Cutting the Network Author(s): Marilyn Strathern Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 2, No.

3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 517535 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034901 Accessed: 06/11/2009 14:20
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CUTTING THE NETWORK

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of Cambridge University

of old debatesaboutwhat is new andwhat is New technologieshavestimulatedthe rehearsal old in descriptionsof social life. This articleconsiderssome of the currentuses to which the and 'networks' arebeing put. It could be seen as followingLatour's call for conceptsof 'hybrids' thatgatherstogethermodernand nonmodernforms of knowledge. a symmetrical anthropology to extend endlessly,and In the process,the articlereflectson the power of analytical narratives limitless. on the interesting ownershipholdsin a worldthatsometimesappears placethatproperty

The owner of the Shell petrol distributionlicence for WestCameroonlives for part of the year in London, has childrentakingcourses in Britain,Franceand the United States, and keeps houses in both capitaland country (Rowlands 1995). The extent of his networkis shown in a sumptuouslifestyle.The busiprinciples;unmarried youths ness on which it is basedis run along hierarchical are sent to work for him in the hopes that he will set them up on their own. Rowlandsfinds an apt descriptionin an image the Bamilekepeople offered to A notable[chef de famille]is a livingpiggybankfor the whole descent Warnier: group: in him is containedthe plenitudeof blood receivedsince the creation, by Rowlands1995: 33, afterWarnier through a chain of ancestors'(translated life essence, but only when 1993: 126). Blood is a metonym for transmissible channelledthrough those who take the title of 'father',ensuring that the contents of the bank are not dissipated.An heir undergoesan 'installationritual his body into the piggybankof the descent group, containing [that] transforms its blood and semen, which togetherwith camwoodand oil, also his possession, forms the corporateestateof the lineage'(Rowlands1995: 33). He must guard that container.The businessmanemphasizesthe importanceof containmentto his commercialoperations,for this allows him to refuse the claims of close kin while retainingtheir support,since it is from him that future prosperitywill flow. Consider Rowlands'sdeliberatephrasing:it is the man's body which is transformed into the piggy bank. When Hageners,from the Highlandsof PapuaNew Guinea, remarkedthat women were like tradestores 1972:99, 120), the analogywas with (M. Strathern the flow of money throughthe store:as the repositoryof nurturefrom her kin which she contains,a bride is also a 'store'or 'bank'of the wealth due her kin in return.ElsewhereMelanesianstranslate terms for bridewealthinto the English idioms of buying and selling (c? Thomas 1991: 194-6). Indeed monetary metaphorswould seem to flow like money itself, and like money act as condensed symbols of power. In turn, these persons imagined as repositories.
J. Roy.anthrop. Inst.(N.S.) 2, 517-535

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Cameroonianbusinessmanand Highlands bride alike, would seem both to carrythe flow andtostopit.1That is, they hold it within themselves. The monetaryidioms throughwhich Melanesiansspeakof transactions such as bridewealthare often takenas a sign of commodity relations,whether of an indigenouskind (Gell 1992) or as the effect of exposureto wage labourand the world economy (Carrier1995: 95). It is not buying and selling as such, of course, that are at the heartof anthropological understandings of commoditization, but the quality of relationships.The Hagen husbandwho speaksof his wife as a purchase,like somethingfrom a tradestore, awardshimself new freedoms. But in some formulations,the bride is also the tradestoreitself If so, then she is a store of wealth for otherswho benefitfrom their relationsthrough her, and it seems to be the personof the bride who, like the Cameroonian notable, containsthe possibilityof convertingthe fertile essence or nurtureof others into wealth. Twentieth-century Euro-Americans,2 by contrast, do not like to imaginethemselvesas commoditizingpeople and do not, at least in the talkof bodies as piggybanks.Personsmay have property, Englishvernacular, be propertied,but are not propertythemselves.On the contrary, recognizingthe agency of the owner,3and thus keeping 'persons'separatefrom what may be owned as 'property', was a hard-won projectof their modernism. It was until recently,that is. Some of the transactionsin persoristhat characterizePapua New Guinea societies offer interestingtheoreticalresourcesfor thinkingabout recent EuroAmerican experiments with relationships. One issue is the incursion of commodities, especiallymoney, into kin relations,as in anxietiesvoiced over commercializing surrogacy agreements (see, for instance, Wolfram 1989; Ragone 1994: 124). The reverseis also pertinent,although not pursued here. Euro-Americandebates over transactionsin human tissue (see, for instance, Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995) offer interestingtheoreticalresourcesfor with commodities.In the 1960s thinkingabout recentMelanesianexperiments and 1970s New Guinea Highlanderswere forevercommenting on money By all accounts'money' (shell valuables)had been presentfor a long time, but at that period 'money' (pounds and dollars) had also come on them as a new thing, an objectof overt speculationaboutsocialchange,an omen of a new era. Outsiders also worried about the incursion of kinship into commodity relations, how those tradestoreswould actually be run, since notions about with the developmentof commerce. obligationsto kin supposedlyinterfered Parallelscannot be taken too far. The Cameroonianpiggy bank and the find bridesuggestmixes of personand propertythatEuro-Americans tradestore have traditionally unacceptable. Indeed, anthropologists dissipatedsuch strong images by talkingof bundles of rights, or by referringto 'bridewealth' rather and analysingthe ownershipof persons in terms of governthan 'brideprice', ance. Thus was the authoritysystem of the Maasai of Kenya translatedby Llewelyn-Davies (1981). However, she makes it perfectly clear that Maasai also involvedrightsof alienation, exercised overhumanandnonhuman ownership to refer to propertyin resources alike, and that it was therefore appropriate women have a women. Jolly (1994) reportsthat on South Pentecost,Vanuatu, 'price'(for which there is an indigenousterm)just as goods in tradestores do; men nowadays prefer to pay this in cash rather than with the traditional

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among themselves (such as the purchase valuablesthey reservefor transactions of rank). Now the benefitsand evils of money (Bloch & Parry1989) havebeen supplemented by a further subject for Euro-Americananxiety and speculation: technology.By all accounts'technology'(the machineage) has been presentfor a long time, but in the 1980s and 1990s 'technology'(hitech and micro) seems to strike people anew. It is ubiquitous,threatening,enabling,empowering,an omen of a new era.And if Hagen anxietieswere about how to control thejlowof are aboutwhere to anNieties money (AJ. Strathern1979), these Euro-American put limitson technologicalinventionsthat promise to run awaywith all the old 1985). These include the division between hudivisions (Warnock categorical upheld (rendereddurable)by man and nonhuman.That divisionwas ordinarily and bea host of others, including distinctionsbetween person and property, tween kinship and commerce.4Across diverse areas of life,5 they seemingly threatento fold in on one another,and notions about humanityand visions of technologicaldevelopmentthreatennewly to interferewith each other. This mutual interferenceis more interestingthan it might seem; I shall suggest that it bears comparisonwith gathering,stopping or containingflows of if increasing of the role of technolMore generally, awareness wealth or fertility. ogy in human affairsnewly links human and nonhuman phenomena, does it invite us to re-think the kinds of flows of persons and things anthropologists have describedelsewhere?

Mixed narratives have made explicit the artificialor ethnoAt the same time as anthropologists divisions,they find themse!vesliving centric natureof many of their analytical that displaya mixed nain a culturalworld increasingly tolerantof narratives ture. I refer to the combinationof human and nonhuman phenomenathat, in the 1980s and early 1990s, producedthe imageryof cyborgsand hybrids.This Euro-American discoveryof imageryhas been fed by the late twentieth-century science as a source of culturaldiscourse (Franklin1995). Neither culture nor science is outside the other. In the case of the hybrid,combinationshave been pressedinto interpretative service to the point of surfeit. Narayan(1993: 29) was moved to identify an writings,citing nine works appear'enactmentof hybridity'in anthropological ing between 1987-92. What is true inside anthropologyis also true outside. whether of an indigeas hybridamalgams, Culturesare everywhereinterpreted nous kind or as the effect of exposureto one another:'almostevery discussion on cultural identity is now an evocation of the hybrid state' (Papastergiadis biographyseems anotherexample. 1995: 9). The Cameroonianbusinessman's drawsattentionto a very Warnier, However,Rowland'ssourceon the Bamilek6, kind of hybridobject, using the term hybridin the sense given it by particular Latour(1993) and to which I shall return.The object was the heterogeneous a company'sbusiness netknowledge createdby a researchteam investigating 1995: 107). The research teamcompriseda networkof different works (Warnier competences. Their knowledge, a mix of technique cum social relationship,

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could be used to throw light on actualbusiness operations,althoughWarnier doubted its legitimacyin the eyes of experts.They were likely to be proprietorialover certaincomponentsof this knowledgeto whose pure form they could lay claim as 'puretechnicalities'. comment takes the tension between pure and hybrid forms to be Warnier's partof the constructionof claimsbetween differentexperts.The interpretation of cultures has led to similar competition; in the hands of the hybridizers, however, the very concept of the hybrid signals a critique of separations,of divisions,encompassingthatbetween the pure and the hybriditself categorical 'Hybridity'is invokedas a force in the world. This appliesto the world created as such, in which the targetis interpretation by certainforms of criticalnarrative and the concept of the hybrida politicalmove to make some kinds of representations impossible (Bhabha 1994). Now, imagining the impossibility of is often renderedconcretethroughthe excoriationof boundaries representation decentralized divides)or the celebrationof margins(deterritorialized, (artificial have in turn been criticizedas re-enactingthe spaces).Such conceptualizations old inversionsof an us/themdividewhen one should be attendingthe processes 1995: 15; Purdom 1995). The huge critical (Papastergiadis of mutualtranslation onslaught against how to think the way different 'identities'impact on one anotherhas yielded a multitudeof hybridizingconcepts such as amalgamation, co-optationand conjuncture. Yetdespitethe surfeitof terms,there are constantappealsto what this or that appealsto power relations.It is as though the writer leaves out; most regularly, politics that lies within the image of hybriditydoes not do sufficientanalytical work - politics is re-createdas though it were also 'outside' the analysisof Hence, too, the frequentappealsto categoriessuch as raceand representations. genderwhich are presented,uninflected,prior to the work that the concept of the hybridis supposedto do in underminingthem ('powermust be thought in the hybridityof race and sexuality'[Bhabha1994: 251]). One reason may be raises inappropriate that the languageof boundariesand culturaltranslation6 expectationsof social analysis.Such expectationsare both superfluousand inas they might be apprehended sufficient:the complexityof people'sinteractions sociologicallydoes not find a simple substitute in the subtlety with which boundariesmay be re-thought.For a start,the concept of boundary categorical is one of the least subtle in the social science repertoire. It is therefore interestingto consider a recent sociological approachwhich hybridizesits tools of social analysis,and devises a new term: network.This is of coursean old term newly inflected.'Networks'(conventionalnetworkanalysis) have long been present, but now we have 'networks'(in actor-network theory) of a new kind. I deployedthe latterin referringto the mix of technical and social competencesin Wamier'sresearchteam,while juxtaposingthe older usage in regardto the company's range of contacts. But what do the new networksconvey about hybrids? fields in orderto show how effects theoristsset up narrational Actor-network are produced out of alliancesbetween human and nonhuman entities. The for it gives off diverse body,as a 'network'of materials,is one such narrative and pathology(Law1994:183).7Thus Pasteur's skill,charisma signals,revealing discoveryof the microbe for anthraxdependedon a whole series of statistical,

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rhetoricaland operationalfactorsthat had to be held togetherin order to sustain, within a continuous networkof effects, the cruciallydemonstrativelinks field experimentand the life and death of between bacillus,disease,laboratory, individualanimals(Latour1988:84-92). The concept of networksummons the traceryof heterogeneouselements that constitute such an object or event, or string of circumstances,held together by social interactions:it is, in short, a hybrid imagined in a socially extended state. The concept of network gives purchaseon those interactions.Latour(1993: 10-11) is explicit: the analytical that 'link in one continuous chain'reprenetworkingactivityof interpretations sentations, politics and the world of the scientific discovery creates mixed are as much networks as any other The theorist's interpretations narratives. combinationof elements. For Latour,the rhetoricalpower of the hybrid rests on its critique of pure form, of which the archetypeis the critique of the separationof technology from society, culture from nature, and human from nonhuman. And this is depends on the work of indeed critique:in his terms, the work of 'translation' form appealsto a same the vice versa. the and At hybridized time, purification, have alwrays mixed their realitythatpure formswould conceal.Euro-Americans categories.It is (modernist) academic disciplines that have tried to pretend anthropologyas condemned to territoriesand otherwise,and Latourcastigates areperfectlycapaunableto follow networks(1993: 116). Now, anthropologists that between the Achuar and is, of tracking ble of following such networks, of knowledge,between science Arapesh(his examples)and, in the organization have and technology.8Indeed, in the spirit of his account (Euro-Americans have alwaysdone so in their 'translations' alwayshad hybrids),anthropologists of 'other cultures'.As students of comparative inquiry,however,they will not necessarilyend up with a critiqueof the same pure forms that bother EuroAmericans,such as technology and society. That is, their accounts will not necessarilylook like anything that could be applied to the social analysis of are often diverted science and technology.In fact,we know thatanthropologists by kinship,and may attendinsteadto matterssuch as the flow of substanceor rules. of marriage the application some of these issues, however,I do not make appealsto In anthropologizing other culturalrealitiessimply becauseI wish to dismiss the power of the Euroto extend them Americanconceptsof hybridand network.The point is, rather, That includesseeing how they are put to work in their with social imagination. indigenous context, as well as how they might work in an exogenous one.9 It as manipulable also includes attentionto the way they become operationalized or usable artefactsin people's pursuit of interests and their construction of In the home culture,partof theirpower will lie in their analogizrelationships. ing effect, in their resonancewith other concepts and other people's usages; must make their own interpretative outside the home culture, anthropologists of the hybrid, decisions as to their utility.I proposeto utilize one characteristic its apparent ubiquity,and to considerhow this is supplementedby the concept of network.

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havelengths? Can networks of hybridsas an outomeof purificatory Latourrefersto the modem proliferation divisions are practice.The more hybridsare suppressed- the more categorical made - the more they secretlybreed. Their present visibility is just that: the outcome of present awarenessof this process.Yet the capacityof hybrids to proliferateis also containedwithin them. For the very concept of the hybrid of (about, containing)mixture, including the lends itself to endless narratives constant splicing of culturaldata in what a geneticist might call recombinant culturology.In fact, the concept can conjoin anything, a ubiquity consonant with the perceivedubiquityof culture itself I see the apprehensionof surfeit, must hold objects of pause. Interpretation then, as a moment of interpretative may be imagined That stable holding to be of use. enough reflectionstablelong as stopping a flow or cutting into an expanse,and perhapssome of the EuroAmericans'voiced concem over limits re-runs Derrida'squestion of how to not to narratives, How arewe to bring to rest expandable 'stop'interpretation. endless productionof culturalmeanings speakof the culturalanthropologist's (Munro in press)?'Cutting'is used as a metaphorby Derridahimself (1992, as in press.) for the way one phenomenon stops the flow of cited by Fitzpatrick others.Thus the force of 'law'cuts into a limitlessexpanseof 'justice',reducing it and renderingit expressible,creatingin the legaljudgment a manipulable so as to producesocial effects. objectof use;justice is operationalized theoristsa socially expanded If I see in the network of some actor-network hybrid, it is because they have captureda concept with similar propertiesof that is, a concept which works indigenouslyas a metaphor auto-limitlessness; for the endless extension and intermeshingof phenomena. A networkis an apt image for describingthe way one can link or enumerate Points entities without makingassumptionsabout level or hierarchy. disparate in a narrativecan be of any materialor form, and network seems a neutral vision bringstogether own symmetrical Latour's phrasefor interconnectedness. social in of life, but also insights not only human and nonhuman the ordering is And that the purpose of his societies. and premodem from both modern beenmodern (1993). Modems divide socinegative,Wehavenever democratizing ety from technology,culturefrom nature,human from nonhuman,except that modernsare like anyone else in the hybridsthey they do not - Euro-American anthropology make,even though they are rarelyas explicit.Before he castigates for not going far enough, he praises the discipline both for creatinghybrid in their ethnographies, politics and accounts (miNingnaturaland supernatural economics, demons and ecology)andfor uncoveringthe thinkingof those who make such hybridsexplicit (in dwelling on them, he says, such people in fact keep them in check). The divides of modern people's thinking do not correspond to the methods they actuallydeploy, and this is what people such as PapuaNew Guineanscan tell them. There are similarities,he implies, in the way everyoneputs hybridstogether:'Is Boyle's air pump any less strangethan the Arapeshspirithouses?'(1993: 115). technologicaldevelopmentoffers a vision of the mixed For Euro-Americans, modifiedby human ingenuforms implied by technique(nonhumanmaterials ity, or human dispositionmoulded by tools). Network imageryoffers a vision of a social analysisthatwill treatsocial and technologicalitems alike;any entity

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or materialcan qualifyfor attention.Thus insteadof askingquestionsabout the relationshipof 'science' and 'society' in Pasteur'sdevelopmentof the anthrax vaccine, Latour(1988: 91) suggestswe follow what Pasteurdid and what his inventiondependedon. However,the power of such analytical networksis also theirproblem:10 theoretically, they arewithout limit. If diverse elements makeup a description,they seem as extensibleor involuted as the analysisis extensible or involuted. Analysisappearsable to take into account, and thus create, any numberof new forms.And one can alwaysdiscovernetworkswithin networks; this is the fractallogic that rendersany length a multiple of other lengths, or a link in a chain a chain of furtherlinks. Yet analysis,like interpretation, must have a point; it must be enactedas a stoppingplace. Now if networkshad lengthstheywould stop themselves.One kind of length is imagined by Latour:networks in action are longer the more powerful the 'allies' or technological mediators that can be drawn in. (Technology has a lengtheningeffect and, in his view,premodernstend to have limited networks.) We may also say that a network is as long as its different elements can be enumerated.This presupposesa summation;that is, enumerationcoming to rest in an identifiableobject (the sum). In coming to rest, the networkwould be 'cut' at a point, 'stopped'from furtherextension.How might that be done? It is worth consulting some of the actorswho put such images to use in their dealingswith one another. Cuttingnetworks Actor-network theorists,and their alliesand critics,are interestedin the diverse props,to use Law's(1994) phrasing,thatsustainpeople'sactionsand in the way the props are held in place long enough to do so. Networks renderedcontingent on people'sinteractions turn out to have a fragiletemporality. They do not last for ever;on the contrary, the question becomes how they are sustainedand made durable.They may seem to dependon continuitiesof identity(thatis, on homogeneity).But heterogeneousnetworksalso have their limits. I shall argue that if we take certainkinds of networksas sociallyexpandedhybridsthen we works as a summacan takehybridsas condensednetworks.That condensation tion or stop. The Euro-American hybrid,as an image of dissolvedboundaries, indeed displacesthe image of boundarywhen it takesboundary'splace. I give two very brief illustrations,the first an instance in which the actors involved might well have recognizedthemselves as a network in the conventional social sense, and the second a case in which the social scientist might think of the chain of elements as a 'network' in Latour'ssense and of the in the first,andthe analytical artefact as a hybrid. The perceivable network resultant hybrid in the second, both bring potentialextensions to a halt. In both cases of claimsto ownership. these imagesof networkor hybridservethe furtherance In 1987 a Californiancorporationdiscovered the hepatitis C virus.11The virus was a discoveryin the sense of an unearthingof fresh knowledge about the world. But the means of detectingthe virus led to the invention of a blood test for which the corporation appliedfor, andwas granted,a patent.Patentsare claims to inventions;that is, to applications of someone's inventivenesswhich others technically could, but are forbidden to, utilize without acknowledgement. This test met all the modern criteriafor a patent. It was novel,

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producedby human interventionand, in the interestsof simultaneouslyproAs a tecting and promoting competition, capableof industrialapplication.12 be payingmore than result, the BritishNational Health Servicewill reportedly - some 3 million a year.Apparently, ?2 for every hepatitisC test it administers What the inventorsaddedwas the the technologyfor the blood test is standard. of the DNA an integralpart genetic sequenceof the virus, maldngidentification of the test. for twelveyearsbeforethe viruswas HepatitisC hadbeen underinvestigation isolated.The patent counsel for the company that developed the test was reported as saying: 'We don't claim we did all the research,but we did the Dec 1 1994).Any one inventhat solvedthe problem'(TheIndependent, research which defines a scientific of knowledge the field by is possible tion only made truncatesthem. So it are long; patenting here community.The social networks a network rights of of or fragment segment mattersvery much over which to a scientific article In names forty another case, can be exercised. ownership not join in. The long did rest the application; a patent to six names became network of scientists that was formerly such an aid to knowledge becomes hastilycut. Ownership therebycurtailsrelationsbetween persons;owners exclude those who do not belong. Scientistsworking with referenceto one anotherwould no doubt recognize themselves as a social network, along the lines of conventionalsocial analysis ('networkanalysis').In this sense, the interestslinking the severalinvestigators at the outset, any one of them was a potential of the virus were comparable: claimant.The network as string of obligations,a chain of colleagues,a history of co-operation,would be sustainedby continuities of identity.However diverse their roles, participantsreplicated one another in the fact of their The patentintroducedthe question over what areathe network participation.13 in the final spurt. who participated spread; The extent of a homogeneous network, such as this one, appearsto be bounded by the definition of who belongs to it. However, the divide, created for the purposesof the patent,between those who did and those who did not belong, was establishednot by some cessationof the flow of continuitybut by a quite extraneousfactor:the commercialpotentialof the work that turned a invention.We could say that the prospectof ownerdiscoveryinto a patentable The claim to have done the researchthat solved 'the the network. into cut ship of hybridization: co-operativeor competitive, act a deliberate justified problem' now be evaluated work could by criteriafrom a different the scientists'prior that of commerce. world altogether: Now, while we might expect our (not quite hypothetical)scientiststo talk of networks,we would be surprisedif they talkedof hybrids.However, an actorwas doubly network theorist might well observe that the act of hybridization of Latourian a form classic for also involved it accomplishedin this instance, has been culture that hybrid:the invention.An invention implies by definition character the addedto nature.The ingenuityof the inventoris held to change of of an entity;intellectualactivityconferspropertyin it, as does the application skill or labourwhich gives people (the possibilityof) propertyin products.14 Hence a person from whom the originaltissue comes finds it difficultto claim Propertyrights producedin the laboratory. ownershipof cell lines subsequently

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cannot be claimedover an unalterednature;they applyonly to an alteredone. modified by The inventor'sclaim is that human tissue has been demonstrably An American process. in technological embodied including ingenuity ingenuity, commentaryon immortalcell lines, that is, cells infinitely reproduciblein the is explicit. 'Manyhuman cells have alreadybeen grantedpatentsin laboratory, the US on the basis that they would not exist but for the interventionof the them' (NewScinist,January 12, 1991). who extracted andmanipulated "inventor", the man who tried to claim propertyrights In the famous Moore litigation,15 in cells developedfrom tissue removedfrom his body during an operationlost the case. It was the claim to the heterogeneoushybrid,the fact that these cells had been immortalizedthrough human ingenuity, that was upheld. In fact Moore was castigatedby one judge (see Rabinow 1992) for his commercial for those developmotives, unseemly in relationto one's body but appropriate ing technologywith commercialapplicationin mind. Between Moore and his opponents,the claims could be constructedas of differentorders;one claimed a body partas partof his person, the other an intellectualproductas a result of certainactivities.The hybridobject,then, the modifiedcell, gathereda network into itself; that is, it condensed into a single item diverseelements from technology, science and society,enumeratedtogetheras an invention and available In fact there is a good case for seeing propertyas a for ownershipas property. in itself, althoughI do not develop the point here. hybridizingartefact Ownership cuts both kinds of network, homogeneous and heterogeneous. First,it can truncatea chain of severalclaimants,otherwiseidentifiablethrough their social relationshipswith one another,dividing those who belong from those who do not. Belonging is thus given a boundary.Second, it can bring elements summatedin an artefact(such as the togethera networkof disparate invention) that holds or contains them all. If it is the perceived addition of human enterprisethatbestowspropertyrights,the humanelement addedto the nonhuman one, then the proof of that hybriditycurtailsother interests.As at once the thing that has become the object of a right, and the right of a person form. in it, propertyis, so to speak,a networkin manipulable holds an interestbeyond The structureof these entailmentsand curtailments the specificapplications noted here. It is thus necessaryto spell out the fact that to imaginethat social there is a culturalpredisposition among Euro-Americans concerncommonalitiesof identitybefore they concerndifference, relationships in combiningthe humanwith the nonhuman. is inevitable and thatheterogeneity I turn now to networksthat are homogeneous in so far as they presupposea betweenhumanandnonhumanforms,andheterogeneous continuityof identities fromone another by theirsocialrelationships. in so fir as personsaredistinguished
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Stoppingpflow

of the Solomon Islandsshows the power of makCoppet'saccountof 'Are'are into three 'Are'are divide living creatures ing objectswhich can be manipulated. kinds. Cultivated plants have body, domesticatedpigs have both body and breath,while human beings also hold a name or 'image'.At death, the once or decomposedinto these differentelements:the living person is disaggregated

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body,a productof nurturereceivedfrom others, is eaten as taro and vegetable food; breath is taken away in the breathof slaughteredpigs, while the image becomes an ancestor(Coppet 1994:42, 53, referring,it would seem, primarily image is revealedas an enduringentity,as the person is to men). This ancestral strippedof body,breathand relationswith all other persons bar ancestorsand debts are settled (Coppett 1994: 53), as elsewhere descendants.Interpersonal 1992). the memory of the deceasedis 'finished'(Battaglia The living human being thus appearsto be a hybrid.But we would be mistaken to see this in the 'addition'of breathto body or in the 'modification'of breathingbody by ancestralimage. Each of the three components has its own human being is a person, so too we may and if the amalgamated manifestation, as a person (a person is made up of persons), in think of each component of money. I use the term 'person' since the flows continuities facilitatedby of relations;it can take the an aggregation as is also conceived human being for consumptionby those otherswho compose it. In form of an objectavailable these acts of consumption, the person is, so to speak, hybridized,dispersed among a networkof others. Nonhuman substitutesexist, then, for each of the forms (body,breath and image) that the human person takes. Through body and breath persons are with taro and pigs, both of which are living beings like theminterchangeable in the case of their distinctive image, however, they become selves; with non-living things.Ancestralimage appearsin the form of interchangeable money; that is, stringsof shell beadsof varyinglengths.The image is composed of strandspresentedat earlierfuneralfeastsand destinedfor future ones. Shell and dispersingas money travelsfrom one funeralplatformto another,gathering and one might imaginea shadowythrongof ancestorsdoing; the fragmentation recombinationof different strands in the dealings of everyday life, Coppet as an entiretyat death.Everytransacnotes, anticipatethe money's appearance tion assiststhe circulationof fragmentsor segmentsof an image.This image is the deceased made present as an ancestor;for shell money is, in effect, an (1994:42), one of a person'spersons,so to speak,in nonhuman 'ancestor-image' form. portions, measured What is this money? Money is divisible into standarized by the fathom containingtwenty-fourunits of fifty shells. It thus 'serves as a measuringrod, situatingon a single scale events as differentas the purchaseof or a murder,the amount of a funeralprestaten tarosor of a canoe, a marriage or for an ensemble of musicians'(Coppet for a ritual service tion, the payment terms gives it an official seal. It also in an monetary 1994: 40). Marking event with diverse others. of a builds up the person as composite past transactions flows can stop flow. stimulator of This to money. There is a furtherdimension because other entities, events and has Shell money circulatory power precisely circulatein and into encounters relationships it: converted past productscan be is at death there a finalizing in its condensedform 'body' (my metaphor).Now, betwo other which the being's components living sequence of exchangesin in another into is pigs come money; in one sequence taro converted money, encompassesboth, and the sequences (Copet 1994: 53-4). The ancestor-image stop at that point. Money thus becomes the repositoryor containerof prior of the final cessationof flow at death that It is as an anticipation interchanges.

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money at other points in life can stop other flows, most significantlyin homicide payments(Coppet 1994: 10-11). Where there has been a series of deaths, money alone stems the flow of revenge. are explicit about this finalizingsequence:they refer to it as a 'stop' 'Are'are imaginedas a fall, as at sunset,or as the sinkingof a stone. Such stops or 'break', can only be effected by means of shell money. In other types of exchange,by element;these include tied exchanges contrast,money is merelya contributory ('linkedsuccession')which connect events leadinginexorablyfrom one to another so that the giver's repaymentof a debt constitutes a new debt for the recipient.Any one prestationis also composed of 'returns',the smallest sequence in a cycle of exchanges;exchanges are thus made up of exchanges. Together,these activities bring about networks of different lengths: 'Are'are measurethe length of debt in an enlargingseriesof acts,from 'return'to 'linked succession' to 'stop', the last gatheringup all preceding flows into one moment.16 Like strands of shell money itself, these flows are simultaneously divisibleand indivisible.In short, networksare composed of both human and nonhumanentities;they differ in how they are absorbedor consumed. The mortuary ceremony that makes the deceased's networks visible also blocks their futureeffect. Old networksare cut by being gatheredup at a point (in the deceased),whose sociallyhybrid form is dispersedand thereby brings new networks into play. The relationshipsthat once sustained the deceased become recombinedin the personsof others.
Bringingfw back

as hybrid,then its heteroIf the 'Are'are personemergesfrom such transactions geneity comes from the way differences are sustained between the social relationsthat sustain it; the hybrid is an amalgamof social relations.In this bridewealthand Melanesiancase, it is made visible as a networkvia funerary, that lay out the person in terms of the claims similarprestations,transactions condense claimsinto diverseothers have.And vice versa:the same transactions objectsof consumption(things).Whatare, in a mannerof sociallymanipulable speaking,homogeneous, implyingcontinuitiesof identity,are the forms - human and nonhuman- that these objectsof consumptiontake (the body is the on Tanga,Foster (1995: 166 sqq.) taro).With referenceto similartransactions reminds us that it is an illusion to imagine that differencesof value lie in the intrinsicnatureof things:values are the outcome of relationalpractices.Thus values (cf Piot 1991). 'identical'productsmay have 'different' Coppet analysesexchangesin terms of a hierarchyof encompassment:from the tiniest interchangethat carries an expectationof a return, to the ritual compulsion by which people are linked through maldng paymentsrequiring further payments,to the capacityto gathersuch exchangesup in a mortuary prestationthat caps them all. Here they are condensedinto money.Money can, What is true of a man's death is also in turn, be spreadout and disaggregated. true of a woman's marriage.Bride-giversbestow on the husband's kin the potential for growth in their sister whom they have grown, and they receive back,and thus consume, evidenceof growth alreadyaccomplishedin the form of valuables.Here are objects with different values: reproductivewealth (a future wife) in return for a non-reproductivesister. Now a non-returnable

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portion of money ('money to stop the woman') is said to stop the woman's image;her kinsmen'sidentitywill no longer flow throughher. In addition,her kin receive furthermoney which they returnto the husband'sside in separate components, lots as money,taroand pigs. Her kin therebyre-create,as separate money. of gift from the the body,breathand image of the woman single 'Are'areancestor-moneyis thus a condensed objectificationof the person of relationswith others. into variousmanifestations who can be disaggregated the person - human up make that elements of network The (homogeneous) of social relationships.In network also a (heterogeneous) nonhuman is and and bodying flow blocking and channel, as container turn, the person acts both it forth. model them, have long providedanaloKinship systems, as anthropologists gies to this kind of process. Consider those curtailmentsof claims that come or cross-cousin marriage.If we imagine these with exogamy,sister-exchange protocolsas creatingnetworksof varyinglengths, then they have differentcapacities for sustaining flow or stopping it. Many kinship systems certainly presupposemeasurementsfor tracingthe extent of substance.Indeed we may take this as diagnosticof 'lineal'modes of kinship reckoning.Extensivenessof claims may be reckonedin terms of continuity of identity,as when a descent group whose members share common substance truncates claims over its members at the exogamic boundary;making new relationsthrough marriage stops the flow. Or old relationsmay have to be cancelledbefore new ones are rule that invites persons to think of produced.Or, again,the kind of marriage themselvesas marryingcousins or exchangingsiblingsinvites them to think of substanceas turningbackon itself Here networksare stoppedin the personsof who become the turningpoint for directingthe flow of fertilityback.17 relatives On South Pentecost, shortly after the birth of a child, Sa-speakersmake a payment to the mother's kin for the loss of blood (jolly 1994: 146). This is among those called lo sal, 'inside the road, or path' (1994: 109). Perhapsthis paymentcan be read as given both for the blood spilt at intercourse particular birth and (the reasonSa people give) and for the blood dammedup, no longer fertility;father'ssemen blocks mother's flow of blood (jolly flowing with their 1994: 143). The child embodies maternalblood but cannot pass it on; instead, lifelong payments are due to the maternalkin. When the mother's brother receives a boar in recognitionof the blood which, while contributingto the child, has no forwardeffect, he is forbiddenfrom tying it up. Insteadthat role is performedby the mother'smother'sbrother,who in turn is forbiddenfrom eating it. The latter has alreadyeaten pigs given him earlierby the mother's brother (jolly 1994: 111-12); he is thus made presentbut cannot benefit from the flow of fertilitybeyond one generation.A sister's substance,then, is not but is stopped in her children.The grandchilpassedon to her grandchildren subsequentlyremakethe marriage partners, dren of cross-sexsiblings,preferred a man marriesinto the place from which his father's 'road'(Sa for 'marriage'): mother came. While these Melanesianchains - of persons, and of the wealth that flows along with them - are followed outwardsto a certainextent, some may turn aroundat key points and return.This may be accomplishedover time: previous generationsare reborn, persons making up other persons. In terms of social

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socialitiescome to be effected by, among other means, the process, alternating sustaineddifferencebetween flow thatspreadsand growth thatgathersor stops to disperseorreturn,it must substanceeither To energizeprocreative the flow.18. out. 'Are'arebridewealth in is spread way its network the different be made taro andpig effect the transfer while identity, money fixes the woman'sancestral of her body and breathbetween kin groups. Each side retains,so to speak,its version of her. relationships rules,such procreative by marriage Whetheror not accompanied constructnetworksof retransactions tend to shareone generalcharacteristic: They are measuredby people's strictedlength. Networks become measurable. to one anotherthroughthe flow of objects,humanandnonhuman; indebtedness those who give or receivewealth, or the people they standfor, become links in a specifiablechain. Claims can be conceptualizedas simultaneouslyresulting from ties of bodily substance and from previous transactions.So brides or ancestorsact as objects that may flow either with or againstthe flow of other objects (Wagner1977). Links appearin the chain when it becomes possible to exchange'different'objectsfor social consumption.By the same token, chains come to rest in these objects,human or nonhuman,at the point when actions can be takenwith them. Bridewealthlays out who shall receive at a woman's marriage,and anticipatesthe next generation of transactionsat her future daughter'smarriage. J. Weiner (1993a: 292) remarksthat in a relationallybased world 'the task confrontinghumans is not to sustainhuman relationships... [but] to place a controls Giving and receivingshell valuablesat marriage limit on relationship'. the flow of relationshipbetween affinal groups. So does the movement of persons. The paternalinheritanceof the Hagen bride terminateswith her; she or the 'Are'are motherwhose blood is blockedat pregnancy, is like the Vanuatu ancestor in whom all reciprocitiesare finished. At the point at which claims cease or turn back, they become truncatedby their intersectionwith other claims, signified by a hybrid figure (human being or wealth item or ritual substance)who gathersthem within, so that they are seen to stop in his or her person.
III

repertoireis notorious for One class of kinshipsystems in the anthropological or cognatic(nonunilineal)kinshipreckoning havingno internalstops. Bilateral allows that substanceflows, and evinces itself in individualpersonsbut it does not stop in them or turn back.Indeed, indigenesmay tell themselvesthat they are all related - trace far enough back and everyone shares substancewith everyone else.19As a response to such systems, there was, in the 1950s and 1960s, much anthropologicaldebate about cutting networks. These debates addressedthe problem of potentiallyendless networksof relationsthat seemingly did not cut themselves.One could traceforeveroutwards.Fromthis came the presumptionthat therewas no measurebeyondthe dictatesof contingency: bilateralkinship appearedto have no inbuilt boundariesof its own. It was arguedthat in orderto creategroups,for example,ramifyingkin ties had to be cut throughother principlesof social organization.

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I would argue that what was appliedto analysinggroup formation in such kin networksof societieswere the very mechanismsthatdo in factgive bilateral n.d.). One kind & Strathern (Edwards character kind a self-limiting the English withfactorsof in operates conjunction it always alone; of reckoningnever operates viewpoint, 'kinship' comparative a different order. From the anthropologist's has to lie in the combination. hybrid:not just an expanse 'cut into' by Here we have the Euro-American of natureand culture. Social relaother phenomenabut a specificabridgement tions depend on multitudinous factors that truncate the potential of - 'blood ties' - can biologicalrelations.Biologicalrelatedness forever-ramifying thus be cut by failureto accordsocial recognition(someone is forgotten),just as social relationshipscan be cut by appealto biological principles (dividing 'real'kin from others). So in practiceone does not trace connexions for ever; converselythe most intimate group is also open to discoveringcontacts they never knew existed. Factorsfrom diverse domains can affect the reach of an otherwisehomogeneous networkbasedon 'blood'or 'family'. then, is that the basison which Whatis interestingaboutEnglishbilateralism, everyone might say they are related(biologicaland genetic connexion) can be from the trafficof social relations.This gives us both conreckonedseparately tinuitiesand discontinuitiesof identity.In so faras biology and society are taken as distinct domains, we can see why the users of English culture presume an identityof interestsin social relationsand why they presume heterogeneityin mixes of human and nonhuman.In Melanesianterms I might want to say that imagine a boundaryto the person that makes internal these Euro-Americans with others). ones (interactions from external different radically flows of substance continuitiesare That also gives a tenacityto their ideasaboutraceand sexuality: somehow within and discontinuitiessomehow outside. While my argumentshave been pitched very generally,I would assert that lie 'within'the specificitiesof social life as well as 'outside' such generalizations them. ConsiderSteve, in Simpson'saccountof the 'unclearfamily'constituted divorce.20 throughparental
Steve's narrationof his 'family life' places him at the centre of a network of relationships which carryvaryingloads in terms of affect and commitment. For example, he sees himself as a 'father'to six children. However, the way in which fatherhoodis expressedand experienced by Steve in relationto each of his childrenis variable.The label 'father'condensesand concealsvaryinglevels of financialand emotional commitment, differentresidentialarrangements and variablequantitiesof contact (1994: 834).

Steve is at once a (singular)fatherand containswithin his fatherhooda rangeof elements. They comprise connexions with persons, different social practices, resourcesand materials,heterogeneouselements from which, in this passage, Simpson has selecteda few. into its components,it would seem that the figureof the father Disaggregated in a rangeof referencepoints;yet it also contractsin so far as to bring expands only a small set of componentsis singled out: what Steve means by 'father'is When the specification likely to encompassmore than can ever be specified.21 defined as both in commitments as elements, to distinguishable is reduced the father resultant to refer the construct, we can then financialand emotional, who shows both, as a hybrid.As a kinsperson,then, this figure constitutesa

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condensed image whose dispersed, network version is distributed between separable ordersof fact (money,emotion). bilateralsystems of kinshipjoin together English and other Euro-American They arepremissedon conservingontological disparate reasonsfor relatedness. differencebetween domains:on imaginingthatthe affectiverelationsof kinship differentfrom the flux of economic life, or that the transmission are materially of substanceoperatesunder laws of biology separatefrom social laws, or that examples Here the earlier beingsmodifiedby society. personsarenatural individual The inventoris a kind of point in my narrative. of invention have a particular enhancedagent.All human agentsare inventors(creators)in a modern,EuroAmericansense: the person is substanceplus the animatingself-inventiveness as of agency,a combinationof distinctelements.The elements may be regarded 'added'together,'modifying'one anotherin the same way as culture modifies sometimes seek to sustain a nature. If, in Melanesianterms, Euro-Americans flows and intellect versus biol(body and external differencebetween internal ogy and culture,and so forth), it is becauseeach can be presentedas havingits as well as in own impetus or logic. For they can be turned to use separately conjunction,as I have indicatedin respectof conceptsof ownership.Belonging of pure and thus the separation marksrelationsbasedon continuitiesof identity, and the conjunctionof human discontinuity, forms,while propertypresupposes enterprisewith nonhumanresources. I havewilfully mixed old and new - the old networksof networkanalysisand kinshiptheory,and the new ones of actornetworktheory.It has led me to think about an indigenous, Euro-Americanmechanism for cutting: 'ownership'. Ownershipis powerfulbecauseof its double effect, as simultaneouslya matter will not have to look farin order of belongingand of property. Euro-Americans to determine network length; they have alwaysknown that belonging divides and propertydisowns. So where technology might enlargenetworks,proprieto cut them down to size. torshipcan be guaranteed notion of 'stop' as a prestationthat is a resting Perhaps,in this, the 'Are'are place, repositoryor turningpoint bearscomparisonwith, though by no means assimilationto, the notions of ownershipI have sketchedhere. These notions challenge the interpretivepossibility of limitlessness:the kinds of interests, social or personal,that invite extensionalso truncateit, and hybridsthat appear able to mix anvthingcan serve as boundariesto claims.

NOTES This article is in memory of Jeffrey Clark, and his account (1991) of pearlshellsthat flow and pearlshellsthat grow. Alan Macfarlanehas contributedinvaluablecomments on ideas of property,and I am furthergratefulto the severalcomments of the ESRC seminaron Technology as Skilled Practice convened by Penny Harvey at the University of Manchesterwhich heard a version of this article.Comments from Annelise Riles, Simon Harrisonand the Journal's anonymousreadershave been much to its improvement.Thanks to those who have given IrisJean-Klein,Christopher me permissionto cite as yet unpublishedworks: Peter Fitzpatrick, Taylor,Nicholas Thomas. 1 Taylor (n.d.) focuses on 'flow' and 'blockage'in certain Central and East African understandingsof channels of potency. A. Weiner (1992) and Godelier (1995) have commented on similarissues to differenttheoreticalends, as hasJ. Weiner (1995a;1995b). 2 I personifya discoursefor expositionalconvenience.

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3 One of the Journal'sreaderscommented on the role of legal thinking in such separations. Indeed, one might take the development of the law as historicallycrucial to that modernist commonplace,the distinction between subject and object. If the eighteenth-centurydevelopment of copyrightlaw, for instance,turned on claimingauthors'paternityin relationto products, through the concept of commercialprofit it also renderedauthors'works separablefrom their persons. 4 The distinctionsdo not preclude but make more powerful the attachmentof persons to their property.Propertyis of course integralto family life, not to speakof inheritanceand family businesses. 5 There are innumerablesuch pairsof terms in English (human and nonhuman,culture and connexions are nature,law and society, person and propertyand so forth). These merographic inflection to the giving a particular conceptualizations, a source of flexibilityin Euro-American 1993: 439). As similarbut not idenone expectsin culturallife (Battaglia 'layersof redundancy' tical constructs,such pairs sustain one another. Indeed, that none of them is identicalto another is part of their rhetoricalpower, since similarcontrastsappearto hold across severaldiscrete (all slightlydifferent)fields. Thus one can talk of an embryo as human but not a person, between human and nonhuman,person and property. while makingmoral discriminations 6 Papastergiadis (1995: 14-15) gives the exampleof Lotman's(1991) 'semiosphere'.'For Lotman, the semiosphereis in a constant state of hybridity.It always oscillates between identity and alterity,and this tension is most evident at its boundaries'.Boundariesare contained in those first-personforms that differentiateself from other. In Lotman's (1991: 131) phrase, 'Everyculture begins by dividing the world into "its own" internalspace and "their"external space'. This is the dangerous nonsense of which European xenophobia is formed (Stolcke 1995). It will be clear that I do no more than brush the tip of recent culturalcritiques;for an commentary,see the essaysedited by Fardon1995. anthropological 7 When Law (1994: 18-19) defines network, he remarksthat it does not have much to do with standardsociologicalusage as in the traditionof kinship studies. I suggest to the contrary that English kinship offers an interestingmodel of networks that concern links not just between persons but between human and nonhuman entities. This is touched on at the end of the article. 8 The tools of their discipline include methods of classification and comparisonthat are, arscientific imaginationwith which they battle in guably, an effect of the same Euro-American description. every ethnographic enquiry, 9 Whereasthe brief referencesto Melanesiathat follow distil extensive ethnographic anecdotal;that is, no more than incidentsare ethnographically the referencesto Euro-American examplesof the culturallypossible. Their value lies in their distillationof reflectionon analytical models within the discipline. 10And they are not innocent (Riles 1994). The observer'sor writer'scounter-rhetorical pracof unity carriesits own politics (Jean-Kleinn.d.), as does the tice in deconstructingnarratives of conjunctureto the concept of hybridity(Thomas in press). easy assimilation 11I have used the exampleelsewhere (Strathern n.d.) from the point of view of the element reportedthem on December 1st 'added'by human enterprise.The detailsare as The Independent 1994, following a High Court rulingenforcingthe patentin this country. 12Critics have pointed out that there is only one set of DNA sequences to be identified in could be challengedby further inventions; the human genome, and no claims to identification the patentis protectingthe companyfrom competition,not promotingcompetition. 13Hill and Turpin (1995: 145) quote the Vice-Presidentfor Science and Technology at IBM who observed in 1991: 'Most large companiesin the world are extensivelycross-licensedwith each other. Exclusivelicences are almost non-existent.The key is not ownership, it is access'. Of course the key is ownership, but ownership of a network or segments of it along which 'access',like money, flows. 14'No skill or labour has been exercisedon it; and there has been no change in its character': a dissentingjudge refutingclaims made to propertyin a corpse, quoted in Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995: 80. Such principlesare of course open to contestationin the way they are appliedin specificcases;I do not have to add that which persons claim propertywill depend on the relationsof production. 15 Moore v Regentsof the Universityof California, 1990, is taken as a locus classicus for debate concerning human tissue developed as the basis for a commercialproduct (Nuffield Council

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is mine. The court was tryinga prelimion Bioethics 1995: 72). The phrasingin this paragraph nary point of law as to whether a person had propertyrights in tissue taken from the body (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995 includes a summaryof the judgment). Rabinow 1992 offers a full and fascinating comment. anthropological 16A distinctionbetween those killed by other persons (death by homicide) and those killed by ancestors(death by illness) alters the sequences here. I should add both that I have put my on Coppet's analysisand that my extractsdo not do justice to his fine, hoown interpretation listic account. 17The exegeses of severalMelanesianists are relevanthere, but I truncatethat chain of collaborative work in referringto one: J. Weiner (1993b)invokes a delightfulsuccession of resting placesin his descriptionof the winged Foi pearlshellcapturingin hardenedform the life-giving force of birds in flight, while certainshells set aside in houses immobilize the life-giving force of shells in constantcirculation. 18 In a positive mode; negative modes would include uncontrolled flow or unproductive blockageor obstruction(Taylorn.d). 19 However, in contrastto universesof kin where affines are alreadyconsanguines(see, for the possibilityis either rhetorical instance,Kapadia [1994] on South India),for Euro-Americans or belongs to the class of bizarretruths. 20 Networks (in Latour'ssense) arise as a result of 'translation', that is, the mobilizationof claims and interests by which people traverseor assemble components of their lives. While Steve and his present wife try to 'treat'all the children equally, his mother-in-law cuts the network: she ignores Steve's children from his earlier marriagesand gives treats only to her children (Simpson 1994: 835). daughter's 21This observationderivesfrom Wagner's(1986) descriptionof contractionand expansionin perceptualprocess. The figure of the father serves as a single 'iconic' image, while containing specifiable,'symbolic',possibilitieswithin itself. These act as codes or referencepoints for the image, but they alwaysadd up to less than the whole. I should note that in this work Wagner is concernedwith the 'flow' of imagerywhich is 'stopped'by the specifyingpracticeof symbolic reference.My focus here is with anotherside of that process:the endless abilityto create more and more referencepoints, as in a narrative, or bring more and more elements into play, which is 'stopped'by the singularityof the image as a particular, usable object. Law (n.d.) observes that actor network theory createslinks in the very process of creatingobjects of study. The 'objectof study' thus cuts potentialnetworks,by drawingthings to a particular encompassing point or image.

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Couper a travers le reseau

R6sund

Les nouvelles technologies ont rouvert un vieux d6bat concernant les descriptionsde la vie I l'appel lance par sociale et les approchesconsid6rees novatricesou surann6es.RWpondant Latour,qui pr6ne une anthropologiesymrtrique r6unissantles formes de savoir modernes et non-modernes, l'article considere les concepts d'hybride et de reseau tels qu'ils sont utilises aujourd'hui.Ce faisant, il pr6sente une r6flexion sur le pouvoir d'extension infinie de la narrationanalytique,et sur la placetout a faitint6ressantequ'occupe le droit de propri6t6 dans un monde apparemmentsans limites.

CB2 3Rf, Lane, Cambridge, FreeSchool University of Cambridge, Department of SocialAnthropology, U.K