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Partial Organization: Marilyn Strathern and the Elicitation of Relations

A leading social theorist, whose work stands at the front of a reanimation of relations, Marilyn Strathern would hesitate to align herself with those who write directly about organization. Her commitment to the discipline of social anthropology is too strong to risk contamination with a concept that was, until the 1970s, a major colonising trope of sociology. Yet Strathern can hardly be said to have ignored questions of organization within anthropology. On the contrary, as part of her major contribution to the rethinking of both theory and the social, Strathern points directly to how the term ‘society’ often acts as a ‘metaphor for organization’ (1988: 11). ‘It is a working tenet of the comparative method in anthropology that societies everywhere do similar jobs in terms of exploiting the environment, providing nurture, reproducing their internal organization’ (Strathern, 1988: 31). Her profound disagreement with this gloss on societies as similar has proved a potent force. Following Edmund Leach, among others, much of Strathern’s writing has been concerned to help unpick how the concept of society ‘organizes so much of the way anthropologists think’. Strathern’s tactics of consumption (de Certeau, 1984) are to embrace this heritage. Rather than merely move analysis to ‘new ground’ (Derrida, 1982: 135), she deploys the comparative method to dismantle the very ‘society’ perspective it has spawned. Moving on from early field studies in Melanesia in which she made an ‘easy living’ (1988: 11) out of showing critical ‘absences’ of Western constructs (like that of nature and culture), her work graduated from re-working the ‘structures’ of kinship (1985), through an analysis of the ‘divisions’ of gender (1988) to more direct scrutiny of the Western inheritance of seeing relations in terms of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ (1991). Like Heidegger, Strathern’s form of deconstruction is to recover the ground extruded by previous analyses (see Munro, 2004a). In taking up the method of comparison, Strathern does not try to de-reify Western thought directly. By always ‘working backwards with our archaeologies’ (Strathern, 1999: 6), I show below how her comparative method follows Heidegger’s (1962) method of ‘questioning the question’. Deftly she brings