culture1

1W c ' Property, Substance

and Effect Anthropological Essays on Persons

and Things

MARILYN STRATHERN

THE ATHLONE PRESS LONDON & NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ

Chapter 7 Divisions of Interest and Languages of Ownership

Trobrianders speak of the [unseen] person who 'walks behind' a valuable object

Debbora Battaglia (1994)

'Neither property nor people': this was, in Dolgin's (1994: 1277) words, the conclusion of the Tennessee Supreme Court faced with seven cryopreserved embryos stored in a Knoxvillc fertility clinic. The two concepts were connected through the nature of the claims that a man and woman, once a couple but now no longer, enjoyed with respect to what they had created. Earlier courts had offered alternative rulings. One proceeded on the grounds that the embryos were persons, children to be brought into the world (the woman wished the embryos to be available to her for bring- ing this about at some future date, possibly through donation to another woman) and whose best interests must be before the court; the other on the grounds that the embryos should be treated as property for purposes of deciding who had control in them (the man had argued that any disposition must - as in the case of property allocation - be agreed upon by both parties) (Dolgin 1994: 1276-7). The Supreme Court sided fully with neither. It described the embryos as lacking '[intrinsic] value to either party', yet as having value in their 'potential to become, after implantation, growth and birth, children' (Dolgin 1994: 1277). Accordingly, it focused on the progenitors, balancing their interests in terms of their procreative intentions.1

In some situations procreation itself becomes a metaphor for aspects of property relations, as in certain Euro-American concep- tualisations of unalienated labour. This can be so for the products

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of mental or intellectual labour whose market value includes their accreditation to the producer. They carry the producer's name and the relationship between producer and product is one of identifica- tion (Schwimmer 1979). 2 Intellectual property rights define this link in such a way that while third parties may enjoy the property, and create more property from it, its future use is also to the benefit of the original producer. Such property is culturally vali- dated as extensions of persons, often in quasi-procreative idiom, as in the appeal to the moral right of creators to their creations or to the paternity of the author. Indeed, the language of kinship was an important source of analogy in early struggles to establish the recognition of authorial copyright (see Coombe 1994). A back- ground question in the Tennessee case was the extent to which the couple's previous procreative intent was to continue into the future.

From a Danish perspective on embryo disposal, Nielson raises two questions. One concerns the disposition of embryos in other than a procreative context; who then has the entitlement? If, for example, someone consents to the embryo being used for research, the entitlement cannot be on grounds of the future parenting or custody of a child. In her view that is the point at which 'it becomes clear that the embryo is treated as property' (Nielson 1993: 219). The other more general question explored by Nielson is the right to become a parent. This the US legal theorist Robertson pursues in terms of procreative liberty - the extent to which inter- ference in people's reproductive choices is warranted. The right to reproduce he sees as a negative right, that is, against interference, rather than a positive right to the resources needed to reproduce (Robertson 1994: 29). The correlative right not to reproduce can be asserted before pregnancy insofar as it is already legally protected by the courts in upholding the liberty to use contraception. However other issues come into play when a couple are in dispute.

Robertson also refers to the problems posed by frozen embryos and introduces the concept of dispositional control: who has the authority to choose among available options for disposition. 'The question of decisional authority is really the question of who "owns" - has a "property" interest in - the embryo' (1994: 104). He then qualifies his terms:

However, using terms such as 'ownership or 'property' risks misunderstanding. Ownership does not signify that embryos

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may be treated in all respects like other property. Rather, the term merely designates who decides which legally available options will occur Although the bundle of property rights attached to one's ownership of an embryo may be more circumscribed than for other things,1'it is an ownership or prop- erty interest nonetheless (1994: 104).

Dispositional authority might rest with an individual in relation to his or her gametes, with a couple jointly, with the physicians who create the embryos and so forth, but the persons who provide the sperm and egg probably have the strongest claims. (Robertson cites a case where a court found that embryos were the property of gamete providers against the claims of an IVF programme that refused to release a frozen embryo to a couple moving out of the area.) Dispositional authority can be exercised in and of itself and thus would not require coming to a decision about other claims to ownership, nor indeed a decision as to

•whether the entities at issues were 'property' or 'people'. The concept enables a further principle to be brought into play. Robertson recommends that the best way to handle a dispute is to refer back to the dispositional agreement made at the time of creation or c i yopreservation of the embryos (1994: 113). In other words, rather than considering afresh the procreative desires of the parties as they have developed in the interim, and perhaps having to balance their interests anew, it could endorse their intentions in this at the time of first determining to procreate - always provided these were made explicit.

The Tennessee Supreme Court "upheld the principle of advance agreements for disposition, but in the absence of such an agree- ment rejected the idea that freezing alone constituted an agreement to later implementation (of these intentions). In the end it weighed up the relative burdens on the two parties, and found in favour of the husband's currently expressed desire not to reproduce.

L A N G U A G E S OF OWNERSHIP

The case raises some interesting issues about the language of analysis. The dispute between former husband and wife necessa- rily mobilised different arguments to litigious effect. Interests at stake were expressed through appeals to interpretations evoking

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different domains of reasoning (property/people). In academic arguments interpretative choice becomes equally explicit: disputes are often about the relevance of the domains from which analyti- cal constructs come. One learns in any case to be self-conscious about the choice of analytical vocabulary; it does not emerge from inspection of data unaided. This is a point on which James Carrier (1998) has commented.3 I endorse his observation that the Melanesian debates about gift exchange are also debates about property relations. Given, however, that the (Maussian) 'gift' was borrowed from Euro-American discourse in the first place, and with political intent, we might consider what parallels we wish to be drawing in the late twentieth century. This is not just an academic matter. I take the view that the way in which people organise their relations to one another as a matter of control not just over things ('property' in the Supreme Court's sense) but over aspects of life and body (that "define 'persons') will loom large on the world agenda over the next decade. We can expect an explosion of concern with ownership.

New resources are coming into being all the time, through the invention of objects of knowledge and utility, as well as new contests over existing resources, and in their wake new negotia- tions over rights, as the Tennessee case shows. 4 The anthropolo- gist might well be interested in the accompanying cultural search - in the exploration of the domains from which reasons "are drawn, .in the metaphors, analogies or precedents "being pressed into service. Here, the claims were over products of the body for which no prior transactional idioms existed, and the mental inten- tions of the parties in producing them had to help define what they were. The language of intellectual property rights itself shades into other languages, such as those of cultural rights and all the questions of exportability that they raise (e.g. Gudeman 1995), including reformulations of practices of reproduction never indigenously conceived in terms of (property) rights at all. Thus Coombe (1996a: 217) writes of the descendants of Crazy Horse, 'upset to learn of the appropriation of the identity of their revered ancestor as a trademark by a manufacturer of malt liquor' who 'find themselves compelled to claim that they hold his name and likeness as a form of property'.5 Anthropologists need to know how and why they might use the language of property and ownership themselves.

Pannell provides a very explicit statement on this from Austra-

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Ha. A particular vocabulary of ownership and repatriation which once shaped debates over the restitution of cultural property (as held for instance in museums) was swept aside by the proclama- tion of the High Court judges in the 1993 Mabo case. Pronoun- cing on the death of the legal fiction of terra nullius, they also pronounced on the 'corresponding common law recognition of native title [as having] implications which extend beyond so-called "land-management" issues' (Pannell 1994: 19). These extend into the possibility of legal protection for other forms of cultural and intellectual property, inviting a new interpretation of repatriation as reappropriation, that is, making something one's own again. 6

Pannell (1994: 33) also offers a persuasive case for considering possessory rights; one might indeed (after Annette Weiner) wish to reinvigorate the concept of possession, though we should be watching what the concept of possession is doing elsewhere. Like any other construct, it needs debate, especially if it is to be appro- priated to demonstrate universal human needs for possessions. The point is that Pannell's argument explicitly addresses the displacement of one set of analytical terms by another.

I follow the contributors to Hann (1998) in deploying property relations as a general analytical construct. Its reference to dispo- sable resources embraces both more than and less than its phenomenological or experiential counterpart, owning/ownership. This is as apparent in Robertson's elisions as it is in the proprie- torial but not property connotations of owning as belonging (Edwards and Strathern forthcoming). A further qualification is that a property relation may or may not be construed as one of possession, that is, as an extension of or gathering into the self.7

In contributing to the division of analytical interests in the concept of property, I wish to point to certain situations where we are made aware of relational preconditions. The Tennessee embryos were in dispute precisely as the product of a relationship between former conjugal partners. An abstract understanding of property as a set of relations is thus explored, in this chapter, through concrete instances where relations are presented twice over, as at once the (invisible) conceptual precondition of there being any claims or rights in dispute in the first place and as the (visible) social grounding of the particular dispute at issue. In English one can thus say that all property claims engage relation- ships; only some are about 'relationships'. One can say the same for ownership: any property claim can be perceived as implying

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ownership (of rights, interests etc) but only some imply 'owner- ship' (possession, certain kinds of title, or whatever).

In discussing the management of knowledge, and envisaging new proprietorial forms, Harrison (1995a: 14) names anthropolo- gists' contribution, 'namely their own knowledge of the culturally diverse ways in which knowledge can be "owned"'. I introduce this reference to culture not to detract from social analysis but to sharpen up the conceptual tools on which such analysis relies, not just to elucidate 'meaning' but to understand the categories of action people mobilise in pursuing their interests. It is probably redundant to say that anthropologists' own management of knowledge already inheres in the concepts they choose to use.

Varieties of timelessness

What connotations dees Carrier give to the concept of 'owner- ship'? In his account of the Ponam of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, where he focuses largely on property embedded in kin and other relationships, Carrier starts with a description of patri- lineal kamal groups as \and-owning. I wonder how the account might have looked if he started with the statistical fact that land is held through numerous transactions which link persons to numerous others; among these others is also a group that lays title to it. If this title constitutes 'ownership', it does not imply that enjoyment of the land and its products inevitably follow. So what does title entail? We know from the detailed ethnography (e.g. Carrier and Carrier 1991) that kamal are prominent in politi- cal life and were in the past important channels for the inheri- tance of assets. Are continuing claims to land a matter of dispositional right, to borrow Robertson's term? Or should one be thinking along the lines of intellectual property claims asserted by the originators of places? One would then be drawn into comparative analysis with, say, title to ritual performance or rights held in images or designs, as in New Ireland malanggan statuary (see Harrison 1992: 234), while recognising that in the Ponam case the assets in question were tangible - not the intangi- bles of the kind often associated with ritual (Carrier and Carrier 1991: 42). That would make them more like property that can be enjoyed by a third party while at the same time conserving a value for the original 'owner'. Whatever way, one may add, contests of power were likely to be built into the claims. How

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then can such contests be a qualification of or deviation from them? To oppose 'practice1 to 'formal rules', as Carrier (1998) does, is to beg the whole question of what contests of title or usufruct are about, that is, what they bring about for the people involved. In short, Carrier reifies the notion of a rule or principle, finds it in Ponam land titles, links these to a concept of order, not to speak of propriety, and projects the whole idealist bundle on to a 'Maussian model'! Having located power and interest outside this model, he then attributes them to other 'forces'. That is, he divides the material up into domains and then shows how one of them does not encompass the whole.

I certainly could not defend the model that he puts forward as Maussian; nonetheless there remains an interesting question to ask about the story of the free trader (Carrier 1998: 99-100). This is about a young man who travelled to Ponam with bundles of sago to sell because he had heard that people were short. He was not intending to trade with kin or partners, and set out the food in a public place, the price clearly displayed, and waited till he had sold it all (but only after having to lower the price). The story is intended to trump any analytical claims that people can only transact in the context of enduring relationships. Should the ques- tion not be whether such actions are a resource for thinking about social relationships? What use do Ponam people make of this act? Does it become a paradigm for other solitary ventures? Consider a Hagen woman going off to a birth hut by herself. Birth may take place in isolation; but-when the act of birth becomes a metaphori- cal resource, an image of productivity or creativity for instance, with the social resonances of regeneration those carry, the hut becomes peopled with others. The mother is not alone: ancestral ghosts affect the ease of labour; the child she bears is already in a relationship with her; all kinds of consequences follow for her kin. At the same time, the act is accomplished in solitude because in another sense only she can effect the birth, and seclusion also signals autonomy of personal action. Acts have to be intentional, purposive; without such personal action there would be no rela- tionships. And without knowing how such acts are imaginatively appropriated, economic analysis cannot begin. For all kinds of values can become present. Battaglia (1994) makes the point through a story about a wealth item which played a determining role in a set of urban transactions without ever appearing - it was (however/only) potentially there. 8 One might ask what is present

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and what is absent in the actions of the Ponam trader. Among the reasons for his treatment (forcing down the price) was the islan- ders' view that he was no kinsman of theirs, that is, they summoned up 'other' (his own) kinsfolk for him. It is not immedi- ately clear why Carrier concludes, as he does, that the transactions therefore resemble those of an 'urban, capitalist economy'.

This is a question of description: what analysis makes meaning- ful. It is also a question of what the object of study is. My own interest has been in forms of sociality developed without regard to the European/Enlightenment distinction between individual and society that has driven much anthropological enquiry. So whatever uses that distinction might have for organising social analysis, there were bound to be some things it left unexplained. The question became how to construct an analytical vocabulary that would make evident those elements previous analyses had hidden. Any choice would entail its-own concealments in turn, and I have been conscious of the fact ^hat exactly the kind of study in which Carrier is involved (the study of economic forms) is concealed by that strategy. But there was nothing surrogate or covert about the antinomies I used; they were deliberate artifice. Nonetheless they do, as Carrier correctly notes, make assump- tions about timelessness.

Carrier and I both deploy concepts of timelessness, though Foster's (1995a) rapprochement renders the observation some- what out. of date. I hold that the knowledge anthropologists have made out of their encounters with Melanesians poses all sorts of questions about the way they (the anthropologists) might wish to think about human relations. The knowledge does not cease to become an object of contemporary interest simply because prac- tices have changed. I would indeed make it timeless in that sense. Carrier's argument is that historical change is crucial, because among other things that shows up the social and conceptual loca- tion of previous practices, and this must be part of - not excluded from - the knowledge with which one works. Yet from another perspective his own categories of analysis remain timeless, as in the very constructs of 'property' and 'ownership', and in his notion that there is such a thing as 'the relationship between people and things'. By contrast, my interest is directed to the historical location of analytical constructs, for none of the major constructs we use is without its history. Let me make this last issue explicit.

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I remember at the time of first writing through 'the gift' as an analytical metaphor that I did not want to 'go back' to Mauss. In the end I noted one or two places where others had drawn on his work, and the absurdity of no acknowledgement at all to the inventor 'of the gift' in anthropology led to another reference. But while one might say all this comprised a salient background, in the foreground was a recent study, Gregory (1982), and contemporary interests in the then influential field of marxist anthropology. Gregory's composite model drew on Marx, Morgan and Levi- Strauss, as well as Mauss; I thus drew on Mauss's work princi- pally as it was filtered through Gregory's. Economist as well as anthropologist, Gregory had a grasp of the economic theories of development being applied to Papua New Guinea at the time, and a lively and informed interest in economic change, and I thought that his appraisal of what was wrong with prevailing economic categories demanded attention.

That is why my definition of the 'gift economy' 9 follows Gregory (a shorthand reference 'to systems of production and consumption where consumptive production predominates' (M. Strathern 1988: 145)). The issue was laid out in ongoing critiques of private property: if the idea of property as a thing conceals social relations then what is gift exchange concealing? (It conceals its own conventions of reification.) Hence the debate with Lisette Josephides (cf. Josephides 1985; M. Strathern 1988) was concerned with what gets concealed or mystified and what is made overt. It was she who stimulated me to consider the conver- sion process by which wealth is transferred from one domain to another. For the ethnographic problem was that, when pigs are taken off by men, women's efforts and the conjugal relation in which production was embedded are not disguised. Returns on work are simply made at a later date. In the meanwhile the man gets out of the transaction a power and prestige that the woman never does. The theoretical problem became how to understand that conversion.

That led me into an analysis of gender relations. The man only takes off the woman's pig in one sense! He is also appropriating his own efforts. To understand the power he has to do this, one has to understand that the husband is taking out of a domestic sphere the pig jointly produced from the work of both of them into a sphere which he alone controls. The point is underlined by Sillitoe for Wola society (1988a). Sillitoe argues that pigs are

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not strictly speaking owned by the men who [nonetheless] hold the right to dispose of them. While men transact with them, women are responsible for herding these animals. The division of rights and duties results in neither owning them. They are jointly custodians, both necessary to their possession. While men hold title to animals, they cannot take possession of them and exercise their right of disposal until they have made a payment, customarily in pearlshells, to the woman herding them, for her male relatives. This payment transfers the crea- tures from the female productive domain to the [male] transac- tional one. (1988a: 7)

This is a conversion from multiple relations of interest in the thing to singular ones, equally applicable to Hagen, although no payment as such is made to the w o m a n . 1 0 A specific instance that unfolded there (in Hagen) recently will flesh out these observa- tions. But, first, a further observation "•'about the historicity of analytical constructs is in order. Which historical epoch is going to supply the anthropologist's comparative vocabulary?

I take Carrier's account as raising two important issues for historical understanding. The first is obvious, that all accounts are contemporary. That is, they can only come out of the present in which they were written; at the same time that present includes diverse pasts and theoretical antecedents that appear to be for the choosing, as one might for example construct an intellectual pedi- gree. The second is that the anthropologist searching for an analytical vocabulary may be as much drawn to particular cultural domains as to other theorists, going to some field or area of knowledge for potential connections. This 'spatial' effect may be literalised in cross-cultural comparison when a society in one place is described from the vantage point of another elsewhere. But suppose we also thought about historical epochs as domains from which to draw resources for analysis?

This has been made explicit in anthropology from time to time, as in Gluckman's (1965: 8 6 0 critical appraisal of feudalism in interpreting land tenure systems in sub-Saharan Africa, fuelled by his interest in hierarchies of estates as noted by Hann (1998). Europe remained the reference point, but the observer pursued constructs from a former era. One wonders what fresh purchase starting out 'now', at the end of the century, would yield the Euro-American anthropologist interested in describing Melanesian

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societies. Anyone drawing on the reach of theoretical resources available from a post-industrial economy might find themselves choosing between modernist, postmodernist and realist approaches to 'contemporary' material. Alternatively, in certain respects 'traditional' Melanesian societies belong much more comfortably to some of the visions made possible by socioeco- nomic developments in Europe since the 1980s than they did to the worlds of the early and mid-twentieth century. Euro-Ameri- cans live these days with the idea of dispersed identities, of. traf- fickings in body parts, but above all what perhaps one could call new divisions of interest in familial and conjugal relationships. Some of these are sketched in Chapter 4. Monetary interpreta- tions of kin obligations and new forms of procreative assets hardly turn Euro-Americans into Melanesians. But perhaps they have turned some of the ways in which relationships are contested in late capitalist society into a new resource for apprehending Melanesian social process. Let me advance this supposition through the specific instance already promised.

Dispute

The following sequence of events took place in Mt Hagen in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea in 1995. 1 1

Kanapa had two children, a boy and a girl; she was looking forward to the day when the bridewealth was assembled for her son. It is the groom's kin who assemble wealth items, including pigs reared by his father's and.brothers' wives. So that would be the occasion on which Kanapa's pigs would be on public display, and people would see what she had raised. However, one particu- larly large pig that she had intended as the special 'mother's pig' (for the bride's mother) had been taken off a couple of years previously by her husband for a funeral prestation (when a bigman of the clan died), and her anger with him was one cause of a long illness. The husband, Manga, has already been intro- duced (Chapter 5).

Discharged from hospital in a weak state, for a month or so she did little more than creep outside to sit in the sun. Her husband complained several times that she did not take the medi- cine he had paid money for, and had brought the sickness on herself. The routing of her anger through ancestral ghosts (who in the past would send sickness to make the victim's suffering

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visible) had been diverted by charismatic Christian teaching which held that one should not get angry at all. Local Christian leaders came on three or four occasions to exorcise the bad spirits that were fighting with her good spirit, and the senior cowife and other women of the settlement frequently said loud prayers over her. However her sickness persisted, and several relatives became implicated. This included on occasion her long-suffering daughter who had moved in to care for her. They bickered, and some blamed the continuing sickness on the daughter's getting cross with her mother. The daughter was married into a locally wealthy family, but the initiative that gave her husband's brother a good job with a .national company had not passed on to her own husband, a youth who contrived to do no work except mind their little boy. He had a small supply of cash coming from his brother, but his father-in-law saw him only as a drain on resources, contributing neither money nor labour. There were complaints about his not using his education. The same could not be said of Kanapa's now adult son, Kitim (see note 11), who was employed in the coastal capital Port Moresby. The father calcu- lated what it had cost him in school fees over the years to put him through secondary education. For the astonishment there was that he rarely sent money home, and when he occasionally did visit he failed to help in the gardens or contribute money to buy in labour, which would have been as acceptable.

Kanapa loved Kitim but was agitated about his bridewealth. He showed no signs of making a match, and parental promptings had fallen on stony ground. The mother was burdened with the thought of his bridewealth going to waste, all the work she had put into rearing pigs, and - with the pride women take in the size of their pigs - her need to show not just that she was but how she was a mother. Relations with her husband were also involved. The prospect of the son's marriage would galvanise the husband into thinking about the pig he had taken from her. In being the principal person to assemble and dispose of the bridewealth, he would have to make good his-promise to the wife to replace the large animal he had taken. At one stage he had promised a sum of money in l i e u , 1 2 and her illness was put down by some to the fact that he had never produced this.

There were various small reasons for displeasure with Kitim; we have seen in the earlier chapter that he had left the rebuilding of her house to her brother, and then given presents to this man

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rather than to herself; this turned into a quarrel between sister and brother. But Kanapa generally accepted the fact that the son ljved away, since it was assumed that one day he would come home to claim his inheritance in land. Had the woman been well she would have taken her part in helping to plant new garden land being developed at the time, as well as clearing the scrub, burning off the rubbish and tilling, the soil, while the men did the heavy work of cutting the bush and digging ditches. The men included her husband, her co-residential brother and workers, 'cargo boys'. Youngish men, these latter were recruited from the. settlement area on an ad hoc basis, prepared to work for immediate cash but not, as might have been the expectation in the past, for food or for the credit of having helped their seniors. These particular gardens were destined for the market, and men and women alike had cash yields in mind. Having to spend on cargo boys was a monetary investment for monetary return. This was work Kitim himself might have done but either could not or did not.

As her illness wore on it became a source of general anxiety, and Kanapa's husband decided there had to be a sacrifice. The only way to get the ancestral ghosts to release their hold on her was to give them something in return, and that had to be one of her own p i g s . 1 3 An animal she had reared from a piglet was selected, for her work was evidently in it. Some would take the killing as an offering to God while others would understand the silent invocation of the ancestors. The husband held the sacrificial pig rope and then handed it to his wife's brother, both of them making short speeches about dispatching the sickness. At that stage they had identified/two ghosts as responsible, the dead mother of Kanapa and her brother, and the dead mother of her husband. When she did not get immediately better, suspicion fell on the latter alone as having a long-standing grievance against the living and fertile alike. It was she who had prevented Kanapa from bearing more children and had made her sick on numerous occasions in the past. People concluded that the ghost was reminding Kanapa that in fact the husband did care for her; she should be content and not allow herself to get carried away by jealous cowife gossip.

Sickness is thrown away or detached from the afflicted person in the same way as a man gives away a pearlshell/money in exchange, or a woman a child in marriage (whether it is a daugh- ter who leaves her mother's house or a son whose mother-in-law

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will receive the large bridewealth pigs she has intended for her). Living people used to fear the too close attachment of the dead who would hang about; at the same time such ghosts can also afford protection, if only from themselves. This is the point at which to repeat the fact that Manga, Kanapa's husband, was already planning a public payment of pigs and money to his maternal kin in order to elicit the positive support of his matrilat- eral ghosts and perhaps (he did not say this) keep them at bay at the same time. Such payments come under the general rubric of payments for the 'body'. The rationale is recompense for the mother's breast (milk) that is regarded as a source of nurture in counterpoint to the nurture derived from paternal food from a person's lineage land. (There is a direct equation between the 'grease' of breast milk, semen and fertile land: A. Strathern 1972; cf. Carrier and Carrier 1991: 218.) Maternal nurture from the lineage of a person's mother, anticipated at the bridewealth that establishes the marriage in the first place, is paid for again once a child is born, especially at the birth of a first child, and subse- quently according to people's inclination or conscience, not termi- nating until mortuary compensation at death. The special bridewealth pig destined for the bride's mother thus acknowledges the social origin of the girl's nurture, and a division of interests between maternal and paternal kin. Thereafter, the girl's paternal kin become assimilated to 'maternal kin' of her children, a rela- tively smooth transition, and one that 'new' maternal kin are ready to exploit since they can expect a small stream of gifts in recognition of their special status. The social divisions are thus enacted out as connections to be pursued. One man told me that it was always worthwhile investing in daughters, because a married daughter thinks of her own parents all the time (wants to send things to them), whereas a married man must think of his parents-in-law. He had adopted two daughters in prospect of the flow of money that would come to him by this route.

In short, the 'work' that goes into making a child comes from both parents, but only paternal kin reap axiomatic benefit. So the (already separated) maternal kin have to be specifically recom- pensed for their lost nurture. It should be added that maintaining connections with maternal kin (and thus the division between sets of kin) is itself 'work', the work being manifest in the swelling and rounded body of the baby and the stature of the adult. A person's spiritual welfare is taken care of by the ghosts, or by

] 50 Property, Substance and Effect

DIVISIONS OF INTEREST

This took place 'in Hagen' but, to rephrase the question we have already asked, what time is the anthropologist in? From what historical epoch should I be drawing the tools of analysis? In one sense the events are reassuringly co-eval (after Fabian 1983; cf. Dalton 1996: 409-10 ) with diverse late twentieth-century global Northern European or American cultures. While bridewealth and the mother's pig, and the need to sacrifice, not to speak of prospective payments to maternal kin, were alt in existence in Hagen before people ever set eyes on the money that enables

God. In fact God has rather upset most such payments, including :

ones given at death; the missions are said to disapprove of such ' child payments on the grounds that God makes the body, not the mother's kin. The arrangements arc also somewhat upset by.the capriciousness of modern marriage, women not necessarily having the input into their husband's land and labour that would be the basis for their kin to claim payment. • '

This is the view Kanapa would have had from the house where she lay sick. Tethered at the end of the courtyard, in the two or three pigs churning up the soil they stood on, tended by her daughter and chased by her husband when they broke loose, she would see some of her years of work, planning and care - a throng of persons, relationships and events. She would see the -i division of tasks, and her husband's work on the cleared land in which the tubers grew, the hours of tracking down animals when they strayed, the discussions about how they should dispose of them, the promise to replace particular pigs taken off for an exchange partner. The size of the pigs and their fatness were prime testimony to the abundance of the staple starch, sweet potato, that she cultivates and they eat, and to the fertility of the soil in which it grows. They were also testimony to her intellectual application to her tasks, and the purposefulness of her work. Kanapa wanted to hold on to the pigs long enough to be able to get rid of them at her son's marriage, in a gesture that would make evident her motherhood. If she could not expend them this way, then she intended to realise them for herself by selling them! For she also saw the division of interests between herself and her husband.

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them these days to discharge their obligations, I was assured of their contemporary saliency. I was told that looking after kin on the maternal side was the one distinctive 'custom' (kastom ) of all Papua New Guinea. It was what marked them out in the modern world, the sign of common identity or national community. But interesting as it would be to join the many commentators on the description o f contemporary culture as kastom, including Carrier's analysis of commodities and markets, I choose another route.

One of the times Euro-Americans may find themselves in has so to speak only just happened for them. But it may have 'happened' long ago in Papua New Guinea. I wonder if some of the consid- erations voiced by Kanapa - especially those with their roots thoroughly in Hagen's past - might not anticipate certain future economic directions in Euro-American quests for ownership. I refer to the economics of new reproductive forms, of rights estab- lished through (pro)creativity, bodily and mental.

Some years ago now, Annette Weiner. (1980, 1982) called for the anthropology of Melanesia to look not to reciprocity as a model for gift-based or exchange relations but to reproduction. Although her own model has been criticised for serving the old tautologies of structural-functionalism in new guise (Carrier and Carrier 1991: 110-13), its reference point was not simply the replication of social categories but reproduction in the sense of bodily procreation. She dwelt on Melanesian images of the indivi- dual life cycle, of birth and decay, and the circulation of_exchange items in relation to these, as generative extensions of body processes. Since that was written, recent developments in the Euro-American anthropologist's society of origin are beginning to provide a vocabulary of 'reproduction' that could inform contem- porary analysis with the same kind of effect that an economically- interpreted inflection of reciprocity once did. In Hagen, the right to the mother's pig is long established - it has historical antece- dents that have nothing to do with reproductive technology and Euro-American legislation and litigation. Yet the emergent quasi- legal concepts that accompany these applications of technology invite Euro-Americans to think of property in persons and prop- erty in life forms (Franklin 1995). There is analytical mileage here: One example must suffice: the recently invented concept of procreative intent. It renders some of the enduring forms of Hagen social life newly co-eval with some from the anthropolo- gist's world.

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Kanapa's final defiance says it all: the dispute between husband and wife was not between keeping and giving but over the contexts in which either of them could dispose of the products of their joint efforts. Carrier is right to emphasise the work that goes into keeping debts alive in people's minds. Yet it is not just transactions that create debts. Maternal nurture also makes persons indebted to their maternal kin. However Kanapa's huband tried to avoid making good what she thought he owed, he could not avoid the long-term consequences of neglect, his own dead mother's ghost being a ready reminder. Bridewealth has a special poignancy for women, as wc have seen, for it is the moment at which the mother's part is made manifest. Indeed, the occasion of marriage is the public 'birth' of parents and children alike, and thus the culmination of a procreative process. One might almost speak of Kanapa, in her deep-felt frustration, articulating the right to be a parent. This means that it is not just, as Sillitoe reminds us (1988a: 7), that men need women to produce pigs, but that women need pigs to produce men. That is, they need a medium which will make visible their maternal care, and then of course for their children to get married. What holds true for both groom's and bride's mother is culturally explicit in the case of the bride's mother. Bridewealth goes to girl's kin because they are her originators, those who produced her, and this is the point at which the bride's kin will utter remarks - as the adopting father did - that could well be glossed in terms of procreative intent. Procreative intent is expressed in people's desire for daughters who will bring their parents (bride)wealth.

This is an openly reproductive system geared to producing persons through the production of things. Yet to locate the prin- cipal analytical vocabulary in terms of production and consump- tion would be to privilege one kind of body product, namely labour, over others. Anthropologists are used to debating the general applicability of market models or the capitalist mode of production to their materials. As I indicated in the previous chapter, here is another debate: the extent to which the technol- ogy released by post-industrial/late capitalist institutions has given us new economic forms, including new body products, to think with. The latter includes both body parts previously inse- parable from human activity or embodiment, but now capable of externalisation, such as the pre-imp!anted embryo, and products of the intellect previously embedded in their realisation, but now

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valued in the way that the potential of inventiveness is valued, such as procreative intent.

The large pig that Kanapa had in mind for the bride's mother was one she had reared, we might say, with such intent. That is, she foresaw the day when it would appear at her son's bride- wealth. It would appear both as the product of joint work bestowed on it by herself and her husband and as the embodiment of her own actions which subsumed her intentions for it. Like the question of the disposition of embryos in an other than procrea- tive context, the husband's taking it off instigated a conflict over the respective interests of the spouses. We might consider, then, the further concepts that Robertson develops, dispositional authority and dispositional agreements. The issue is not that these are necessarily new in American legal thinking but that they are these days being applied to products of the body. Something of a parallel is offered by Sillitoe's (1998a) discussion (and cf. Salis- bury 1962) of personal possessions owned by Highlands men and women and the pigs and shell valuables that circulate in exchange. In relation to valuables he notes that the rights at issue are those of disposal, and that this is a right that only one person at a time may hold, though the item in question (the rights in it) may pass serially between persons. One cannot own valuables exclusively (as 'private property'), but may enjoy custody of them for a while. He thus disputes the relevance of inalienability as a concept; people may cease to have rights in particular items while continuing to have rights in relation to the recipient by virtue of the transfer of those i t e m s . H What is helpful in Sillitoe's contribu- tion is his focus on the right to dispose not as a concomitant of pre-existing or already established property rights but (precisely as suggested in the case of the Tennessee embryos) as a form of property relation itself. Recall Ponam land titles.

One might elaborate: disposability begins to appear as an outcome of social context, an entitlement to be exercised in the appropriate milieu. Like the Tennessee woman who wished the embryos to live so that she could complete her motherhood in however removed a form, Kanapa wanted to complete her motherhood with the disposal of her pigs at her son's marriage. By the same token, the Hagen woman's entitlement to dispose of the mother's pig is dormant until bridewealth mobilises it. The conventions of marriage prestations here provide a kind of tacit dispositional agreement. In the meanwhile, the potential 'mother's

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pig' is prey to all v sorts of other demands. Until it is realised as such, like the unrealised embryo, other claims may come to the fore. In the Hagen case men have an interest in deferring that particular realisation because they have other uses for the valu- able items; in the Tennessee case the man who had no other uses for the embryo simply wished to block that realisation, for it would have made him the father he did not wish to be.

N o w through their own exchanges Hagen men create a separate domain of entitlements for themselves; they belong to this social domain by the authority of the dispositional control it enables them to exercise. We may further note that it defines desire as desire for valuables to dispose of and identities as relations made present through the dispositional acts of others. In short, what keeps men's commitment to their collective exchanges is the same as the commitment of husbands and wives to their joint work: a division of interests. For any or either party to pursue their inter- ests, such a division must be made visible. But what is being divided by these interests?

Alan Macfarlane's (1998) analysis of the varying divisibility and indivisibility of resources (things) on the one hand and on the other of rights' (distributed among persons), at different times and places in Europe, becomes germane at this point. He points to an ancient difference between Roman and feudal law. Roman lawyers saw things as property and as divisible (land could be divided or partitioned again and again among heirs), while for feudal lawyers the thing was indivisible or impartible but property rights in it could be almost infinitely divided among persons with claim upon it (there might/be several distinct titles to the same piece of land). Under this second regime, the bundle of social ties between people was divisible in different ways. He thus quotes an observation that common law, developed from the tenures of medieval feudalism and by contrast with civil or Roman law, was the more easily able to treat abstract rights such as copyright and patents as forms of property. The point is that partibility and impartiality might rest either with the .object of the property claim or with the subjects making the claim. The Melanesian material prompts a further question. Suppose the claims were not about things or rights but about persons as such?

In the Melanesian case there is on the one hand a division of interests among persons with respect to other persons, as evinced through bridewealth payments, for instance, where kin of differ-

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ent kinds have claims on persons. There is on the other hand, and simultaneously, a conception of a person's identity as inherently divisible. Thus parts of the person may be imagined as cut off from having future effect: in patrilineal regimes a woman cannot transmit her clan identity to the' child - it is turned back through bridewealth, through the wealth which compensates the maternal kin for the substance they have 'lost' through their daughter. Where wealth flows, bodily substance 1 5 may also be thought of as flowing, and body composition becomes an image of the person and his or her relationships with others. As a consequence, there is both internal and external partition. The partibility of the person (evinced in flows of wealth) is a counterpart to the person as a composite of the relations that compose him or her. It is as though these people were at once dividing the thing (here the person) and dividing bundles of rights in relation to the thing (here sets of relations that at once Compose and are external to the person). If we translate that back into Euro-American, so to speak, we might say that persons can be divided both as subjects (Euro-American anthropologists have always argued for a theore- tical construct that defines persons as social bundles of rights and duties distributed between various relationships) and as objects (that is, as the objects of other people's interests). But to leave it like this would simply recapitulate the distinction between rights in personam and rights in rem which Radcliffe-Brown (1952)..long ago made a cornerstone of analysis. The kinds of novel partition- ings of procreative material offered these days through some applications of reproductive medicine demand new ways of imagining divisible persons and of imagining the social conse- quences such divisions set in train. These may be interpreted, in Euro-American experience, as fragmenting 'the individual' or 'the body', that is, dividing what is not properly divisible. However, fragmentation does not give us much of a comparative tool. A formula which would be equally apposite for Melanesia is that relationships divide and are divided by interests.

This construct does not map in any simple way on to the differ- ence between inclusive and exclusive relations. Rather, inclusivity/ exclusivity seems particularly apposite for the analysis of one type of property relation, namely possession, which resonates with the community/individual axis engrained in European thinking. Now , in the 1990s, there seems a renewed anthropological concern with the concept of possession. If this concern is responsive to a late

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twentieth-century cultural re-embedding of personal desire and identity in indivisible things, perhaps such a move resists exactly these concurrent perceptions of divisions of body and body products. Perhaps it challenges exactly those emergent quasi-legal constructs of dispositional control - such as the ones presented by Robertson - being developed to deal with divergent interests in life forms.

Battaglia (1994) introduces a scholar, Rosalind Petchesky, who has deliberately sought to construct a critical vocabulary drawn from another epoch, and with resistance in mind. Let us return for a moment then to Battaglia's own story of the potential presence. In her critique of Bhaskar's new materialism, 1 6 she considers how Trobriand Islanders in Port Moresby drew attention to axe blades, a class of valuable called beku. These have been analysed (A. Weiner 1976) as significant for the beginnings of new reproductive cycles, affirmed in the words of an urban Trobriander that they 'represent life'. If one wished to use the terms, they are both alien- able (bestowed on recipients without creating continuing partner- ship) and inalienable (a man hopes eventually to walk after his beku and follow its path through successive villages in order to buy it back). 'It would seem,' Battaglia adds (1994: 637) 'that posses- sion, while an important issue for users, is not the only . . . issue . . . Property models are outdistanced by the way people operate the object and by their quest for it along the path of remembered (or fabricated?) "owners".' This is the juncture at which she draws at- tention to an article by Petchesky (1995) on the conceptualisation of property in relation to the body: the problem is not the language of ownership but the reification of property as possession. Note that the language of ownership is thus rendered 'unproblematic' through a deconstructive division (on Battaglia's part) that produces a counterpart query, as here in the query about reifica- tion, possession conceived as a thing; without that kind of division, one may add, there is no analytical position to take.

Petchesky wishes to recover political purpose for the construct of 'self-propriety' or self-ownership specifically in relation to the body as a point of feminist resistance to other, private, exclusive, conceptualisations of ownership. Against those who decry the language of property altogether she wishes to open up the range of conceptual resources from which we might draw our models. 1 7

Her inspiration is a moment of resistance that she identifies as

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having taken place some three hundred years ago. This was a moment at which 'self-propriety' summoned a 'concept of prop- erty that is inclusive rather than exclusive and a model of the body that is extensive rather than insular' (Petchesky 1995: 400). (Protest was against the enclosing of the commons, property imagined as a shared rather than private resource.) It was inclu- sive from the connections that were established with the commu- nity, evoking a vision of an 'extended or communally embedded body' as a 'normative ground in the process of self-creation and self-engagement' (1995: 400). The embedding of self-creation in community (rather than against it) echoes Gudeman's (1995) analysis of what he calls the community economy as a reproduc- tive system. He draws on Latin American ethnography 1 8 in order to make a point about the embeddedness of innovation in social practice. It is a specifically 'Western' proclivity, and a late one at that, to treat innovation as a product of the intellect and the products of the intellect as separate from other aspects of the person. He thus asks, apropos. the foundations of formal economic knowledge in common practice, at what point it would have made sense to treat innovations in practices and knowledge as clearly independent products of the mind. A historical question about the development of modern European institutions again asks us to historicise our analytical vocabulary. 1 9

N o w Petchesky deliberately searches for a conceptualisation of ownership in relation to the body that will be relevant for contemporary feminist practice. ('[0]wning our bodies depends integrally on having access to the social resources for assuring our bodies' health and well-being; self-ownership and proper care- taking go hand in hand with shared ownership of the commons' (Petchesky 1995: 403).) She finds the construct she is looking for in the writings of Leveller tracts, as well as later slave narratives, of the seventeenth century. The concept of self-ownership, or property in one's person, was being promulgated among folk who were collectively opposed to market relations, not defending them. The promulgation, pre-Lockean, 2 0 summoned a notion of rights in the body that were free from state interference, especially in sexual expression. Early modern radicals were, in her view, taking an oppositional stance against interference by public authorities in sexual and bodily functions, much we might add as Robertson would like to see procreactive choices constitutionally protected against restrictive legislation on the grounds that legisla-

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tion interferes with reproductive liberty.2 1 With Locke, Petchesky argues, the radical idea of self-ownership fell away before a new and individualistic interpretation of property in the person founded on rights to one's own labour. There is no 'one' epoch here. It would be interesting indeed to know how these diverse formulations related to the seventeenth-century beginnings of intellectual property rights (copyright) and the emergent idea of authors' proprietory rights in their w o r k . 2 2

Here we find in miniature a recapitulation of the European history of inclusive and exclusive notions of ownership ('posses- sion') which suggests "a creative re-use of them. The need comes from the pressure of contemporary social change. Against the background of an emergent Euro-American discourse about prop- erty in persons and body products, especially in the context of kinship created by transactions, it is not only anthropologists who are thinking anew about what 'ownership' entails. The current language about reproductive rights'is also developing in conscious collusion with and contest against commercially driven definitions of body products. It may endorse or defeat other connotations of proprietorship, for instance in Britain those evident in indigenous (Euro-American) kinship thinking. It may find an echo in the indigenous (Melanesian) comparison of socio- economic systems, prompted for instance by the Papuan New Guincan way in which commerce and kastom are played off against each other in radically different trajectories of commoditi- sation. These all afford analytical choices In devising their own contemporary lexicon of property relations, social anthropologists need to know the lexicons developing around them.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I am most grateful to Alan Macfarlane for initial stimulus, and to Debbora Battaglia and Eric Hirsch for further comments. A version o f this chapter was read as a paper to the Royal Histori- cal Society's 1996 conference at York University, and to the Sociology and Social Anthropology seminar at Keele University. It received some prety hefty'criticism from which I have benefited. James Carrier has as always given me much food for thought, and I record my warm thanks.