strathern 85 constitutive orders of kinship & econ

Kinship and Economy: Constitutive Orders of a Provisional KindAuthor(s): Marilyn StrathernSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May, 1985), pp. 191-209Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644216Accessed: 24/03/2009 11:46

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kinship and economy: constitutive orders of a provisional kind

MARILYN STRATHERN-Trinity College, Cambridge

From time to time, terms that have lain unremarked in the anthropological vocabulary sud-

denly become widespread and habitual. "Constitution" is one such: along with its more active

partner "construction," as in "construction of the person," it is in contemporary vogue as a solution to certain problems of representation. These are conceptual problems to do with how we order relations between terms referring to analytically separated parts from which our models construct wholes.

The order may be encapsulated in a conjunction, "family and economy," or a persuasive preposition, "structures in history" or "the structure of the practice" (Sahlins 1981). However, unlike directional formulae, as in the separation of constants and variables, such framings may turn into commentary on what consequently seem limitations in the original concepts. Sahlins can write (1983:534) on how to explode "the concept of history" by the anthropological "ex-

perience of culture." Similarly, to confront a distinction between "symbolic" and "material" realms consistently suggests a construction amenable to deconstruction. Thus, when the terms/

concepts are then rendered as "constitutive" of one another, they can be grasped both as themselves and as the relation between them. "Constitution" is a powerful trope for this revelation.

In particular, "constitution" currently speaks to the apparent collapse of certain traditional dualisms in anthropological analysis, as between rules and behavior (Ahern 1982), meanings and data (Crick 1982; Scholte 1981), relations of production and ideological "social" relations

(Keenan 1981), or ritual and cultural reality (Kapferer 1984). It seems an appropriately encom-

passing metaphor for what was earlier given processual form (interaction, transformation, gen- eration, regulation). Whereas processual analysis uses sequence to keep apart the terms of the

relationships being studied, the new idiom could speak equally to order (Comaroff and Roberts

The contexts in which kinship seems theoretically distinguishable or indistinguish- able from economic relations can be subjected to empirical sorting of a kind. Drawing on a debate over the nature of sexual inequality, this paper addresses the manner in which items produced by or transacted between people stand or do not stand for aspects of social relations. Traditional anthropological interest in "rights" or "roles" was perhaps developed in the ethnographic context of certain cultural equations between "things" and "persons." In other contexts things fail to carry such reference to persons; western commodity logic, on the other hand, abstracts labor as simultaneously a part of the person and a thing. We run the danger of preempting our subject matter to assume we know what is transactable between persons. [anthropological models, bridewealth, gift systems, roles, sexual inequality]

Copyright ? 1985 by the American Anthropological Association 0094-0496/85/020191 -1 9$2.40/1

kinship and economy 191

1981) or to dialectic (cf. Boon 1982). Comaroff (1980) is particularly clear on its analytical utility in the interpretation of bridewealth. One no longer describes this institution in terms of property disposal as an independent variable, but sees "property" (how this is defined) as constitutive of "bridewealth" (how that is defined). Constitution here includes a notion of symbolic ordering. What is deliberately lost is the kind of relational account that normally yields explanation. Loss of essentialist meaning to either term, property/bridewealth, yields their mutual constitution as its product. This position is criticized by restoring essentialist meanings to the terms-it being the symbolic strategy of such critics to set "materialist" explanations against "symbolist" ones. The procedure of those who trade off comparison for context (Comaroff 1980:15), whether or not they achieve post-binary bliss (Parkin 1982:xiii quoting Sturrock), is to claim they are the same thing.

Uncertainty about terms of analysis is self-generated in one sense: the empiricist dilemma is to no longer know how to proceed in the description of relationships if we can no longer assume discrete definitions for the elements. Thus to relate "kinship" and "economy" is to bring two elements or terms together, but seeing how the one bears on the other depends also on keeping the terms separate.' Without such an essentialist grasp, the one may well appear to be subsumed by the other, kinship collapsing when one considers institutions from the perspective of economic relations, economics when one considers kinship.

I return later to the significant symbolic role of "constitution" as signaling an analytical awareness of this conceptual dilemma. The point to press at this juncture is that kinship and economy are a particularly apposite pair for scrutiny. In following through some of the implications of how we construct these specific terms, it is possible to arrive at some measure of why we do so. The argument is foreshadowed in Barnett and Silverman's (1979) analysis of "separations." They are interested in the manner in which units and entities are conceptualized, and argue that western social science draws heavily on an ideology of "society" or "system" com- prising the organization of self-evident bounded entities, notably "persons." Following Maine, they call this a contractual (as opposed to a substantial, sc. Maine's "status") symbolism; the forces that bind persons are seen to lie in abstract institutions beyond them, rather than inhering in their fundamental makeup (substance). At its heart, they assert, this is "an ideology which postulates a distinction between the person and things separable from the person" (1979:55). In the same year as their book came out, Reason (1979) examined systems of classification with a similar eye. His starting point is the (Saussurian) separation of sign from sense. Reason argues that the further binary conception of a sign, the separation of signifier and signified that the sign unites in an arbitrary relationship, "mimics in its form the orderly anarchy of capitalist production" (1979:241). For the "prime determinant of the dominant mode of signification in a culture," he states (1979:224), is "the way in which production is organized." His antecedents for this conclusion (they include Saussure and Merleau-Ponty) are different from those claimed by Barnett and Silverman (notably Marx and Schneider); but the latter are equally concerned to specify that it is bourgeois political thought in capitalist society that sets up as arbitrary the relation between persons on the one hand, and on the other hand the things that come to stand for persons' performances and statuses. The paradigm is labor power, abstracted from the person and acquiring an independent value.

The anthropological organization of data in terms of "kinship" and "economy," then, is likely to reveal the limits of our own representational devices. It also provides information on how these devices might be contextualized and compared with those of other societies.

In one view, kinship and economy may be taken as terms for systems which deploy elements of substance, viz. persons and things; each describes the social character to the material givens of existence. The terms may be constructed serially ("religion," "politics," and so on can be added). "The kinship system" and "the economic system" thereby assume the character of

192 american ethnologist

bounded entities, insofar as their internal systemic nature gives them a "natural" (substantial) coherence. The question becomes how to relate them to each other. Kinship and economy never make up a binary pair; yet, in the manner in which the relationship between them is conceived, the two systems may be treated dichotomously, or if not as two parts making up a common whole then as axes in specific antithesis. I mean this in a limited but important sense: in the attempt to grasp a holistic understanding of "society," the two terms may be played off against each other. They are, of course, by no means the only terms to be so used; I wish simply to draw attention to the strategy itself.

The dichotomy can then be collapsed, a procedure that frequently appears forced on anthropological analysis by the nature of nonwestern, noncapitalist social systems. It may be argued that in fact kinship codifies economic behavior or that economic values symbolize kin relationships; or even that kinship is economy, and vice versa. Contrast may be made with the restricted role that kinship plays in capitalist society. This presents a familiar comparative problem. To the extent that kinship and economy popularly tend to be defined as exclusive of each other, applying these concepts elsewhere involves not just translating the individual terms into other contexts, but of dealing also, as I have stressed, with the relations presupposed between the terms. For to say that in such and such a society kinship is economy, or kinship is both infrastructure and superstructure (cf. Godelier 1975, 1977:123), has revelatory force as a counter to cultural assumptions which otherwise take their separation for granted. But if one could specify the grounds for making such separations, perhaps one could specify the grounds for also collapsing them.2 In the meanwhile, we need tropes such as "constitution" in order to adapt our conceptual vocabulary to very different social conditions from those in which it is embedded. Our concepts adapt deceptively well. Indeed, one might say that an enabling condition for social science investigation lies in the binary sign which allows us to comprehend things in terms other than themselves. If we were not easy with this as a symbolic strategy, then we could not begin to grasp other cultures in the language that belongs to our own.

Reason contrasts features of this symbolic strategy with noncapitalist representations, for him typified in peasant life. Indeed, he argues:

If by "symbol" we understand a signifying which may be realized in virtue of that which is signifying possessing a prior significance, then the peasant consciousness is not symbolic and is not organized by symbolism [1979:239; original emphasis].

The peasant world is composed by exemplification: signs possess that to which they refer (1979:237). Exemplification is done, enacted. In this light, Reason's peasant societies appear similar to Barnett and Silverman's "holistic" ones. Barnett and Silverman entertain the notion of noncapitalist symbolism, but stress its substantial, enacted nature by contrast with the abstract quality of (capitalist) contractual symbolism. In the former, persons embody their own statuses, enact their own value. Persons are not defined separately from the "roles" they "perform," but through diffuse codes for conduct enact their particular statuses. Their "substance" is determining. Barnett and Silverman go on to suggest that "western logic" allows persons to be dominated by abstract things and systems perceived as the "real world," with the result that where a person is dominated simply as a person, domination is legitimated through the possibility of his or her being defined as incomplete (cf. M. Strathern 1984b). In precapitalist logic, though, "domination is legitimized ... through the ideology of superior substance enjoining particular codes for conduct, and inferior substance enjoining particular codes for conduct" (Barnett and Silverman 1979:70). This at once brings to mind the domain of gender symbolism. However, I turn to recent gender studies not for the analysis of substance symbolism as such but as a theoretical resource in the elucidation of the relation between kinship and economy. I briefly sketch some current issues to do with domination between the sexes, but focus only on one aspect of what is sometimes classified as substance, namely labor. Since the separation


of labor power from the laborer appears to be the principal capitalist experience in the accounts already mentioned, this would seem a useful comparative starting place.

More importantly, perhaps, the analyses I wish to discuss depart from a simple contrast between capitalist and noncapitalist consciousness. There are some very evident organizational differences among societies normally taken as typifying the latter-particularly in the relationship in which kinship and economics appear to stand to one another. We can thus begin to grasp differences in the construction of other relations, such as those that yield what Reason calls symbolism. The categories "male" and "female" are so often pressed into symbolic service that it is perhaps no surprise that these are issues in which feminist anthropology is especially interested.

the feminist input

A sketch of recent discussion will set the context for the next section. Aside from illuminating problems to do with the kinds of identities that feminist-inspired writers have created between themselves and their subject of study, the "deconstruction" of gender (cf. Harris and Young 1981:111) has had profound implications. Among other things, it has laid open the symbolism of analytical devices. This certainly applies to the ideological character of the separation between kinship (the "family") and "economy" under capitalist regimes. It becomes transparent that quite different values are assigned to what are seen as differentiated sets of relationships. The family is conceived as both the context for (nurture) and the end of (consumption) processes held to lie beyond it-these processes are conceptualized as production, and production in a wider sense is "society" (Harris 1981). Whitehead (1981, cf. 1976:201) and Stolcke (1981) have recently debated the extent to which the bourgeois "family" is constructed as a natural unit. As Harris (1981:63) points out with precision, the evaluation of the family as a natural unit mystifies economic relationships between family members, and projects society as beyond its bounds. These analyses form part of a long series of writings concerned with the status of domesticity as a politically charged and theoretically loaded concept (e.g., Ortner 1974; Lam- phere 1974; Rosaldo 1974; Reiter 1975; Stivens 1978; Yanagisako 1979; Hirschon 1981). Framing the family as natural, and thus differentiated from society, is interpreted as part of an industrial world view which equates production with society itself. The point has been made by others (and perhaps most systematically by Sahlins 1976), but feminist analysis has given it substance (cf. Sacks 1979; Rapp 1979; Lederman's 1982 citation of Etienne and Leacock 1980 in this context, and so on).

The first deconstructionist step was to demolish essentialist definitions of "woman" (cf. Ed- holm, Harris, and Young 1977; Mathieu 1978; Sacks 1979:243), and thus recontextualize them with ideological postulates about the givens upon which society works (women's natures as opposed to men's natures). Meanings assigned to sexual attributes, then, can be taken as relational; not just as culturally variable (a conclusion that belongs to an earlier epistemology [Mead 1962 (1950); Freeman 19831), but as ideologically produced. The locus of essentialism has consequently shifted, from questions about the nature of the sexes to questions about the nature of "inequality." Indeed, Atkinson asserts (1982:239-241) that new formulations of the issue as to whether or not social inequality inheres in relations between men and women mark a radical divide in recent anthropological studies of gender.

This leads to a second step. To the extent that gender is divested of "natural" attributes, there is a tendency to adopt the counter position in the same antithesis (between nature and culture) and thus reclothe the sexes with "cultural" ones. Similarly, to regard "persons" as performing "roles," or "individuals" as integrated into "society," reproduces a dual and invariably gen- dered predicate of agency. Profounder grounds for cross-societal comparison lie in the possibility of accounting for the very notions of role or society, an ambition foreshadowed by the


Ardeners' (1972, 1975) interest in the bounding of Bakweri women beyond society and beyond discourse. The issue to which Atkinson draws our attention rests vexingly on the extent to which men and women may be seen to act with common goals or values, conflicting interests, and so on, and raises the query as to whose models we are considering. Involved also in the debate about inequality are decisions being made on behalf of the actors, which result in certain evaluations about the nature of power and who has it (Tiffany 1978). The new evaluations are laud- ably explicit on this point.

Leacock (1981), for instance, is clear about the evaluative process. Her depiction of egalitarian relations in Montagnais-Naskapi, a band society, rests first on dismantling western bias as to what are important activities, and second, on selecting decision-making powers as the test. "The basic principle of egalitarian band society was that people made decisions about the activities for which they were responsible .... With regard to the autonomy of women, nothing in the structure of egalitarian band societies necessitated special deference to men" (1981:140). Sacks, on the other hand, stresses that the question of egalitarian relations between the sexes is to be decided in respect of relations of production (an issue taken up in Leacock 1982). Following Engels, Sacks sees familial property relations as crucial, and from a typology of political economies (communal, corporate kin, and class) analyzes inequality as the product of specifiable conditions of ownership. Partly because of the difficulty of evaluating deference (Sacks 1979:91), she thus turns to the productive mode for evidence of inequality. Equality is to be found where producers are also owners. Citing !Kung and Mbuti as communities of owners who are also communities of producers, she adds "and ties of kinship and affinity are also forces of production" (1979:114; my emphasis). What differentiates relations between the sexes in the corporate kin political economy, as opposed to this communal one, is that "where men and women in the communal mode of production had the same relations to the means of production, only siblings share this relationship in the corporate mode. Spouses stand in different relations to productive means" (1979:118). As Hamilton (1982:88; see Godelier 1982) reiterates, "to lump together all pre-state formations as cases of primitive communism is to obscure the differences between them."

These discussions underline the point that we cannot possibly regard noncapitalist societies as homogeneous in the organization of production. It would be dangerous, therefore, to gen- eralize also about their symbolic strategies. Sacks envisages a shift (in the ownership of resources) from equal to unequal relations between husbands and wives. The notion of "equality," however, is our own (cf. Atkinson 1982:240). We are left with where to put people's own models, since it is precisely between husbands and wives that many so-called band societies posit asymmetry. To provide a place for people's models requires a further analytical move. Concentrating on the organization of production takes the construction of "relationships" for granted. Here I take differences in "productive modes" for granted, and concentrate instead on how the idea of a relationship might be variously conceptualized. There are many more symbolic strategies at work than a simple dichotomy between capitalist and noncapitalist systems allows.

egalitarian modeling

In thinking about the notion of a relationship, it is helpful to consider an argument offered by Collier and Rosaldo (1981) in theoretical antithesis to the kind of discussions mentioned above. The authors are explicit on the point that understanding inequalities between the sexes must be with reference to general "structural inequalities" within social systems: Sexual inequality is systematically linked to the organization of general social inequality. More than that, in their model the one implicates the other. In fact, for the cases they consider this is an apt modeling; yet I do not think this modeling covers all noncapitalist (nonstate/nonclass) systems


as they seem to imply, and their own account, it so happens, gives some insight into why not. Collier and Rosaldo directly confront the issue of egalitarianism for the kinds of societies

discussed by Leacock and Sacks. Their chief examples come from !Kung San, N. E. Arnhem Land, and llongot; apropos the last, they argue that many hunter-horticulturalists share features otherwise associated with hunter-gatherers. The type they wish to establish is based not on technological but on marital criteria. They argue that relations established at marriage provide "a privileged clue to the organization of gender-relevant productive relationships in all class- less social formations" (1981:278). The significant divide is between societies where marriage is structured through brideservice-the groom does things for his affines-and through bridewealth-the groom gives things to them. Distinctive meanings are attributed to the groom's services and gifts in each case. These distinctions lead to a discussion of how persons establish claims over one another.

Instead of "band" or "communal" formations, then, they talk of "brideservice" systems. Here, individuals are autonomous, adults being in no position to command others, to a large extent controlling the foodstuffs they acquire and experiencing considerable freedom to with- draw from undesirable interactions (Collier and Rosaldo 1981:279, 289). Nevertheless, the experience of independence for men and women is different. The "egalitarianism of brideservice societies" rests for men in their access to wives: "once a man is married he needs nothing" (1981:289-290). At marriage women lose a degree of personal and sexual freedom; men, on the contrary, gain the opportunity to be equal with other men. A married man "can be seem- ingly free from obligations to others . .. [for] marriage enables a man to become an effective social actor" (1981:284), to a degree not available for women. "Because the equal status all men hope to earn is based on marriage, men must be able to assert, and to defend, their claims to women" (1981:290). Direct-exchange marriage becomes a prototype of men's socially creative powers, and thus men apparently come to bear ritual responsibility for the regeneration of social life (1981:286, 303). It is commonly reported that women's rituals tend rather to be focused on their capacity to create heterosexual relations.3 Within marriage, finally, men may assume obligations toward their wife's kin, but they also gain access to the products of the wife's labor.

Now, stating the case in terms of expectations concerning labor seems at odds with everything else reported from these societies. It confounds, for example, Woodburn's typological distinction between immediate-return (including the !Kung and other hunter-gatherers) and de- layed-return systems. His immediate-return societies sound like Collier and Rosaldo's brideservice ones. Egalitarianism rests in

the ability of individuals to attach and to detach themselves at will from groupings and from relationships, to resist the imposition of authority by force, to use resources freely without reference to other people, to share as equals in game meat brought into camp, to obtain personal possessions without entering into dependent relationships [Woodburn 1982:4451.

Yet the domain of marriage stands out as a chief context for the organization of enduring connections between persons. Collier and Rosaldo cite Marshall's description of affinal prestations in !Kung (1981:282), and Woodburn writes of his own Hadza that individuals

have some obligations to all the other Hadza who happen to be in the same camp, and other obligations to all the other adults of the same sex who happen to be in the same camp. They do not have important differentiated property obligations to specific individuals within these groupings except in the man-wife- wife's mother triad [ 1972:197; my emphasis].

Collier and Rosaldo argue that relations between the sexes in fact structure general social ine-

qualities in brideservice societies. Bonds are established between persons in the sense that people do things for one another; there is a correspondence in the manner in which a bride per- forms services for her husband and the groom services for her kin.

This brings me to the crux. Woodburn points to the significance of property. The egalitari-


anism of immediate-return systems, he states (1982:445), disengages people from property and from the potentiality in property rights for creating dependency. Since property is a social relation, what he must mean is that things are not a vehicle for relationships. He rightly stresses the noncompetitiveness of this egalitarianism in contrast to systems where claims to equality are asserted through strenuous competition in transactions.

If the point is that there is no property relation between people through things, then we can move, as Atkinson (1982:240) hoped, from a negative to a positive characterization of the systems. It cannot be that people disengage themselves from something they never had, but that they put particular constructions on their labor. Collier and Rosaldo make the point beautifully. The logic of direct-exchange is that only a woman can be exchanged for a woman. The logic of brideservice, concomitantly, is that only labor can be exchanged for labor. Asymmetries come from unequal value being put on the products of labor (men's game and women's gath- ered food, cf. 1981:282). But the products have no "transcontextual value" (1981:289). Above all, they do not represent conversions of labor. "Goods can be exchanged only for other goods" (1981:298) precisely because labor is defined by its exercise in the context of specific relationships (cf. Schwimmer 1979). Goods cannot be used to create or dissolve other obligations (Col- lier and Rosaldo 1981:313). The services and gifts a groom tenders to his in-laws only represent his continuing claims in his wife-his labor in performing or obtaining them cannot be detached from these affinal relationships. It is really back to front to write as Woodburn does of the depersonalization of goods (1982:448). I would put it much more strongly. In these band/ communal/immediate-return/brideservice systems, items do not come to stand for labor and do not come to stand for persons.

Collier and Rosaldo's analysis of labor relations thus allows one to retain notions of bonding and obligation, and thus the idea of relationship itself. By looking at relationships between men and women we are reminded that some men and women are indeed in a position to claim labor from others. This takes the direct form of claims on services. What misleads us is that this is not done through an idea of property.

Hamilton (1982) makes it clear for the Australian case that equal access to the means of production is beside the point. Owners are workers-if there is a difference it is with respect to ritual action (Bell 1980:243)-and control over productive resources resides not in control over things but over events and enactments. In these systems, gifts are not in lieu of labor. Reciproc- ities between husband and wife are thus not coded as at some level an equal or unequal exchange of items. (Collier [in press] develops the implications for dispute-settlement procedures which cannot draw on notions of compensation-things for persons-and for authority structures which rest on what people know, not what they manipulate.) The things a groom gives his parents-in-law are often items he obtains himself, and comprise his obligations, his service. Services and goods may thus be rendered to specific kin, but goods cannot symbolize services.

In brideservice societies all the appurtenances of complex relationships are there (obligations, claims, bonds) and their consequent asymmetries, that between the sexes being most marked, but their milieu is unfamiliar. It would make more relational sense to us to be able to accord the distribution of goods and services some determining place. It is puzzling to en- counter a situation in which things are substitutable neither for persons nor for labor.

property and its consequences

I suggested that Collier and Rosaldo's approach to social inequality through sexual inequality was particularly apt for the "brideservice" case. These two types of inequality entail one another for the very reason that things play no mediating role. At the back of their account is always the shadow of "bridewealth" societies, where material items do stand for persons and


labor, and "rights" and relationships are defined by the passage of gifts. They cite, for example, situations in which juniors have to work for seniors in order to marry, their labor convertible into (corporate) wealth and then as bridewealth used to compensate for or be exchanged against the bride's labor. ("Valuables and men's rights in women are not just interchangeable, but actual equivalents" [Collier in press].) One might here use the dimension of sexual inequalities as a key to other socially constructed inequalities, as Collier has done. My own feeling is that a further kind of relationship between these domains is at issue. In bridewealth societies differences between the sexes may be used as codes for talking about other differences between persons: they come to have the status of a model or a medium of representation but do not comprise the entire subject of the differences.

Bridewealth societies thus evince a profound symbolic shift. In the equation of things with persons, aspects of personal status become manipulable. Labor may be conceptualized as detachable from the person and, like fertility or sexuality, as a disposable asset. Control over the productivity of others may be accumulated as "wealth," as in the "wealth-in-people" system Bledsoe describes, which "binds people to their superiors in ties of marriage, clientship, and filial obligation" (1980:1). Relationships may be conceptualized as matters of debt and credit, hierarchies and multiplicities of "rights" (Bloch 1983:92) or "ownership" (Llewelyn-Davies 1978, 1981; cf. Whitehead 1984). Things in brideservice societies are not equated with women (Collier and Rosaldo 1981:299); in bridewealth contexts they very often are. Women often emerge as "gifts" in exchanges between men. This does not of course make them objects in the commodity sense (Rubin 1975:174), insofar as gifts themselves stand for persons orfor parts of persons (M. Strathern 1984a). Indeed, the particular case of women as wealth is an aspect of a more general characterization of interpersonal relationships in the same terms.

For whether the items in question take the form of fixed, "corporate" estates or movable items, they allow a dramatic representation of partibility. What looks like partibility in property has to be partibility in relationships. That is, persons may be constructed as identified with certain assets, as having disposable assets, as being deprived of claims to assets, which means that in relation to sets of diverse others they may be defined through an identity of interest or be seen as detachable from such interests. In her category of kin corporate societies, Sacks (1979) thus differentiates women's status as wives and as sisters, documenting the contextual shift from the conceptualization of women as coparceners with their brothers in respect of common property to their exclusion from the interests of their husbands.

Collier and Rosaldo indicate the enormous variation to be found in bridewealth societies. But possibly they push their typology beyond its limits to then point to the further category of "dowry" societies, though clearly they are referring to the same divide that Goody (1976) char- acterizes as between homogeneous inheritance (bridewealth as part of a societal fund) and diverging devolution (dowries creating a conjugal fund) (cf. Goody and Tambiah 1973). Yet, to follow Collier and Rosaldo, we should not be diverted by the form of property transfers at marriage from the systemic differences they symbolize in the way claims over persons are structured.

One difference is this. In so-called bridewealth contexts, items can substitute for labor, embody it (Modjeska 1982:105), yet continue to carry reference to the social source of production. Thus "rights" can be established through "work." Labor may be formulated as embedded within kin relations (owed to others) or detachable (at a person's disposal), but not, I would argue, alienable in a technical sense. In certain so-called dowry contexts, however, it would seem that "rights" do become completely detached from "work." Whether, in fact, estates are transmitted as entire entities to single heirs or whether they are divided between heirs whose interests together make up the whole, in essence such "property" is conceptually unitary or non-partible. It is not conceived as composed of socially heterogenous interests. Such property can carry messages about a social identity which, instead of being construed as the product of


differentiated sources of labor or of transactions (as in bridewealth) that sustain heterogeneous interests, can only be the product of accumulation or of replication: hence the importance of like marrying like and the compatibility of marital estates. It is the logical condition of non- partibility that leads to such property acquiring what looks like autonomous value. Social status comes to appear contingent on the value of the assets.

This prefigures privatization, in which everyone becomes placeable in reference to a condition of ownership (Gregory 1982:106). Indeed, through capitalism persons are construed in property terms-by what they own-and relationships, in turn, are seen to rest on rights to assets, even for categories of apparently "propertyless" people who in the last resort "own" their labor. It is a mistake, of course, to equate property relations with the deployment of possessions; rather, the concept of property as an alienable thing structures the very conceptualization of relationship. People may experience agency, for example, as their being active sub- jects in respect of inert objects. In "capitalist" systems, then, we are dealing with a specific (though not exclusive) formula for the reckoning of relationship-to be matched not with any distribution of goods within the population but with the symbolic detachability of persons from things in such a way that the value of things can be constructed without reference to social sources of production.4 Let me return to the question of variation within the category of bridewealth societies to underline the point. I touch briefly on an ethnographic contrast between West African notions of inheritance and succession and Highlands New Guinea exchange transactions between persons.

From a West African perspective, kinship appears to revolve around issues of succession and property devolution, there being a concomitant detachability between person and kin role such that kin roles may be thought of as miniature offices (Goody 1962:329). Kin groups may be conceptualized as estates, and intergenerational succession as analogous to holder/heir relationships. This yields both a hierarchy of positions (elders, seniors), and principles of exclusion (women as "jural minors"). The compelling nature of these metaphors is examined through a contrast developed in Andrew Strathern's (1980, 1982) discussion of mortuary and bridewealth payments in the New Guinea Highlands. Here rather "it is the person who is the prime form of 'movable property' and not any material property which he or she 'owns' and others inherit" (1982:222). Gift-giving is the counterpart to intergenerational succession; exchanges are to be understood in respect of the relationships they generate (Modjeska 1982). To put it another way, "status" devolution is less apt as an analytical metaphor than the idea of directing or averting flow, the flow of persons or parts of persons being embodied in the flow of wealth objects (Wagner 1977). Like the holder/heir model, in constructing persons through transactions, the donor/recipient model also sets up an asymmetry. The split is not in terms of eligibility for office, as in the West African case, but between transactor, gift-giver, and the transaction, gift (Rubin 1975:174). If gender in some situations marks the divide (men exchange women as gifts), it also marks the internal partibility of persons (the agent who transacts with part of him/ herself).

In both ethnographic regions persons are equated with things. But there is a difference in the way partibility is achieved, and this in turn has significance for the way attachments between persons-relationships--are set up. I have suggested that the notion of role as office emerges as a strategy in West Africa but not New Guinea. In the West African situation some roles in fact appear more office-like than others (cf. Rogers 1978:151), so that a theoretical approach to a study of social relationships based on the office analogy perhaps reflects an indigenous interest in the jural delineation of certain statuses at the expense of others.5 Whether the person is invested with heritable wealth, or with shrines or objects which endow him or her with a position, the formula of endowment turns out to describe certain positions (e.g., lineage elder) and not others (e.g., genitor, genetrix). This particular conceptualization of role is thus, as Goody intimates, closely bound up with property notions, both role and property being seen


as attached to persons-and attaching persons to one another-in comparable ways. It is of interest that analyses of such societies, where roles thus have a jural/property dimension, en- counter difficulty in conceptualizing the "roles" of non-office holders except in the emic idioms of mystical or moral influence, or through resort to biological metaphors of innate bonding or rivalry.

Perhaps it is only where roles are construed as offices that we can speak of the "second class citizen" syndrome for women-a political idiom that marks exclusion from office holding. Such analytical idioms are quite properly responsive to specific ethnographic situations, but equally they may incorporate the very ideology to which analysis should also attend. The idea of "role" itself may turn out to be part of the data to be analyzed.

Since we are used to thinking of society as involving networks of "roles" (or as a structure of "statuses"), this problematizes the notion of "society." It has been a central concern of much writing on gender that men so frequently appear to capture the social domain. Feminist-inspired debates on the nature of political-domestic dichotomies acknowledge the extent to which drawing boundaries embodies processes of legitimation and mystification, and the analytic usefulness of simply considering women's contigent "status" was early demolished (e.g., Kaberry 1952:145; cf. Wallman 1978; Shapiro 1979). The notions of role as an office (part of an estate), or of status as marking a "position" with respect to others, rest on indigenous formulations of relationship. To describe relations in terms of such positioning is, of course, to accept the boundary-framing which requires accounting (Comaroff 1980:7). What is true for "status," I have suggested here, is also true for "role." Both arise from specific developments, in the social situations under study, of an equation between persons and things.6

In response to the question, Why do men appear to be prominent in society?, it is apparent that it is as much the notion of "society" we must explain as the behavior of men. The postulate of male models has characterized feminist writings on gender to a profitable degree, less because male bias provides the crucial answer, than because it indicates the crucial question: Under what circumstances is a concept of "society" produced? The idea of society is itself a modeling, and it is by no means clear that all the so-called "societies" we study have such models. (I do not mean in the sense of a conception of a unified structure-we know this for our own device-but in the sense of a representation of collective life describable as sets of relationships of the role/status kind.) My intention is not of course to jettison the concepts of "role" or "society", but to locate these "constructions" within specific "social," viz. historical- material, conditions. It is my argument that a dimension of materiality comes from the way in which things are used or not used to talk about persons.

The notion of an abstract, overriding system (system over units, society over persons; Barnett and Silverman 1979:25) may, indeed, stem from separations ultimately traceable to the alienability of labor power "in capitalist societies." However, it is not possible to simply counter- pose a generalized precapitalist holism of action and substance, as these authors imply:

The alienation of commodity production is a product of the transition from feudalism to capitalism .... This transition corresponds to the separation of substance and performance; prior to the emergence of capitalism, substance and action enjoined each other, being and doing were not separable categories. In such holistic societies substance enjoining action structures relations among persons in all aspects of life [Barnett and Silverman 1979:78].

On the contrary, recent writings in the field of gender, as we have seen, make it clear that

separations between persons and things occur under a number of regimes with respect to the

way in which labor is represented. The societies considered as operating "bridewealth" systems effect these separations in different ways, of which attention has been paid to two (the role/office complex, and gift transactions). Personal attributes, including labor, may be construed as detachable, although this is not to be confused with capitalist alienation. The detach-

ability of attributes gives rise to specific possibilities for the construction of symbolic representations.


constituting relationships

There are two senses in which the adjective "constitutive" is coming to be used in contemporary anthropological parlance. First, it may mean defining or creating the conditions of an activity; that is, the sense in which what constitutes it is the activity. For example, Ahern (1982) argues that the procedural rules that make up Zande oracle consultation are not regulating forces independently conceived, but, in Barnett and Silverman's words, are the enactment of the activity.7 This is also perhaps the meaning which Barnett and Silverman (1979:5) intend when they speak of anthropology "as a theoretical exercise" being "constituted by the contradiction between sameness and difference"; or when Comaroff argues that how property is defined is constitutive of how bridewealth is defined.8 However, these latter two examples introduce an additional feature, which with greater or lesser emphasis leads to the second use of the term.

In the first sense, where the rules are the game, the idea of the one being constitutive of the other depends on propriety or fit. As an afterthought, reflection might lead one to contrast the game and the rules in certain ways, yet such a contrast would not be integral to their mutual constitution. But anthropological analysis is all afterthought. It establishes itself through distinctions ("separations"), even when it wishes to collapse them. Here "constitutive" may refer to a single conceptual entity, but when that entity is a relationship between terms, it implies that those terms are to some extent kept separate. This is its second sense. To take an example: Parkin (1980:197) opens a discussion on bridewealth by saying "marriage payments in a culture constitute a system of exchange." One surmises that he is adapting for people who do not make the distinction, an analytic separation between marriage payments and an exchange system. The institutions which are the subject matter of the statement can be conceived as a single "constitutive order," "the same thing," in Comaroff's terms (1980:38); but the anthropological statement itself relies on the concept of constitution to retain reference to discrete analytic domains. "Marriage payments" cannot substitute for "exchange system" in the analytical vocabulary; they are not isomorphic constructs. With this in mind one can return to Ahern's (1982) depiction of constitutive rules-that beneath the grasp of the Zande institution lies a commentary on the analytical relationship anthropologists set up between rules and behavior.

The notion of constitution in this second sense plays a mediating role insofar as the relationship it describes depends on it simultaneously preserving the distinctiveness of the terms being mediated.9 A dualistic structure is thus pressed into the service of holistic understanding.10

Parkin (1982) himself suggests that the interest of the last decade first in dichotomies and then in questioning them leads to the implication that "all explanation premissed on the analysis of relational opposition" is also questionable (1982 :xiii). The compulsion to bring elements into explicit, literal relationship comes from our "culture of science" (Wagner 1978:27, also 1975), which uses a relational logic (expounding the connections between elements) in the context of a particular folk modeling of society."1 The kinds of dualism to which Parkin alludes encompass, for example, the western perception of a relationship between "culture" and "nature." These constructs depend on the distinction between two terms to a relation, and the relation itself is construed as "interaction" or whatever. If focus is shifted, instead, to the relation as such, then the distinct terms seem to collapse, precisely because both are seen as productive of it. It no longer appears meaningful to talk of a "relationship" between culture and nature when each term appears subsumed under the "interaction" between them. The point is valid for other antinomies in social science, as in the construction of society which opposes "society" and "individual" or "person." I would follow Parkin, however, in resisting the conclusion that self-consciousness about the status of our propositions converts our subject of study, society, "into nothing more than a metaphor for the socially decontextualised languages of grammarians and certain theoretical linguists" (1982:xvii).


Drawing on the discussion in the body of this paper, I conclude by knowingly reappropriat- ing "constitutive" in its mediating sense. It can be employed in the analysis of "the relationship" between kinship and economy in order to recall an analytic distinction (as a matter of anthropological understanding) while applying it to contexts not indigenously formulated in the terms of such a distinction. It can be employed usefully, I believe, because it is possible to show that there are different kinds of "relationships" at issue, and thus to show that kinship and economy are not everywhere mutually constituting in the same way. I propose, then, to use the concept consistently in its second sense, which implies an internal relationship between analytical constructs, but to apply it to a range of situations which differ among themselves. Even if we agree with Barnett and Silverman that the discovery of "relationships" belongs to the ideology of social science description in its claims to provide models of society, we can also suppose that other systems may or may not have their own interest in formulating relationships.

Caution is particularly important for situations where bourgeois folk modeling insists on "separations," as for instance in relations between "persons" and "things." It does not im- mediately spring to mind that the kinds of contextual shifts we might allow for (say) culture and nature would also apply in the case of persons and things. We are familiar with these categories in a transitive form, and use dimensions of subjectivity and objectivity (people make or do things) to reinforce the divide between them. When subject and object are detached from the dichotomy between self and other, however, one encounters their easy reversibility (Parkin 1982:xlii). Quite apart from this are the conditions under which things come to stand for persons. Property relations, after all, are a type of social relations-connections between persons constructed in terms of connections between persons and things (for example, O'Laughlin 1974; Block 1975; Modjeska 1982). Things as components of property relations, Gregory (1982) urges, are best considered not as the substantive and subjectively defined "goods" of neo-classical economics, but conceptualized in reference to these relations, as, for example, "behaving" as a gift or commodity. Let me return to the significance of the earlier argument that, in brideservice systems, things act as neither gifts nor commodities.'2

For a start, this proposition renders absurd the observation often made that the egalitarianism of these brideservice systems speaks to ours. Similarities perceived on the basis of egalitarianism are quite illusory; very specific strategies are being used in the construction of relations. In Collier and Rosaldo's brideservice systems (Sack's communal productive mode), relationships are set up by direct transfers of labor, that is, people perform services for one another, including supplying others with the products of hunting or gathering. The social value attached to the exchange of items is derivative from the relationship in question-as material items they have value only against other such items, this social value not being embodied by them. Sacks (1979:115) was right to argue that women in her "communal" political economies did not become gifts. Indeed, I would summarize the brideservice logic by asserting that transfers of things do not underwrite the gift premise of "reciprocal dependence" between persons through the "exchange of inalienable objects" (Gregory 1982:101). In such a context, we could say that sexual and social inequality are constitutive of one another; Hamilton (1982:90-92; cf. Bloch 1983:166) argues the same point, apropos Australian Aboriginal society for religion and economics; and I would assert that in these contexts, economy and kinship, as sets of relationships, must also be constitutive of one another.

Collier and Rosaldo's bridewealth systems (Sack's kin corporate mode), on the other hand, turn precisely on equations between things and persons: things can indeed "behave" as "gifts." They may stand for whole persons or for part-persons and their disposable attributes. Persons are thus constructed as bundles of assets to be distributed among others (thus making relationships). Techniques take many forms, and allusion was made to structures of inheritance and succession on the one hand and, on the other, to structures where persons enmesh one another in perpetual exchange. Thus, in the context of a gift as opposed to a commodity system, Gre- gory analyzes kinship terminology as the analogue of pricing mechanisms.


An interpretation of classificatory kinship terms as exchange relations analogous to prices ... [makes it possible] to explain kin terms in a self-replacing clan-based society with reference to the methods of consumption and consumptive production, a demonstration which involves the conceptualisation of kinship as a method of consumption [1982:213]. The personification of things in a gift economy is not simply an attempt to overcome the time problem in the process of reproducing people, it is an aspect of the predominance of the methods of consumption which are . . . a personification process: the act of consumption converts things into people [1982:90].

Here, then, economy and kinship are also constitutive of one another, to the extent that relationships between persons are envisaged as relationships between things. The social value of things makes them embody aspects of those relations (e.g., labor itself). Parts of persons may thus be detached, transacted with. At the same time these systems create certain representational possibilities. Things may be equated with persons; but while in some contexts this is a matter of identity (the bridewealth is the bride), in others, the elements may be conventionally separated (the bridewealth stands only for aspects of the bride's relations with others). This latter type of disjunction, in which the bridewealth and the person of the bride are not isomorphic, is arguably a prerequisite for the kinds of cosmologies which Bloch and Parry (1982) have recently described. (Only the "brideservice" societies among their cases seem little concerned with the ideological transformations involved here in the "systematic attempt to transform death into a rebirth or a regeneration of either the group or the cosmos" [Bloch and Parry 1982:42].) It also leads to mystification in the manner in which "persons" and their "products" are represented (for example, Jolly 1981; Josephides 1982). That aspect of ideology which constructs or models the realities of experience may do so by presenting one order of events in terms of another. The extent to which disjunction is sustained-so that comparable events are also apprehended as in some sense noncomparable-is presumably a matter for empirical enquiry. I would draw attention to Gudeman and Penn's (1982) description of modeling as a symbolic activity. Their interest is in "universal" anthropological models which display de- grees of separation between the "layers" being brought together. However, they refer to models in general as "the product of a constitutive activity" (Gudeman and Penn 1982:90), in the sense that there "is no 'objective' world outside them, except as constituted by another model" (1982:100). One takes the point that models cannot displace "reality"; they can only displace other models. But the construct of the partible person (see below), with different values to dis- pose in different directions, may lead to creative play with form, incorporating a notion of con- vention or arbitrariness. This is the meaning I would give to gender as a coding device in bridewealth systems, constitutive in the equally limited and unlimited manner that models are constitutive. So, too, kinship and economy may from one perspective or another take up a coding position. Kinship may function as a way of "thinking about" (to use Leach's 1961 phrase) economic relations, and vice versa.

In their account Gudeman and Penn offer a contrast, similar to that proposed by Reason and by Barnett and Silverman, between overtly layered or internally disjointed "universal" models (as found in anthropological analysis, but more widely attributable to features of western capitalism), and "local" models which have a nonreferential character. The latter point only to themselves. It should be clear from the above discussion, however, that if we do, indeed, allow the degree of disjunction to become a matter of enquiry, we can begin to see the differences in the construction of local models. Contrary to the assumptions of some of these writers, I would argue that constitutive modeling of a "local" kind may turn on certain perceptions of disjunction or detachment (between concepts, between persons and things) even though these are not "separations" of the capitalist kind. Indeed, it is exactly in the relation between persons and things that we may be confronted with systems which claim simultaneously that things are both like and not-like persons. Gudeman and Penn refer to cattle raising among the Gogo being modeled in the image of female reproduction and vice versa. I would be surprised, however, if this personification process resulted in complete conflation. From what we know of bridewealth systems, I would predict not that one can raise cattle by giving birth to children, but that


cattle raising in fact models, or codes, values also held to be part of human reproduction. Models or codes of this kind do not seem to occur in brideservice systems in the same way.

The distinction between brideservice and bridewealth systems offers an advance upon the position that noncapitalist, local, peasant models, or whatever, are simply constitutive or nonreferential in nature. Gender symbolism leads at once into the way people personify things (events, values, activities), and into different models of equation and reference. Bridewealth regimes, in particular, appear to invest in conceptualizations of relations between elements only partially or incompletely detached from one another. "Parts" of persons may thus appear to be subject to transaction. For bridewealth systems (Gregory's gift economies) allow labor (and "office") to be visualized as an element separate from the person over which, through the manipulation of wealth, others may have control ("authority"). Things can come to stand for extrinsic qualities such as prestige or power, creating various possibilities for inequality. But things, like power, do not lose their ultimate reference to persons; indeed, it is in its reference to the social sources of its production that wealth constitutes power over people. In bridewealth societies, which lack the conditions for alienation, an equation between persons and things does not entail the alienability of things.

When things become commodities, they are detached and distanced from the social source of production, a strategy that appears to restore to goods equivalence only against other goods. Items that cease to bear reference to persons instead become attribute-carriers themselves (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Nothing could be more misleading, I have noted, than to com- pare their construction with that of material items in brideservice societies (cf. Asad 1979:618- 619). For the latter, relations between people and things are characterized by nontransforma- bility-things do not embody persons (labor). The class-based definition of a commodity, on the other hand, is predicated on perpetually keeping apart "persons" and "things," labor being assimilated to a "thing" of a particular kind. Given that such "things" are created by their complete detachment from persons (through the alienation of labor power), the terms of what is propositionally always held separate (a person is never a thing) provide their own context for collapse-the possibility that persons may be treated as things, that is, as not-persons. This is impossible in brideservice systems.

Under a commodity regime "kinship" is not a code for "economic" relations (e.g., Brown and Jordanova 1981:224).13 Here the constitutive idiom loses its force. "Society" is seen to rest in the conscious cultural effort to separate persons from things (to be human, to be humane). Persons replicate this process internally, being able to separate off parts of themselves.14 Thus creative "social" or "cultural" ways of behaving are seen to overlay other attributes fixable to persons as a matter of nontransactable "nature" (Stolcke 1981). Feminist anthropology began, of course, with the western construction of gender difference in terms of physiological sexual difference. And this presumably is one source of the "binary conception of the sign" which Reason (1979:241) locates within capitalist consciousness.15

The relational positions which the commodity logic of class systems sets up-people have control over things-and its hidden identifications-sometimes people can be treated as things-also sets the propositional context for the kinds of explanation with which we are hap- piest. We demand from explanations that they bring different elements into relationship: thus "kinship" can be explained by reference to "economic" organization. But such terms are not always reversible. There is a tendency especially to demand that if we are accounting for axi- omatic relationships between people (which is what kinship appears to be about), a different order of reality must be introduced to ground them (such as techno-economic constraints). This different order-that is, its difference-is frequently conceptualized as to do with things as such. Such materialism often claims to introduce reality into analysis. The materialism I have been dealing with has on the contrary addressed relationships, not entities (cf. Ingold 1983).

In many, typically noncapitalist contexts, kinship and economy seem mutually collapsible. Bloch (1983:13) reminds us that this was where Marx's and Engels's concern with anthropo-


logical material began. If it no longer seems appropriate to talk about the relationship between these domains as a matter of superstructure and infrastructure, for such systems one is tempted into the constitutive trope: kinship is economics. It is important to specify the conditions under which this appears to be the case (cf. Godelier 1977:49). Kinship and economy may appear to be "the same thing" in terms of an easy ability to collapse our own distinctions. But this ability is not reducible to self-reflection: it also addresses real differences in systems by which people organize relationships and establish separations among themselves. These systems are not simply different from our own, but are importantly different among themselves. If the metaphor of constitution is to be guaranteed any extension of life, such a proviso must be taken into account.

notes

Acknowledgments. A version of this paper was first presented to the Commonwealth Association of So- cial Anthropologists' Third Decennial Conference in 1983 held in Cambridge. I am grateful to the Austra- lian National University for providing the context in which I could give it further thought, and to the in- formed criticism of the journal's readers.

'The rubric under which this paper was first presented was "Family, economy and society" (in a session addressed to "Gender studies").

2The desire to ground, that is, contextualize, in this way is blatantly neo-functionalist. In the end, what is being grounded are the kinds of generalizations one can draw from the scrutiny of representations using a set of (social science) representations as its vehicle. For us, such representations have to make sense as ideologically motivated, that is, accountable with reference to social interests (cf. Ortner 1984:155). The job is to understand what these are. This almost puts the present endeavor into the theoretical camp Boon playfully labels "pragmatist" as opposed to "structuralist" (pragmatism "studies symbol systems as vital synapses that join the roles of living actors to their social institutions" [1982:154])-if it could not also be construed as a comment on our predilections for such dualistic classification. I should add that my subse- quent argument can only proceed (true to type) by my leaving undefined the key terms "persons" and "things."

3Queries have been raised about the authors' ethnographic reliance on Arnhem Land, which obscures the kinds of reciprocities between the sexes perhaps found elsewhere in Australia (Diane Bell, personal communication). Ceremony, not the marriage transaction, might be a better starting place for this data. Bell (1983) analyzes Aboriginal women's role as ritual owners of ceremonies that "care for" the land.

4Such a statement cannot, of course, apply to all relationships within capitalist, class-based societies, but refers to possibilities peculiar by and large to them.

5The point is argued more fully in M. Strathern in press. 61t is a fascinating commentary on this cultural specificity that whereas the interaction between the West

African "office" and "person" has serious implications for an individual's metaphysical state, in western society "role" is assimilated to a drama enacted. In our dramaturgical idioms we allow the "playing" of roles to be simultaneously everything and nothing as far as persons are concerned.

7Ahern's use of Searle's distinction between constitutive and regulative rules is a version of the contrast drawn also by Barnett and Silverman, and by Reason, though she allows that the two types may co-exist. In the context of regulative rules, "behaviour exists logically independently of the rules associated with it" (1982:303). Constitutive rules, on the other hand, are definitive of the behavior itself. One can accept Ahern's characterization of the term at face value insofar as it successfully represents its referent (Zande oracles or whatever), but point out that it is commonly employed in the context of analytical distinctions which are necessarily preserved as logically independent of one another. The concept to which the term refers may be holistic, but the concepts from which the term derives very often are not.

8Goldman (1983:1) offers a similar proposition when he lays out the subject of his work on dispute- settlement in terms of the relationship between language use and conflict situations: "The organizational and sequential properties of talk about claims, rights, or obligations, are constitutive phenomena."

9Scholte (1981:171) refers to cultural anthropology as "not only mediated, but mediating; not merely conditioned, but constitutive" (his emphasis).

101 refer to dualistic here, though in fact what is being constituted may be a composite of many elements. Thus Comaroff and Roberts's "constitutive order" amounts to an internally differentiated set of sociocul- tural principles itself in dialectical relationship with the lived-in universe of experience. This dialectic is also in turn seen by them as (my usage) constituting an "order."

"Drawing on a contrast between western and non-western (Minangkabau) types of "consciousness," Errington (1984) points to the contrast between explanation as reduction (uncovering hidden relationships) and explanation as replication (enactment, exemplification).


"2Strictly speaking, the paradigm of gifts/commodities is not reducible to its characterization of systems based on "gifts" and "commodities": the two terms simply specify its discriminating power in reference to types of socioeconomic relations (Christopher Gregory, personal communication). My shorthand-"neither gifts nor commodities"-simply indicates that we need a third term to allude to the utilization of things that are not commodities, and that are not gifts in the sense of themselves carrying messages about inalienable bonds, but are simple instruments in the performance of services. I wish to make the distinction because gifts are an abstraction (of qualities and parts of persons and the links between them) that allow the production of ideological coding in the way instruments of services do not.

"3That is, the relation between them is to be grasped in terms of their "separation." It does not follow, of course, that because a discriminatory analytical vocabulary is derived ultimately from a social consciousness which rests on discriminations, that the anthropologist will simply match separations in the data with separations embedded in the analytical vocabulary. I have found it useful, for instance, in another context, to suggest that English constructs of kinship or village identity function as a "code" for ideas about class. This conflation is an analytical construction, which overrides separations experienced by the actors.

14This partibility is not sustained in equilibrium, however (cf. Marriott 1976). Rather, persons are seen as constantly transforming and modifying themselves, and as constantly getting rid of and cutting off (al- ienating) parts of themselves. Thus in transactions with others, persons may gain or lose. In losing control over commoditized labor or action, the person is recreated as a complete, bounded entity: perhaps this is the existential source of the manner in which issues to do with race and gender are fixed in our systems. We perceive of relationships between persons through concepts of control, rights, access to resources-all of which turn on the possibility that the things a person does or makes may be conceptually separated from him or her. At the same stroke this proposition creates the idea of an object whose value is not constrained by the social source of its production-the commodity-and simultaneously creates persons as totalized entities.

15One is not uttering vague culturological aphorisms, then, referring to "kinship" as a code for "economic relationships" or "gender" a code for "social inequality." Rather one is pointing to possibilities for codification from within the system itself. Code, itself a trope for our own teasing out of relationships, is more apt for some societies/systems of production/historical moments than others.

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Submitted 26 April 1984 Accepted 2 July 1984 Revised version received 15 October 1984 Final revisions received 12 January 1985


strathern 85 constitutive orders of kinship & econ

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