8/25/2014 Mary Douglas reviews The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern LRB 4 May 1989

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A Gentle Deconstruction
Mary Douglas
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia by
Marilyn Strathern
California, 422 pp, $40.00, December 1988, ISBN 0 520 06423 2
What has been happening in anthropology since Margaret Mead died? This book would have
helped me to answer that casual question. A study of Melanesian culture, it does refer to
Meads field reports from New Guinea and to her interest in adolescent and sexual behaviour:
it also surveys the whole record of anthropological reporting in the region. The state of the art
that it reveals is rather disconcerting, but the manner of revealing it is highly original.
Note that the book is written for a Post-Modern anthropology. That means it is addressed to a
generation engrossed with problems of authenticity and authority, and profoundly sceptical
of claims to objectivity. What is left to write about is personal experience, and the central
rhetorical issue is how to establish authenticity. Post-Modern anthropology manages to seem
sincere by disdaining to hide the plumbing. It conveys the Pompidou effect (or the Camden
Town Sainsbury effect) by showing that inside is as valid as outside. Indeed, showing how the
thing works is the main achievement that it values. In ethnography the front-stage space, in
which foreign culture used to be recorded, has been vacated because of its inauthenticity. The
front is now occupied by the former back-stage anthropology of fieldworkers self-questioning
commentary, and their letters and diaries. An interesting comment on the current vein by
Clifford Geertz[*] demonstrates why writing whose first aim is to explore consciousness is
unsuited for sending messages.
Marilyn Strathern actually has got something she wishes to communicate, but she also
wishes to write a Post-Modern book. This presents a severe problem. Post-Modernism is
against domination, claimed authority and distinction. Once it has shown how a statement is
made (and invalidated it by exposure of its origins), it has undermined the means of saying
anything at all. To establish enough authority to declare her views Strathern has to develop a
peculiar strategy, which will involve putting the back-stage problems up front. Her object is
to interpret Melanesian ideas central to their understanding of themselves: these are ideas of
8/25/2014 Mary Douglas reviews The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern LRB 4 May 1989
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person, gender and agency. For this, she re-examines the rich ethnography of Melanesia that
has accumulated since World War Two in the light of three debates among anthropologists.
Drawing analogies between the three dialogues, she allows each one to invalidate one of the
others. It is like the puzzle of the missionaries and the cannibals who must ferry them across
the river and who will devour any missionary left alone with them. What she calls a gentle
deconstruction of existing readings on Melanesian culture is a devastating criticism, yet she
manages not to have authored any criticisms herself. Extraordinarily difficult, a tour de
force. I am left dazzled by the cunning of the design.
The first of the three dialogues is dominated by the fiercest cannibal of them all. It is about
how to deal with the universalist fallacy: the idea that nature is one and the same for us,
living in advanced industrial economies, and for the others, the subjects of anthropological
research. For instance, an earlier generation thought it plausible to interpret Melanesian boys
initiation ceremonies by their own idea of what it feels like to become a man, as if there were
a shared natural basis of experience to guarantee a universal concept of manhood. The
present generation finds it objectionable to assume that any concept familiar to ourselves
should be present in every culture. Supposing naively that other peoples use the idea of
society in the same way as we do is regarded as a piece of monstrous ethnocentrism. This is
fair enough, so long as there is some acknowledged way of meeting the criticism. If there is
no way of justifying the use of any of our terms, the cannibal wins and all our discourse is
plunged into total relativism. Marilyn Stratherns strategy is to place this relativising discourse
athwart both of the others, a trap that can catch them out in almost any word they utter, as
we shall see.
The second discourse is between feminist scholars and feminist anthropologists. The feminist
scholars have a practical objective, to improve the situation of women. Their commitment
against domination extends to their style: since they wish all views to be heard without any
one suppressing any others, it is a sustained polyphonic chorus. By contrast, the feminist
anthropologists speak within anthropology, where judgment and priorities are applied: there
they are just one more new strand of thought, offering another view of old matters. In that
context, inevitably, their work contributes to the construing of an on-going discourse, and so
is more focused. Both feminist discourses are concerned with the exploitation of women.
Both use the relativising attack on universalised ideas of nature to dislodge preconceived ideas
about womens nature. Both debate passionately the issue of whether Melanesian men do or
do not exploit Melanesian women.
Already the delegitimating effect of cross-referencing between the discourses is apparent.
There is nothing in it to prevent the pragmatic feminists from simply declaring that by their
criteria the Melanesian women are exploited by the Melanesian men. But the feminist
anthropologists are vulnerable to the relativist attack. They use it themselves when denying
8/25/2014 Mary Douglas reviews The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern LRB 4 May 1989
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that there is a common, basic experience of feminine gender round the world. What can they
reply if asked whether it is a monstrously ethnocentric, politically-inspired conceit to apply
the idea of exploitation to other cultures than our own? The relativising criticism of the first
dialogue stops the feminist anthropologists in their tracks. Much patient unravelling will have
to be done for them even to have an argument about domination.
The third dialogue is the debate within the market economy about the status of the gift
economy, or about other kinds of economic relations that take place beyond market confines.
Here the dialogues all link up. Feminist scholarship has, for example, been very interested in
the unpaid work of housewives in industrial societies as an obvious case of exploitation.
Marilyn Strathern convincingly argues that Melanesia can only be interpreted in terms of the
gift economy. She uses this term to focus the solutions she will give to problems uncovered by
the contraposition of the three discourses. In the gift economy the concept of work does not
apply, and so the argument about the unpaid work of Western housewives would be invalid,
if the gift economy governs the relations between husband and wife. This relates to current
discussions about the fairness of the marriage contract. The claim is that the gift economy
belongs to a fundamentally different way of conceiving relationships, one in which
exploitation, if it has a meaning, has a very different meaning from exploitation in a market
economy. The words person, gender, agency, cause, society, all have to be completely
reworked to avoid the universalist fallacy against which we have been warned in dialogue
one.
This is the teasingly intricate structure of the first part of the book. The three dialogues are of
course all variants of the same large discourse heard in advanced industrial nations about
their own internal problems of authority and justice. The argument of the whole book is
canopied by a debate between rather dumb capitalist defences of the existing order, and, on
the other hand, the critic, the opposition, the conscience of the West, anthropology no less.
What is referred, to as Western thought turns out not to be Western thought, but a set of
uncritical assumptions which distort anthropologists approaches to the interpretative task,
and which the authors strategies are designed to rebuke. If these assumptions do indeed form
the intellectual mainstay of contemporary anthropology, no wonder the author needs so
much scaffolding for her argument.
The central theme is that in the industrialised West labour is an instituted category: that is,
the concept of labour is an abstraction that has an institutional reference. The concept of
alienated labour depends on a concept of proprietorship, also deeply rooted in law and other
institutions, as well as in the political philosophy of private property. Commodity and price
are other concepts that have precise meaning in the same Western institutional context. It
makes sense in a commodity economy (sense meaning that it can be sensibly debated) to talk
of a person being exploited if someone else enjoys the fruits of their labour. On the model of
8/25/2014 Mary Douglas reviews The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern LRB 4 May 1989
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stealing, alienated labour depends on the concept of property. In a gift economy none of these
abstractions has a point of reference. Neither the institutional framework nor the philosophy
is there to support those meanings. How then can we talk of Papuan women being exploited
by Papuan men, even though it is clear that the men use the womens productive capacities
for ceremonial exchanges in which they, the men, get all the credit? Her frank and disturbing
answer is: we cant.
I feel as bad about blowing her cover as if I were the reviewer of a crime play giving away
the dnouement. What Marilyn Strathern is teaching is much more violently counter-
cultural than openly using theory or writing in old-fashioned Modern style. After all the
deference she has shown to the mood of Post-Modern tolerance, she ends by ruthlessly using
the first discourse to pull the rug out from under the feet of the other two. To the Marxists
and the feminists she says: No, these women are not being exploited. Her grounds for saying
this are the Papuans own metaphysical interpretations of what they are doing. The second
part of the book is devoted to presenting their theories of cause, agency and personhood.
Inescapably, at this point she is plunged into the meaning of gender for Papuans. Since it is
their central organising idea, it is absurd to talk about gender as if it were about the relations
between men and women. Every event is structured so as to engage donors (male) and
recipients (female): a person has to be mobilised as a same-sex actor for taking any action,
but sometimes the mobilisation is in the male and sometimes in the female mode, strictly
according to the context of the event. For example, when the older men are interacting with
the boys being initiated, all the men are single-sex males and all the initiates female. It is like
our dissociation of biological age from seniority. According to local theory, a person is
composed of multiple gendered parts, or multiple gendered persons, which are interacting
with one another as donors and recipients in maintaining the flow of elements through the
body. In an encounter defined as one with the opposite sex, the variously gendered elements
of the person fall into alignment to make a single-sex being, so that the appropriate
enactment between donor and recipient can be performed. The same for mixed groups of
persons: overseas traders are males in relation to their hosts. It seems quite a workable idea.
In Melanesia, gender is not about men and women, but about the structuring of social events
and relations. Men and women both work in producing the food for ceremonial exchanges,
but the latter are organised entirely by the men. It is perfectly true that engaging in gift
exchange gives the individual men scope for gaining prestige, and that they do this by using
the products of womens work, and thereby gain symbolic capital for themselves: but it is not
true that the women who contribute so much at the level of production do not also get
prestige from their association with the successful event. The relations between persons in the
gift economy are not assimilable to a contract of work. In a commodity economy persons are
treated as commodities, and with commodity thinking there is no way of understanding
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relations within a gift economy. Commodity thinking is the trap which we fall into unless we
take special precautions. It is the trap that deforms our perception of intellectual problems. In
the authors hands the reproach of commodity thinking is a debating strategy which could
provide her with an escape route from the relativising attack which she herself uses so
dexterously, but which could easily entrap her too. By isolating commodity thinking as a
distinct genre she has shifted the argument upwards to a new semantic level.
My main criticism of this remarkable attempt to come to terms with fundamental problems
of interpretation is that something called the West is presented throughout the book as a
solid block, as if there were one, timeless, Western thought. Not very cerebral, nor very
contemporary, this Western thought sounds like some outdoor hustings where capitalists and
workers debate about property rights, exploitation, surplus value, control over the means of
production, and about individuals as owners of their time and work. But it is many-stranded,
and possibly could be used in her argument in another way.
The gift economy depends upon perception of a pattern of relations in which each persons
place has unique value for the whole. It is divided into different, incommensurable, mutually
balancing and reinforcing levels. Much of what she says about the gift economy sounds like
an incipient version of the hierarchical structures celebrated in Augustine and in Medieval
political philosophy. Freed of commoditised thinking and of the anthropological straitjacket,
she could find affinity and support for her radical re-analysis of the anthropological literature
in alternative strands within the Western tradition. Marilyn Strathern sometimes adopts the
usage of the commoditised thinking that she is battling against. The term hierarchy she only
uses pejoratively for stratified, impersonal domination. As she rightly says, the language gets
in the way: with such a denuded concept of hierarchy it is easy to miss the sympathy
between Melanesian political thought and our own old idea. The same applies to
contemporary thinkers. If only she had not felt obliged by the state of the art to spend so
much ingenuity on creating the Pompidou effect, she might have gone more directly into the
philosophical foundations of Papuan thought and related it to current Western speculations
on closely related themes.
For example, there is a chorus of learned voices to back her criticism of representation as the
model of cognitive processes. In her discussion of Papuan ideas of cause and effect, she is
almost reaching for an Aristotelian idea of essences, and might find her discussion matched
in the philosophy of science. What she says about standardising of gifts and performances
echoes what Nelson Goodman says about copies, authentication and entrenchment. The
concept of the individual is central to her contrast between Papuan and Western thought, but
the latter countenances two usages: one which refers to a unique, unanalysable unity, and
another which recognises composite individuals, such as individual species in biology. So she
does not have to labour so hard the differences between Papuan and Western concepts of
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individuals. Philosophers current discussions of personhood and convention would also
enrich her project, to say nothing of the philosophical criticism of relativism.
She is obviously impressed with the relativising criticism. But it is not clear that she knows
how to escape it. She might try claiming that she has not imposed Western categories but
only translated Papuan words: that wont work, because it would imply an extensive overlap
between the gift economy and the commodity economy, which she wants to deny. She might
try to defend her views of Papuan culture with the claim that she has given every word a new
meaning, elicited from its instituted uses. But that wont work, for institution is a thoroughly
Western concept, so is individual and meaning, for that matter. If good will is lacking,
her argument would hang all too precariously in the air.
What about the good will? The feminist anthropologists may not be inclined to forgive the
ruses. The feminist scholars have no need to accept her conclusions about Papuan women
not being exploited by the men, for they are entitled to define exploitation as they see it, in
relation to their practical intentions. But the feminist anthropologists are more vulnerable, if
they accept the relativising thesis at face value. Will they have the nerve to use it when they
want to and reject it when it doesnt suit? Or would that put them outside of the
anthropological discourse? Will they object to being used to trip the Marxist anthropologists?
Will the Marxists feel guyed? Everyone looks a fool under this gentle deconstruction.
By striving with this straw man, Western thought, the author is doing less than the best she
could do for her theme. I dont at all mean that if she had access to relevant work her task of
describing Papuan principles of action would be easier. Rather the contrary: she would be
tempted to take it to a deeper level. For this exercise she would need to realise that as a
Westerner herself she has options in her own culture. She doesnt have to be a relativist, and
certainly she does not have to subscribe even indirectly to an impossible quest for foundations
of knowledge. Rules of discourse that render discourse impossible are absurd: she doesnt
have to take them seriously. But evidently she does, judging by the elaborate defensive
outworks.
The simple solution for justifying the second part of the book would be to recognise the value
of theory and to accept its relation to action. Action creates problems, theory chooses among
problems, and chosen problems justify definitions. The feminist scholars are free of the
relativist strictures just because they have a problem and they define their concepts as the
problem requires. The other scholars could do the same. But problems, like theories and
definitions, are highly suspect to Post-Modernism. Their absence exposes scholars who
attempt to do without. Marilyn Strathern tries to deflect the relativist criticism by disavowing
theorising. She apparently agrees that theory is a regrettable form of dominance, and
implicitly wishes that theoretical analysis could be done without distinguishing, classifying
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and hierarchising. Half-defeated in advance, she says she does not offer analyses but
narratives. Instead of hypotheses she has fictions, metaphors. Instead of argument, plot.
Again, this may be another sign of her ultra-sophistication, for when she feels free to plunge
into part two she chooses problems and theorises about them uncompromisingly. But the
result is that the full job of deconstruction is left undone. Perhaps it is of its nature impossible.
But at least it will be interesting to follow up her ideas about the different ways in which
exploitation can be articulated in different thought systems, and to work out the implications
for false consciousness.
Many anthropologists in Melanesia and elsewhere would like to get a go-ahead signal to do
the old-fashioned kind of comparative regional studies based upon a hypothesis generated
from Western experience and Western categories. Some are doing it already, with a theory to
test, and a specific task of collecting and organising the evidence. It is a difficult genre: the
worker has to be sustained by the idea that the synthesis will be of value somewhere, if only
to the self-understanding of the West. But Marilyn Strathern scoffs lightly at any suggestion
that when we have uncovered the principles of another civilisation we could use them for
solving our own problems. I venture to disagree. Historians and political philosophers would
find her plot relevant to their work. Thanks to her story, intellectual debate with
anthropology has a chance of reaching a new depth. At the very least, we could all make use
of an alternative fiction to counterpoise the hack political narratives that lie to hand.
[*] Works and Lives, Stanford University Press, 1988.
Vol. 11 No. 9 4 May 1989 Mary Douglas A Gentle Deconstruction
pages 17-18 | 3313 words
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