homes, communal living experiments, or so-called ‘tiny houses’) has received less anthropological attention thus far.

Architecture as discipline

The anthropology of architecture has also been affected by the disciplinary institutionalisation of architecture. This has involved the emergence of the role of the architect, separated from the role of the builder, the former being the designer or creator of a set of design concepts and the latter being the maker who materialises those ideas. Both architect and builder work in a hierarchical relationship in which the former dominates the latter (Carpo 2011, Ingold 2013). The beginning of this distinction can be located in the European Renaissance and goes hand-in-hand with the contemporary idealisation of Greco-Roman antiquity. From the seventeenth century onwards, architecture was institutionalised by the arts Academies (particularly the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), which acted as the principal institutions for artistic education and took the lead in the provision of architectural training (Stevens 1998).

One way in which anthropology has problematised the increasing professionalisation of architectural practice, and the subsequent hierarchical nature of relations between builders and architects, is through studies of how construction practices, even in traditional contexts with supposedly more symmetrical relations, are characterised by hierarchies, expert knowledge, and strict power relations, without being explicitly mediated by professional roles (Marchand 2009, 2012; Tomasi 2012). Through professionalisation of the discipline, the architect is commonly presented as a kind of external, expert mediator between people and their spaces, restricting the margins of action of others. However, as previous stated, the architect does not absolutely determine the ways of dwelling (De Certeau 1984). Many other actors, including owners, builders, ritual experts, and, in modern societies, planners, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders, play major parts in the development of houses and other buildings. Within this paradigm, recent anthropological approaches have shifted their perspective from studying ‘architecture without architects’ (Rudofsky 1964) to studying ‘architecture with architects’ (Stender et al. 2022). An early, ground-breaking study of the social foundations of professional architectural prestige, success, and taste argued that successful architects do not owe their success so much to genius as to their social background: going to the right schools and aligning themselves with influential colleagues appeared to be more important than talent (Stevens 1998). Along the same lines, a number of ethnographic studies of design processes in mainstream architectural studios have shown how architectural design is less of an individual pursuit characterised by moments of brilliance, inspiration, and innovation—as it is often portrayed—than it is a collaborative, routine, and sometimes slow process of improvisation, and the recycling, repurposing, and rescaling of existing ideas and practices (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019).

Considering that the establishment of national architectural canons was based on European models and became a central part of imperial ‘civilising’ projects in various parts of the world, current discussions have also aimed to rethink the relationship between architecture and anthropology, seeking new forms of mutual transformation and disciplinary action in design processes, as part of a decolonisation of practices (Stender et al. 2022). Decolonisation cannot undo the systematic stigmatisation and transformation of other, local, or Indigenous forms of architecture that became part of the ideological projects of many nation-states; however, efforts to decolonise look to local and Indigenous architecture to make visible the perspectives, demands, and struggles of diverse oppressed or minority groups. Local vernacular architecture is also often seen as a source of inspiration in relation to discussions about architectural sustainability (Vellinga 2013).

Finally, architecture has pursued new disciplinary roles that transcend individual creative genius and that move towards more collective forms of production (Blundell Jones et al. 2005). Thus far, anthropology has had very limited involvement in such pursuits, beyond occasional collaborations such as that between the anthropologist William Mangin and the architect John F.C. Turner during the 1950s and 1960s in Peru (Mangin and Turner 1969). Similar collaborations are today found in the field of design anthropology (for example, Gunn et al. 2013; Drazin 2019), which aims to imagine new forms of co-creation and collaborative production. In turn, what distinguishes an ‘anthropology of architecture’ and an ‘architectural anthropology’, as has been proposed in recent years (Stender et al 2022), is moving beyond the study of architecture that already exists towards the generative possibilities of an anthropological perspective that seeks to modify the world we inhabit (Ingold 2022). The challenge of ‘corresponding’ between disciplines requires a reflection on respective disciplinary biases and assumptions as well as a willingness to engage in forms of communication that focus on the architectural object and the practices related to its production. For architecture, this cannot be limited to the use of ‘ethnographic tools’ without the application of an interpretative theoretical framework, as noted by Marie Stender (2017). For anthropology, it requires an intention to move beyond studying what people do and an engagement with materiality and processes of making.

Conclusion

One of the foci of this entry has been what we call the ‘continuous becoming of architecture’, or how architecture is comprised of a constant process of designing, making, and dwelling that presents a relative stability within dynamic flows of people, materials, and environments. For decades now, these flows have been at the centre of an anthropological enquiry to understand ‘how the things that people make, make people’ (Miller 2005, 38). As in the case of material culture more generally, it is a dialectical relationship, in which architecture, culture, and environment mutually constitute one another. Architecture is not simply a way into cultural values or a response to environmental conditions that already exist; rather, it plays an active part in their formation and reproduction, just as much as the cultural values and environmental conditions help define the design, use, and meaning of the architecture.

The question of the relationships between people and their architecture continues to be at the core of anthropological interest in architecture. Such discussions require a holistic view that does not divide that which in our daily lives operates simultaneously. We design, build, and inhabit in overlapping moments. We seek shelter from a natural and social world, we arrange spaces that provide us with comfort and pleasure, and we define and present ourselves as persons through architectural actions that we cannot separate, nor prioritise, in clearly defined ways. Architecture can be designed and built, conserved or revived, or imposed or demolished to shape cultural identities and influence environmental conditions. It can be a place of comfort and protection, a model of the cosmos, a tool in environmental revival, and a source of pride, as much as it can be a prison, a place of fear and abuse, or a source of environmental damage.

Recognising the dynamic totality of architecture is a necessary starting-point for any shared project between architecture and anthropology. Such projects cannot be limited to understanding what already exists; rather, they should explore more egalitarian and collective approaches that allow for the creation of new forms of architectural production in pursuit of more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable ways of dwelling.

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Note on contributors

Marcel Vellinga is Professor of Anthropology and Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Holding a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University (the Netherlands), he has taught and published on a variety of topics including vernacular architecture, the anthropology of architecture, rural architectural regeneration, and Minangkabau architecture.

Prof Marcel Vellinga, School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom. mvellinga@brookes.ac.uk. https://orcid.org/000b0-0002-1390-3925

Jorge Tomasi is an architect (Universidad de Buenos Aires), with a Master in Social Anthropology (ISES-IDAES-UNSAM) and a doctorate in Geography (Universidad de Buenos Aires). He is a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and Professor at Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. He is an expert member of ISCEAH and CIAV-ICOMOS.

Jorge Tomasi, Rivadavia 642, Tilcara, Jujuy, Argentina. jorgetomasi@hotmail.com. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8568-4426

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Cannibalism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 02:06:17 +0000

Shirley Lindenbaum

Graduate Center, City University of New York

Initially published 5 Jun 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21cannibalism

Abstract:

Cannibalism, the eating of one’s own kind, is a practice that occurs in both humans and non-humans. Some people consumed their own kin to ensure that their spirits joined those of their ancestors; others ate their enemies in anger in the context of warfare, in some cases to acquire the powers of those they had defeated; and others ate sorcerers who they thought brought them disease and death. Archaeologists provided evidence of prehistoric cannibalism among different peoples as well as among many of our ancestors. In the twentieth century, anthropologists published well-documented accounts of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. Resisting the image of primitive people as cannibals, anthropologists often wrote about cannibalism as a metaphor, in the form of human alligators, zombies, and witches. In the 1970s cannibalism was at the centre of three widely-publicised debates. The first two featured a small number of distinguished scholars who held different views about who had the right to speak about and to evaluate conflicting claims about other people’s pasts. The third was provoked by one anthropologist’s argument that, except in the case of cannibalism in the context of survival, the cannibals described by anthropologists were mythical creatures. This gave rise to a passionate response by anthropologists who viewed the critique as an attack on their discipline in general, and on their research methods. Contemporary descriptions of cannibalism, seeming to echo the archaeological accounts, now argue that in one form or another, we are all cannibals.

Introduction

The term 'cannibal', defined as eating one’s own kind, is a legacy of Columbus’ encounter in 1492 with the Caribs of the Antilles, said to have been consumers of human flesh. Studies documenting the practice of cannibalism among non-humans, identified in more than 1,500 species (Polis 1981: 225), have led to the distinction between human and non-human cannibalism. The term anthropophagy, from the Greek anthropophagia (‘the eating of men’), is retained to refer to the eating of humans by other humans. Cannibalism is used to describe both the human and non-human practice.

Cannibalism represents the ultimate forbidden behaviour for many Western societies, something to relegate to other cultures, other times, and other places. New archaeological research has provided evidence that long before the invention of metals, before Egypt’s pyramids were built, before the origins of agriculture, and before the explosion of Paleolithic cave art, cannibalism could already be found among many different people, as well as among many of our ancestors (White 2001: 88).

As this entry illustrates, the cannibal was also an object of fascination in the ancient literature recorded by historians, theologians, and philosophers, and then in the accounts of explorers, merchants, and ambassadors during Europe’s Age of Exploration. Distant people were often portrayed as cannibals: that is, as strange, animal-like creatures. In the twentieth century, anthropologists depicted cannibalism as another example of the many ways of being human, answering the question of what the practice meant for those who consumed the dead. Some people ate the bodies of enemies killed during warfare, and some killed and ate sorcerers who they believed had brought them death and misfortune. Others consumed the bodies of deceased relatives in mortuary ceremonies, expressing love and grief for those they had lost, a sentiment that unites us as human beings. The diversity of cannibalism as practice, and of the contexts in which it occurred, is evident in the three regions in the world where the practice has received the most attention, namely Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa. In the 1970s, cannibalism was at the centre of three anthropological debates, which raised methodological issues about how we know ‘others’. A new approach to cannibalism (Nyamnjoh 2018) extended the meaning of the term from ingesting others to considering others as food for the body, the mind, and the soul. This broader notion of cannibalism conveys a more ethically sensitive understanding of the nature of human relationships. The entry ends with a reflection on the future of the cannibal in anthropology.

Historical reports of cannibalism

Early reports of cannibals can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times, where they were often part of stories about mythical creatures in unexplored reaches of the world. They include fabulous and bizarre tribes of men, such as the man-eating Cynocephali, dog-headed people held to be living in Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Homer, the presumed author of the epic poem The Odyssey, composed between 800 and 750 BC, depicts a tribe of giant cannibals living on an island native to the Laestrygonians, who pelt Odysseus’s ships with boulders, sinking all ships but his own. In Histories, a book published between 426 and 415 BC, Herodotus wrote about cannibal nations that inhabited the margins of the world. Pliny the Elder’s Natural history, drew on Herodotus’ broad mix of myths, legends, and facts to recount rumours of strange peoples on the edges of the world. This inspired medieval bestiaries and the illustrations of old maps (Sandys 1911). The European catalogues of other peoples and marvellous creatures, Liber monstrorum and Tractatus monstrorum, thought to have been written in the eighth century, stressed the threatening nature of their material. One list of creatures that provoked the greatest terror included harpies, crocodiles, boa constrictors, enormous ants, and cannibals. From the 1240s through the late fourteenth century, Europeans set out for Asia in increasing numbers as missionaries, ambassadors, explorers, and entrepreneurs, recording their experiences for a growing audience at home. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who made two extended Asian voyages in the second half of the thirteenth century, described cannibals as cruel beings who liked to eat strangers raw and highly spiced (Daston & Park 1998: 24-6).

The discovery by Columbus of cannibals in the Americas did not just lead European observers to recycle ancient theories around cannibalism. It also raised questions on the appropriate nature of funerary rights and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, for example. When one man ate another, in what body would the eaten person be resurrected? Would the owner’s flesh be restored to him, or would it remain part of the cannibal? These questions also arose in the case of shipwrecks when fish ate the body of a drowned man and the fish were then eaten by other humans. The rise of modern science and discourses, notably those of physics and chemistry as the scientific study of substance and particles, led to the disappearance of many of the theories and styles of philosophical language that cannibalism inspired. As a result, a world of arguments, values, and sensibilities has been lost (Avramescu 2009).

The literal ingestion of human flesh, not surprisingly, had also evoked the Eucharist, its sublimated variant, and the ritual commemoration of the Last Supper. Debate over the Eucharist, fraught with cannibal associations since the earliest days of the Christian Church, became a major point of polemic contest in Reformation Europe (Rawson 1997: 4). Following his encounter in Rouen with the Tupinamba people of South America, who said that they ate the bodies of their dead as a matter of honour, Michel de Montaigne denounced the cruelty displayed by Christians during the religious wars in France:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellow-citizens and neighbours – and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after death (1991: 235-6).

Montaigne’s essay On cannibals, first published in 1580, is viewed now as an early statement of cultural relativism, which calls attention to the importance of local context in understanding the meaning of particular beliefs and activities, without thereby asserting that all value systems are equally valid.

Papua New Guinea

Francis Edgar Williams, a government anthropologist in Papua from 1922 to 1943, was among the first to publish ethnographic material about cannibalism in New Guinea (Williams 1930), a Trust Territory at the time administered by Australia. Williams suggested that his accounts of the practice provided a long and perhaps ill-assorted menu from which the anthropological diner was invited to take what tempted him (1936: x). He reported that the Orokaiva had once been a high-spirited and warlike people, who frequently raided, killed, and ate one another. Their reason for cannibalism was said to be the simple desire for good food (Williams 1930: 170-1). War-parties by the Keraki included raiding their neighbours, clubbing, and beheading them. Back home, a period of rejoicing and feasting followed, which Williams describes as ‘not cannibalism’, except for morsels, such as eyeballs or snippets from the cheek. After this, they resumed ordinary life until they were raided in turn and lost some of their own heads. A brief outbreak of head-hunting in the Moorhead district in 1928 was judged to be the last (Williams 1936: 26).

In the early 1930s, nearly one million previously-unknown people were discovered living in the New Guinea Highlands. Following a hiatus during WWII, as the number of anthropologists increased, New Guinea provided an opportunity to undertake research in the unexplored regions of the world. Well-documented cases of cannibalism were described for a number of populations in the Eastern Highlands. Charles Julius, another government anthropologist, sent his survey of the beliefs and practices of the South Fore peoples, living in today’s Eastern Highlands Province to the Department of Public Health, and observed that in most areas women and uninitiated men had both the right and duty to eat dead relatives (Julius 1981 [1957]). Based on data collected in 1951 and 1952, Ronald Berndt’s ethnography Excess and constraint: social control among a New Guinea mountain people (1962) provided information about the intra- and inter-district manifestations of cannibalism. It showed that the North Fore ate their own dead (endocannibalism) as well as the bodies of enemies killed in warfare (exocannibalism). Berndt offered his work as a contribution to the sociology of conflict, but he also said that ‘Dead human flesh, to these people, is food, or potential food’, and ‘the diet of the region is apparently deficient in protein’ (1962: 270-1). In 1961, Robert and Shirley Glasse (later Lindenbaum) arrived in the South Fore region with a charge to provide cultural information which might support the hypothesis that genetics could explain the epidemic of kuru, the neurological disease afflicting the Fore people (Bennet et al. 1959). Their data did not support this premise, and they proposed instead that the epidemic was related to the consumption of deceased relatives by women and children of both sexes. Robert published an account of the hypothesis in 1967. In 1976, Carleton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for confirming that kuru was infectious. Gajdusek did not doubt that the Fore were cannibals, but he initially dismissed the hypothesis that cannibalism was the mode of transmission. Instead, he proposed a variety of non-oral routes of transmission (Sorenson & Gajdusek 1969; Gajdusek 1970; Gajdusek 1971).

A new chapter in the history of kuru and cannibalism began in 1996 when an interdisciplinary team of investigators composed of neurologists and an anthropologist, later known as the MRC Prion Unit, began to study the disease. Their studies were informed by Gajdusek’s research, and by Stanley Pruziner’s discovery of prions, the infectious agent responsible for fatal neurodegenerative disorders in humans and animals, for which he had received the Nobel Prize in 1997. Jerome Whitfield, the anthropologist who was located in the South Fore, working with a group of Fore research assistants sent bloods collected from women as well as cultural information about mortuary practices to the rest of the group (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). The MRC Prion Unit published three important findings. In the first, elderly women known to have consumed deceased kin, but who had not developed kuru, were shown to have a distinct type of prion protein gene, protecting them from the disease (Mead et al. 2003). A second study, using a larger sample, identified the epicentre of the epidemic in the South Fore Purosa Valley (Mead et al. 2009), and a third showed that a naturally occurring variant of the human prion gene completely prevents prion disease (Asante et al. 2015). Asante noted that the collapse of the Fore population had been prevented by the cessation of cannibalism in the late 1950s, which had interrupted the route of transmission and led to a gradual decline in incidence. However, if transmission had continued at the epicentre of the affected region, the area might have been repopulated with kuru-resistant individuals.^[1]

Some studies in the region explored the links between cannibalism and peoples’ beliefs and cosmologies. Drawing on Freud, Gillian Gillison’s ethnography Between culture and fantasy (1993) revealed the complex ideas held by the Gimi of Papua New Guinea about sexuality and conception and the rights of cannibalism performed in Oedipal dramas. The Gimi, like their neighbours, the South Fore, only practiced endocannibalism, as part of mourning rituals governed by convention and filled with emotion. A more recent ethnography of the Ankave people living in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Gulf Province described invisible cannibal creatures called ombo’, held responsible for bringing fatal illness to humans with the goal of feasting on human flesh of Ankave corpses (Lemonnier 2005). The ombo’ represent the transformed spirit of a long-deceased person that members of the Ankave hold within themselves and that they can direct towards a victim. Pierre Lemonnier suggests that comparing the ombo’ with the image of cannibal characters by other groups reveals the ways in which the human mind imagines death, evil, and misfortune.

A number of anthropologists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare. In his ethnography The making of great men, Maurice Godelier (1986) described Baruya great leaders meeting in single combat. When one felled an enemy, he carried the body back home where he severed the right ‘fighting’ hand and daubed his body with the victim’s blood. He sometimes cut off the arms and legs, which he cooked and ate to appropriate the powers of the vanquished enemy. Elsewhere on the island of New Guinea, Gerard Zegwaard (1959) described cannibalism in the context of warfare among the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea. K.F. Koch (1970) said it was a component of cannibalistic revenge among the Jale in the province of Irian Jaya. And among the Baktaman, a group of 183 people occupying a tract of mountain rain forest in West Sepik Province, cannibalism was said to be an escalation of warfare, done in anger and a lust for revenge (Barth 1975).

Cannibalism could also be a form of punishment for people considered to be malefactors. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, a number of linguistically and culturally related peoples in the Strickland-Bosavi region in inland South Papua gained a degree of notoriety for their reputed anthropophagic practices. Almost all deaths among the Kaluli (Schieffelin 1976), the Etoro (Kelly 1993), the Samo (Shaw 1990), the Gebusi (Knauft 1985), and the Onabasulu (Ernst 1999), were attributed to witches and sometimes sorcerers, who were executed and often consumed (Ernst 1999: 144-7).

The Korowai people of southern West Papua were said to be preoccupied by the threat to their lives posed by a category of ‘witches’, pathologically deviant men who lived amidst the human population and caused death by eating people’s bodies. Outraged mourners could seize the accused men and transfer them to people living several miles away, who shot, butchered, and consumed the witches. At some future time, the consumers might send a witch in return, a balancing of negative transactions that ameliorated the outrage felt in the initial exchange. An execution also often led to the transfer of a woman to the witch’s relatives in anticipation of her bearing children as a form of regenerative long-distance social interaction. Cannibalistic belief thereby contributed to the Korowai’s previously high homicide rates (Stasch 2001).

Among the Daribi who occupy the volcanic plateaus south of Simbu province, only adults and aged persons were eaten and were permitted to eat the dead. Members of nuclear families did not normally eat one another. Daribi clan membership was based on sharing wealth, symbolised by sharing or giving meat. Consuming the flesh of clan members was seen as akin to sharing ‘vital wealth’. Members of a clan were held to ‘eat meat together’, while those of other clans ‘give meat’ or ‘are given meat’. Meat also served as currency, in that a man could marry the sister or daughter of someone with whom he shares meat, for example. In this and many other instances, the study of cannibalistic beliefs and practices shows that Indigenous social structures included symbolic systems that are usually relegated to the areas of religion or myth (Wagner 1967).

Cannibalism disappeared rapidly in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s following contact with missionaries and colonial officers who tended to abhor the practice. However, many of the cosmological perspectives in terms of which cannibalism made sense locally have persisted in mortuary rituals, which are now the largest and most expensive ceremonial events in the Pacific.

South America

Hans Staden’s The true history of his captivity (2008 [1557]) is considered to be a foundational text in the history of the European discovery of Brazil, and a work of ethnographic significance. While serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast in 1550, Staden was captured by Tupi Indians. He took notes on their skill in shooting wild animals and catching fish, the nature of their government by chiefs, and many other aspects of daily life. He also witnessed cannibalism, and recorded occasions when he feared he was about to be killed and eaten. This was the earliest European account of the ritual execution and consumption of war captives among Tupi people who would become a quintessential case of cannibalism in native South America. In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries sent reports and letters to headquarters about the customs and practices of cannibalism among the Tupian-speaking Indians. Their accounts proved to be valuable, because these coastal groups had disappeared as a result of disease, warfare, enslavement, and assimilation by the time serious anthropological research began (Forsyth 1983). The relationships of the Tupi with enemy groups were not always negative. When the work of explorer Jean de Lery (1536-1613), was examined closely, it was apparent that warfare also provided the means for establishing reciprocal relations among warring groups that were essential to the maintenance of culture (Levi-Strauss 1976).

In contrast to endocannibalism in Melanesia, which aimed to preserve, perpetuate, and redistribute elements of the deceased, endocannibalism in South America more often had the objective of eradicating the corpse in order to sever relations between the dead person’s body and spirit, and between living people and the spirits of the dead. Endocannibalism, as part of funerary or mortuary ritual, is thought to have been more widely practiced in lowland South America than anywhere else in the world. It usually took place in one of two forms: people consumed the ground, roasted bones or bone ash, the more common practice, or they consumed cooked flesh. Bone-eating was especially concentrated in northern Brazil, the Upper Orinoco regions of southern Venezuela, and western and northern Amazonia (Conklin 2001: xxiv-xxv). A poignant account of bone ash cannibalism among the Amahuaca in southeastern Peru portrayed a mother wailing while she prepared her deceased daughter’s body for cremation, grinding the bones into a powder, mixing them with a maize beverage ready to drink, and then throwing the remaining ashes into the river. The ritual had taken almost two weeks (Dole 1974).

Flesh-eating was less common in South America, but it was reported in several areas, including in Paraguay by the French ethnographers Pierre and Helene Clastres, who attended a Guayaki funeral in 1963 at which the participants said they ate almost an entire corpse (Clastres, P. 1974). A case in which the secondary father^[2]ate a child, thinking that this could cure his illness, was reported by Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag (1964). Once the child’s meat had been consumed, the bones of the corpse were broken, sucked, and thrown into the fire. The skull was also crushed and burned, the smoke rising from the fire allowing the child’s soul to ascend to its heavenly abode.

Some South American ethnic groups practiced both endo- and exocannibalism. The Wari’ of Rondonia in Brazil ate their enemies killed during warfare as well as the corpses of fellow Wari’ at funerals (Conklin 2001: xxiii)). A southern Amazonian group of the Wari’ are also said to have eaten their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the 1960s (Vilaca 2000). A curious case blurring both categories of cannibalism took place among the Tupinamba, a Tupi ethnic group who regularly consumed their prisoners of war. According to analyses by Helen Clastres (1972), a number of rites first integrated a prisoner into the community. Fattened up and given to a woman in marriage, he changed his status from enemy to that of an ally. He was then killed by the woman's brother ^[FS1], a process that is driven by desires for revenge as well as attempts at suppressing social differences.

Much has been written about the Uitoto people who live on the lands between the Putumayo and Caqueta rivers in Southeastern Colombia and Northeastern Peru. Eugene Robuchon, a French explorer, was the first to write about the Uitoto practice of exocannibalism (1907, 2010 [1907]) a practice that fascinated him greatly but that he never got to witness. Konrad Preuss (1984) provided additional recordings, transcription in the native language, and translations of the cannibalistic bai ritual, in which only men ate the flesh of their opponents, to appease the souls of those who were devoured, to protect the souls of the devourers, endowing them with supernatural powers useful in warfare.

The Uitoto had suffered greatly during the Rubber Boom from the late 1890s to the late 1920s, with the arrival of the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British-Peruvian venture devoted entirely to the extraction and sale of wild rubber from the Putumayo area. The opulence of the Rubber Barons was exceeded only by their brutality. They hired their own armies to defend their claims, to acquire new land, and to capture native labourers. The first accusations of rubber violence were compiled in texts by Walter Hardenburg (1913) and G. Sidney Paternoster (1913). First-hand reports on the atrocities can be found also in a book by Carlos Valcarel (1915), and in the report and diary of the British consul, Roger Casement (1912, 1998 [1912]). Based on these reports, the anthropologist Michael Taussig argued that the Rubber Boom violence was due to a ‘synergistic relation of savagery and business, cannibalism and capitalism’ (Taussig 1984: 482). Fear of Indigenous cannibalism drove the colonists’ imagination, and was used to justify the torture, enslavement, and mass murder of Indigenous people. It is said that at least 100,000 Indigenous people had died during the Rubber Boom.

Cannibalism was also a prominent theme for many native South Americans whose images of cannibals appeared in their myths, cosmologies, and eschatologies (the component of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the ultimate destiny of the soul and of humankind). One theme is that death itself is a form of cannibalism. The Yanomami, for example, think of every death as an act of cannibalism in which the human soul is devoured by a spirit or an enemy. The Araweté Tupian speakers of Para, Brazil, believe that at death, human spirits are cannibalised by the gods, then rejuvenated and transformed into gods themselves. The Kulina, Arawakan speakers of Acre in Brazil, hold that when a human spirit journeys to the underworld, it is ritually welcomed and devoured by Kulina ancestors, who have become white-lipped peccaries, a pig-like hoofed mammal (Conklin: xxvi).

Such cannibalistic beliefs and practices from South America have advanced anthropological theory. The publication of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s From the enemy’s point of view (1992) presented a new way of looking at the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Viveiros de Castro analyses the belief held by the Araweté people that the souls of their dead will be devoured by the gods, an act by which their souls become immortal. To explain this assertion, he presents Araweté society as composed of gods and men, in which human destiny is to remain in a process of constantly becoming other beings. In this society, cannibalism is an important practice that enables them to change from one entity to another. These insights were fundamental to question what it means to be human. According to Viveiros de Castro, intentionality and reflexive consciousness might no longer be attributes of humanity, but potentially available to all beings in the cosmos. Animals, plants, gods, and spirits were also potentially persons, and could occupy a subject position in their dealings with humans (Fausto 2007: 497). The adoption of such ‘perspectivism’, led to an ‘ontological turn’ in anthropological theory, suggesting that difference could be understood not in terms of different world views, but different worlds, and that all of these worlds were of equal validity. Viveiros de Castro’s publication had also provided a framework for the comparative analysis of predation as a key process and metaphor for socio-cultural analysis and practice (McCallum 1999: 445).

Africa

Early accounts of cannibalism in Africa refer to the Azande, especially the ‘Niam-Niam’, racist stereotypes of Central African people who were depicted in medieval Arab sources as naked creatures with filed teeth and dog’s heads, living at the end of the known world. Stereotypical accounts of cannibals came also from west-central Africa in the sixteenth century (Heinze 2003). With the exception of the German, Ewald Volhard, who in 1939 published a 500-page study on the worldwide practices of cannibalism, classical social anthropologists are said to have been extremely hesitant to take up the subject (Behrend 2011: 8). In his legendary account, Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1937) mentioned the topic of cannibalism only once, noting that it was interesting to hear well-travelled Azande speak about the pygmies of the forests and of the artificially deformed heads of the Mangbetu, their curious crafts, and the cannibalism of the Abarambo who shouted at them ‘nombi! nombi!’: ‘flesh! flesh!’ (1937: 278).

In a later review of a study of Azande Cannibalism (1955), Evans-Pritchard agreed with the study’s author Renzo Carmignani that some of the Azande had practiced cannibalism, but he doubted that it could anywhere have been a regular occurrence. His inquiries on the subject had led him to believe that there was no other reason for eating human flesh than the desire for meat. In 1956 he published ‘Cannibalism: a Zande text’, an account of the practice written by his Zande clerk, which had a detailed description of dissecting a corpse, the process of cooking and eating it, and the assertion that in the past almost all Azande ate people, including that the author himself had done so. Evans-Pritchard refuted the latter claim a few years later when he concluded that Azande cannibalism had not in fact been widespread, and that if it occurred, it did not bear cultural meaning but was driven by hunger and a taste for meat (Evans-Pritchard 1960).

In the 1970s, information about cannibalism in Africa was sometimes arrived at indirectly while the anthropologist was investigating other topics, such as witchcraft. Peter Geschiere reported that he often heard the term ‘In such and such a village we couldn’t eat’ to be a prohibition against eating together, but the real meaning the interlocutors wished to make was that they could not eat its inhabitants (1997: 33). Restrictions on cannibalism, it seemed, constituted a sort of map of the region, permitting one to distinguish between kin-linked villages (potential allies) and others (Geschiere 1997: 33). The stereotype of the Africans as cannibals had featured in the texts of traders, explorers, and missionaries ever since the sixteenth century. In Cameroon, the Germans were obsessed with cannibalism, so anthropologists tried to keep their distance. Another complicating factor was that African elites spoke strongly against the stereotype of Africans as cannibals (Gingrich pers. com. 10.1.2021 - 3.2.2021). This might throw light on Evans-Pritchard’s cautious approach to the topic.^[3]

In varying degrees, discussions of cannibalism are part of grappling with the question of how to represent Africa, and how to translate experience there to the rest of the world (White 2003: 632). The topic of cannibalism was discussed in the literature on modernity and the occult in postcolonial states experiencing economic distress. Contemporary images of the occult were said to be mediated by colonial memory. In some parts of Africa, experiences of colonialism were themselves configured by traumatic memories of earlier trans-regional processes of the slave trade. The postcolonial condition might be the most recent historical predicament in which commodification and rupture were experienced and made sense of through images of occult beings, such as cannibals (Shaw 2001). Cannibalism, presented in accounts of propaganda describing ‘man eaters’ in west-central Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, was shown to be a colonial-imperialist stereotype, said to coexist with an internal African version (Heinze 2003). An anthropological account of cannibalism among the Sherbro of Sierra Leone combined historical and ethnographic material, with an analysis of the symbolic and political implications of cannibalistic belief (MacCormack 1983). Here, allegation of cannibalism was a strong political weapon used to menace people, and a technique for controlling a rival political faction. It was also used against chiefs, government officials, and allegedly even a prime minister, said to have been brought down by the accusation. It was a way of saying, ‘This person is a willful, selfish seeker after antisocial personal power and not fit to rule’ (MacCormack 1983: 59-60).

Different African and European images of the cannibals may often intersect and influence each other. Cannibalism, food, eating, and being eaten in its many variations were explored in Resurrecting cannibals, a book about Tooro, a small kingdom in Western Uganda (Behrend 2011). Behrend wrote about people who felt threatened by cannibals, churches who combatted cannibals, and anthropologists who found themselves suspected of being cannibals. The book shows how the figure of the resurrecting cannibal drew on both pre-Christian ideas and church dogma of the bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion.

In the 1990s, Western journalists wrote about cannibalism in the context of warfare, focusing on rape, torture, and atrocities against civilians. A social and historical analysis of the conflict in Liberia, which lasted from 1989 to 1997, examined how Liberia had descended into conflict and why it took such a violent form. The author suggested that the causes were not only political but could be explained in religious or spiritual terms. Impoverished young men who attacked people, boasting of eating human hearts, were performed in the familiar language of secret society rituals now out of control. Ritual murders were no longer carried out by officers of established cults, such as the Poro society, but by unqualified adolescents, their quest for power fulfilled by the consumption of the vital organs of others (Ellis 1995: 165-6; Ellis 2006).

Debating cannibalism

For several decades, beginning in the late 1970s, the topic of cannibalism was at the centre of three well-publicised anthropological debates. Marvin Harris (1977) proposed that the endless varieties of cultural behaviour can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions, a materialist theory adopted by Harris from the work of Michael Harner (1977). Anthropophagy was thus said to be a rational response to the shortage of protein, which resulted in the slaughter of war captives by Aztecs during times of famine, for example. The statement that cannibalism was a form of meat consumption was a constant theme in the anthropological literature, and the question of whether it had relevant nutritional value was investigated. For tropical people living at low-medium population densities exploiting a diverse range of animal foods, the answer was yes (Dornstreich & Morren 1974). For prehistoric cannibalism, probably not, as the value of human meat compared unfavourably with the nutritional value of huge animals, such as mammoths consumed during Paleolithic times (Cole 2017).

Critics of materialist approaches argued that it left out that ‘the practical function of institutions is never adequate to explain their cultural structure’ (Sahlins 1978: 45). Theories such as the one by Harris were held to be also at fault for reducing human populations to being quantities rather than societies, consisting primarily of organisms with biological requirements rather than people with cultural interests. Utilitarian explanations of cannibalism and of human behaviour more broadly may thus falsely incorporate meanings other people give to their lives within the kind of material rationalisations that we might give to our own (Sahlins 1979: 53). Harris’ approach to cannibalism and human behaviour stood accused of a ‘bourgeois’ conflation of the more or less efficacious ways that people maintain themselves with the optimising or maximising behaviour characteristic of enterprise.

A second debate around cannibalism arose first over the question of how we were to understand the death of Captain Cook at the hands of the Hawaiians in 1779 and, in particular, whether Cook was perceived by some of them to be a manifestation of their god Lono. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1995) argued that upon arrival, Hawaiian priests objectified Cook as the said god of growth, reproduction, and fertility. Thus, Sahlins held that Cook’s violent death just a few weeks after his arrival, when he was trying to abduct the local king, should be understood with reference to local ritual and metaphysics. Sahlins defended the view that there are distinct cultures, each with a total cultural system of human action, and that they are to be understood on their own terms.

This view was challenged by Gananath Obeyesekere (1992a), who argued that Hawaiian natives likely never considered Cook to be a god. Myth might have been at play in his encounter with Hawaiians, but the myth is a European one that propagates ideas of a redoubtable European travelling to ‘savage’ lands as the harbinger of civilisation. Discourses about Cook might thus reveal more about the relations between Europeans and other peoples than about the nature of anthropophagy (Obeyesekere 1992b; Barker, Hulme & Iversen 1998). Obeyesekere’s interpretation of events relied on the wider approach to studying socio-cultural phenomena, in which people’s actions and beliefs are assumed to pursue particular, practical functions in their lives that should be understood along psychological lines.

Sahlins (2003) returned to the debate years later, arguing that cannibalism in the Pacific was a complex phenomenon whose myriad attributes were acquired by its relation to a variety of ‘elements of society’, and that anthropologists had to be as wary of exaggerated accounts of cannibalism that stand in the service of imperialism as they had to be of a baseless denial of cannibalism practice that romanticises the people under study. The Lono story, which depicts the body of Captain Cook dismembered and parts of it possibly eaten, posed a question, fundamental to anthropology, about how to understand non-Western cultures. Cannibalism as a practice or an accusation has the mark of the greatest imaginable cultural difference, and is thus the greatest challenge to our categories of understanding (Hulme 1998: 20-1). Obeyesekere and Sahlins together are said to have posed – in a way they could never have done separately – fundamental theoretical questions and had raised critical methodological issues with respect to the delicate business of ‘other-knowing’ (Geertz 1995).

A third debate began soon after Arens published The man-eating myth (1979), a book that attracted the attention of anthropologists and the popular press. Arens said that, excluding survival conditions, he had been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society. Rumours, suspicions, fears, and accusations abound, but no satisfactory first-hand accounts exist (Arens 1979: 21).

Anthropologists were quick to respond with The ethnography of cannibalism, edited by Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (1983) and The anthropology of cannibalism (1999) edited by Laurence Goldman. Arens’ critique received some support. Michael Pickering’s essay in the Goldman volume, for example, had asserted that there was no evidence to support the claim that Australian aboriginal societies had engaged in cannibalism. The sources relied upon were said to be of poor quality, with a paucity of evidence. The majority of reports were based on innocent misunderstanding and misinterpretation, or on deliberate lies and attempts to belittle, denigrate, and dehumanise Aboriginal people, usually as a prelude to denying them basic human rights and usurping their lands (Pickering 1999: 51-68). Overall, however, Goldman observed that the great number of studies from the region published after WWII provided the tombstone for Arens’ denial of cannibalism.

Arens’ hypothesis also received criticism from scholars working in South America. Neil Whitehead (2008) provided reliable historical evidence of cannibalism among the Caribs and other Indian groups in the ‘New World’. In response to Arens’ assertion that people alleged to be cannibals always deny it, Beth Conklin (2001: 22) argued that the Wari’ told her that they once ate human flesh, and talked about it in detail. She also provided a detailed record of endocannibalism in Lowland South America (Conklin 2001: xxiv-v). Anthropologists working in Africa were also critical of reducing the accounts of anthropophagy to the inventions of missionaries and other Westerners. There was evidence that the Maka in Cameroon had ritual prohibitions that allowed only adult men, elders, and champions of war to eat human flesh (Geschiere 1997: 235). Making the authenticated Western eyewitness the yardstick of the reality of cannibalism risked falling back on a position of Eurocentrism which Arens had originally contested (Behrend 2011). The debate about the existence of cannibalism was also one about the nature of anthropological evidence. Arens held that people’s descriptions of their own practices could not be trusted, a strict definition of evidence that many anthropologists challenged. Several others defended that proving or denying cannibalism should not depend on direct observation as many intimate and forbidden behaviours tended to be conducted in secret (Brady 1982). Contrary to the assertion that no one had ever observed cannibalism, Peggy Sanday (1986: 9-10) cited reliable eyewitness reports of the Jesuits in South America, and a missionary’s description of the practice during a war in the Cook Islands in 1897. Ultimately, Arens presented his ‘somewhat revised thoughts’ on the topic in a book in which the contributors discussed the discourse of cannibalism rather than cannibalism itself (Hulme 1998: 16). The controversy had usefully heightened both scholarly awareness of the ideological potential of ‘cannibalism’ and empirical rigor in studies of cannibalism as a culturally embedded, institutionalised practice (Tuzin 2001: 1454).

Conclusion: The future of the cannibal

This entry has discussed cannibalism in places where the practice was recent, and people who ate the dead could provide detailed information. The reports of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa had presented seemingly boundless accounts of the practice. However, anthropologists were said to have been unsuccessful in disturbing or unsettling Western systems of knowledge, and there was insufficient treatment of cannibalism as a theory-building part of Western science (Ernst 1999: 155). Types of literal cannibalism were also said to vary according to motive and circumstance, the diversity so great that it tended to overwhelm the common feature of ingestion and to confound efforts to understand cannibalism as a unitary phenomenon (Tuzin 2001: 1453).

And yet, a new way to think about cannibalism has recently emerged (Nyamnjoh 2018), expanding the definition of the practice to include both the actual eating of human flesh and fantasies of eating other humans, being eaten by other humans, and being seen to eat other humans. Eating is here understood in its most inclusive and elastic sense to imply consumption in general, directly and indirectly, actually, symbolically, metaphorically, and in fantasy (2018: 73). Incorporating perspectives from the Global South, Francis Nyamnjoh developed the key observation that to feed on someone’s life chances may be tantamount to feeding on someone’s flesh. He considers humans to be fundamentally incomplete and cannibalistic, a condition of the powerful no less than of those they prey upon. Nyamnjoh thereby provides an alternative to the identity-obsessed ethics and politics of the twentieth century (Englund 2018: x), one that leaves room for the possibility of a common humanity and equal access to human dignity. It was cannibalism’s ubiquity and capacity for presence in simultaneous entities and multiplicities that pushed Claude Levi-Strauss (1960) to argue that, in one form or another ‘we are all cannibals’, ‘whether or not the humans we consume are served through our palates, injected, inserted as transplants or grafted onto our bodies’ (Nyamnjoh 2018: 6). As a reflection of our moral sense of self, the concept of the cannibal seems destined to remain with us forever.

Notes

This entry is an extension of topics covered in Lindenbaum (2015a).

References

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——— 1998. Rethinking anthropophagy. In Cannibalism and the colonial world (eds) F. Barker, P. Hulme & M. Iversen, 39-62. Cambridge: University Press.

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Note on contributor

Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was awarded an MA from the University of Sydney in 1971, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Melbourne in 2016. She co-edited The time of AIDS with Gilbert Herdt in 1992, and Knowledge power and practice with Margaret Lock in 1993. An updated version of Kuru sorcery: disease and danger in the New Guinea Highlands was published in 2013.

[1] Later ethnographic research about the handling of contaminated tissue did not support the likelihood of self-inoculation by oral, nasal, and conjunctival routes during mortuary feasts (Whitfield et al. 2008; Whitfield 2015). A detailed account of the sequence of events that led to the cannibalism hypothesis, as well as the different ways in which anthropologists and medical investigators studied the disease, was published by Lindenbaum (2013; 2015a; 2015b).

[2] The father’s brother is often classified as a father in patrilineal kinship systems.

[3] See also Ernst (1999: 156) on the reluctance of anthropologists in Papua New Guinea.

Gifts

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:47:55 +0000

Yunxiang Yan

University of California, Los Angeles

Initially published 7 Jul 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20gifts

Abstract:

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. This entry starts with the distinction between individual gifts and collective gifts which explains some cross-cultural misunderstandings, and moves on to review the two basic theoretical models on the engine of gifting—the spirit of the gift and the principle of reciprocity. While revealing that the highly diversified patterns of gift exchange derive from different perceptions of the relationship between culturally-constructed notions of personhood and material objects in the larger social setting, the anthropology of the gift also unpacks the nuances of social life by examining patterns of gift-giving behaviour all over the world.

Introduction

When Europeans first arrived in North America and received presents from the Native Americans they encountered, they could not understand why an equivalent return was expected by their hosts. Many Europeans believed they owed nothing in return, because a gift should be free and with no strings attached. They also assumed the Native Americans were merely pretending to be generous; hence the expression of ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ for objects and people given merely in hopes of future returns (Wilton 2009: 166-7). The famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, for example, often suspected such motivations to be guiding their Native hosts when being presented with gifts. They even rudely refused to accept them, referring to the Native Americans as impertinent and thievish in their journals (see Slaughter 2004). Yet the Native Americans considered gifts to be initiating cycles of social exchange. They felt insulted by the Europeans who either refused to accept gifts in the first place, or who did accept them but did not want to reciprocate. In their eyes, both stances proved their unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Thanks to the anthropological study of gifts and gift-giving, we can now see clearly that beneath the racist expression ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ lies the European settlers’ imposition of a culturally specific understanding of gifts onto Native Americans, who saw their function and meaning in a quite different light. To somewhat simplify the matter for the sake of clarity, I hereafter refer to the former as the individual gift that is imagined as a token of a person’s affection with no strings attached, and to the latter as the collective gift that is part and parcel of a series of collective actions with wider and profound social implications. At surface level, they represent two different prototypes of gifts and two different systems of social exchange, which are often diametrically opposed to each other. The individual gift emerged in the modern West along with the rise of individualism and the expansion of the capitalist market economy, while the collective gift has been a major system of social exchange all over the world that creates sociality through a sense of indebtedness (see Graeber 2011) and can be found in various forms in different cultures. At a deeper level, their differences are actually more rhetorical than behavioural, and more in degree than in kind. Behind the discourse of the individualised pure gift in modern times, there are still rules of gifting, expectations of returning gifts, and the social function of strengthening social ties through gift-giving, all of which are similar to their counterparts in systems of traditional collective gifts. Yet, without knowing the cross-cultural differences and similarities between the two basic types, we may be biased to place one against the other, or to misunderstand both of them.

In the following pages, this entry briefly introduces two well-known examples of the traditional and collective gift—the Kula ring and yam exchange, which both occur in the Trobriand Islands—highlighting their features in contrast to the widely-held assumption of modern individual gifts. It then introduces two major theoretical models—the spirit of the gift and the reciprocity principle—that emerged out of scholarly efforts to better understand the origin and driving force of gift exchange. The scholarship shows the main commonalities between the two basic types of gifts, as well as some important differences which in turn lead our inquiry to a deeper level: the cultural understanding between persons and things. In the last section, the entry demonstrates the richness and complexity of the world of gifts that has been explored by scholars from different academic disciplines in recent decades.

Obligatory gifts

A striking feature of collective gifts is their obligatory circulation among the same group of givers and recipients, as illustrated in the Kula ring and yam exchange in Melanesian society. Kula is a ritualised form of intertribal exchange of red shells necklaces (soulava) and white shells armbands (mwali) carried out among men of influence in the Trobriand Islands, a region now part of Papua New Guinea. Predefined partners exchange these gifts in a closed circle across several islands, and they always circulate the gifts of necklaces clockwise and exchange armbands in the opposite direction. These gifts are made for exchange only and have their own names, identities, and histories. The exchange relationship is a lifelong one, but the gifts of necklaces and armbands always flow among fixed partners. Kula exchange voyages from one island to another customarily take place twice a year, and it will take one or two years for a given Kula object to return to its original owner. More importantly, each Kula voyage is highlighted by the interisland trade of many other objects, and in this sense the Kula ring also reflects the economic system in this region (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Leach & Leach 1983).

An equally important form of collective gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands involves yams. Trobriand men spend a great deal of time and energy cultivating yams, but local people normally eat other fresh produce, including sweet potatoes, greens beans, squash, fruits, and taro. The yams are mainly used by men as gifts to their married-out daughters and sisters who will display them publically in a special yam house. The obligation to participate in gift-giving is in this instance dictated by the local kinship system. People in the Trobriands traditionally adhere to matrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence. This means that when a woman gets married to a man, she moves to his village but her husband continues to belong to his mother’s lineage. The woman who married him will in turn belong to her own mother’s lineage. The gift of yams from a man to his sister or daughter brings the woman prestige and status because it shows how many strong supporters she has from her matrilineal kin. The gift of yams thereby recognises the woman as the actual owner of the matrilineal group. In return, her husband, who will receive some of the yams that she is given, will similarly be obligated to produce and send yams to the house of his married-out sister or daughter who, again, will be living in her husband’s matrilineal community.

These interlocking exchange relationships between men and their married-out sisters or daughters do not stop at the exchange of yams. By giving yams to one’s sister and thereby to her husband, one obligates one’s brother-in-law to give a return gift. This must come in a particular form—bundles of banana leaves given by women. When a man dies in a matrilineal village, all female descendants of this matrilineal lineage who are already married must come back to participate in the funeral as the kinswomen of the deceased. More importantly, they return as the true owners of the matrilineal group. During the funerary ritual, these women give away their special wealth—bundled banana leaves or banana-leaf skirts—to funeral guests. They also mourn the deceased and contribute to the ritual with labour. The woman who gives away the largest number of bundles and skirts is recognised as a ‘wealthy woman’ (Weiner 1992).

Here the links among a woman, her husband, and her brother are made visible and embodied in the flow of yams and banana leaves. The production of yams and banana leaves is in fact so important that it occupies a central place in the local economy, keeping both men and women busy all year around. Importantly, they are not busy for their own consumption needs; rather, they work hard in order to have more gifts for others and expect to receive return gifts as well.

On the surface, gift-giving in both the Kula ring and the exchanges of yam and banana leaves is an obligatory act with specific expectations about the time of return and the volume of the returning gift that takes place between persons as representatives of their own familial/kin groups. These gifts serve socio-political functions while forming an important part of the local economy, motivating economic behaviour and ‘making the world go around’. This contrasts sharply with contemporary understandings of individual gifts, which should be non-obligatory and have no strings attached, especially not specific expectations of return gifting.

Yet this difference become less striking in some customary gift exchanges in the modern West, for example the exchange of holiday greeting cards. More importantly, the expectation to offer gifts but also to receive them and then to make counter-gifts is clearly present in the family tradition of Christmas gift exchanges. This is similar to the yam exchange among Trobriand Islanders, although the value and content of Christmas gifts should be individualised. Truly free gifts seem only to exist in discourse. As Marcel Mauss notes (1967 [1925]), the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts constitute the foundation of gift-exchange systems all over the world, notwithstanding special cultural and temporal differences.

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

Anthropologists have been debating for many years about what motivates gift-giving around the world. Although not the first to explore the subject, Mauss offered the first theory on various gift-exchange systems in non-Western cultures that continues to provide inspirations for the study of the gift. He highlighted the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of gifts being simultaneously obligatory and free, material and spiritual, with interest and disinterested. He started this intellectual journey by asking the fundamental question, ‘What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’ (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 1). Mauss finds his answer in the Maori concept of hau—a mystic power that lies in the forest and in the valuables (taonga) given by one person to another. According to studies of the Maori that Mauss had access to, the hau always wishes to return to its place of origin, but can only do so through the medium of an object given in exchange for an original gift. Failure to return a gift can result in serious trouble, since not returning the hau can cause the death of gift recipients. It is the hau in the gift, Mauss asserts, that forces the recipient to make a return, and he calls this ‘the spirit of the gift’ (1967 [1925]: 8-9). According to the Maori, to receive a gift is also to receive a part of the gift-giver’s own spiritual essence. Thus, one must make a return gift to keep the original giver intact.

The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift, however, did not convince Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Prior to the appearance of Mauss’ classic 1925 work, The gift, Malinowski had already published the famous ethnographic account of Kula exchange in Melanesian society (summarised above) and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from ‘pure gifts’ to ‘real barter’ (1984 [1922]). Rejecting Mauss’ interpretation of the spirit of the gift, Malinowski retracted his category of the ‘pure gift’ in a later book (1962 [1926]) and articulated the principle of reciprocity to explain the Trobriand system of economic transactions. Malinowski argued that the binding force of economic obligations lies in the sanction, which either side may invoke to sever the bonds of reciprocity. One gives because of the expectation of return, and one returns because of the threat that one’s partner may stop giving. He thus concluded that the principle of reciprocity serves as the foundation of the Melanesian social order (Malinowski 1962 [1926]: chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9).

Inspired by Malinowski's work, Raymond Firth argues that among the Maori in New Zealand, exchange is driven by reciprocity (locally called utu). The Maori attach great importance to the idea of ‘compensation’ or ‘equivalent return’ (Firth 1959: 412ff). According to Firth, Mauss misinterprets the hau by imputing active qualities to its social construction, which Maori people do not recognise; Mauss also allegedly confuses the hau of the gift with the hau of the gift-giver (Firth 1959: 419-20). In a similar vein, Claude Levi-Strauss went so far as to call the spirit of the gift a mystification:

Mauss strives to construct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau. Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? (1987: 47).

The most effective advocate for the accountability of the principle of reciprocity, however, is Marshall Sahlins, who introduces a tripartite division of exchange phenomena—generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. He identifies three variables as critical to determining the general nature of gift-giving and exchange: kinship distance, sociability, and generosity (1972:191-210).

The principle of reciprocity was so frequently employed to explain various patterns of gift exchange that it quickly became something of a cliché, as Geoffrey MacCormack warns: ‘the description of all types of exchanges as reciprocal easily leads to an obscuring of the significant differences between them’ (1976: 101). Ultimately, the principle of reciprocity is nothing more than saying that no one will do anything for nothing. As Annette Weiner commented, such a rational and overly general notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought and has been used to justify theories of a free market economy since Thomas Hobbes (1992: 28-30).

To truly understand what motivates various systems of gift exchange in non-Western cultures, therefore, one must go beyond Western assumptions of economic rationality and the notion of Homo economicus, which is exactly what Mauss did in 1925 (see also Graeber 2001). The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift was therefore revitalised from two directions. First, in South Asia studies, anthropologists have explored the Hindu idea of giving without expectation of material return. As early as the 1970s, Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk (1971) noted some asymmetric gift-giving relationships in the context of caste hierarchy. Here, people of low castes were generally not expected to return the dan gifts they receive from their superiors. Further investigations reveal that the dan gifts, which are offered by the dominant caste to lower castes during various secular and religious rituals, serve to transfer dangerous and inauspicious elements, such as illness, death, and misfortune, from the donor to the recipient. The acceptance of these gifts is intended as a vessel of evil and inauspiciousness, like swallowing poison. The recipients of lower castes are required by caste ideology to receive this type of poisonous gift without returning it. As a result, the institutionalised flow of poisonous gifts from the dominant caste to subordinate castes creates a mode of cultural domination (Raheja 1988). These findings seriously challenge generalised models of reciprocity. They led Jonathan Parry (1986) to interpret the absence of reciprocity in the Indian dan in terms of an ‘evil spirit’ of the gift. This denies Mauss’ original argument that the spirit of the gift elicits a return gift. Realising this difficulty, Parry writes: ‘Where we have the “spirit,” reciprocity is denied; where there is reciprocity there is not much evidence of “spirit.” The two aspects of the model do not hang together’ (1986: 463). James Laidlaw argues that the notion of the non-obligatory pure gift exists in all world religions, albeit often in obscured forms, such as the case of the dan gift to Shvetambar Jain renouncers in India, and it carries as many important social meanings as the obligatory gifts (2000).

A solution to the tension between motivating spirits and merely secular reciprocity is found in studies of Pacific island societies. One can see both the ‘spirit’ and the social obligation to return. Rather than accepting Mauss’ interpretation of the Maori hau, many anthropologists have employed the notion of inalienability to explain the existence of spiritual, non-utilitarian ties between giver and recipient. Frederick Damon discovered that not all Kula objects are in the endless circle of exchange; the Muyuw islanders, for example, separate particular types of conus shell valuables known as kitoum from other Kula gifts. They may take the kitoum gifts in or out of the circle at their individual choice. This is because they represent the ‘congealed labor’ of their individual owners and because ‘no matter where a kitoum is . . . it can be claimed by its owner’ (Damon 1980:282). All Kula valuables are brought into exchange by the labour of specific individuals whereby they constitute one’s inalienable kitoum (Damon 1980: 284). Similar views are developed by Christopher Gregory in his analysis of the difference between gift-debt relations and commodity-debt relations, positing that gift-debts involve a transfer of inalienable objects between mutually dependent persons, whereas commodity debts result from the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (Gregory 2015). Interestingly, the inalienability of certain valuables may explain not only the motivation to return but also the original motivation for participating in competitive exchange such as the Kula (Feil 1982).

The inalienability of gifts is at the core of an innovative theory of exchange by Weiner (1992), arguably the sharpest critic of standard anthropological studies of the gift which routinely rely on the principle of reciprocity. She maintains:

[w]hat motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give-and-take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another (1992:43).

It is this principle of keeping-while-giving, rather than the norm of reciprocity, that can explain the obligation to return a gift (Weiner 1992: 46). Weiner also believes that Mauss is right about the Maori hau: ‘[t]he hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions and thus adds inalienable value to the objects’ (Weiner 1992: 63; see also Godelier 1999; Graeber 2001; Thompson 1987).

Weiner’s theory of the inalienable gift may be hard to apply to gift-giving practices in some complex societies, where most gifts are purchased commodities and where gifts are often individualised. For example, in China, money plays an important role in ceremonial gift-giving, and most material gifts are consumer goods, such as wine, cigarettes, or canned food. Altogether the monetary expenditure on gifts among Chinese villagers costs about twenty percent of household income, making it literally a gift economy (Yan 1996). Moreover, in contrast to the Melanesian and Polynesian cases, which involve the endless circulation of valuable shells, fine mats, or cloaks, the commodities-turned-gifts exchanged among the Chinese are rarely recycled as return gifts; instead, it is expected that gifts will be consumed by their recipients soon after their acceptance. In this sense, not only is a gift alienable, it must be alienated; to return the same gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection (Yan 1996).

While posing a challenge to the notion of inalienability, the Chinese case suggests that the spirit of the gift can be understood at two levels. Inalienability as elaborated by Weiner, among others, can be seen in the Melanesian case, where gifts are believed to contain hau or some similar spiritual essence and thus cannot be disposed of freely by the recipient. This is the empirical evidence upon which Mauss bases his argument; but, as an empirical observation, it may not be true in other societies. Therefore, the key issue in any society is to determine what people think about the message conveyed by the gift—love, friendship, caring, obligation, competition, or a supernatural spirit—and the essential implication is that a bond between individuals or groups can be created through the association between persons and things.

The person in the gift

Indeed, the underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects. The bonds created by gifts (inalienable objects) are often considered to be the same as the mutually dependent ties between persons. Here we can see that the fundamental issue in Mauss’ analysis of the gift is to determine how people relate to things, and, through things, how people relate to each other. As John Liep notes, both Karl Marx and Mauss are concerned with the alienation of people from the products of their labour, which correlates to the development of a world capitalist market economy (1990: 165). But unlike Marx, who focuses on the system of commodity exchange in modern societies and discovers the secret of surplus value, Mauss concentrates on gift exchange in pre-capitalist societies and seeks answers from indigenous belief systems. To compare the archaic, personalised gift economy with the modern, impersonalised system of commodity exchange, Mauss draws a three-stage, evolutionary scheme: social exchange begins with ‘total prestations’, in which the materials transferred between groups are only part of a larger range of noneconomic transfers. The second stage is gift exchange between moral persons who represent groups, leading finally to commodity exchange between independent individuals in market societies (see Mauss 1967: 68-9).

Jonathan Parry (1986) pushes Mauss’ thesis further by first showing that the Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types: the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given, while the latter denies reciprocity. However, the Maori gift and the Indian gift share one thing in common: namely, the absence of an absolute disjunction between persons and things. The separation between persons and things is, according to Parry, a product of Christian cosmology: ‘Christianity—with its notion that all men are fashioned equally in the image of God—has developed a universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving’ (Parry 1986: 468, italics in the original). Furthermore, the strong faith in freedom and rational choice also leads to the belief that ‘those who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’ (Parry 1986: 469).

In line with Parry’s view, James Carrier argues that the ideology of the perfect gift in the West is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism:

Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labor and capital (Carrier 1990: 31).

This ideology, however, does not always guide everyday practice. Instead, modern American gifts are often predictable and socially regulated (see Caplow 1984; Cheal 1988). The obligatory gift relations characterised by Mauss for traditional societies also exist in capitalist societies (for a further discussion of these themes, see Sanchez et al. 2017).

One important implication of Parry’s and Carrier’s works is that, although gift exchange exists in all human societies, the form it takes varies greatly depending on the particular culture within which it is rooted. Hence we may find multiple ‘forms’ of the gift—the Melanesian gift, the Indian gift, the Japanese gift, the American gift, and so on. At a deeper level, different forms of gifts tend to reflect different customs in the cultural construction of personhood. In Melanesian societies, for example, the person is relationally constructed and in turn represents a set of social relations in his or her social acts, including gift-giving. A primary feature of relational personhood is that ‘persons simply do not have alienable items, that is, property at their disposal; they can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others’ (Strathern 1988: 161). By contrast, the free, autonomous individual defined in neoclassical economics has nothing intrinsic to his or her personhood but the ‘bare undifferentiated free will’; everything else is alienable (Radin 1996: 62). In other words, the differences in personhood provide us with a key to better understanding why the Melanesian pure gift is inalienable and thus obligatory, while the Western perfect gift is free and thus must be unconstraining. Moreover, personhood also explains the idiosyncratic differences between the two prototypes of gifts and gift-exchange systems: the modern individual gift and traditional collective gifts.

Particularly noteworthy is that a Western-centric understanding of personhood may easily contribute to the misunderstanding of the gift in non-Western societies. At the core of the debate about the nature of the gift is its essential ambiguity; that is, gifts are at once free and constraining, self-interested and disinterested, and are motivated by both generosity and calculation or expectation of return. Although Mauss initiated the anthropological discourse on the gift by taking a both/and approach in examining its ambiguous nature, most subsequent studies focus on one side or another. As a result, the principle of reciprocity, the inalienability of the gift, and the dichotomy of gifts vs. commodities have taken turns dominating the study of the topic. Underneath all these theories, there is a Western notion of a pure gift based on the belief of the autonomous and free individual that has been used as the ultimate measurement to examine gift-giving activities all over the world. As Mark Ostern points out:

We have met the enemy and he is us: the perfect altruist is nothing more than the obverse face of Homo economicus…[w]e will achieve no deeper understanding of gift exchange and their relationships to economic and social behavior until we discard or at least modify the notion of persons as free, unconstrained transactors (2002: 240, italics in the original).

The inability to think beyond Western economic rationality is precisely what caused cultural misunderstandings between the early European settlers and Native Americans, discussed at the outset of this essay.

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Anthropologists have explored a great number of social functions of gifts as well as the explicit and implicit rules governing gift exchange, which in turn help us to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. The enigma of the gift continues to draw more scholars to such an intellectual endeavour, and the study of gifts has gone far beyond anthropology to become an interdisciplinary enterprise in its own right. This section can only make a few brief observations thereof, barely scratching the surface.

Gifts are commonly exchanged in ritualised contexts and can even constitute a rite in and of themselves, such as the presentation of a wedding ring. Thus we can make a distinction between ceremonial and non-ceremonial gifts. The most common examples of the former include gift-giving activities in rites of passage and holidays, such as weddings, funerals, and the Christmas holiday. An occasional gift offered to a helper to express gratitude or some regular exchange of presents among family members or friends may be considered as the latter.

Yet, one possible classification is to see the social identity symbolised by the gifts. Do two persons exchange gifts on behalf of the respective group that they belong to, such as family, lineage, or village community? Or is the gift exchanged between two autonomous individuals? The custom of bridewealth and dowry constitutes a good example of collectivist gift-giving; by contrast, most gift-giving activities in contemporary Western societies occur between two autonomous individuals.

In general, most collective gift-giving activities are institutionalised and ceremonial because collective identities and group interests are at stake, while most individualistic gifts occur in non-ceremonial occasions. But there are exceptions. The exchange of Kula valuables is an institutionalised ceremonial activity but remains a highly competitive enterprise whereby individuals act as free agents. On the other hand, the offer of an engagement ring in contemporary Western societies is a highly ritualised and institutionalised act of individual gift-giving.

Once we place gift exchange in the larger social context, we can see the difference between horizontal and vertical gift exchanges. Horizontal gift exchange occurs among social equals, while vertical exchange cuts across the boundaries of social status. Both types of gift-giving activities may coexist on some occasions. Taking Christmas gift-giving as an example, the horizontal exchange of gifts among friends, classmates, or coworkers goes side by side with vertical exchange of gifts between employers and employees, patrons and clients, hosts and service providers, and to a lesser degree, between senior and junior generations in a family or kin group. Because the obligation to return a gift places its recipient in the inferior position of being indebted, gift-giving is often used as a way to create political authority and dominance, such as in cases of the Melanesian big-man and the Polynesian chieftainship (Sahlins 1972). It may even become a weapon to fight against one’s political opponents, such as in the cases of potlatch among Native Americans on the Northwest Pacific coast.

This superiority of the gift-giver, however, may not work in complex societies with a clearly defined class hierarchy and/or a centralised state authority. For example, in her study of the repayment of Japanese on gifts (benevolent favours from superiors), Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1969) demonstrates that, given the hierarchical context of Japanese society, the gift-donor who is in a subordinate position can never balance what has previously been received from a superior. In Chinese society, a particular type of gift known as xiaojing, which is rooted in the cultural promise of filial piety, unilaterally flows up the ladder of social status and no equivalent return is expected. Recipients remain socially superior because their acceptance is already regarded as a favour to the gift-giver, showing that the principle of hierarchy overshadows the principle of reciprocity in this context (Yan 2002).

Gender constitutes another important dimension in the world of gifts. Many earlier studies of gift-giving in non-Western societies seemed to be gender-blind because they tended to focus on institutions of ceremonial exchanges in public life where women were thought to play only a trivial role. Annette Weiner’s 1976 book, Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange, represents one of the first significant breakthroughs in this regard. Weiner argues that women in the Trobriand Islands are by no means the object of gift exchange by men; on the contrary, women play an autonomous and crucial role in certain ceremonial gift exchanges in public, such as the mortuary exchange described above. In it women reclaim their unique role in the matrilineage and restate matrilineal solidarity (Weiner 1976, 1992). Marilyn Strathern pushes the theme further by pointing out that, in Melanesian culture, women and men not only have their own domain in gift exchange but also separate realms of power and domination which are gendered by the gendering of gift exchange (Strathern 1988, see chapters 2, 4, 5 and 11). In contemporary Western societies, women not only give more but also receive more gifts than their male counterparts, and gift-giving is regarded as an essential part of a feminised ideology of love (Cheal 1988; Caplow 1984). How to assess women’s dominant role in gift-giving, however, remains to date a debatable issue (Komter 1996).

If we look at the purpose of gift-giving, we can see that a gift may serve an expressive or an instrumental function, or both. In expressive gifts, the existing status relationship between the giver and the receiver determines the conditions of gift exchange (the kind and value of gifts to be given), and gift-giving supports the status relationship. By contrast, if the conditions of exchange (the nature and value of the gift) determine or alter the respective statuses of a giver and recipient, we are likely dealing with instrumental gifts. In other words, expressive gifts are ends in themselves and thus often reflect a long-term relationship between a giver and a recipient; instrumental gifts are a means to some utilitarian end and ordinarily indicate a short-term relationship. Nevertheless, in practice, the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts never exist; rather, elements of expressivity and instrumentality coexist in almost all gift-giving activities, but in different ratios and combinations. In post-socialist Ukraine, for instance, a small payment of cash presented to a doctor is regarded as a gift instead of bribery, as long as the recipient did not explicitly demand it (Polese 2008).

In a broader sense, the exchanges of greetings, assistance, and moral support are often regarded as gifts from one party to another. Their nonmaterial nature often makes the giving a more disinterested act and thus closer to the idealism of the pure gift. In this connection, donations, charities, and especially online gifting to strangers are particularly noteworthy gifts that build impersonalised ties between the givers and the often-unknown recipients. The best example is the donation of human blood, tissues, organs and bodies, which are more often than not transacted from anonymous donors to unknown recipients. These altruistic yet unconventional gifts also raise new ethical issues in both Western and non-Western societies (Bolt 2012; Simpson 2004).

The economic implications of gift-giving are enormously far-reaching in post-modern and developed countries, as well as in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. Malinowski had long argued that the work incentives of the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained in terms of materialistic self-interest. Instead, they produce extra yams so that the harvest may be given to exchange partners and chiefs and eventually rot in storehouses for the sake of earning prestige. Similarly, they actively participate in the inter-island Kula exchange primarily to obtain the armbands and necklaces that have no practical value except to become renowned (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Weiner 1992; Graeber 2001). The exchange of Kula valuables therefore constitutes the very foundation of this prestige economy in Trobriand society. The cattle complex in Africa is another example in which the production and exchange of cattle mostly serve social, political, and ritual purposes, and people have an exaggerated and emotional personal attachment to their animals (Evens-Pritchard 1940). Gift exchange may be seen as a different type of economy even in the narrowest sense of the term: Christmas gifts alone amount to a multi-billion-dollar business in contemporary American society (Waits 1993). The global expansion of the capitalist market economy and consumerist ideology has pushed the gift economy to a higher level, leading to new ceremonial occasions like Mother’s Day and more convenient ways of gift-giving like gift cards (Otnes & Beltramini 1996). The most intriguing and perhaps excessively individualistic invention is the gift given to oneself, known as self-gifts (Mick 1996).

Riding the tidal wave of global consumerism, self-gifts can be found all over the world and are more popular among millennials. In the village community where I conducted a systematic study of gift exchange (Yan 1996), I found that the emergence of self-gifts is part of the much larger and important trend among young villagers to embrace the modern individual gift in their practice of gift exchange. Most of these individual gifts are not offered through ritualised family ceremonies; neither do many of them lead to long-lasting cycles of giving-receiving-returning between the donor and recipient. The occasions of individual gift-giving are not only personal but often ad hoc or situational, such as celebrating a friend’s promotion in the workplace or bringing something nice or exotic to family members from a trip back home. More intriguingly, the motivation of offering such a personal gift is also highly personal—as villagers put it, they did it because they had good feelings toward the recipient and they felt good after offering the gift as a token of their fondness toward the recipient. The influence of consumer individualism is obvious here, as all kinds of commercials and products of pop culture promote the importance of affection and emotional ties in the context of commodification. An emphasis on feeling good may have replaced past requirements of being or doing good; hence, personal gifts for feeling good replace obligatory gifts for being good. The implication here is that the two prototypes of gifts that we examined at the outset of this essay not only coexist in our time, but also influence and transform each other, creating new possibilities in the world of gifts.

The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens social bonds—be they cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define the identities of persons. Scrutinising gifts and gift economies may therefore provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given society. Lastly, although gifts are given and received among peoples all over the world and throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Gift exchange thereby crystallises the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anthropology of the gift is particularly important for understanding social life for several reasons. Gift-giving has long been one of the major forms of social exchange, along with redistribution and market exchange. Yet, unlike the other two, it encompasses multiple domains of social life and carries rich meanings above and beyond the economy. Moreover, the study of gift-giving reveals the social origins of economic institutions and provides insights about the value of human labour that have long been obscured by modern economic theories. They include the relationship between persons and things, or what drives people to work beyond their basic consumption needs. Gift-giving basically debunks the cornerstone assumption in neoliberal economics that human beings only aim to maximise individual utility, and thus has greatly enriched social theories. Additionally, the give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens various social bonds—cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define personal identities. An examination of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, will provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations. Furthermore, although gifts are universal and are given and have been received throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Therefore, gifts represent a crystallization of the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the gift is no longer the preserved subject of anthropology. Scholars of humanities and social sciences alike have joined forces to explore the dynamic, complicated world of gifts from different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, such as antiquity study, history, literary critics, philosophy, sociology, law, economics, and marketing research (see Cheal 1988; Davis 2000; Davies 2010; Hyland 2009; Kolm & Ythier 2006; Marion 2011; Osteen 2002; Otnes & Peltramini 1996; Satlow 2013). The growing literature also shows that, as the human interest in and capacity of doing gift exchange are consistently changing in response to a rapidly shifting environment of social life at large, the enigmatic gift will likely remain to be an attractive subject in anthropology and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their insightful comments on early drafts and advice for improvement.

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Note on contributor

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fudan University, China. His research interests include family and kinship, social change, and the anthropology of moralities. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village.

Prof. Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, 366 Haines, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. yan@anthro.ucla.edu

Science

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 18:16:28 +0000

Matei Candea

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16science

Abstract:

'Science' features twice in anthropology. On the one hand, science is an object of anthropological enquiry, in much the same way as ‘kinship’, ‘religion’, or ‘nationalism’. Anthropologists have studied scientific practices and practitioners ethnographically, and have traced the effects of scientific knowledge in other spheres of human activity. Alongside other scholars in ‘science and technology studies,’ anthropologists have raised questions such as: is scientific knowledge ‘socially constructed’? Does the ‘culture’ of scientists matter? What is objectivity? Is science a distinct kind of activity or domain? Are scientists in the business of describing the world, or transforming it? And is science ‘western’? In a number of these cases, anthropologists’ answers have been distinctive.

On the other hand, for much of its history anthropology itself was understood as a science of society or culture - and continues to be so understood by some of its practitioners today. An anthropological look at science thus also involves turning the lens back onto anthropology itself, and examining it with the same tools we are using to inspect other scientific practices: how are the methods and concepts of anthropological knowledge production (culture, society, ethnography, the site, comparison) themselves put together? And how does applying these terms and methods to the strange object that is ‘science’ distort and transform them?

A science of non-science?

As noted above, anthropologists are only one voice in the broad chorus of social science and humanities disciplines which have taken ‘science’ as their objects. Philosophers and historians have been studying science for nearly as long as such a thing has been thought to exist. Sociologists joined the conversation in the twentieth century with quite far-reaching effects. Anthropology was a relative latecomer to the study of science, and there was no self-defined ‘anthropology of science’ until the late 1970s.

The main reason for this is that for much of its history, the discipline of anthropology was imagined both by its practitioners and by others as a ‘science of non-science’ (Viveiros de Castro; see also Nader 1996). In other words, anthropologists tended to assume both that their methods and approaches were part of a unitary project they thought of as Science, which belonged properly to the modern West, and that their object of study was made up of alternatives to this project: non-scientific or not-quite scientific ways of thinking and being amongst non-western peoples. When nineteenth century evolutionists and early twentieth century functionalists argued about magic, ‘animism’, witchcraft or religion, they often framed these, implicitly or explicitly, as the non-western ‘others’ of western science - including the western science of anthropology.

Another approach involved the study of what came to be called ‘ethno-science’. This line of enquiry was launched by Bronislav Malinowski’s (1884-1942) essay ‘Magic, science and religion’ (Malinowski 1925). Here Malinowski argued that, in fact, scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking existed alongside each other in all human cultures, ‘primitive’ as well as ‘modern’. Malinowski concluded that

If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried on by some sort of social organization – then there is no doubt that even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, however rudimentary. (Malinowski 1925: 34)

Anthropologists took up Malinowski’s point, to develop an interest in what came to be known as ‘ethnoscience’. The patronising language and the evolutionary assumptions were progressively abandoned, and studies of ethnoscience came to document sophisticated non-western cultural knowledge about the natural world, which contemporary western botanists or biologists might indeed seek to learn from. And yet, the very need to qualify these non-western beliefs and practices as ethnoscience intrinsically carries with it the assumption of a distinction between this and ‘proper’ – read: Western – science. Once the comparison has been set up in this way, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ethnoscience is a more rudimentary, or more practical or limited version of something which in its full form is the prerogative of the West. A more radical point was just around the corner, namely that all science (including Western science) was an ‘ethnoscience’. But, as we shall see below, it took some time - and some help from other disciplines – for the full effects of this realization to sink in.

It is precisely against this portrayal of non-western people’s knowledge as a more practically oriented, rudimentary version of Western science, that Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) built his theses about ‘the savage mind’ (Lévi-Strauss 1996). The point here was, as for Malinowski, to show that scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking co-existed in all human societies. But whereas Malinowski tried to argue that even the technologically ‘simplest’ peoples mix in a good dose of science with their rituals and beliefs, Levi-Strauss took a different tack. He started from a description of the incredible complexity of the symbolic systems through which many non-western peoples classify the natural world around them, to dispel the sense that this might be reduced to the mere satisfaction of their immediate practical needs. Rather, for Levi-Strauss, this ‘untamed thought’ which exists everywhere, but is particularly prevalent in ‘simpler’ societies, is a fully fledged intellectual pursuit, different but equal in sophistication to scientific thinking. It is a ‘logic of the concrete’ in which natural objects are combined and recombined into a complex symbolic language for thinking about social and existential problems.

From Science to sciences

The nudge to think ethnographically about western science itself, however, came from outside anthropology, as sociologists and historians started to rethink western science as an object of study. Many of these works, however, themselves drew on the findings and ideas that anthropologists had been developing in their studies of science’s ‘others’. Eventually, anthropologists joined the science studies party in their own right, and their contributions were distinctive.

Taking his cue from Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, as well as Weber’s writings on science and ethics, sociologist of science Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) investigated science as a functionally integrated social institution whose role was ‘the extension of certified knowledge’ (Merton 1973). This institution operated through the production of a ‘complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the man of science.’ (Merton 1973). A number of sociologists later took issue with Merton’s account of norms, noting in particular that these seemed to be mainly honoured in the breach by practising scientists (e.g. Mitroff 1974). More profoundly, what many later sociologists of science found lacking in Merton was the explicit way in which he cordoned off his account of the structure and norms of science from the positive content of science - its actual facts and findings. Sociology might explain failures or perversions of scientific knowledge and might give clues to the general conduct that would permit such perversions to be avoided. But it had little to say about the successes of science - its established facts and currently powerful theories. Paradoxically, while Merton’s account does suggest that the effective pursuit of scientific knowledge requires particular social and cultural factors, the nature of his ‘norms’ means that in most cases, what this structure requires is precisely that the interference of historical, sociological, and personal factors be eliminated. Ultimately, we are left with a picture in which, as in classic histories of science and in accounts of scientific practice by many scientists themselves, socio-cultural, historical, and personal factors could explain the context of science, always, but its content only in the case of scientific error. As for scientific success, it remained, presumably, a sign of the fact that scientists had managed to get in touch with reality and that extraneous social, cultural, and personal factors had been kept at bay. Merton just highlighted the idea that such keeping at bay was itself a social and cultural process - a thought to which later historians and anthropologists would return.

A more profound challenge, however, was under way. Long-standing assumptions about science as a broadly unitary method for moving from individual facts to general claims in a rational, value-free way - the sort of picture of science which remained at the core of Merton’s account and underpinned anthropologists’ own ideas about their own discipline – had started to be challenged from the early twentieth century onwards. Doctor and historian of science Ludwig Fleck pointed out that in tracing the history of a particular scientific object - syphilis – one did not find the expected history of the systematic application of a standard method, of rigorous hypothesis testing leading to a progressive history of discovery (Fleck 2012 [1934]). Science, for Fleck, could not be understood without a study of the particular communities of scholars and the ‘thought-styles’ which they developed and passed on through training. These thought-styles, and not simply evidence, reasoning, or logic, shaped what would count as an interesting question or an acceptable answer at any particular historical moment.

Years later, Thomas Kuhn expanded and popularised this notion through his discussion of ‘paradigms’ (1962). In a strong, and much debated statement, Kuhn claimed that paradigms represented ‘incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practising science in it.’ (Kuhn 1962). This view of science exploded the idea of a single project with a continuous, progressive history. Instead, historians and sociologists were offered a new object of study: the rich tapestry of multiple scientific paradigms, each carried by a human community with its own internal rules, forms of transmission and structure - much like the ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ which anthropologists had been investigating.

Studying scientists in their labs: two examples

By the later 1970s and early 80s, sociologists of science had begun detailed ethnographic studies of particular laboratories seeking to demonstrate the social construction of scientific knowledge in particular concrete settings. They showed how collective cultural assumptions, pragmatic negotiations between individuals, and the use of particular methods, tools and techniques rather than others, all came together to build a finished product which would later be packaged as a ‘mind-independent fact’. These sociologists opened up the practice of science to scrutiny.

A classic of the genre was Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts (1979), based on fieldwork and interviews undertaken in a biology lab – the Salk institute in La Jolla California. The authors – of whom one, (Woolgar) was a sociologist influenced by Garfinkel’s ‘ethnomethodology’ (cf. McDonald 2012) – highlight that their aim is to treat scientific practice as if it were as unfamiliar and in need of explanation as the subjects usually tackled by anthropologists. They give a deadpan and minute description of the spaces of the lab, the kinds of people present there and their daily activities - all as if the endpoint of this bustling were mysterious and unknown. On the face of it, it seems that enormous amount of time and money, masses of physical materials (frogs, mice, paper, electricity, pipettes, etc.) are being expended to produce a seemingly rather slim result: some papers, published in scientific journals. These papers contain statements about the world, cast with more or less qualification. The less qualified a statement is, the closer it is to an indisputable fact. By the time papers are published, the scientists themselves, like the broader public, talk of the facts they contained as if they were merely abstract statements made of an ‘external reality’. Facts become independent of the process of production described above. The laboratory is thus rather like a factory - a factory for producing standalone objects called scientific facts.

As another prominent author in this tradition commented, the core point of sociological lab studies was to show that “scientific products are ‘occasioned’ by the circumstances of their production” (Knorr-Cetina 1983). That is to say, the facts cannot stand alone. The circumstances of their production are not just an external ‘context’ – they are what constitutes these facts. In sum, laboratory studies continued the philosophical discussions about the nature of scientific knowledge, by making knowledge empirical through and through.

Early anthropological studies of scientists at work had a slightly different flavour, and different concerns. In one of the earliest ethnographies of Western science, Beamtimes and lifetimes (1988), Sharon Traweek studied high energy physicists in America and Japan to elucidate their shared and contrasting cultural constructions of their subject matter and themselves. Traweek, like Latour and Woolgar, explicitly played up the strangeness of treating physicists as if they were an alien cultural and social form. She described their spaces and the tools and techniques they used in detail, as well as the social arrangements which tied their scientific communities together and the hierarchies and training trajectories that crosscut them, and built up a detailed and convincing ethnographic picture of the ways in which these scientists understood their world.

Unlike Latour and Woolgar, Traweek was not interested in the construction of particular facts in physics. Rather, one main takeaway of Traweek’s ethnography – beyond the rich description itself – was that social organization structures scientists’ perception of nature, and vice versa. Traweek noted, for instance, that core gendered metaphors about nature as a ‘female’ realm to be investigated and unveiled by forceful ‘masculine’ scientists both stemmed from and reinforced broader gender stereotypes and assumptions in scientists’ own careers and lives. In these respects, Traweek’s project was strictly social constructionist: it related the ways in which these researchers understood nature to the social structures within which they operated, such as their gender relations, or the structures of authority and training which characterised their scientific communities.

Three key lessons

The anthropology of science today is a complex and diverse field, which is not easy to systematize or order into ‘schools’. However, one might point to a number of key debates which arose over the past twenty or so years since the beginnings of the anthropology of sciences, and key lessons which contemporary anthropologists have drawn from them.

Beyond social construction: don’t forget the things!

The contrasts between the methods and approach of Latour and Woolgar on the one hand, and Traweek, on the other, is instructive. All took as their object scientists and their daily practices. All began with careful and methodologically ‘naive’ descriptions of the spaces, practices, and social organisation of scientific activity. But there the similarities mostly ended.

While Traweek’s aim remained fairly classically – to demonstrate that understandings of nature were socially and culturally constructed – Latour and Woolgar’s book actually drove the first nail into the coffin of this popular kind of explanation. As Latour noted in a review of Traweek’s book (Latour 1990), to describe scientists as socially constructing ‘nature’ on the basis of their existing cultural and social arrangements was to write past the fact that their work produced specific realities which would later impact the actual worlds they lived in (and not just western culture’s ideas about nature, but also westerners’ and others’ daily lives).

The broader point was that ‘social construction’ itself was in fact a misnomer, if one took it to mean that the solid facts of science could be explained away by pointing at ‘social factors’ lying behind them. To understand the construction of scientific facts, Latour argued, one had to attend not only to the activity of humans, as sociologists typically did, but also to the activity and effects of the non-human materials in the lab: the machines, which enabled particular stabilizations and inscriptions, and the biological entities which ‘behaved’ in particular ways. Both Traweek and Latour and Woolgar had paid attention to the machines and objects which enabled scientists to construct their explanations and seek to encounter nature. But Traweek’s interest, ultimately, was in the ways the scientists understood and symbolised these machines (reflecting for instance, on the gendered imagery of huge expensive machines with names like ‘SPEAR’ etc.). In Latour and Woolgar’s account, the actual activity of these machines, the ways in which they transformed phenomena, was a core element in the explanation. Humans, their account suggested, are not the only agents. Rather, action is distributed, and swathes of human and nonhuman actants have to be aligned to produce effects in the world. This may be construction, but there is nothing straightforwardly ‘social’ about it. From this point of view, to claim that scientific facts or ‘nature’ are mere social constructs becomes as absurd as arguing that a chair or an apartment block is a mere social construct.

This philosophically counterintuitive point of view was eventually articulated more broadly as ‘Actor-Network theory’ (Latour 2005). The point was general. It did not imply a return to the earlier position that western science was not socially constructed, but that other knowledges were. Rather, for Latour and the actor-network theorists, classical sociological approaches always failed when they sought to explain phenomena away as social constructions – it’s just that the sciences (and scientists) to whom they did this were rather more frequently in the position to speak back loudly enough to prove them wrong. Sociologists and anthropologists of science writing today, while they might object to particular elements of Latour’s approach and assumptions and want to retain a more traditionally critical stance, still hold on to the core lesson: never forget the effects of materials!

Science beyond the lab: no need to stay put!

But there were gaps in Latour’s picture too, as anthropologists observed (Martin 1998). Comparing once more Traweek and Latour and Woolgar’s books, one obvious gap in the latter is how little the scientists’ own understandings and perspectives - their words, even - featured. We will return to this below. Another was the rather myopic attention to one particular setting, the lab, to the exclusion of broader extensions and connections. This echoes a broader distinction. Where sociologists of science more generally had focused in on particular laboratories and research programmes, the tradition of comparative and holistic thinking in anthropology drove anthropologists to ask broader questions about the ways in which purportedly scientific and non-scientific ways of encountering the world relate, differ, or cut across each other. Note, for instance, the fact that Traweek’s work focused on physicists in Japan and the US, thus introducing sophisticated questions from the start about the notion of cultural ‘context’ and what is or is not shared. Anthropologists of science pursued these complexities by asking how scientific knowledge and practices travelled beyond laboratory settings. This brought to center stage questions of history, power, and culture.

One could move beyond the lab by relating scientific and non-scientific knowledges within western societies themselves. A classic example of this approach is Emily Martin's influential book Flexible bodies (1994). There, the author traces the changing ways in which Americans imagine immunity. Drawing on the history of immunology and on popular media representations of the body, and moving backwards and forwards between researchers in immunological laboratories and interviews with a wide selection of laypersons in Baltimore, Martin shows the complex interplay between changing scientific and popular conceptions within the broad cultural setting of late-twentieth century America.

Crucially, Martin's point is not that initially correct scientific understandings are 'dumbed down' in popular portrayals. Nor is she arguing that scientific facts are the straightforward effects of social structure or a stable 'cultural context'. Rather, she notes that there is a constant interplay whereby scientists themselves draw on changing popular conceptions and metaphors to think through their research questions and findings, and that these findings in turn shape and transform popular conceptions. Scientific facts and representations travel and change as they move beyond the lab. The question of the cultural construction of scientific facts thereby opens up onto the broader question of how ‘American culture’ itself is in part constructed by reference to certain popular understandings of scientific facts. More broadly, Martin’s work involved a critical reflection (responding to the ‘crisis of representation’ of the 80s) about the formerly rather static and bounded ways in which anthropologists had conceptualised culture. This also involved new and creative ways of re-imagining anthropological fieldwork stretching over multiple places and times (Marcus 1995). Anthropology’s ‘holistic’ imaginary was thus both challenged and reconfigured (Candea 2007).

The other way in which anthropologists moved beyond the lab was by explicitly challenging their earlier distinctions between 'Science' and 'ethnoscience' (see above). A fairly straightforward point was that all science, including western science, is after all an ethnoscience - each can only be understood in context, and none can act as a privileged vantage-point from which others can be judged. These comparisons demote western science from its unique and exceptional position (Nader 1996). But to leave it there might suggest that each (ethno-)science operates in a self-contained world, rather like Kuhn's 'incommensurable' paradigms. The more challenging task is to trace the multiple power-laden interactions between these various ethnosciences.

An example of a convincing attempt to do this can be found in Roberto Gonzalez's Zapotec science (2001). Gonzalez argues that while Zapotec farming practices are grounded in a range of beliefs which western scientists might dismiss (such as a humoral theory, or the belief in animate supernatural beings), they also involve the key elements of scientific thinking:

Like agricultural scientists, Talean campesinos conduct experiments, formulate hypotheses, mold their results to theoretical frameworks, and disseminate their findings, from campesino to campesino, and from parent to child. (González 2001)

So far, Gonzalez's argument sounds rather like Malinowski's regarding Trobriand gardening. But, as we saw above, where Malinowski portrays Trobriand science as a pragmatic and rudimentary version of 'proper' contemporary science, Gonzalez portrays the two as equally theoretical and equally complex. The difference is historical and political: Zapotec science is a 'local' science, whereas western science – Gonzalez calls it 'cosmopolitan science' – is an ethnoscience which has gone global, partly through the effects of colonial and capitalist expansion. Gonzalez traces the historical process whereby Zapotec and cosmopolitan sciences have historically borrowed knowledges and techniques from each other. In sum, Gonzalez shows us how anthropology can take us beyond relativism by putting different (ethno)sciences in historical relation - not only different views on the world, but different and unequally powerful views in the same world.

Science, norms and ethics: take scientists seriously!

Throughout these developments, an increasing distance crept in between the way most anthropologists and sociologists thought about science, and the way many self-defined scientists did. For many of the latter, as for much of the Western public at large, science remains, despite its occasional failings, a unique and broadly successful attempt to establish truths about nature.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called 'science wars' (Ross 1996; Parsons 2003) erupted as a number of scientists struck back at what they read as anti-realist and politically motivated attacks on science from the humanities and social sciences. At the margins of this occasionally rather unedifying debate, a number of more interesting positions emerged within the anthropology of science. These voices asked again what it would mean to really take science and scientists seriously. This question has particular traction in anthropology - after all, one of the discipline’s core commitment had always been to take seriously the people with whom anthropologists work. If anthropologists’ accounts persistently irritate and offend the people they are describing, then surely something must be wrong? Again, one can distinguish two main approaches to dealing with this question.

We have seen the outline of one of these approaches in Latour’s comments about science’s power to talk back, which were made precisely in the context of the science wars. His far-reaching philosophical reconfiguration of science was cast as a partial response to these concerns. However, Latour’s radically performative view of science takes a very different turn when combined with the more engaged political stance stemming initially from feminist critiques of science. If science is a process of active world-making, rather than merely the discovery of truths about the world, then this recasts the question of how one might do science for ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Science becomes political through and through, not simply because it provides legitimising narratives for this or that political practice or social arrangement, but more potently and directly because it can build the world in different ways. For example, a world in which humans are understood as behavioural machines of the type described by some forms of psychology is a world in which voting, advertising, education, and taxation, will all take a certain form. Actual humans will be shaped and transformed in important ways by these various offshoots of scientific understandings built in particular labs, and will in turn live to confirm the value and reality of these understandings. Other paradigms in psychology might lead to different understandings of the human – different policies, different humans. In other words, the frontlines of the ‘science wars’ are not between science and non-science, or between science and the humanities who critique ‘it’ from the outside. The frontlines are within science itself.

One of the most influential exponents of this position is Donna Haraway. In her painstakingly detailed history of primatology (Haraway 1989), Haraway draws together Marxism, feminism, cultural anthropology, actor-network theory, and her own experiences as a trained biologist. Haraway shows how particular research programmes emerged out of a mix of assumptions, techniques, and human and non-human actors differently situated and positioned, and how these scientific practices and their results fed into and fed off of popular imaginaries. At every juncture, different sciences and different politics were possible.

What is crucially at stake here is a challenge to the ability of any one commentator to speak for ‘Science’. The sciences are multiple, contest-riven, and political. Anthropologists and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities learnt from Haraway to attend to the many voices within scientific debates, and occasionally to shed their reserve and enter debates ‘behind the lines’, forming alliances with particular scientists against others, rather than sniping at ‘Science’ from a self-definedly external position. In sum, a 'feminist technoscience' approach such as Haraway’s confronts the question ‘are you taking scientists seriously’ with another question: ‘which scientists?’. In some respects there can be no more serious engagement with science that to get stuck in and argue within it.

Nevertheless, one might argue that, as with actor-network theory, the alliances proposed by this approach paper over some deep philosophical divergences. At its core lies a radical assumption that one can only properly engage with scientists once a general narrative about the aims, norms, and duties of 'Science' (as an objective, value-free, method-bound quest for knowledge about the world detached from any particular standpoint) has been replaced with one that depicts sciences as this-worldly, inherently political, and grounded in multiple standpoints. While it may encourage engagement with scientists on particular issues and projects, this approach comes, in other words, with a strong ‘top-level’ sense of what science is and how it should be done, one which is intentionally and forcefully at odds with the way scientists themselves have usually imagined those broadest aims and meanings of their practice.

There is, however, a very different way of tackling the question of ethics and of taking scientists seriously. This way traces how these commitments are lived in practice - to return, in other words, to the question of science as a vocation, as launched by Max Weber, and developed by Merton (see above). As anthropologist Paul Rabinow noted,

Although each component of Merton’s picture of science has been subjected to historical, sociological and philosophical reevaluation, it is fair to say that many scientists believe that these norms guide their practice. Hence, a major gap has developed today between scientists’ self-representation and the representations of scientists by those who study them. (Rabinow 1996)

These norms were mostly denounced as ideological cover by an early generation of social constructionists, and ignored by those who chose to focus on the practice of scientists in their labs rather than their accounts of what they did. Finally, ‘performative’ approaches such as those of Haraway sought to engage them head-on by articulating specific counter-norms (for instance that of the scientist as 'modest witness' (Haraway 1997). Rabinow called, instead, for anthropologists to study them, as they would study any other social practice which exists in tension with particular ideals. That means accepting that norms may never be completely and coherently instantiated, but they can nevertheless guide practice and inform scientists sense of what they are up to and their judgment of each other. Despite the mention of Merton, Michel Foucault’s late interest in the subject of ethics and self-formation was perhaps more of a key conceptual influence and guide here.

This interest in norms had strong roots, too, in the history of science. Shapin and Schaffer’s account of the controversy between Boyle and Hobbes over the nature of scientific knowledge, Leviathan and the air-pump (Shapin, Schaffer, & Hobbes 1985), for instance, gave an account of the way proper scientific experimental procedure was articulated, from the start, in moral (as well as gendered and classed) terms as going hand in hand with a particular ‘gentlemanly’ ethos of honour and trustworthiness. Later, Shapin returned to the subject – with explicit reference to Merton – to trace the transformations in scientific norms which came with the increasing professionalization of science and the increasingly strong links which developed during the twentieth century between science and industry (Shapin 2008). Daston and Galison’s monumental history of changing understandings and practices of scientific objectivity (Daston & Galison 2007), traces the effects of changing instrumentation, new scientific problems, and historical contexts. At its heart, however, the book approaches objectivity precisely as an ‘epistemic virtue’ - something scientists genuinely strive for, although its content may change.

In anthropology, this interest in scientific virtues was bolstered by the broader consolidation of the anthropology of ethics as a field of study (Laidlaw 2014). It became easier to think of scientists at work as – much like persons everywhere – pursuing particular kinds of ethical projects and undergoing particular practices of self-formation. One could point out that scientists were not unique in this respect, and yet do justice to their sense that the aims, goals, and ascetic practices they underwent were distinctive (see e.g. Candea 2010).

In sum, from the diverse and interwoven strands and debates above, emerged three fairly strong elements of advice to the aspiring anthropologist of science: 1) Don’t forget the things: Pay attention to the power and effects of non-human entities; 2) Don’t stay put: think about sciences (in the plural) and other knowledges as they interact and intersect in power-laden ways in the world beyond the lab; 3) Take scientists seriously: keep in view the real politics of scientific world-building and scientists’ own sense of themselves as engaged in particular ethical projects. The best anthropology of science today does all of the above.

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Note on contributor

Matei Candea is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2013-2016). He is the author of Corsican fragments: difference, knowledge and fieldwork (2010, Indiana), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (Routledge, 2010) and Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) with Jo Cook, Catherine Trundle and Tom Yarrow. He has published a number of articles on politics, identity, hospitality, human-animal relations, behavioural science and anthropological comparison. His current research interests include anthropological heuristics and the comparative study of free speech.

Dr Matei Candea, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. mc288@cam.ac.uk