Uncertain Relations

Limits and Possibilities

in Ethnologia Europaea
Author:
Marilyn Strathern Emeritus Professor, Cambridge, UK ms10026@cam.ac.uk

Search for other papers by Marilyn Strathern in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2004-1902

Abstract

In 2023, the SIEF convenors set out the multivalent character of “uncertainty” as at once opening up terrains riddled by catastrophe, reminding us of a quality of everyday being, while also promising alternative paths and possibilities. This talk, presented in Brno as the Congress Keynote, offered one way to engage with this complex field. It proposed to interrogate the notion of uncertainty through another multivalent notion, “relations”. Might our ability to perceive relations – activate them, embody them, and enquire with them – help us acknowledge the role that uncertainty plays in our lives? Might thinking of relations as uncertain in their capacities and effects throw light on what we ask from knowledge practices in order to enlarge and/or shrink the world in which we live? From global crises to fieldwork encounters, presenting certain ways of thinking uncertainty through relations hoped to sketch something of the broader themes of that Congress.

Some sixty years ago, the French linguist and botanist, André Haudricourt, told of an encounter on a dockside in Port Vila, Vanuatu.1 Two men each imagine they recognise the other. One of them, thinking the man on the shore is a long deceased relative, leans over the rails of a cargo boat to whisper, “Are you dead or alive?” (Haudricourt 1964: 99). The very means by which one ordinarily verifies something – in Melanesia as elsewhere – “I saw it with my own eyes” – has become the basis of an acute uncertainty: “What is it that I am seeing?” “Is it my cousin or a ghost?” Seeing the person does not actually tell you that.

Only one does not need to be on a tropical dockside to be caught in the uncertainties that wishing to be certain helps generate. “The facility of explaining things takes over from the things to be explained, until the whole project, whatever its aims or original intentions, becomes a forum in methodologies: how to know what it is you are testing and test what it is that you know” (Wagner 2001: 248). Roy Wagner is commenting on ever-pressing attempts on the part of anthropologists to account for their knowledge, vis-à-vis social practices for example, but he could be referring to scholars anywhere who point to requirements for verification – or, in an all too familiar twist, university auditing to determine the success of a department's output or research impact. If “the [scholar's] working out of [an] explanation becomes the explanation of its working out” (2001: 248), so too assessing scholarship becomes subject to ever more complex controls on the assessment process.

The rubric for this SIEF conference sets out the multivalent character of “uncertainty”: at once the prospect of terrains riddled by catastrophe, a quality of being in the world that we live with all the time, and a promise of renewal, of alternative new paths and possibilities, whether in everyday life or academic work. Affective accompaniments to uncertainty can include both being overwhelmed, feeling there are too many directions one could follow, and equally the starkness of either/or decision-making that puts one into crisis. Then there is the beckoning openness of not-yet-knowing. At the same time, academic work in the social sciences has given us a little tool for approaching “uncertainty”, itself developed from everyday experience.

I refer to the notion of relations. It was a relative that each of the Vanuatuans thought they saw in the other man, literally a “relation” in English, but a relation too in the more abstract or conceptual sense of entities linked to one another. Yet, whether we think of relations in interpersonal terms or as conceptual or epistemic links, the ability to perceive relations, activate them, embody them, enquire with them – and enlarge and shrink our world in doing so – has something of the flux and dynamism also found in the notion of uncertainty. How to limit or delimit such matters? An interesting delimitation might be to think about the concept of uncertainty precisely with that of relations in mind, and vice versa: to interrogate the one concept through the other.

Like “uncertainty”, the concept of “relation” is multivalent, in Europe inflected by vernacular as well as expert parlances. It is also one on which you might expect a social anthropologist to dwell – after all, the discipline regards it as something of a touchstone. But, above all, I suggest in a moment, there is a powerful way in which relations contribute directly to the entailments of uncertainty. Meanwhile, talking of language leads me to register the fact that the Congress language is English – an effort on everyone's part not to be taken for granted. I should confess that in the past (Strathern 2020), I have been highly critical of how “relation” is inflected in English, and especially how vernacular sentiments colour its “expert” use in anthropology. But for present purposes that is all to one side; I assume we share as much a working knowledge of what we mean by “relation” or “relations” as we do of “uncertainty”. My remarks come in four parts, with the fifth no more than a short coda at the end.

Interaction and indeterminacy

What is this powerful way, then, in which relations contribute directly to the entailments of uncertainty?

There is an almost inevitable open-endedness to interactions between people. When a relation depends on different parties to it, its enactment can never be completely certain. Take the uncertainty of the anthropologist in West Africa who apprenticed herself to a weaver, dutifully modelling her actions on those of other apprentices, only to find to her surprise that no-one is asking any questions (Goody 1978: 21). They certainly do not ask questions of the weaver-teacher, and he is not encouraging them either. We shall come back to the apprentice shortly. For now, note that uncertainty is introduced the moment one can no longer, if one ever can, assume how people will act.

From this point of view there is an inherent indeterminacy to interpersonal relations, as many writers have commented. I need only mention João Pina-Cabral (2017: 176), and his observation that being in the world means being with others, and interactions have their own effects, or Anna Tsing (2012: 510) on encounters across difference that are inevitably transformative, or Donna Haraway (2003: 50) on the always unfinished nature of relating. Asking questions seems a heightened example; indeed, a question compels an interaction. Now I had been so intrigued by the substance of enquiry – “Are you dead or alive?” – I had not thought twice about the verbal form that the Vanuatuan's puzzlement took: he had been asking a question. And perhaps my conclusion about uncertainty was a bit too quick. Let us go back to the anthropological apprentice at the loom, who is finding it very difficult indeed not to ask questions about what to do. The apprentice was Esther Goody2 in the 1970s; by then she had worked in Ghana for nearly two decades.

Goody realised that it was clearly inappropriate to be asking questions of the teacher. In fact, asking questions often turned out to be a polite way of navigating oneself through social protocols – it was certainly not part of skills transmission. Questions were not used by weaver-teachers because they were not teaching a verbal skill; they judged progress by the work. The apprentice had found something else: an intriguing research topic!

In the highly status-conscious milieu of the state (and former kingdom) of Gonja, questions divide into four types, appropriateness being modulated according to the speakers’ relations of seniority and juniority. Questions thereby inevitably carry messages about social relationships. We do not need to go into these, except to note that when a senior directs a question to a junior it is likely to convey a command. Children are trained early on to recognise the command function of a question. Goody writes:

it is very difficult for a person in a clearly defined authority role to ask a pure information question – that is, to ask a question which is perceived as being just about facts and not also about fixing responsibility or threatening control. And it is equally difficult for a person occupying a junior status to ask a pure information question because . . . [of] the possible challenge implications to his questioning. (1978: 39–40, original emphasis)

Of itself, a question seems inherently open-ended, an incomplete proposition begun by one person to be completed by another (1978: 22). At the same time, the depiction and organisation of relations – what one can expect from particular kinds of people – reduces uncertainty.3 Indeed such expectations can introduce certainty – whether the issue is positive or negative – when one assumes that, from the roles they play or the characteristics they show, it is possible to predict what people will do or determine what kind of people they are. Needless to say, the certainty of familiarity is also the certainty of prejudice and stereotype. Depending on the relations being mobilised, then, a question can imply greater or lesser degrees of certainty.

Arising from this brief foray into question-making, I wish to make a formal point about the everyday place of uncertainty in relations. Asking a question elicits a double relation, at once between the propositions posed and answered and between the speakers. Whether or not sequences are routinised, interaction – the relation – itself raises questions as to whether the interchange was not just appropriate or adequate but also legible, that is, intelligible (the relation is carried forward accordingly). A kind of low level, everyday uncertainty is thus built into interactions between people, which may or may not burst into the surprise of the unexpected.

Twenty years on from the 1970s, Goody had taken some of her ideas into a more ambitious terrain – what she calls social intelligence. It is her observations of relations as social interactions that are germane. What is reciprocity in relations if it is not interactive interdependence? If it does not imply anticipation, expectation, wariness about the untoward? In short, not being certain about what the other party will do? In fact, she coined the formula “anticipatory interactive planning (AIP)”, a form of reasoning effective for solving problems arising out of social interdependence.4 One of the steps in her argument is that “the AIP [Anticipatory Interactive Planning] structure of thought which incorporates mental representations of others’ responses to one's own actions is itself a model for reciprocity in social relations (Goody 1995: 13).

What she is labelling by the formula AIP is, so to speak, the creation of a certain kind of indeterminacy, namely the indeterminacy that social relations build into the anticipatory nature of interaction. Indeterminacy is the corollary of, is held in place by, the possibility of anticipation.5 One can never foresee all the effects that an interaction will bring about, nor, for that matter, what retrospective reappraisal will throw up.6 The feeling or state of apprehension that such indeterminacy produces we may call uncertainty.

The more expectations about the conduct of social relations appear to regularise interactions, to take away uncertainty, as in the protocols for relations between Gonja seniors and juniors, the more people may have to observe fine discriminations between different kinds of appropriate responses, in order to reach some certainty of outcome from the interaction. Every Gonja adult can anticipate the kind of answers that Goody got from young children when she first asked: “‘What are you doing?’ – ‘Nothing.’ ‘Where are you going?’ – ‘Nowhere.’” (1995: 34). These are typical of children's replies, she observes, to what they perceive as control questions. It takes effort to overcome a Gonja child's training into such an expectation and make or allow her or him receive a question differently.

[A] boy of about four who was playing on a tiny improvised loom by the weaving sheds was gently questioned by the youth who was weaving next to him about the pattern he was making . . . [The youth] didn't really want to know . . . whether the tangled threads were intended to be one pattern rather than another. . . . [Those kinds of] questions were a way of expressing interest and concern in the activities of the children. (1995: 33–34)

But, to avoid ambiguity, they had to be delivered with utmost gentleness.

Calling “uncertainty” a feeling or state of apprehension is mere suggestion on my part. Yet there is a dimension to the kind of everyday uncertainty I have been describing that is somewhat like the force of affect: the sense that comes over one, even if only momentarily overwhelming, when (the anticipatory) “this will happen” turns into “anything could happen”. Interpersonal relations carry such a sense into the future or make doubtful what occurred in the past. But here one might pause. When it comes to apprentices who are also anthropologists, it is highly likely, as Goody's wry comments conveyed, that they have already been trained into ways of negotiating the attendant uncertainties. After all, questions and answers seem at the centre of European pedagogy (I use European in a non-exclusive sense, and one might prefer the epithet Euro-American). And that is largely, I suspect, because of the part that relations play in what Europeans call knowledge.

There is plenty of Anticipatory Interactive Planning in European knowledge practices, but it is mainly to do with interpretation and understanding as matters of the mind: with what one knows. I would go so far as to say that scholars, above all, are trained to treat certainty and uncertainty as issues to be decided by knowledge. This leads us, gently I hope, towards another dimension.

Communication and knowledge

Of course, in conveying these details about Gonja, I can only convey them as knowledge, and you will properly want to know just how I – and before me, Goody – knew. Wagner's comment about the facility of explaining things that takes over from the things to be explained was prophetic.

When social scientists describe interactions between people, their descriptions are assumed to be based on knowledge. Concomitantly, the kinds of information people derive from their relations can be rewritten in terms of their knowledge too. Indeed, the very idea of knowledge compels the user to make relations of an epistemic or conceptual kind. Examples of such knowledge-relations are cause and effect, analogy, comparison, the organisation or classification of data.

There is one very interesting aspect to how Europeans often think about knowledge. It is expected to guide the way one looks at the world, providing one with a basis on which to act. Here, certainty and uncertainty become synonyms for whether or not one knows enough in order to proceed further – that is, to proceed with a conclusion about a situation, with what is the best action. Knowledge gives certainty, like an answer to a question. Except that we also know that answers are likely to open up more questions. A process that may dismay one in planning an event, drilling down through every solution to ever more problems to deal with, is also highly prized in pedagogy and research. Scholarly “doubt” is a virtuous uncertainty. Indeed, in respect of knowledge-relations and how they will be communicated, there is always a fine judgement to be made as to whether certainty or uncertainty is the greater good: either action or precaution may turn out to be the right course. The models and graphs of carbon emissions have become a dreadfully familiar case in point.7

Graphs demonstrate relations between variables that we are habituated to expressing in numerical form. They rest on measurements that allow certainties in the parameters of description. Whether one is talking of a percentage of particles in the air or of the precise grams of an ingredient in a medical prescription, measurements habitually reduce uncertainties of all kinds. The digital anthropologist Tone Walford (2021) has added a well-known rider to this from their time with scientific researchers and technicians at the Brazilian-based project Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA). The researchers were measuring a range of meteorological phenomena, from rainfall to carbon flux. The well-known rider is that “[t]hese researchers clearly held the phenomena they were studying to be independent of their practices of representation” (2021: 210, my emphasis). They knew their instruments could affect the readings – if a thermometer got too hot, then it would be recording its own as well as the ambient heat – but that could be taken into account.8 In other words, another layer of knowledge about the conditions of use would be added to compensate for uncertainty.

However, uncertainty never really disappeared. Take, for instance, hygrometers for measuring humidity. The hygrometer measures the humidity of the air through its [the air's] relation with a semiconductor, lithium chloride, expanding and contracting in response; that in turn is read against a scale – (intermittently) ten times a second – and through analogue-to-digital conversion turned into data. Yet the hovering uncertainty is how one knows that any specific instrument is accurate. The immediate answer for the Brazilian researchers would be by reference to Brazil's central calibration facility, itself ideally accredited through a chain of international calibrations.

Aside from all the challenges to using instruments in the forest, Walford was intrigued by the grounding fact that calibration processes themselves “generate uncertainty in the act of measurement” (2021: 213). So, even before being put to use, instruments must come with added knowledge about their particular performance. They carry with them an “uncertainty factor”, expressed by degree of deviation from the standard.9 But then there is the matter of communication. The uncertain relation between specification and use was a headache for one of the scientists in the calibration unit, “my biggest worry of all”, he said (Walford 2015: 71). For when it comes to reading the instrument, do researchers on the ground allow for the uncertainty factor or assume the numbers are exact?

The controversial “hockey stick” graph of global warming was first popularised in 1999 when “climate debates still turned on whether or not past records, present measurements and future predictions provided scientifically dependable evidence of natural variability or of unnatural anthropogenic carbon emission” (Crook 2024: 127). The uncertain relation here is that of the “human species to the earth”, as former US Vice President Al Gore stated in his vigorous campaign, known latterly as the Climate Reality Project. Tony Crook, an anthropologist writing on time, is drawn to Gore's depiction of centuries – we now know it is millennia – with little change evident, then an upward swing likened to the blade of an ice hockey stick. Change continues undetected in everyday life until a threshold is passed and a flood of changes happen all at once.

There is no need to mention the disputes that the graph generated, as well as the emergence of climate change deniers. Adopting the findings of the research behind it, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) entered into two decades of increasing, along every possible dimension, the amount of knowledge that might engender the kind of large-scale response needed.10 There have been advances, but in its eyes nowhere enough. Lack of response, as we now also know, is not alas because of lack of knowledge. Apart from the weight of inertia, the calibrated uncertainties that attend scientific findings get mistaken for ignorance, while the certainty of contrary convictions is not shaken by new knowledge when that knowledge appears simply as other people's purported certainties.

This leads one to think that perhaps too much expertise, being too certain in one's capacities, can sometimes stand in the way of response. For those with expert knowledge to convey, communication and the relations they entail seem key. One of Gore's visions for world communication was realised in the staging of the biggest twenty-four-hour media event that had ever been held, Live Earth 2007. Beamed from seven continents, before an audience of more than a million and with 2 billion viewers, “the live flow of digital signals, and of relations, were intended to generate a new phase of life for . . . planet earth” (Crook 2024: 137), to tip the world into a new responsiveness, itself like the upward turn of the hockey stick. Yet this microcosm of the technical expertise that “the world” was able to marshal for the climate change campaign did not have the institutional push behind it to continue on that upward trajectory.11 In more gloomy moments, I wonder if the very facility to produce a global media show, almost too easy an accomplishment, did not reduce it to a proxy for the action being called for. Not enough uncertainty about what sharing information can and cannot do? Did “communication” get in the way of building other kinds of relations? – and the institutions needed to sustain them?

In sum, when knowledge-relations turn on certainty and uncertainty, the ambiguity of the relation sticks to everything like Midas's gold – not to speak of vested interests in what one knows for certain and what not. Let me turn to a powerful account of the institutionalisation of one set of uncertain relations. At least the ethnographer's courage raises the spirit.

Relations of uncertainty in ethnographic writing

I have moved from observing some general qualities of relations as social interaction, and the uncertainties they introduce, to a glimpse into the involuted world of present-day crises, where what we do with knowledge generates fresh grounds of doubt. With these two dimensions in mind, let us ponder on how ethnographers have dealt with uncertainty through the relations they make. Walford (2021: 214) puts into words what we all know: “Ethnography is a relation . . . [between research and writing], and as such it makes other relations possible”. We had moved, too, from focusing mainly on interpersonal relations to thinking about conceptual or knowledge-relations. It is predominantly knowledge-relations that Suzana Sawyer (2022: 7) invokes when, in The Small Matter of Suing Chevron, she talks of “the relational compositions through which truths are brought forth”. This is the sense in which anthropological ethnographers often refer to their writings as relational accounts.

However, at this particular moment, Sawyer is referring not to her own description but to what she calls crude's – that is, crude oil's – valence of truths.12 Above all is the way legal truths – the findings of certain US and international courts – based on legal facts and legal principles vindicated the oil giant Chevron's refusal to submit to a claim from a court in Ecuador. The case that the Ecuadorian court brought against Chevron was for enduring environmental contamination.13 Sawyer wishes to show the relations at issue: “the complexity of the relationally contingent, sociomaterial compositions that produced legal truth” (2022: 8). But she confessed herself “befuddled by the amount of energy and concerted effort that [Chevron's] scientists and lawyers had expended to demonstrate whether crude oil was, or was not, toxic” (2022: 19). Her uncertainty about trusting her senses (“of course crude oil is toxic”) pushed her into a novel exposition.

The nature of US legal reasoning and judicial fact-finding, she argues, cut through the kind of enquiry that the court in Ecuador had mounted. The latter aimed not at singular truths but at grasping a complex reality for establishing responsibility, and the Ecuadorian court addressed disease aetiology, business deals, local stories, sensory perception, hydrocarbon chemistry. On each of these, one by one, Chevron's lawyers were able to show that the evidence was indeterminate, a matter of interpretation or subjective judgement. They made counter-accusations of corruption: they claimed that the Ecuadorian rulings were based on fraudulent linkages of evidence. And of all the relations thereby dismissed as sham, where one might have expected most agreement lay disagreement too. “Far from providing certainty, the chemistry of oil proved deeply contentious” (2022: 37). The relations that chemical knowledge held in place were not certain. “[T]he relative capacity of an element to connect, react, or meld – or to disavow or repel connection – is not static or stable but rather is ever contingent on milieu. It reflects at its core a purely relational motive force” (Sawyer 2022: 13).

Crude oil is, Sawyer remarks (2022: 68), “a complex brew of thousands of different hydrocarbon compounds”. Basically, measures of toxicity depend on determining relations between numerous factors, inviting different assessments of certainty in determining toxic risk. Where the Ecuadorian judge used a measurement of total petroleum hydrocarbons present in the soil, in the United States it had long been argued that the best measures of petroleum toxicity belonged to certain trace elements, ones that would eventually evaporate and no longer be found even if hydrocarbons were still present.

While institutions clearly have their own interests, as in rendering apparent certainties (such as the inadequacy of post-extraction clean-up) uncertain (were the residues really toxic or not?), the ethnographer's stance is not that of the usual Chevron critic. Her focus is on how the combinatorial power of law, science, and oil created worlds of greater or lesser plausibility – and on both sides. But from where would her language of description come? How to approach arguments when they are indeed compositions? And when they have involved a huge outpouring of data – over twenty-five years of litigation – into the behaviour of crude oil, which now seems obvious in its tenacity, now eludes comprehension, now presents aspects that occlude others? She found her language of description in what is known of hydrocarbon chemistry itself, and what is known is that it is not one thing.14

While the chemistry belongs generally to the bonding and de-bonding of subatomic particles, and the changing capacities that result, a brief example illustrates her method: the durability of benzene. Benzene is “dramatically more stable and potent” than its compound would suggest (Sawyer 2022: 217). This is because some of its bonds are formed over the expanse of a molecule instead of just between atoms, in a manner known in organic chemistry as “delocalized stability”.15 “Delocalized stability refers to a reactive association where electrons disassociate from their origin-atom orbital and consort in a new orbital . . . [that] spans the entire molecular composition” (2022: 214). She turns benzene's particular molecular qualities into an analytical model for the contrasting legal determinations. On the Ecuadorian side, what stabilised the many factors into a legal synthesis (leading to the judgement that Chevron had not properly cleaned up after itself) was the judge's grappling with an equivocal, dispersed phenomenon that could not be reduced to isolatable events. Chevron's transgression was delocalised in this sense, occurring across a complex and ultimately indeterminate whole. The evidence of contamination in several different registers seemed unassailable. On Chevron's side, however, the stability of its counter-claim rested on the de-localising ability to repeatedly detach expert analyses from their original locations, raising what therefore seemed a multitude of individual queries. These formed cohesive bonds with one another under the ubiquitous mantra of corruption: equivocations in the Ecuadorians’ ruling could be melded together as signs of “a new unshakeable relational configuration” (2022: 294), namely the conspiracy and racketeering of which they were accused.

What I take away from this piece of ethnographic writing is the transformation of the writer's initial uncertainty (her being befuddled) into analysis. She is describing how diverse registers of certainty and uncertainty – understood as distinct ways of making knowledge – are produced in contexts that can be specified in the account with considerable precision. Beyond the different interests of the actors in this long saga of litigation – five years of judicial inspections in the Ecuador rainforest, two thousand Chevron lawyers – there are observations to be made of the knowledge-relations themselves. Arguments, facts, truth-telling, and so forth, all come out of and into relations with one another and work their own effects.

Relations of uncertainty in fieldwork encounters

The vast amount of information that it was technologically feasible to assemble over the course of the lawsuits had to be distilled or reduced for there to be any judicial outcome, but of course the point holds more generally. Making particular kinds of knowledge out of information is one means of reduction, although that in turn adds its own layers to whatever is being communicated. Anthropological knowledge is no exception. But sometimes there are situations where one wants to stand back, in a deliberate effort at reticence, in order to keep conceptual frameworks open. Indeed, an ethnographic fieldworker might try to get away from any straightforward concept of knowledge in getting to grips with their interlocutors’ world. One stance to take is that of deliberately ‘not knowing’, at once keeping ‘knowing’ in view and suspending pre-existing claims as to how it would appear (de la Cadena 2021). What does such a drawing-back do to the notion of uncertainty?

“What do you do”, Marisol de la Cadena herself asks (2021: 248), “when you ask what ‘something’ is, and the response is that an answer cannot be provided because the answer would not be that ‘something’?” Think of that original question: are you dead or alive? The question is an address to a world that is not using the language of knowledge in the way most Europeans would recognise. One route to interpretation lies perhaps in the consequence of the question – how others react to it. To return to interpersonal relations is not to diminish a sense of social complexity but simply to note the mode through which complexity is registered. If we were back in the realm of interpersonal relations, then, and if this were old Melanesia, we would be supposing a world of persons and metapersons, seen and unseen, alive and dead, friend and enemy, kin and nonkin, human and other-than-human, a world in which nothing moves that is not caused by personal agency. To repeat, what of uncertainty here, then?

Uncertainty is everywhere! The agency of persons and metapersons is chronically unpredictable insofar as relations of cause and effect fall not within the purview of knowledge, which at least theoretically can be made more or less certain, but rather within that of intention and disposition, the bestowal of ill favour or fortune, curse or blessing, harms and flourishings in diverse forms. People take steps to reduce or channel such rampant possibilities, and through all kinds of divinatory or omen-taking practices try to work out whose intentions might have led to particular events or anticipate what might happen from the dispositions of those they encounter. But then one never knows who or what one has encountered until afterwards, once the encounter has revealed its character. How did the person behave? What was the outcome of one's own action? Did calamity or fortune follow?

That said, there is an interesting brake on such a proliferation of uncertainties: the opacity Melanesian people ascribe to one another's minds.16 Opacity is certain. The idea that one cannot know what is going on in someone else's mind is a kind of institutionalised reticence or restraint,17 even akin to respect on occasion. One result is that persons are not constantly turning thoughts into words that then circulate to their own good or ill effect. People exercise their social intelligence, to recall Goody, by other means.18 Of course, people's agnosticism in this regard may well be a locus of uncertainty for the fieldworker who wants to know what they think of one another: “I can't see into her mind!” For no-one is responsible for another's intentions; you do not speak on another's behalf.19 Consider one of my own encounters in Papua New Guinea. Anxious and puzzled about actions I could not understand, indeed which troubled me, on the part of someone whom I thought I knew well, I quizzed the person's father. I thought the parent would come up with an explanation or some kind of accounting for his child. Not so. “Oh”, the father said, “he tricked you, did he? He tricks us too”.

The Melanesianist Rupert Stasch (2008) has been prominent among writers on the opacity of mind. His ethnography of the Korowai of West Papua (2009) turns on the many ways in which Korowai people make the otherness or strangeness of persons to one another the basis of their interrelations. One might have thought that the small communities that Korowai form, everyone addressable by a kin term, would lead them to emphasise bonds of commonality. Far from it; they maintain their distance from one another, respect the otherness of the persons they interact with, and, as Stasch puts it, create relations across boundaries.

This holds in what English-speakers would regard as the most intimate of relationships. Much of Korowai activity is oriented towards regeneration, to the fact that children are replacements of their parents. Children are the very purpose of relations, he says (2009: 141). Yet, their coming into the world is a time of maximum uncertainty. Repelled by the sight, people regard a newborn as a disgusting, demonic freak. It is not human. Only gradually does it acquire a human body, and as gradually acquire relations. Korowai say that, until it creates them through its interactions, an infant has no relatives. Parents in turn are said to feel nothing at the outset. “Because there is such a vacuum of felt belonging toward a newborn as a physical organism, acts of care that people do perform for it have extraordinary relational force” (2009: 152). The first gestures of care thus elicit courage and commitment on the parent's part. As mothers hold and nurse the tiny creature, they explicitly connect their growing love with the baby's bodily responsiveness to them. Attachment grows so deep that mothers who later lose a child are thrown into extravagant expressions of bereavement. This is of a piece with the general fact that relations are known through interactions, such that an event is the truth of a bond: “Korowai know relations by events, and they search for relational meanings in events” (2009: 7).

Stasch himself does not thematise uncertainty. Rather, the opacity of minds in Korowai is seen to belong to a wider ethos of autonomy and to the “strongly held notion that persons are irreducibly separate in their thoughts and desires” (2009: 179). This is shown, too, in bodily contact: “Korowai adults are wary of casual touch or clasping. Thus, the idea of ‘holding’ another person is all the more forceful as a willed assertion of relatedness” (2009: 132). At the same time, appearances are deceptive. People are forever open “to the possibility that a mundane appearance of bodily health and human conviviality could be the deceptive mask over an underlying reality of furtive, destructive witchcraft” (2009: 215).20

Certainty and uncertainty was not the register, then, in which Stasch was writing, although he gives a detailed account of people who have turned the way relations are made in the face of unpredictability, and the danger that hovers with it, into a social art. Opacity of mind does not lead to indifference; rather, it draws people to ponder on others’ hidden intentions. To unpredictability in what others will do and in what they actually are – “Are you dead or alive?” – Korowai seem to have added a poignancy to the very notion of otherness. Separation at the heart of relating becomes an ethos to be actively maintained. It is one that offers the anthropologist a vivid if very particular reading of uncertain relations.

Coda: Thinking uncertainty through relations

I hope a sense of the intriguing terrain that the Congress convenors laid out has emerged from some of the diverse possibilities sketched here. The pair, interpersonal relations on the one hand and epistemic or conceptual knowledge-relations on the other, winks in and out of our purview in different ways. The two also invite us, as European scholars, to suspend some of our certainties on occasion or, on other occasions, lay out that relation – between certainty and uncertainty – to see what it is doing in our narratives.

I end with a piece of American – and international – folklore, about a non-existent object that became for a while an uncertain object. The point is that, as an uncertain object, it mobilised enough relations, among persons and between bits of knowledge, to be a presence in the public mind, and indeed an expense on the public purse, for many years. The uncertainty lay in its relationship to what was witnessed.

I refer to flying saucers and a set of anthropological musings on them. Insofar as they were taken as harbingers of extra-terrestrial life, Tim Jenkins (2022) finds their antecedents in early twentieth century spiritualism, rejuvenated by the military-industrial developments of the Second World War, and given a visible presence in the post-war activities of the US Air Force. As a result, he says, the “form in which life elsewhere was conceived was the product of an organisation based on advanced technology crossed with a situation of high threat to home security” (2022: 128).21 The 1950s was a time when home radar systems were being rolled out across the United States, and among all the identified flying objects (including alien aircraft) there emerged – one might have predicted! – unidentified flying objects, UFOs.

This is not to launch into another arena (see Battaglia 2005). I just wanted to end by quoting Jenkins's own closing words for what they say about uncertainty, and the relations that sustain it. You can hear his own uncertainty too.

An unprovable idea – the flying saucer – is transitory and yet has enduring and widespread effects, remaining curiously active, joining different times and human groups, and allowing new things to emerge, things which cannot be anticipated in advance. . . . We are, in short, dealing in signs (for want of a better term) that lead neither exactly to thought nor to action, and seeking to account for the way that humans produce “life” outside their powers of representation. (Jenkins 2022: 136)

Acknowledgements

This presentation was written while I was involved in a project, “Time and the ethnographic horizon in moments of crises”, funded at St Andrews University by the International Balzan Foundation; my manifold thanks to the Deputy Director, Tony Crook. Let me also express my gratitude to the convenors of the SIEF Congress for mounting such a stimulating occasion.

Notes

Professor Strathern delivered this lecture on Wednesday, 7 June 2023 in Brno, Czech Republic. It was the Keynote address to the 16th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF). The Congress theme was: “Living Uncertainty” (for details see: https://www.siefhome.org/congresses/sief2023/). To preserve something of the informal tenor of the original, it has been only lightly edited for publication.

1

Haudricourt tells the story of one of his assistants. A sailor on a cargo ship, he had noticed someone staring at him who resembled a long-lost cousin, presumed dead, and whispered in the man's language; Haudricourt surmises that the latter was staring because he too had recognised a relative.

2

Goody was my doctoral supervisor in Cambridge in the 1960s.

3

Gonja go out of their way to reduce uncertainty (ambiguity) in the master-apprentice relationship. A father does not teach his son but hands him over to a male kinsman or acquaintance, so the relationship is not affected by the intimacy of familial ties (Goody 1978: 40–41).

4

It is specifically social not logical reasoning (see Goody 1995: 29).

5

Anticipation of another's reactions creates (brings into being) a difference between actors insofar as it positions or puts in place – precisely – their respective positionalities (places them with respect to one another). This is an emergent social interaction, regardless of any prior recognition of difference.

6

After the rather differently worded argument by David Good (1995: 140), who comments on the crucial role of social relations. See Good (1995: 142–143) on uncertainty and the constant negotiations implied by interaction, anticipation being an ever-moving horizon.

7

They may lead to action (the certain knowledge of the relation between carbon emissions and global warming / the precautionary principle that it is better to act before waiting on granular demonstrations that provide proof) or inaction (we cannot do anything to avoid the fate of global warming / we do not know enough yet in order to act).

8

As a matter of epistemology, not ontology, she remarks. Her concern in this piece is with how as a fieldworker she can remain true to her interlocutors, despite current assumptions that “practices of measuring, counting, and numbering actually have a hand in sculpting and shaping the worlds that they measure, count, and number” (Walford 2021: 209), as when, for example, continuous phenomena are turned into discontinuous units.

9

The development of “absolute standards” has its own history, as she recounts (Walford 2015). She comments on the relation between singularity and ubiquity: the absolute standard registered at one ultimate location also has to be interchangeable with innumerable instantiations of itself. At the same time every instantiation, including during the calibration process as such, raises questions of error and uncertainty (2015: 69).

10

Crook (2024: 130) observes that, for Gore, the hockey stick pattern is repeated in diverse registers (global warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide, species extinction,human population growth), which he identified as indicating relations of interdependency.

11

Gore himself was very conscious of the shape of political process, and its precipitation of action, being hopeful that a step-change in people's thinking would suddenly take off. Live Earth would create the “tipping point”, through a massive effort at public education, which would move the world's governments to take action.

12

“Valence” speaks “of a relationally constitutive reality in which entities are never singular or fixed but rather always emergences of collective composition” (Sawyer 2022: 13).

13

Suing Texaco-Chevron for $9.5 billion took the Ecuadorian court eight years of work, a monumental feat. Chevron's defence was carried from a US district court and a US court of appeals to the Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The tongue-in-cheek “small matter” refers, among other things, to the difference that drilling down into the details can make (see Sawyer 2022: 8).

14

She organises the narrative through her understandings of certain chemical interactions, mediations and tenacities of being: “dissociating bonds”, “spectral radicals.” and “delocalized stabilities”. Sawyer equipped herself to comprehend the complex chemistry of contamination, and then found possibilities for analytical re-description in the verbal/conceptual models by which people describe molecular processes. This training also gave her the confidence to assert that the adverse verdicts on the Ecuadorian rulings were not inevitable (e.g., Sawyer 2022: 262–263).

15

Sawyer explains (2022: 213): electrons are the subatomic particles essential for forming bonds, as when two atoms share an electron. A more complicated but ubiquitous bond, crucial to the biochemistry of all life forms, comes from the disassociation and re-association that occurs when electrons in certain orbitals “sever their allegiance to a singular atom and commit their obligation to the molecule as a whole” (2022: 217). The new orbitals have a stability and intensity that far exceed the capacities of the constitutive elements. Benzene is an exemplar.

16

Robbins and Rumsey (2008); see Buitron and Steinmüller (2021) for a recent reappraisal of anthropological interest in the topic.

17

As Chao (2022: 101) describes the deliberate ethos of “restrained care” with which Marind people attend to sago palms without violating “the autonomy of plant organisms”.

18

On the one hand, in many situations, to speak “words” is to make an issue (trouble, complaint) of something; on the other hand, in the Euro-American view, the “mind” as the seat of consciousness (see Strathern 2020: 66–69) is displaced by other registers that compel reactions, such as what is inside / outside a person.

19

These could almost be Stasch's words (2008: 449) [see below].

20

Korowai live in constant fear of witch attacks. Stressing a child's otherness, a parent may call him or her “a little witch”. “Children are irreducible others, not just when feared as monsters [at birth], but also when most loved as objects of attachment” (Stasch 2009: 169).

21

From documentation dated to 1947–53, “flying saucers or UFOs are a product of the constellation of various military, industrial, technological, and scientific interests of the time, and [interplanetary] life elsewhere takes this form and no other because of the site of its production” (Jenkins 2022: 130).

References

  • Battaglia, Debbora 2005: Insiders’ Voices in Outer Spaces. In: Debbora Battaglia (ed.), E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspacesg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 137.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Buitron, Natalia & Hans Steinmüller 2021: Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility. Ethnos 88(4): 677701, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Chao, Sophie 2022: In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Crook, Tony 2024: Al Gore's Horizons, Hockey Sticks, Holograms and Hope: Plotting Nature and Time in a Crisis. In: Tony Crook & Marilyn Strathern (eds.), Crises in Time: Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 121145.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • De la Cadena, Marisol 2021: Not Knowing: In the Presence of . . . In: Andrea Ballestero & Brit Ross Winthereik (eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 246256.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Good, David 1995: When Does Foresight End and Hindsight Begin? In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139150.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goody, Esther N. 1978: Towards a Theory of Questions. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1743.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goody, Esther N. 1995: Introduction: Some Implications of a Social Origin of Intelligence. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Haraway, Donna 2003: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

  • Haudricourt, André, 1964: Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l'igname: L'origine des clones et des clans. [Nature and culture in the yam civilisation: The origin of clones and clans]. L'Homme 4(1): 93104, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/hom.1964.366613.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jenkins, Timothy 2022: The Role of Unproved Ideas in the Production of Knowledge: A Case Study. In: David N. Gellner & Dolores P Martinez (eds.) Re-creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination. London: Routledge, 126137.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pina-Cabral, João de 2017: World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: HAU Books.

  • Robbins, Joel & Alan Rumsey 2008: Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and Opacity of Other Minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2): 407420, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0005.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sawyer, Suzana 2022: The Small Matter of Suing Chevron. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Stasch, Rupert 2008: Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology, Anthropological Quarterly 81(2): 443453, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0009.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stasch, Rupert 2009: Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Strathern, Marilyn 2020: Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Tsing, Anna 2012: On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales. Common Knowledge 18(3): 505524, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1630424.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Wagner, Roy 2001: An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walford, Antonia 2015: Double Standards: Examples and Exceptions in Scientific Metrological Practices in Brazil. JRAI 21(S1): S6477, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12166.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walford, Antonia 2021: Analogy. In: Andrea Ballestero & Brit Ross Winthereik (eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 209218.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

Contributor Notes

Marilyn Strathern is an Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. Her research career began with work on kinship and gender relations, with a Melanesian emphasis, and she is best known for The Gender of the Gift (1988). She subsequently pursued anthropological approaches to assisted conception, intellectual property, and audit cultures. While a recent book is Relations: An Anthropological Account (2020), her most sustained address to uncertainty (apropos the comparative method) is to be found in Partial Connections (1991). Email: ms10026@cam.ac.uk; ORCID: 0000-0003-2004-1902.

  • Collapse
  • Expand
  • Battaglia, Debbora 2005: Insiders’ Voices in Outer Spaces. In: Debbora Battaglia (ed.), E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspacesg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 137.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Buitron, Natalia & Hans Steinmüller 2021: Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility. Ethnos 88(4): 677701, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.2007154.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Chao, Sophie 2022: In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Crook, Tony 2024: Al Gore's Horizons, Hockey Sticks, Holograms and Hope: Plotting Nature and Time in a Crisis. In: Tony Crook & Marilyn Strathern (eds.), Crises in Time: Ethnographic Horizons in Amazonia and Melanesia. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 121145.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • De la Cadena, Marisol 2021: Not Knowing: In the Presence of . . . In: Andrea Ballestero & Brit Ross Winthereik (eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 246256.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Good, David 1995: When Does Foresight End and Hindsight Begin? In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139150.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goody, Esther N. 1978: Towards a Theory of Questions. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1743.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goody, Esther N. 1995: Introduction: Some Implications of a Social Origin of Intelligence. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Haraway, Donna 2003: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

  • Haudricourt, André, 1964: Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l'igname: L'origine des clones et des clans. [Nature and culture in the yam civilisation: The origin of clones and clans]. L'Homme 4(1): 93104, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/hom.1964.366613.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jenkins, Timothy 2022: The Role of Unproved Ideas in the Production of Knowledge: A Case Study. In: David N. Gellner & Dolores P Martinez (eds.) Re-creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination. London: Routledge, 126137.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pina-Cabral, João de 2017: World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: HAU Books.

  • Robbins, Joel & Alan Rumsey 2008: Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and Opacity of Other Minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2): 407420, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0005.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sawyer, Suzana 2022: The Small Matter of Suing Chevron. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Stasch, Rupert 2008: Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology, Anthropological Quarterly 81(2): 443453, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0009.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stasch, Rupert 2009: Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Strathern, Marilyn 2020: Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Tsing, Anna 2012: On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales. Common Knowledge 18(3): 505524, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1630424.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Wagner, Roy 2001: An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walford, Antonia 2015: Double Standards: Examples and Exceptions in Scientific Metrological Practices in Brazil. JRAI 21(S1): S6477, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12166.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walford, Antonia 2021: Analogy. In: Andrea Ballestero & Brit Ross Winthereik (eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 209218.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 0 0 0
Full Text Views 508 508 508
PDF Downloads 263 263 263