philosophy midterm paper

Partners and Consumers:

Making Relations Visible*

Marilyn Strathern

AT THE 1990 MEETINGS for the British Association for the Ad- vancement of Science, an experimental embryologist ex- pounded an expert's view to a lay audience.' Martin Johnson

was concerned to demonstrate the continuity of biological process. A person's birth begins with primitive gametes laid down when one's parents were embryos in the grandparental womb. Subsequent de- velopment depends not only on genetic coding but on extragenetic influences that operate on chromosomes from the start; these include stimulation from material enveloping the egg,2 as well as nutritive and other effects derived from placenta and uterus. It was a powerful origin story,3 especially in the context of current legislative decisions with respect to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990). Here, however, the problem has been to formulate discontinuities between developmental phases. The House of Commons decided that research on human embryos is permissible up to fourteen days, by which time, among other things, the pre-embryonic material is now discernably divided into those cells that will form the future embryo-fetus and those that will form the placenta. The Secretary for Health was reported as saying that status as an individual could begin only at the stage where cells could be differentiated.4 Yet while biology appeared to provide an index,5 the further problem of personhood raised the same notion of continuous process. Another member of the Commons pointed out: "It is a very difficult matter to say at what stage do you have a citizen, a human being. At various stages fresh rights are acquired."' Rights can only be acquired of course, in this view, if there is an individual person to bear them.7

Here are experts informing lay persons (the BAAS talk), experts

*This was initially presented to the conference on The Gift and Its Transformations, organized by Natalie Davis, Rena Lederman, and Ronald Sharp, National Humanities Center, N.C., November 1990. I am most grateful for comments from the participants. I should add that I have retained the original mode of address, since the paper was written for a multidisciplinary audience.

New Literary History, 1991, 22: 581-601

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informing experts (the Secretary for Health is briefed on what the fourteen-day stage means), and lay persons (Members of Parliament) turning expert in making legislative decisions. An anthropologist might wish to bracket all of them lay insofar as they promote a common view of the person that, in his/her eyes, must have the status of a folk model. For the anthropological expert, "person" is an analytic construct whose utility is evinced through cross-cultural comparison. One draws, as always, from one's culture of origin, but to be an expert in anthropology is to demonstrate simultaneously the cultural origins of one's analytic constructs and their cross- cultural applicability.

A person cannot in this sense be seen without the mediation of analysis. Yet those who discuss the potential personhood of the embryo implicitly contest such an appropriation of the concept. Visual representations of first the division of cells and then the human form as it takes shape regularly accompany not just talks designed to popularize the findings of science but attempts to make vivid the political issues at stake.8 Indeed, a flurry of fascination/ repulsion was created by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Children which in April (while the Act was still in debate) sent all 650 MPs a life-sized model of a twenty-week-old fetus. This parody of the ubiquitous free gift was intended to mobilize a parallel concern over the limit for legal abortions. The plastic fetus lifted out from a sectional womb,' and its message was clear. One can "see" a (potential) person, and a person is known by its individuality. In- dividuality in turn means a naturally entire and free-standing entity: the claim was that at twenty weeks a fetus is a viable whole.

Between the anthropologist as expert and the layperson with his or her folk model lies more than an epistemological issue over what is usefully designated a "person"; there is an ontological issue over the nature of the category. The anthropologist is dealing with a category that refers to certain analytical constructions. The laity may argue over what they see and what they call it but take for granted that the category refers to persons existing as visible and substantial entities. So while it may be hard to tell when a person begins, and while the law may have to define the stages at which rights accrue, it seems self-evident that the subject of these debates is a concrete human being. The anthropologist is not, of course, untouched by this cultural certitude.

Now for "person" one could write "gift." That concept was drawn into anthropology from various domains of Western or Euro-Amer- ican discourse (economy, theology, and so forth) though its most

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notable proponents made out of the indigenous connotation of presentations voluntarily made an analytical category that also in- cluded the social fact of obligation. The point is that the concept of gift seemed readily applicable to self-evident and concrete "gifts." The term trailed a reassuring visualism. One could "see" gift ex- change because one could see the gifts, the things that people exchanged with one another. It also trailed a concern, as Panoff, Parry, and others have noted, with individual autonomy (volunta- rism) and interpersonal relations measured by degrees of interest- edness (altruism).1o

As an anthropologist I am crippled, so to speak, by expertise- by the desire to appropriate the category "gift" in a special way, insofar as those negotiations of relationships known as gift exchange in Melanesia have a character whose uniqueness I would be reluctant to relinquish. I say crippled to the extent that this position appears to set up barriers. Blind: I do not believe the evidence of my eyes, that one will recognize a gift when one sees it. Constricted: I cannot stride across the world map looking for gifts at all times and places. The wrong color: monochrome rather than polychrome, for ex- hilarating as the company of other disciplines can be, I lose ap- propriative capability, feel very lay in the presence of other expertise. Other knowledge does not necessarily repair deficiencies in one's own. Not something that concerns Melanesians, one should add, for they borrow from foreigners all the time, including the most intimate powers of reproduction.

Melanesians borrow origin stories, wealth, and-as in the area I know best (Mount Hagen)-the expertise by which to organize their religion and their future. One clan takes from another its means of life. Indeed, exchanges surrounding the transfer of reproductive potential are intrinsic to the constitution of identity. From a clan's point of view, foreign wives are drawn to them by virtue of bride- wealth, and such items of wealth are themselves considered to have reproductive potential. Pigs create pigs and money creates money, as shell valuables also reproduce themselves, an idea given visible form in the iconography that developed with the influx of pearlshells into the Hagen area at the time of contact. Shells for circulation in gift exchange were mounted on resin boards vividly colored with red ochre. The whole appeared a free-standing entity. But it was not an image of one. Rather than plastic molding a visible homun- culus, the child/embryo in its netbag/womb was indicated in the abstract by the curvature of the shell crescent, and the resin molded a container around it."

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Personalized Commodities?

In taking off from some of the expert discourse of Melanesian anthropology, I confine myself to certain issues in the understanding of gifts, namely those concerned with reproduction and the life cycle. It is arguable that all Melanesian gift exchanges are "repro- ductive," but I make a more restricted point. The reason is to provide an approximation of the indigenous Euro-American un- derstanding of gifts as "transactions within a moral economy, which [make] possible the extended reproduction of social relations.""12 This account ignores those aspects of the Melanesian gift that have seemed most strange to the twentieth-century Westerner (competition and the political striving for prestige), in order to focus on the apparently familiar (the celebration of kinship).

From the perspective of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, of the kind that Lederman has described for Mendi,' I thus appear to privilege one nexus of gifting (kinship-based) over another (clan- based). Or, more accurately, to evoke one type of sociality, for it is also arguable that each set of relations transforms the moral base of the other. But my interest is not in the relative moralities of exchanges.'4 It is in whether Melanesian gifting can illuminate the very idea of there being part-societies ("moral economies") that "typically consist of small worlds of personal relationships that are the emotional core of every individual's social experiences" (GE 15).

Whatever parallels might be useful for earlier European mate- rials,15 in the late twentieth century any understandings of such part-societies must in turn be put into their specific Euro-American context: consumer culture. Cheal himself goes on to give a con- sumerist definition of sociality. Everywhere (he says) people live out their lives in small worlds; the primitive (he says) because the societies were small, the modern because people "prefer to inhabit intimate life worlds" (GE 15)[!].16 Now recent anthropological discussion of the gift has turned, among other things, on the analytic advantage of distinguishing gift-based economies from commodity-based ones. Gregory has been notable here,17 and while his arguments explicated the contrast between gifts and commodities in terms of production, they have also opened up the question of consumption. In the formula he adopts, it is through consumption that things are drawn into the reproduction of persons, and reproduction can be under- stood as a process of personification. But consumption as a universal analytic is one thing. I take my own cue from the further fact that we live in a self-advertised "consumer" culture.

A consumer culture is a culture, one might say, of personalization.

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And to Euro-Americans, gift-giving seems a highly personalized form of transaction. After all, it was the person in the gift that attracted anthropological attention to the concept in the first place. But whether useful parallels can be drawn between the personali- zations of consumerism and the personifications of Melanesian gift exchange remains to be seen.

Free-standing Entities

The notorious individualism of Western culture has always seemed an abstraction of the state or of the market economy that lies athwart those concrete persons we recognize in interactions with others. No one is really an isolate. This was a point the embryologist wanted to get across, and for which he offered biological reasoning.

Johnson was concerned to demonstrate the influence of the en- vironment in all stages of fetal development. Its significance for him lies in its contribution to the identity of the emergent individual: personal identity is the outcome not just of a unique genetic com- bination but of a unique history of continuous development which affects the way genetic factors themselves take effect. The organism is a finite and discrete entity; the process is continuous. Thus, he opined, an individual is always in interaction with its environment. This provoked a comment from the gynecologist Modell who ob- served that, as far as the embryo is concerned, the environment is immediately the mother and the mother is another person. Among other things, the embryo undergoes the effects of the parents' changing perceptions of it.

The point slid by without much comment. What I see in that interchange is more than a dispute among experts, for it barely registered as a dispute. It epitomized the simultaneous delineation of a hegemonic model (of personhood) and the possibility of con- testing it, somewhat parallel to the manner in which anthropologists have extricated the idea of gift from hegemonic understandings in Western culture in order to contest either the application of these understandings to non-Western cultures or the dominance of the model in people's lives.'" Modell's mild intervention sounded, in fact, almost like a version of critiques well rehearsed through the contested notion of rights in abortion debates. The right of the mother against the right of the child presents a contest of alter- natives.'9 However I wish to make a different kind of contest appear.

Johnson's idea of the individual person doubly defined by genetic programming and by environmental factors seems a solution to the

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old nature/nurture debate: we have, so to speak, put the individual back into its "environment," in much the same way as social scientists are perpetually putting individuals back into "society." This is an individualism that gives full recognition to the context in which persons flourish, and we may read off from the image of the embryo an image of the individual person in a responsive, interactive, and creative mode with the external world. Indeed, it is colloquial English to speak of an individual's "relationship" to its environment as we do of an individual's "relationship" to society.

But what a bizarre coupling! The whole person is held to be a substantial and visible entity. The environment, on the other hand, like society, is regularly construed as existing in the abstract, for it cannot be seen as a whole.2" We may concretize the environment through examples of its parts, as uterus or as trees and mountains, as we may concretize society through referring to groups and institutions. But there was more to Johnson's purpose. He wished to convey how it is potentially everything beyond the individual person that may influence that unique person and help make it what it is. The forces that continuously shape us are always, as he comments elsewhere, both genetic and epigenetic, and "epigenetic" is the biologist's catchall "for everything else besides the genes."21 I would add that this makes the latter of a different order from the former precisely insofar as they are imagined, hypothetically and thus abstractly, as infinite. "Myriad" is his word; the environment consists in this view of the sum of all the factors that might have an effect.

The view against which Johnson argues would hold that the whole and finite individual is determined largely by its genetic program- ming. But rather than contest, perhaps we should see analogy between the conceptualizations here. Suppose the concept of the genetic program were analogous to that of the individual, then the concept of epigenetic forces would appear analogous to that of environment/society. In turn, the relationship between genetic and epigenetic forces that Johnson postulates would be seen to minia- turize or replicate commonsense understandings of that between individual organism and enveloping world. And the interest of Modell's remark would be in the way it cut across the analogies. For she displaced the image of a (finite, concrete) person contex- tualized by an (infinite, abstract) society/environment with another image: the exterior world imagined as another (finite, concrete) person.

She thus gave voice to a capability that also rests in English: of imagining a world that does not imagine such abstractions for itself, where sociality impinges in the presence of other persons. English

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speakers readily enough personify the agency of "society" or even "environment," though they would be hard put to think of these entities as persons. Yet that is exactly the way in which they might imagine that Melanesians imagine the world beyond themselves.22 What contains the child is indeed "another person," whether that other person is the mother, or the clan that nurtures its progeny, or the land that nurtures the clan and receives a fertilizing coun- terpart in the burial of the placenta. This other person may be regarded as the cause or origin of the effective agency of those it contains.23

When Euro-Americans think of more than one person, they are faced with the disjunction of unique individuals and overcome this in the notion that individuals "relate" to one another. What lies between them are relationships, so that society may be thought of as the totality of made relationships. That relationships are made further supposes that what are linked are persons as individual subjects or agents who engage in their making: "[i]nterpersonal dependence is everywhere [!] the result of socially constructed ties between human agents" (GE 11). The idea of persons in the plural evokes, then, the image of the interactions between them, in turn the immediate social environment for any one of them.

It is because society is likened to an environment that it is possible for Euro-Americans to think of individual persons as relating not to other persons but to society as such, and to think of relations as after the fact of the individual's personhood rather than integral to it. Or so the folk model goes. Anthropologists, for their part, have captured the category of person to stand for subjects understood analytically in the context of social relations with others. In the particular way she/he looks to making "society" visible,24 the an- thropologist would be scandalized at the idea of a nonrelational definition of persons.

The analytical necessity appears to have been given by just such societies as are found in Melanesia. Indeed, the anthropological experience may be that in such societies everything is relational. Certainly Melanesians constantly refer to the acts and thoughts of other persons. But if they seemingly situate themselves in a world full of what we call "social relationships," such relationships do not link individuals. Rather, the fact of relating forms a background sociality to people's existence, out of which people work to make specific relationships appear.25 Relations are thus integral to the person or, in Wagner's formulation,26 persons may be understood fractally: their dimensionality cannot be expressed in whole numbers. The fractal person is an entity with relationships integrally implied.

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Any scale of social activity mobilizes the same dimensionality of person/relation.

There is no axiomatic evaluation of intimacy or closeness here. On the contrary, people work to create divisions between themselves. For in the activation of relations people make explicit what differ- entiates them.27 One may put it that it is the relationship between them that separates donor from recipient or mother from child. Persons are detached, not as individuals from the background of society or environment, but from other persons. However, detach- ment is never final, and the process is constantly recreated in people's dealings with one another. To thus be in a state of division with respect to others renders the Melanesian person dividual.

Persons are not conceptualized, therefore, as free-standing. A Hagen clan is composed of its agnates and those foreigners detached from other clans who will give birth to its children; a woman contains the child that grows through the acts of a man; shells are mounted on the breast. One person may "carry" another, as the origin or cause of its existence and acts. An implicate field of persons is thus imagined in the division or dispersal of bodies or body parts.28 From their viewpoint, Western Euro-Americans cannot readily think of bodies and body parts as the substance of people's interactions. They can imagine objects flowing between persons "as though" they "symbolized" body parts, but for them to discover that a shell is like a fetus in a womb is simply to uncover an image, a metaphorical statement about (say) fertility. So let me return to the embryologist's address and to a moment when he seemed at a loss for a metaphor.

During his presentation, Johnson flashed on the screen a picture of twin babies with their common placenta between them. The three were genetically identical, he briefly observed. Three what? One may fill in the silence, that of course they were not three persons, for only the twins, not the placenta, would grow into autonomous subjects. The placenta is regarded as a source of support, at once part of the fetus and part of the fetus's environment, yet only through detachment from it is the individual person made;29 the picture included the cut cords and the scissors that cut them. Not at all how the Melanesian 'Are'Are of Malaita in the Solomon Islands would see it. There the placenta both remains part of the person and, in becoming detached at birth, is treated as another person. Detachment is conceptualized as a separation of (dividual) persons from one another.

Coppet describes how the placenta is buried in ancestral land, linking the living person to a network of ancestral funeral sites and returning to source two vital parts of personal substance.30 It is

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planted like a dead taro that has lost its living stem (the baby); taro denotes "body." The 'Are'Are placenta is also referred to as the baby's pig, an allusion to animate "breath." (What the placenta lacks is a third part, the ancestral "image" that adults assume when they die naturally, that is, are killed by their own ancestors; the un- imaged placenta is buried somewhat after the manner of an un- imaged murder victim.) Pig and taro assure the vitality of the living child; it is also expected that scavenging pigs will eat the buried placenta and that taro will grow there. The land that nourishes the food that nourishes the child is also constituted of what constitutes the living person and is a cause of its life. 'Are'Are personify the land, territorialize the person. When one understands how the land owns people, Coppet was told,3 one can understand how people own land.

This relationship to the land is not quite the same as the English- speaking conceptualization of a (concrete) person's relationship to the (abstract) environment/society. For the 'Are'Are person (land) thereby enters into an exchange with the land (person). If your placenta has been buried, "it proves that, in return for your life, through the land, you have given back the share of 'body' and 'breath' which must rejoin the universal circulation."32

It is for such a world as this, where persons' actions always seem to be caused by or elicited by other "persons," that the borrowed concept of the gift captures what a Westerner would sense as a pervasive sociality. It seems just the formula to emphasize the personal nature of interpersonal relations. Perhaps that is because gifts in turn typify a sector of Western culture which seemingly parallels the pervasive sociality of Melanesian life: the close inter- personal relations of kinship and friendship. Here one gives and takes on an intimate basis. Yet the appearance of similarity is, inevitably, misleading. Euro-American intimacy is signaled by two constructs peculiar to it, altruism and voluntarism.

Altruism: Donors and Partners

Advances in reproductive medicine that have highlighted artificial mechanisms to assist procreation have also heightened certain West- ern perceptions of the interaction between procreating partners. Thus in the context of discussing artificial insemination by donor Sissa recalls the assumption "that semen is donated, the uterus only loaned."33 That paternity should in addition be thought a matter of opinion, maternity a matter of fact, turns not on the certainty

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about donation but on certainty about social identity. It is because semen has the appearance of a (visible) detachable bodily substance that it seems alienable. Because it is alienable, its source may be in doubt. Both the substantial nature of semen and the asymmetry of the relationship between semen and uterus (individual and envi- ronment) present an inverse of the supposition found in Aristotle, that semen provided form and maternal blood the substance of the child. The potency of semen in this ancient view was that it was efficacious in the way a craftsman's activities were efficacious; it had an activating force on female blood but did not contribute particles of matter to the embryo. The movement of the male body, the act of donation, constituted the male part in procreation.34

Sissa draws the inevitable parallel with the Trobriands, between the multiple fathering made possible by insemination by donor and the fact (as she puts it) that the Trobriand child has two fathers, one whose semen molds somatic identity and one (the mother's brother) who defines the kin group to which the child belongs. Yet the parallel is a poor one, since the social identity of the Trobriand father is integral to his somatic role, whereas in the case of DI knowing the father's identity is both optional and after the fact of the donation. Donation linking a person to a source of genetic endowment does not necessarily link the person to another person. Indeed, twentieth-century people who talk of semen "donation" treat it as a substance that will fertilize the maternal egg whether or not its identity is known. This is the crux. Semen is potentially alienable (from the body), I suggest, because of the possibility of its being produced without being elicited by another person. This is, in turn, a general conceptual possibility, regardless of whether or not DI is at issue, captured in its visual representation as a detachable sub- stance.35 DI adds the further conceptual possibility that conception need not be accompanied by bodily movement; movement is only required to produce the semen. Sissa points out that Aristotle's emphasis on the transcendent and nonsubstantial aspect of the semen led him to assert it could never be frozen, whereas twentieth-century people keep frozen specimens in banks for future use.

Nonetheless, the new reproductive technologies have repaired some of the asymmetry, for it would seem that "egg donation" has passed into the lay imagination as a process analogous to semen donation.36 Anonymity may or may not be preserved. In the case of maternal surrogacy, however, a partnership of a kind has to be set up between the commissioning couple and the surrogate mother. People talk crudely of womb-renting, or more delicately of the gift of life.37

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Donation is here conceptualized in two ways. On the one hand it may simply involve an act of bodily emission intended for an anonymous recipient; on the other hand it may involve a relationship between donors and recipients as partners in a single enterprise. This corresponds to the double conceptualization of sociality in consumer culture, as much a matter of an individual's relationship to society in the abstract as of interaction between concrete persons.

The terminology of donation and gift is seemingly encouraged by clinical and other experts by virtue of this double evocatory power. It evokes the charitable altruism of blood and organ donors; it also evokes the intimate altruism of transactions that typify personal relations outside the market. (1) Organ donors can give anonymously because human organs are regarded as anonymous: kidneys differ in physical condition rather than social identity.38 Such organs or materials as can be excised or secreted from the body become free- standing entities. So although semen carries formative genetic ma- terial that will contribute to a person's identity, it is also possible to think of contributing one's part to a general supply. Donation here carries connotations of the charitable gesture, the personal sacrifice for the public good, a gift to society. (2) Alternatively, sometimes in the case of egg donation and certainly of willingness to carry a child, altruism may be embedded in specific relations. A partnership is created between donor and recipient. An egg donated from a close relative can thus be regarded as belonging to a rela- tionship that already exists, an expression of love. The carrying mother, related or not, is regarded as sacrificing comfort and ease in order to enable others to have children; because of the nature of her labor and the attempt to protect such acts from commercial exploitation, as in the case of charity the language of gift-giving becomes the language of altruism.

But do these gestures and does this language constitute a gift economy?

Cheal has argued exactly this in examining the nexus of present- giving among friends and relatives, as at Christmas and birthdays, in suburban Canada (see GE). Gifts indicate community membership (the reproduction of social status) as well as relations of intimacy. In either case, they symbolize the central values of a "love culture," he argues, whether the love is generally or specifically directed. We encounter here the same double: gifts for society and gifts for persons. Cheal introduces a further distinction between the im- mediate society of the moral economy (his "small world," the real community) and the further society of the political economy. Gifts make gestures of altruism within, it would seem, the near society,

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whereas the far society is seen as a realm of commerce. It is in their immediate circles that persons "make" relationships as they "make" love, and community-giving is a diffuse, impersonal version of intimacy-giving.

While I would dispute neither the evocation of emotions and (society-near) relational behavior among friends and relatives nor the way this mobilizes conventions distinct from those that regulate other (society-far) areas of life, I add one comment: the circulation of gifts does not create distinct kinds of persons. "Gifts" (presents) are free-standing entities just like commodities, alienable, as Cheal says. Indeed the person who purchases a present to give to a friend simply puts in reverse the same process which makes it possible for him/her to donate body substance to a blood bank, cadaver to science. An anonymously-produced object becomes part of a store on which others draw. Preserving the social anonymity of market goods is of course fundamental to the supposition that goods are available for all. That such goods can be appropriated by the consumer and fashioned to the ends of personal identity9--the wrapped present, the exhibited taste-is part of the cultural inter- pretation of consumption as consumerism.40

While they may express personal identity, goods do not have to be made into gifts in order to do so. Gifts between persons can make statements about relationships, yet a relationship is not necessary to the creation of identity. The analogy with reproductive process is evident: genetic identity does not imply a social relationship.

As I understand it, what Euro-Americans call gifts in late twentieth- century consumer culture, whether body substance or merchandise, are regarded as extensions of the self insofar as they carry the expression of sentiments. Sentiments are commonly expressed to- ward other persons, but they may equally well be directed to abstract entities such as "society." For sentiments emanate outwards from the person, whether or not they are "received" by specific others. They thus appear as the person would like to appear, autonomous, char- itable. Sentiment is supposed to have positive connotations in the same way as near relations are supposed to be benign, and presents carry positive overtones of sociability and affection. Hence Cheal's closeted language of community and intimacy.

Indeed, the kinds of presents Cheal describes are like the "goods" of classical economy: objects of desire. It is individuals, he observes, who give and receive goods and who reproduce their relations with others, though they do so, I would add, from their own vantage point (of desire). Cheal himself offers a comparison (GE 10); he takes the free disposition of items as distinguishing the gift in the

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moral economy of suburban Canada from those reciprocities alleg- edly described by Gregory that put people into a state of (his term, not Gregory's) bondage.41 It is the alienability of the former that confers freedom. The sentiment such items express springs from within the individual person, and it is the flow of sentiment (the ideology of love) that makes relationships. As a consequence, Euro- American gift-giving really only works as a sign of personal com- mitment if it is also a sign of benign feeling. Benign feeling in turn is presented as an attribute of the small-scale, with its dialectic of intimacy and community. This confident equation of the small-scale with the interpersonal is, to say the least, an interesting cultural comment on the dimensions of persons.

Where the cycling of gifts among kin effects the procreation and regeneration of relationships, this can comprise activity of a cosmic order. Consider the Melanesian Sabarl on the eastern tip of the Massim archipelago.42 Not only is this tiny dialect group of fewer than a thousand people able to account for the beginning of time, their gift exchanges are of universal dimensions. No part-societies here; the entire system of production, distribution, and consumption is a process of personification "that converts food and objects and people into other people."43 And society does not exist apart from other people; rather, persons are of global dimensions, sociality integral to them. This is made evident by their parentage. A person is forever a dependant with respect to his or her father's clan, with whom he/she is involved in a lifetime of exchanges. Dependency is conceptualized in terms of specific relations: a member of the father's clan acts as a designated "father" to the eternal "child" whom he "feeds," an activity that lasts from conception till burial when it must be stopped.44 In this matrilineal society, paternal kin are keepers of mortality and the father's donations have effect (only) for as long as the child lives. This is no more nor less "bondage" than one might say one is a slave to life or, in Aristotle's terms, a victim of paternal motility.

The partner in such exchanges is always another and specific person. Gifts are never free-standing: they have value because they are attached to one social source ("father") in being destined for another ("child") and, whether they originate in labor or in other transactions, carry identity. Yet when all such encounters are inter- personal encounters, they convey no special connotations of intimacy. Nor of altruism as a source of benign feeling.

The Western notion of persons being contained by their envi- ronment/society is indeed significant here, though not quite for Johnson's reasons. It enables Euro-Americans to think of the gift

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as altruistic by the conceivable analogy of a gesture toward exactly such abstract entities.45 Altruistic gestures toward other persons are invariably tempered by the aftereffect of realizing that one's own self-interest must be bound up somewhere, if only in maintaining one's (social) environment. Conversely, it is possible to think of gifts as voluntarily given despite social pressure and obligation precisely because they conventionally typify those relations that are made through the spontaneous emission of emotions.

Voluntarism: Recipients and Consumers

Consumer culture, it would seem, springs from the perpetual emanations of desire held to radiate from each individual person. This wellspring is like the bottomless pit of need that Euro-Americans are also supposed to suffer, such as the celebrated biological need for women to have children-a "drive to reproduce."46 In meeting need and desire, the individual person expresses the essential self. A rhetoric of accumulation is thus bound to the voluntarism of individual effort. One might remark that the constant necessity for the individual to implement his or her subjectivity has its own coercive force.

If there is a similarity between the coercions of gift-giving in Melanesia and late twentieth-century consumerism, then we may indeed find its echo in the desire/drive/need for the individual to act as a free agent. With two differences. One, that on the Melanesian side the need is located not in the agent but in those "other persons" who cause the agent to act. Two, that Melanesian accumulation is tempered by the fact that acts, like relations, work to substitutive effect. Relations are not perpetually "made." Rather, relations are either made to appear or appear in their making; every new re- lationship displaces a former one. Each gift is a substitution for a previous gift. One extracts from another what one has had extracted from oneself. Thus Coppet points to the chain of transformations that constitute the common task on which 'Are'Are society is based. An endless process of perpetual dissolution by which "objects, an- imals, persons, or elements of persons" change continuous decay into life.47

As elsewhere in Austronesian-speaking Melanesia,48 a death divides survivors into mourners (feast givers) and workers (who bury the deceased and are feasted). In 'Are'Are each side makes a pile of food, topped with money, which reconstitutes the dead person. Not only do both piles incorporate food items from the other, the two

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piles are then exchanged. They replace the deceased with a com- position both of the relations once integral to him or her, and of his or her basic elements, "body" (taro and coconut), "breath" (pork), and "image" (money). These replacements enable the deceased's body/breath to be consumed, later themselves replaced by a further display composed entirely of money. First the workers take charge of it, then reassemble it for the mourners (the deceased's family) to dispose of; the latter return all the wealth received in the course of the funeral and thereby complete the final element, the ancestor's image. The new ancestor is now accessible to his living descendants.

Coppet refers to "replacement" rather than substitution,50 which for him carries too many resonances of displacing one individual object by another. Yet, as we have seen, what are also replaced are not just the elements that compose an individual but the relationships of which the person is composed. A relationship is "replaced" through the substitution of a counterpart. The point is explicit in Battaglia's account of Sabarl mortuary ritual, where the actions of mourning and burial mobilize the respective maternal and paternal kin of the deceased. That person is visibly reconstituted in the assembling of funeral foods (sago pudding) and wealth (axe blades), simultaneously semen and bones being returned by maternal kin to the paternal.

These are gifts of life. Life is given in the necessity to consume the deceased as a physical presence and thus release the future- the ancestor to future descendants--from present relationships. As a consequence, the relations that composed and supported the deceased must be made finally visible. Most importantly, in the course of the funeral feasts, relations between maternal and paternal kin appear in the division between donors and recipients. The "father" makes a final presentation of axe blades; maternal kin then substitute for these blades of their own and hand back the items with increment. But more than this. Food and valuables are composed into an image of the deceased before being given to the paternal kin. The Sabarl deceased is thus rendered into a form at once visible (in the abstract) and dissoluble (in its substance): its components can be consumed or dissipated. "[P]eople consume other people."'51 The dead die because the link between persons out of which the person was born is dissolved.

Insofar as one might imagine elements of this exchange sequence as involving the transfer of gifts, the obligation to receive cannot be reduced to the enactment of any one particular exchange. For the person to die, relationships must be undone. And once the person has died, paternal kin on Sabarl can no more avoid being

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the recipients of funeral gifts than the maternal body in Western discourse can avoid bearing a child.

Sabarl recipients are also consumers: that is, they turn these things (food, valuables) into their own bodies (to be eaten, distributed). Similarly Coppet suggests that 'Are'Are life is dominated by the fact that it is one's own kin who have the ultimate right to consume one, body and breath being thereby absorbed back into body and breath to be available for future generations. The capacity to con- sume is thus the capacity to substitute future relations for past ones. It depends on a double receptivity-to reabsorb parts of oneself and to be open to the (body) parts of others. The difference between death and life is the absence or presence of such relationships with "other" persons.

The Melanesian recipient of a gift who puts wealth into the recesses of a house, as a clan contains the external sources of its fertility within, is literally "consuming" the gift. But the vitalizing power of the gift lies in the fact that it derives from an exogenous source. One attaches and contains the parts of specific others, for the process of attachment and detachment is the motility that signals life. Actions are registered (fractally) in the actions of other persons, each person's acts being thereby replaced, reconstituted, in new and even foreign persons/forms. Thus is the living person personified.

By contrast, the latter-day Euro-American consumer draws from an impersonal domain, such as the market, goods that, in being turned into expressions of self-identity, become personalized. The exercise of choice is crucial; choice creates consumption as a sub- jective act. To evince subjectivity is to evince life. One may even appear to exercise "more" subjectivity in some situations/relationships than in others. This rather bizarre notion-that ideally one ought always to act as a subject but cannot always do so--is symbolized in the special domain of interpersonal relations.

The Euro-American person is presented, then, as a potentially free-standing and whole entity (an individual subject or agent) contained within an abstract impersonal matrix which may include other persons but also includes other things as its context (envi- ronment/society). And this is the image of the consumer. Consumer choice is thinkable, I would suggest, precisely insofar as "everything else" is held to lie beyond the fetus/embryo/person: anything consumed by that person comes from the outside, whether or not the source is other persons. For generative power lies in the individual person's own desire for experience. Desire and experience: the principal dimensions of the consumer's relationship with his/her environment. And the field is infinite; it consists of the sum of all the possibilities

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that may be sampled. Satisfied from without, the impetus is held to spring from within.52 While individual desires may be stimulated by the outside world--advertising, marketing, and so forth-that in turn is supposed to be oriented to the consumer's wants.

Whereas the Melanesian capacity to receive has to be nurtured in and elicited from a partner, sometimes to the point of coercion, the twentieth-century consumer is depicted as having infinite ap- petite. Above all, the consumer is a consumer of experience and thus of him/her self. Perhaps it is against the compulsion of appetite, the coercion of having to choose, the prescriptiveness of subjective self-reference, that the possibility of unbidden goods and unantic- ipated experiences presents itself as exotic. The "free gift."

My assertions have no doubt resisted certain commonsense for- mulations (one cannot see a gift) only to substitute others (we know what a consumer is). And to suggest that the issues which the concept of the gift trails through anthropological accounts--a relational view of the person, altruism, voluntarism--have to be understood in terms of its culture of origin is hardly original. But perhaps the particular substitution I mention here has interest. Given the part that so-called gift exchange plays in the reproduction of persons in Melanesia, it was not inapposite to consider the new language of gifting that accompanies the propagation of late twentieth-century reproductive technologies. There we discover the Euro-American person as a free-standing entity interacting with its environment, a figure missing from the twentieth-century Melanesian pantheon. The first question to ask, then, is what kind of person the Melanesian gift reproduces.

The double orientation of gifts in consumer culture presupposes two kinds of relationships: an individual person's interpersonal relations with others and an individual person's relations with society. Melanesian gifts on the other hand presuppose two kinds of persons, partners divided by their transaction: paternal from maternal kin, fetus from placenta, clansmen from the ground they cultivate, descendants from ancestors. Gifts may come from an outside source, but that source is hardly imagined as beyond persons in the way the talents and the riches of the world seemingly come from God in Davis's sixteenth-century France.53 For even where the other person is imagined as a deity or spirit or as the very land itself, the Melanesian act of giving that divides recipient from donor presupposes a partnering of finite identities. By contrast, the gift capable of extending a personalized self into a potentially infinite universe turns the person into a potential recipient of everything.

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Late twentieth-century and Euro-American, the embryo visualized as a homunculus is a consumer in the making. For the consumer actualizes his or her relationship with society/the environment in its own body process. This prompts a second question: whether gift- giving in a consumer culture contests the coercive nature of this relationship or is another example of it.

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

NOTES

1 See also Martin Johnson, "Did I Begin?" New Scientist, 9 December, 1989, pp. 39-42. The BAAS meetings are intended to present scientific investigations and discoveries to the public. The debate, Human Embryo Research: What are the Issues?, was organized by the Ciba Foundation. 2 The early conceptus is dependent on the developmental history of the egg in the mother, which provides "a mature physical and biochemical entity within which the whole complex process" of early development operates (Johnson, "Did I Begin?" p. 40), an interaction quite distinct from the egg's genetic contribution to the conceptus. 3 See Sarah Franklin, "Making Sense of Missed Conceptions: Anthropological Perspectives on Unexplained Fertility," a paper presented to the 152nd Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Swansea, 1990). 4 See Martin Linton and Nikki Knewstub, "MPs Give Overwhelming Backing to Medical Research on Embryos," The Guardian, 24 April 1990, p. 6. 5 To the lay person. To the embryologist, "Biology does not tell us that a line should or should not be drawn" (Johnson, "Did I Begin?" p. 41). It is the job of legislation to draw the lines. 6 Linton and Knewstub, p. 6. 7 See Gordon Dunstan, "The Moral Status of the Human Embryo," in Philosophical Ethics in Reproductive Medicine, ed. David R. Bromham, Maureen E. Dalton, and Jennifer C. Jackson (Manchester, 1990), p. 6. 8 See Rosaline Pollack Petchesky, "Foetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, ed. Michelle Stanworth (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 57-80. 9 The fetus was entire (a homunculus), but its cord was severed, and the womb was in half-section with the placenta visibly sectioned as well. The severed cord was painted in such a way as to invite horror at the tearing away of the fetus; but the womb itself was "severed" for no other purpose it would seem than to have it provide a convenient cup for the model of the fetus. A simulated horror. 10 See Michel Panoff, "Marcel Mauss's The Gift Revisited," Man, NS 5 (1970), 60- 70; and Jonathan Parry, "The Gift, the Indian Gift and the 'Indian Gift,' " Man, NS 21 (1986), 453-73. 11 The shell is both procreative and procreated. The point is stimulated by two unpublished papers in which Jeffrey Clark has analyzed the remarkable iconography of Wiru pearlshells. 12 David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London, 1988), p. 19; hereafter cited in text as GE. 13 See Rena Lederman, What Gifts Engender: Social Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea (Cambridge, 1986).

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14 See Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge, 1989). 15 See, e.g., Mario Biagioli, "Galileo's System of Patronage," History of Science, 28 (1990), 1-62. 16 In the 1990s, life-world-style worlds are already passe, if one is to believe upmarket consumer experts. I refer to the concept of the personalized market here. "If the modern world is based on the notion of an endless repetition of a few products, then its successor is based on the idea of short-runs and the targeting of many, different, products" (Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick, What is Post-Mod- ernism? 2nd ed. [London, 1987], pp. 48-49) though, as Jencks observes, individual tastes are not as variable as the potential production of variety. 17 See C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London, 1982). 18 See Lisette Josephides, The Production of Inequality: Gender and Exchange among the Kewa (London, 1985). 19 See Faye Ginsburg, "Procreation Stories: Reproduction, Nurturance and Pro- creation in Life Narratives of Abortion Activists," American Ethnologist, 14 (1987), 623-36. 20 I read this off from Johnson's presentation of the epigenetic factors. These were indicated in highly generalized terms by contrast with the specific representation of the fetus/person. No doubt his professional view is more sophisticated than the image I have derived from his talk (an organism as a free-standing entity within an environment to which it "adapts"), but for a critique of similar perceptions as they have informed the concept of culture in anthropology, see Tim Ingold, "Culture and the Perception of the Environment" (n.d.); for EIDOS Workshop on Cultural Understandings of the Environment (London, 1989). 21 Johnson, "Did I Begin?" p. 39. 22 See, e.g., Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo. Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, tr. Basia Miller Gulati (1947; rpt. Chicago, 1979). For non-Melanesian depictions of the world imagined as a plurality of bodies and of the body containing a plurality of worlds, see the chapter by Malamoud and Levi in Michel Feher, et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols. (New York, 1989). 23 See, e.g., Roy Wagner, Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Princeton, 1986). 24 See Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987), p. 14. 25 See James F. Weiner, The Heart of the Pearlshell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality (Los Angeles, 1988). 26 See Roy Wagner, "The Fractal Person," in Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, ed. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge, 1991). 27 See James Weiner, "Diseases of the Soul: Sickness, Agency and the Men's Cult among the Foi of New Guinea," in Dealing with Inequality, Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond, ed. Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge, 1987), p. 255-77. 28 See Gillian Gillison, "The Flute Myth and the Law of Equivalence: Origins of a Principle of Exchange," in Big Men and Great Men; and Jadran Mimica, Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of Iqwaye Counting System and Number (Oxford, 1988). 29 See Lynn M. Morgan, "When Does Life Begin? A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Personhood of Fetuses and Young Children," in Abortion Rights and Fetal 'Personhood,' ed. Edd Doerr and James W. Prescott (Long Beach, 1989). Morgan observes that in the United States it is generally thought that the neonate becomes a person with the cutting of the umbilical cord. 30 See Daniel de Coppet, "... Land Owns People," in Contexts and Levels: Anthro- pological Essays on Hierarchy, ed. R. H. Barnes, Daniel de Coppet, and R. J. Parkin (Oxford, 1985), pp. 78-90.

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31 My interpretation of the sequence of statements made to Coppet by the para- mount chief Eerehau. 32 Coppet, "Land Owns People," p. 87. 33 Giulia Sissa, "Subtle Bodies," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3, p. 133. See Verena Stolcke, "New Reproductive Technologies--Same Old Fa- therhood," Critique of Anthropology, 6 (1986), 5-31. The term semen may be used either as the vehicle that carries sperm or as an alternative for sperm itself. It is sperm donation that is strictly at issue here. 34 Rather in the way that gifts of money in 'Are'Are (see below) encompass, transcend, and differentiate the three components of the person (body, breath, and image) (Daniel de Coppet, "The Life-Giving Death," in Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, ed. S. C. Humphreys and Helen King [London, 1981], and "Land Owns People"), so Aristotlean semen is the vehicle for the three "principles," soul, form, and movement (Sissa, "Subtle Bodies," p. 136). 35 However, its alienability is a contested point. A recent study by Jeanette Edwards (personal communication) points to diverse views on men's part about the extent to which semen is or is not felt to be disposable in the way body organs potentially are. 36 The relative complexities of the techniques render the physical operations quite different. See Frances Price, "Establishing Guidelines: Regulation and the Clinical Management of Infertility," in Birthrights: Law and Ethics at the Beginnings of Life, ed. Robert Lee and Derek Morgan (London, 1989), pp. 46-47. While artificial semen donation is a two-hundred-year-old practice, scientific papers about pregnancies from donated oocytes did not appear in professional journals until 1983-84 (Frances Price, personal communication). 37 A phrase applied to interventionist medicine in general. In a world of punning acronyms, it is no accident that GIFT should occur, though for a process (gamete intra-fallopian transfer) that need involve no "donation" from outside sources. 38 However, see Ray Abrahams, "Plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose?" For festschrift for J. A. Barnes (n.d.). Ties are occasionally established between the relatives of organ donors and the recipients. Abrahams, drawing on analogies with gift-giving, explores what is both new and old in the identities set up by organ transplant; "racial" origin remains an uninvited guest at the debate. I am grateful for permission to cite the paper. 39 See Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption; and Daniel Miller, "Appro- priating the State on the Council Estate," Man NS 23 (1988), 353-72. 40 For nonconsumerist appropriations, I cite two examples. One is Pnina Werbner's remarkable account of "capital, gifts and offerings among British Pakistanis" (The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis [Oxford, 1990]); the other Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang's critique of "second-economy" arguments in relation to gifts and the state redistributive economy in contemporary China ("The Gift Economy and State Power in China," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 [1989], 25-54). 41 See Gregory, Gifts and Commodities. 42 See Debbora Battaglia, On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society (Chicago, 1990). 43 Battaglia, p. 191, emphasis omitted. 44 See Debbora Battaglia, " 'We Feed Our Father': Paternal Nurture among the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea," American Ethnologist, 12 (1985), 427-41. 45 Parry arguing on this point also reinstates Mauss's purpose in The Gift as demonstrating just how we ever came to contrast interested and disinterested gifts. "So while Mauss is generally represented as telling us how in fact the gift is never

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free, what I think he is really telling us is how we have acquired a theory that it should be" (Parry, The Gift, 458, emphasis omitted). I merely point here to the further coercions of choice in the consumer world of compulsory subjectivity. 46 Quoted in Stanworth, Reproductive Technologies, p. 15. 47 Coppet, "The Life-Giving Death," p. 201. 48 See Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring, ed. Frederick Damon and Roy Wagner (DeKalb, Ill., 1989). 49 See Coppet, "The Life-Giving Death," p. 188. 50 See Coppet, "The Life-Giving Death," p. 202, n. 17. 51 Battaglia, On the Bones of the Serpent, p. 190. 52 I am compressing several arguments and contested positions here, and do not specify where the view is held. It alludes but does not do justice to Miller's reading of consumption as symbolic labor (the consumer recontextualizes the commodity and objectifies it afresh as a source of inalienable value). See Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption. 53 See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Gifts, Markets and Communities in Sixteenth-Century France," a paper presented to the conference The Gift and its Transformations, National Humanities Center (1990). For a Melanesian Christian counterpart, see C. A. Gregory, "Gifts to Men and Gifts to God: Gift Exchange and Capital Accumulation in Contemporary Papua," Man, NS 15, 626-52.

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