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Diagrams in Anthropology: Lines
and Interactions
Tristan Partridge
[1]
Diagramming is the procedure of abstraction when it is not concerned with reducing the
world to an aggregate of objects but, quite the opposite, when it is attending to their
genesis extracting the relational-qualitative arc of one occasion of experience and
systematically depositing it in the world for the next occasion to find the activity of
formation appearing stilled (Massumi 2011: 14, 99).
The ongoing use of diagrams in anthropology has its roots in the emergence of the
discipline itself. Ever since the work of Malinowski and a number of notable
predecessors, diagrams (along with maps) have become a customary feature of
ethnographic monographs with some more standardised and familiar than others. A
two-dimensional, often schematic, arrangement of lines drawn to show the organisation,
appearance, arrangement, mechanisms or interactions within an area or action of
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analysis, the diagram has appeared in many different forms.This introductory review
focuses first on two particular kinds: those used to convey information regarding kinship,
and those depicting different forms of exchange.
Critiques and Challenges
Compared with other practices that rely on the visualisation of ideas and data, and which
also operate within an interdisciplinary context, diagrams in anthropology have received
less critical scrutiny than, for example, cartography and visual research methods.
Photography and film within Visual Anthropology have become established forms of
both presentation, and of method. They also provide objects of analysis in and of
themselves. Interrogating the pitfalls and potential of their display via digital media has
led to the development of hypermedia anthropology (Pink 2006: xi) enabling novel
combinations of the visual, aural and textual. For some, this counteracts a previous
rejection of the visual, sensory and applied that coincided with social and cultural
anthropology establishing itself as a scientific discipline a rejection of the subjectivity
of photography and film in favour of adopting visual metaphors such as diagrams, grids
and maps to synthesise and objectify knowledge (Pink 2006: 8; Grimshaw 2001:
67).Framed this way, diagrams lack the sensory transmission that multimedia forms of
presentation seek, in part, to address.
Another critique questions the decontextualisinglinearity (Ingold 2000: 140) of
diagrams. In this light, the kinship diagram, for example, is seen as a chart that can be
taken in at a glance and scanned indifferently from any point in any direction, thus
presenting the complete network of kinship relations over several generations as a
totality present in simultaneity (Bourdieu 1977: 38, at Ingold 2007: 111). For Ingold, such
a snapshot resembles the sterile austerity of an electrical circuit board a schematic
devoid of human inspiration even adopting the technical convention of drawing a
hump where unconnected lines cross one another, echoing the circuit drawing of
electrical engineers (Barnes 1967: 122; Ingold 2007: 111).
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[2]
(Leach 1961, at Ingold 2007 112: Kinship Diagram as Circuit Board): The lines of the
kinship chart join up, they connect, but they are not lifelines or even storylines. It seems
that what modern thought has done to place fixing it to spatial locations it has also
done to people, wrapping their lives into temporal moments (Ingold 2007: 3).
However, given their innate reliance on the visualisation of data, diagrams also appear
to have much to offer the development of forms of ethnographic presentation that
challenge, or augment, an exclusive reliance on text. Relationships between the two vary
greatly, and critical approaches to cartography raise questions that are equally
applicable to diagrams. For example, the idea that they conceal as much as, if not far
more than, they reveal, and that any sense of accuracy comes at the cost of minimising
complexities inherent in the lives and locales of research. Recognising that maps, as
representations, are necessarily selective (Turnbull 2000: 101) leads many, among them
Monmonier (1991), to emphasise how all maps tell lies.
This is not simply because the quest for an accurate or precise and comprehensive
representation of reality raises impossible questions regarding what counts as detail
and information on one hand and what constitutes the infinite, remaining particulars on
the other, but is because in the cartographic world, all is still and silent as opposed to
the world of our experience that is suspended in movement (Ingold 2000: 242).
Crucially, for the types of diagram under consideration here, this cartographic or
diagrammatic world threatens to conceptualise social relations as static social facts
rather than as dynamic phenomena, offering a particularly empty conception of social
life (Kertcher 2006) and envisaging these relations without space to query how they
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persist or diminish over time (Suitor et al 1997). As we shall see, however, questions
around how diagrams are used in anthropology are as numerous as the forms they
adopt. Maps of places can be used for guiding and informing our interaction with the
world. Diagrams of human relations of different kinds tend not to share such an explicit
purpose, however. The role of an exchange diagram, for example what we might
decide it is for depends very much on the ethnographic material that accompanies it,
and which generated it in the first place. In what follows, I present various examples
drawn from the anthropological to begin exploring some of these issues and relations.
Kinship
Bourdieu questioned the origins and meanings of familiar graphic representations of
kinship, recommending a social history of the genealogical tool (Bourdieu 1977: 38,
207) a task which Mary Bouquet addresses by highlighting affinities between
European iconographical tradition in sacred, secular and scientific family trees and the
conceptual field around the anthropological kinship diagram (Bouquet 1996: 45, 59). As
elsewhere, these traditions and influences are seen as coalescing and finding form
within the work of W. H. R. Rivers and his visualisation of kinship in the genealogical
diagram (ibid.).
[3]
(Rivers 1910: 1 The Genealogical Method (Kurkas genealogical diagram)
Rivers is usually credited with developing the genealogical method within
anthropological inquiry. In his words, this was to involve the means of both obtaining
information and of demonstrating the truth of this information. In this, diagrams were
seen as crucial devices in the presentation of facts, and as a way to guarantee the
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accuracy and completeness [of those facts] (Rivers 1910: 11). This was a staunchly
positivistic approach (Stocking 1992: 34) and explicitly sought to establish the emergent
discipline of ethnology on a level with other sciences by demonstrating the facts of
social organisation in such a way as to carry conviction to the reader with as much
definiteness as is possible in any biological science (Rivers 1910: 12). Visual
representations thus became an argument for the credibility of the scientists inferences
(Gifford-Gonzalez 1993: 26, at Bouquet 1996: 45). Kinship diagrams were not his
invention, however: Morgans diagrams of consanguinity in his Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) were also based on historical
models of the family tree.
[4]
(Left) One of Morgans (1871) diagrams of consanguinity.
(Right) This Dance Diagram by Charles Seligman (1910: 156 WHR Rivers colleague
and part of the Torres Strait Expedition) prefigures the symbols used today in kinship
diagrams with circles in outline (women) or shaded (men), to distinguish between people
of different genders.
Rivers argued that the systematic presentation of genealogical facts offered a way to
get beneath the skin of human beings to the relations that people were born into and
developed throughout their lifetime, admiring how once people had been identified in a
genealogical diagram they became real personages although I had never seen them
(Rivers 1968: 105, at Bouquet 1996: 45). This reflects both the concrete method of
questioning in order to learn personal names and terms known by informants, and also
the weight given to the abstract system of relations underlying those names an
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abstract order that was itself reconcretized (visualized) in the genealogical diagram
(Bouquet 1996: 45). Rivers diagrams led to the conventionalisation of inverting the tree
of family trees, placing its roots at the top (Bouquet 1995: 423; 1996), and thus
erasing the image of the tree as a living, growing entity, branching out along its many
boughs and shoots, and [replacing] it with an abstract, dendritic geometry of points and
lines, in which every point represents a person, and every line a genealogical
connection (Ingold 2000: 135).
This inversion had lasting effects.The stories that people tell about themselves and the
information gleaned from them by systematic forensic inquiry (Bouquet 1993: 140) that
Rivers described continued to influence the systematic collection of genealogical data
methods that in 1967 Barnes acknowledged could scarcely be improved (Barnes 1967:
106, at Ingold 2007: 110). Bouquet also suggests that visualising kinship in the
genealogical diagram reflects the limits of a specific ideological consciousness,
[marking] the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go, and
between which it is condemned to oscillate (Jameson, in Clifford 1988: 223) (Bouquet
1996: 44). Their presence persists (Bouquet 1996: 44) and genealogical diagrams are
established as images for use on the edge of the text (Stoller 1994: 96) each
(diagram and text) expanding on the explanatory reach of the other.
Diagram as Method and Delivery
To recognise this is to emphasise how the diagram is a possibility of fact it is not the
fact itself (Deleuze 2004: 110). That is, genealogical diagrams are contemporary
models for social relations (Barnard & Good 1984: 9), portraying the inter-relationships
of real or imaginary individuals (ibid. p.8). The significance of these diagrams is not
established until the nature of those relationships between the individuals portrayed is
clarified (Bouquet 1996: 45). Malinowski recognised the visual clout and direct efficacy
of the reduction of data within visual forms, whilst at the same time elaborating on the
kinds of details and observations that are necessary in establishing the relationships
portrayed how to flesh out the bones of the genealogical diagram: The method of
reducing information, if possible, into charts or synoptic tables ought to be extended to
the study of practically all aspects of native life. All types of economic transactions may
be studied by following up connected, actual cases, and putting them into a synoptic
chart. Also, systems of magic, connected series of ceremonies, types of legal acts a
table ought to be drawn up of all the gifts and presents customary in a given society, a
table including the sociological, ceremonial, and economic definition of every item
Besides this, of course, the genealogical census of every community, studied more in
detail, extensive maps, plans and diagrams, illustrating ownership in garden land,
hunting and fishing privileges, etc., serve as the more fundamental documents of
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ethnographic research (Malinowski 1922: 11).
[5]
(Left) Malinowskis use of diagrams extended to documenting canoe types and
construction (1922: 83/top; 85/bottom). (Right) He also used diagrams in his linguistic
work (here from 1948: 261), on the phatic (or performative) use of language (Gellner
1998: 148).
Malinowski, along with Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Fortes (among others)
sought to understand the basis for the orderly functioning of small-scale, effectively
state-less societies, and kinship was seen as constituting the basis and structure for
social continuity in these settings (Carsten 2004: 10). Latter work was dominated by
avowedly ahistorical studies of African unilineal kinship systems, treating the lineage as
bounded units, and developing a complex typology to describe the functioning of these
systems, involving maximal and minimal lineages and sublineages (Carsten 2004:
11).
Evans-Pritchard adapted the visual metaphor of the tree to account for such notions of
scale in the inter-relationships between Nuer clans and lineages. He also made attempts
to represent Nuer descriptions and depictions of these inter-relationships.
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[6]
Evans-Pritchards (1940) diagrammatic lineage trees of the Jinaca (196/l) and
Gaatgankiir (197/r).
In these attempts, Evans-Pritchard explicitly states that it was only the analyst (or we)
who insisted on this visual metaphor, highlighting something of its limitations and biases:
[the Nuer] do not present [lineages] the way we figure them as a series of bifurcations of
descent, as a tree of descent, or as a series of triangles of ascent, but as a number of
lines running at angles from a common point they see [the system] as actual relations
between groups of kinsmen within local communities rather than as a tree of descent, for
the persons after whom the lineages are called do not all proceed from a single
individual (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 202).
[7]
(Left) Evans-Pritchards (1940: 201) outline of a Nuer system of lineage, compared with
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(Right) how the Nuer themselves figure a lineage system (1940: 202).
During this era of kinship studies in Britain, largely preoccupied with the analysis of
descent groups (Carsten 2004: 12), such projects in France followed a route influenced
by Lvi-Strausss The Elementary Structures of Kinship with an emphasis instead on
social rules, the generation of exchange, and marriage (ibid.). The once-raging debates
between adherents of alliance or descent theories do not need to be repeated here.
For current purposes, I focus on how the established symbolic formulae of kinship
diagrams have been adapted for use in different ethnographic works, and how the
diagram has been modified to focus analytical attention on different aspects of social
life. Kinship diagrams do not always fit the static model they imply: its not always the
intention for each triangle and circle [to represent] one real man or woman since they
may be used to be used to represent fictive genealogies of imaginary persons (Barnard
& Good 1984:7). Even when the correlation between diagram symbols and living
individuals is more direct, kinship diagrams have been diversely adapted, and
constructed so as to bring out certain structural features that the work seeks to draw
attention to (Bouquet 1996: 60).

Munn (1986: 39) highlights interhamlet kinship relations in a Gawan neighbourhood.
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Relationality and Decentering
The different variations on kinship diagrams above share in common a recognisable
linearity. Reflections on these conventions question their impact on reinforcing particular
notions of relationality, and subsequent effects on ideas around alterity and the
individual. In the above examples, the passage of time (in peoples lives) has a
directional, generational thrust that can be depicted (across the page) accordingly. For
Ingold, this trend reinforces anthropological habits of insisting that the way people in
modern Western societies comprehend the passage of history, generations and time is
essentially linear, which casts anything that is not immediately recognisable in an
opposing category: alterity, we are told, is non-linear (Ingold 2007: 3) and this, in turn,
equates the march of progress with the increasing domination of an unruly and
therefore non-linear nature (Ingold 2007: 155).
Sahlins, meanwhile, suggests that the partible dividual has become a regular figure of
kinship studies as well as a widely distributed icon of the pre-modern subject, perhaps
as a result of anthropologists staring too long at ego-centred, cum egocentric, kinship
diagrams (Sahlins 2011: 13). As such, we have learned to make the mistake of
rendering the relationships of kinship as the attributes of singular persons (ibid.). Not
only this, but also considering kin persons as the only kind of persons who are multiple,
divisible, and relationally constructed leads to a tendency to overlook the fact that more
familiar terms are also relational, among them employees, clients, teammates,
classmates , guests, customers and aliens: When aspects of the same person,
variously salient in different social contexts, they are instances of partibility. But they are
not instances of dividuality, since they do not entail the incorporation of others in the one
person (Sahlins 2011: 13).
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[8]
Clockwise from bottom left: social structure and marriage rules within Aranda kinship
(Lvi-Strauss 1972 [1966]: 83); Ambryan kinship systems (Lvi-Strauss 1969, fig. 5),
cited by Gell 1998: 91; (Upper right) Figure 24 Relationships and Contexts (Rose
2000: 222); (Lower right) Figure 9 Yarralin marriage practices and identities cross-
cutting moieties and social categories (Rose 2000: 77).

Rhizomes
In her description of the Yarralin peoples world view, Rose (2000: 221) describes
individuals as shaped by their own personal angle of perception, the angle of their
matrilineal identity, and their various country angles which tie them into other species
and to the workings of the world (ibid.). The diagram drawn to reflect this resembles
Deleuze and Guattaris rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 18): a dense and tangled
cluster of interlaced threads or filaments, [where] any point in which can be connected to
any other (Ingold 2000: 134). As we have seen, the tree has become one of the most
potent images in the intellectual history of the Western world, not only used in
diagrammatical form to represent hierarchies of control and schemes of taxonomic
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division but also, and above all, chains of genealogicalconnection (ibid.). The rhizome
model, by contrast, looks beyond the static and linear, arborescent and dendritic
imagery of the genealogical model to begin thinking about persons, relationships and
land in a world in movement, wherein every part or region enfolds, in its growth, its
relations with all the others (ibid.): a continually ravelling and unravellingrelational
manifold (Ingold 2000: 140).
Roses description of relationships and contexts based on Yarralin ideas about
wisdom, difference and interconnection includes the influence of (physical and
relational) positioning on perception, in a strikingly rhizomatic account: an angle of
perception is a boundary, and boundaries are both necessary and arbitrary. Necessity
lies in the fact that there are no relationships unless there are parts, and without
relationships there is only uniformity and chaos. Arbitrariness lies in the fact that since all
parts are ultimately interconnected, the particular boundary drawn at a given point is only
one of many possible boundaries. Each line in Figure 24 is both and boundary and a
relationship. Each node (A, B, C, etc) is both a context and an angle of vision, another
centre One particular human angle defines our world as it is because it is we who are
looking. Perception distorts, but wisdom lies in knowing that distortion is not
understanding (Rose 2000: 222).
Such developments and reflections take us beyond the more recognisable examples of
kinship diagrams, especially those focused on lineages and descent. As mentioned
above, Lvi-Strausss work on kinship shifted focus to the importance of marriage, and
of exchange more generally, in establishing and maintaining relations between groups,
rather than just individuals (Carsten 2004: 14). In this, he developed models for
elaborate, long-term exchange[s] involving the transfer of goods, services, and people
that cemented relations between groups (Carsten 2004: 14) making extensive use of
diagrams.
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[9]
(Left) Lvi-Strauss (1969: 64) draws on Firth (1936) to highlight the astonishing
complexity of matrimonial exchanges in Tikopia (Solomon Islands), cementing relations
between specific groups of in-laws and binding each lineage (or kinship group) in a
system of directional exchanges.
(Lower right) Lvi-Strauss (1969: 35) focuses on the ceremonial distribution of meat in
Burma, emphasising the role played by kinship systems in determining the kinds and
quantities of meat received by different individuals, and the subsequent effects that
generosity expended in such feasts have on future marriage arrangements.
(Upper right) Robinson (in the volume Marriage in Tribal Societies, ed. Meyer Fortes
1962: 129) specifies not only the kinds of foodstuffs (re)distributed as marriage gifts and
the order of consent and expectation between specific members of the bride and
grooms families, but also the temporal order of the transfers, spread over a number of
days around the ceremony itself (1962: 130).
Exchange
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There is a tension at the heart of anthropological diagrams of exchange concerning
attempts to represent movement (spatiotemporal change) and the effects of time
passing. Holbraad (2012: 101) asks why a line is appropriate for representing a
trajectory [of change] and how the inherent continuity of trajectories relates to the
momentum of movements and action. Is demarcating, visualising and representing the
continuity of plotted trajectories not a very faint way of expressing momentum (ibid.)?
He adds that tota simul representations on paper have to be economical since they
do not move in themselves, and hence they cannot really have a momentum, but argues
that this economy comes at a price: For the point about momentum is not only that it
renders motion both continuous and directional, but also that it does so as a matter of
necessity: momentum describes the inner compulsion of motion. The best way to
understand this, I think, is cinematic: imagine panning away from the birds-eye
perspective of diagrams, and placing the camera at the helm of a moving trajectory,
cockpit-style (Holbraad 2012: 101).
Flow
With kinship diagrams, their linearity directed the passage of time and the segregation
(or interaction) of generations. Attempts to visualise and represent exchange, however,
emphasise the movement of transfer relying on directional arrows to depict action and
change, often across both time and space. As the following examples illustrate, on the
more abstract level of economic theory, diagrams are apt devices for illustrating modes
and relations of trade and transfer operating at different scales in order to reflect
different flows (Appadurai 1996) of goods, labour, capital, value, commodities, people
and technologies.
[10]
(Left) Gudeman (2001: 6) diagrams the neoclassical economy, in the style of work that
deals explicitly with Economics, eg. (Right) Harvey (2003: 10) outlining the paths of
capital circulation (in capitalist society).
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Building on diagrams of neoclassical economy (see above), Gudeman (2001: 7)
draws the Economy as a complex of practices and relationships that are constituted
within the two realms of market and community and the four value domains he terms
the base, social relationships, trade, and accumulation (Gudeman 2001:
5). In this diagram (below, left), he emphasises the difference between established
contemporary theories of value relativism through individual preference and its influence
on demand and supply, and his own that proposes a world of inconsistent, or
incommensurate, domains of value that are locally specified culture is thus made
and remade through contingent categories, such as home and work, body and the other,
weekdays and weekends, beauty and efficiency, or friendship and love. Different value
arenas make up economy (Gudeman 2001: 6-7).
[11]
(Left) Gudeman 2001: market, community and value domains. (Right) Gudeman &
Rivera (1990: 119, used here by Mayer 2002: 22) delineates the flow of expenditures
and leftovers within a specific (if unidentified) site the house (more on Sites of
exchange, below).
The economic diagram format suits cases where the directional flow of abstract goods
or entities is depicted in transfer or exchange with similarly abstract (or, rather,
generalized) actors. Gregorys work on gift economies makes extensive use of such
diagrams: at the initial level, distinguishing between the single, quantitative exchange
relation established between objects in commodity transfer, and gift exchange that
consists of two transactions [where] the transactors become mutually indebted to each
other the exchange relation is established between the transactors rather than the
objects (Gregory 1982: 46). The gist of these differences is summarized in two, simple
figures (3.1/2, below).
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[12]
(Upper left) Gregory on Commodity exchange and Gift exchange (1982: 46).
(Bottom left) The standard conception of the general relations of production,
consumption, distribution and exchange within the broader economy is represented
diagrammatically by placing production (represented by firms) in opposition to
consumption (represented by households), in a relation mediated by exchange (the
product market) and distribution: households supply labour and demand consumption
goods; firms demand labour and supply consumption goods (Gregory 1982: 103).
(Right) The change a trois central to Mausss work on The Gift as developed by Sahlins
(1972: 159), emphasising the role of the second donee in the parable (Damren 2002:
86), and using a particular case (4.1) to elaborate on the consequences for our
understanding of gift exchange more broadly (4.2). In the former, the mauri that holds the
increase-power (hau) is placed in the forest by the priests (tohunga); the mauri causes
game birds to abound; accordingly, some of the captured birds should be ceremoniously
returned to the priests who placed the mauri; the consumption of these birds by the
priests in effect restores the fertility (hau) of the forest (hence the name of the ceremony,
whangai hau, nourishing hau (Sahlins 1972: 158). Thus, the meaning of hau one
disengages from the exchange of taonga is as secular as the exchange itself. If the
second gift is the hau of the first, then the hau of a good is its yield, just as the hau of a
forest is its productiveness if the point is neither spiritual nor reciprocity as such, if it is
rather that one mans gift should not be another mans capital, and therefore the fruits of
a gift ought to be passed back to the original holder, then the introduction of a third party
is necessary. It is necessary precisely to show a turnover: the gift has had issue; the
recipient has used it to advantage (Sahlins 1972: 160).
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[13]
(Left) The Temporal the Dimension of Exchange: Gregory (1982: 48) responds directly to
the question of temporality in exchange: simple commodity exchange established a
relation of equality between heterogeneous things at a given point in time while gift
exchange establishes a relation of equality between homogenous things at different
points in time (Gregory 1982: 47). The earlier diagram is tabulated to illustrate this: A
and B exchange x and y. This is simultaneous exchange but it can be split up into two
parts that can be thought of as occurring at two different points in time. If this pair of
temporally separated transactions is reproduced at a further two points in time, but in the
reverse direction, the temporal outcomes of the debts thereby created will differ
depending on whether the debt was of the commodity or the gift variety (Gregory 1982:
47).
(Right) Roads of Gift-debt:the circulation of gifts of different rank and velocity create
roads of gift-debt that bind people together in complicated webs of gift-debt Gregory
(1982: 57-9). The two diagrams show the minor roads of exchange that formed the
outward and return sequences of exchange, respectively, and emphasise the importance
of timing: in both sequences C was a major injunction, whose gifts depended on the prior
receipt of goods and gifts from others, which in turn were dependent on the prior return of
offerings from still other parties (Gregory 1982: 59).
Sites of Exchange
Another broad category of anthropological exchange diagrams attends less to abstract
principles or temporality and instead focuses on the specific locales, or sites, of
exchange interactions. As such they more closely resemble maps/plans, but often also
contain or suggest particular forms of movement and/or interaction.
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[14]
(Left) Gells (1999: 122) plan of the Dhorai market, and (Right) how people in the market
are put in their place in symmetrical and competitive (as opposed to hierarchical)
relations: in the outer zones relations are territorial and segmentary, with traders and
associates from a given locality all expected to be seated together (Gell 1999: 127).
Gells account of the Dhorai market (in Madhya Pradesh, central India) pictures the
market as a wheel: different groups of traders are able to sit and transact business in
particular areas according to social rank, and the goods they trade in are also ranked,
from the most prized (more central) to the less valuable (more peripheral) (Gell 1999:
121).
[15]
(Left) Duranti (1994: 50) publishes a page of fieldnote sketches later refined for print
(Right) where the organisation of spatial relations exerts a critical influence on the
political prestige of participants during a meeting held to distribute kava, and the
sequential serving of drinks makes and remakes social hierarchies (Duranti 1994: 70).
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(Left) Sequences of affinal payments made for a canoe by individual recipients: each
payee makes his gift directly to the canoes builder (Munn 1986: 133).
(Right) This diagram (Gurven et al 2004: 33) models relationships of interaction, viz. the
path model of foraging and sharing partnerships, specifying sites in relation to forest
days and time spent away from home.
[16]
(Left) Gell (1999: 64) and an impossible figure to reflect the symbolic practices of
marriage and affinity, dependent on cross/sex unmediated and same/sex mediated
readings of gendered exchanges at the root of conflict between alliance theory and
feminist critiques (ibid.). This model derives from the fact that any Melanesian marriage
is both collective and individual unlike what might be a more familiar stipulation that
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relations are either between individuals (interpersonal/private) or between collectivities
(corporate/public) (Gell 1999: 63). Since individual and society are not opposed, the
relationship between marriage (the union between specific spouses) and alliance
(affinal alliance linking collectivities such as clans) can be understood in terms of fractal
magnification/minimization: an approximate, but not exact, analogy between spouse-to-
spouse relations and affinal-group to affinal-group relations (ibid.)
(Right) Another Strathernogram from Gell (1999: 72) detailing the specific working and
feeding relations that constitute and support the dala: a matrilineal sub-clan described as
the enduring, self-reproducing, building-blocks of Trobriand society (1999: 70).
Routes
Malinowskis (1922: 63) famous map of the Kula ring an extensive form of exchange
carried out across a wide range of islands that form a closed circuit: in the direction of
the hands of a clock long necklaces of red shell, called soulava in the opposite
direction bracelets of white shell called mwali Each of these articles, as it travels in
its own direction on the closed circuit, meets on its way articles of the other class, and is
constantly being exchanged for them (1922: 64). We are told that every movement of
the Kula articles is fixed and regulated, that no one ever keeps any of the articles for
any length of time in his possession, and that transactions lead to permanent and
lifelong connections none of which is visualized around the text (Malinowski 1922:
62). Others (two examples follow) have subsequently revisited the Kula ring.
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[17]
Malinowskis (1922: 63) famous map of the Kula ring.
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[18]
Hages (1977) undirected graph of the Kula Ring.
Hage (1977: 29) describes his diagram as an undirected graph of the Kula Ring it
follows Malinowskis descriptions and plots 18 points (each representing a Kula
community) at their approximate relative locations: Each point is enclosed by a broken
line roughly indicating the territorial extent of the Kula community as an island, a part of
an island or a group of islands as in Map V in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The
unbroken lines represent trading relations between these communities (ibid.) adopting
this form to highlight how trade links may be of any physical distance but may not pass
through the territory of another Kula community (Hage 1977: 30).
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[19]
(Left) Damons (2002: 108) map of locations within and around the Kula ring adopts
cartographic norms and scales, and focuses on the names of locations (as part of a
paper focusing on the production of fame within the systems exchanges).
(Right) An earlier map (from Herskovits landmark Economic Anthropology 1952: 200)
tracing historical trade routes for various commodities exchanged across the Australian
continent, with trade connections extending to the Torres Strait islands and Western
Papua.
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[20]
Baruya trading partners (Godelier & Jablonko 1998).
Godelier and Jablonks (1998) diagram (above) combines elements of each category
outlined above: flows; sites; sequences (interactions); routes. The Baruya had trade links
with 12 other tribes; whose territories are located from 1/2 days walk to more than 3
days walk away journeys were made to exchange bark cloth, bows and arrows, stone
adzes or steel axes, feathers, shells, dogs, and pigs (ibid.). This account queries
standard notions of the operations within cashless economies: With such a diversity of
goods being exchanged, it might be difficult to find just the partner who had on hand the
item one wanted. The problem does not arise, however, because salt bars, like currency,
can be exchanged for all kinds of subsistence goods (e.g., bark cloth, stone adzes,
arrows) and all kinds of luxury goods (e.g. feathers, shells). Salt bars crisscross all these
distinctions. There is a known and accepted rate of exchange of salt bars for any given
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1. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/massumi.png
2. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ingold1.png
3. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/rivers.png
4. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/morgan-seligman.png
5. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/malinowski1.png
6. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ep1.png
7. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ep2.png
8. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/levi-strauss1.png
9. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/levi-strauss2.png
10. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gudeman.png
11. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gudeman-2.png
type of item with each other tribe. The partners in this exchange system are not trading in
order to make profit, but rather in order to fulfill their needs as individuals and as
members of their society. Nobody hoards salt bars, and nobody withholds goods in order
to create an artificial scarcity to force a rise in price. This trading system requires
regular, permanent, face-to-face relationships with people with whom one will continue to
deal for many years. Everyone knows the accepted rates of exchange (Godelier &
Jablonko 1998).
Directionality and Irreversibility
Questioning and expanding on the diverse use of diagrams in anthropology parallels
broader concerns within the discipline as a whole not least how we understand
attempts to create a moving picture of a world that doesnt stand still (Clifford 1997).
Bourdieu (1990) challenged the structuralist analysis of gift exchange and the idea of
some abstracted and synchronic law of reciprocity, highlighting instead the political
judgement of the agents involved as regards the timing of the giving of the initial gift and
then of the counter gift (Jedrej 2010: 692). This is to question structural analyses that
deal with a synchronic virtual reality and tends to privilege spatial relations and their
analogues in such forms as synoptic tables, diagrams (structures) and figures, and is
instead to deal with practice, which necessarily unfolds in time and has all the
properties which synchronic structures cannot take into account, such as directionality
and irreversibility (ibid.). There are works such as those on the concept of landscape
that explore and articulate the intersections of time, space and practice (Jedrej 2010:
692). As the above examples suggest, those same intersections urge further
examination and exploration through the use of diagrams in anthropology.
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12. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gregory.png
13. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gregory2.png
14. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gell1.png
15. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/duranti.png
16. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/gell2.png
17. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/malinowski-map1.png
18. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/malinowski-map2.png
19. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/malinowski-map3.png
20. http://anthropologyoffthegrid.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/malinowski-map4.png

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