2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 23–37 SPECIAL SECTION Anthropological reasoning Some threads of thought Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge The interventionist properties of description are considered in relation to two strands of thinking, each as evidently “outside” anthropology as “inside.” In terms of concept formation, the nature–culture dyad seems forever to be subject to critique, reformulation, and re-critique; examples from current debate over clinical practices in South America make the point. In terms of engagement with “human subjects,” anthropology has been as much heir to regimes of audit and self-scrutiny as it has shown their limits; the reflexivity now routine in ethnographic inquiry is shown up in approaches to present-day health policies for Aboriginal people in Australia. Both arenas (nature–culture/self-scrutiny) have contributed at once to anthropology’s self-formation and to the kind of knowledge it makes more widely visible. Both were also topics of huge interest to the European Enlightenment. A suggestion is proffered about the outlines of a newly apparent object of knowledge then, which could have been something of a driver, and seems to have been a driver of anthropological reasoning ever since. Keywords: health interventions, relations, nature–culture, self-scrutiny, the Enlightenment Prologue Given the ambition of this collection to think about anthropology’s world, its con- ditions of possibility, and the clues to that contained in what counts as interventions in it, we may wonder about the discipline’s relational practices. What, for instance, might be learned from colleagues? Anthropologists’ descriptions of professionals whose very job it is to make interventions in people’s lives reflect back on their an- thropology in interesting ways. Indeed, an ethnographer who worked with a com- munity of health professionals in Australia’s Northern Territory puts into words something akin to the position I wish to take here. Where knowing interventions This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Marilyn Strathern. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.003 Marilyn Strathern 24 in the world of affairs rest on describing what is happening, then description itself is an intervention.1 Medicine has always been an arena in which interventions are deliberate, aimed to be effective and to have benign outcomes. Given the endemic ill health of the lo- cal Aboriginal population, Territory Health Services address an ever-deteriorating situation with ever more effort at intervening. They apply a huge organizational apparatus, the need to coordinate services proliferating in schemes for “collabo- ration, cooperation, networking, team-building, [and] information sharing” (Lea 2008: 63). Yet the more the administration tries, the more apparatus is needed: the greater coordination to which the administration aspires, the greater fragmenta- tion it sees.2 This underwrites a bureaucratic project. People wanting to deliver care do their best by the systems of organization that also organize them: intervention through organizational means implies making the organization work.3 One means is through self-description. The organization keeps detailed track of itself, and we should not be surprised to find auditing procedures addressed not only to the outcomes for the health of the population but also to the officials’ orga- nizational effectiveness as service-providers. Implementation plans are rolled out with performance indicators, and targets are given numerical thresholds, alongside annual reports, data summaries, program reviews, workshop recommendations, and so on. An inordinate amount of time, many complain, is taken up with pa- perwork: that is, with describing what is happening. Yet describing bureaucratic performance itself is seen as a precondition to changing things.4 At the end of every day of their exhausting induction “in the field,” new recruits are presented with evaluation sheets (Lea 2008: 87). Regardless of any external monitoring, and al- ways working to improve the program, the organizers themselves beg for feedback 1. The status of the activity of “description” is key here, and would be central to any com- parison with (say) Holbraad’s (2008, 2009) work on the inventive definitions or “infini- tions” that characterize Cuban diviners’ pronouncements; these are imagined not as claims about the world but as ontological interferences in it. 2. Lea describes how “coordination” takes on a social life of its own, producing organiza- tional complexes that succeed in the “unintended consequence of pinpointing the need for more effective coordination” (2008: 63). I do not do justice here to Lea’s sympathetic rendering of bureaucratic lives (see further Strathern 2014a). 3. All the workshops, fact-finding missions, and health instruction programs which the health officers try to bring to the local population rest on the conviction that “better quality and more accurate information will eventually become better self-understand- ing for the Aborigines” (Lea 2008: 121). By the same token, the better the data are col- lected and analyzed, the nearer the bureaucrats will be to implementing the “helping state.” Welfare bureaucracies attempt to change the world by orienting the “bureau- cratic inhabitant so that she or he conceptualizes the world in terms of reform and intervention” (ibid.: 225). Is this in part the academization of bureaucracy? 4. In which the reviewers and reviewed concur. Added to anxiety about the health work- ers’ own efforts to improve things for the local population was a quite different set of anxieties about the ethics of intervention: in this particular context, health workers expressed anxiety about causing collateral damage to indigenous culture. 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 23–37 25 Anthropological reasoning from those they have been inducting on the way they have carried out their job (of induction). This is the world in which the anthropologist also lives. Lea minces no words about the liberal rationalism that brings bureaucrats and anthropologists into proximity; rather than simply chiding bureaucratized perceptions for their limi- tations, anthropologists might also want “to comprehend the cultural habits we share with their formulators” (ibid.: 234). What is interesting in Lea’s rehearsal of this stance, which has been the subject of much debate in the discipline at large (“trying to make sense of people whose job it is to produce sense,” as she puts it [ibid.]), is her emphasis on the task of description. “We” anthropologists “are en- snared by the same belief in the power of representation to bring the misconcep- tions of others to correcting light”’ (ibid.). Her monograph concludes that, for all the problems there are, it can be liberating to gain some sense of the lived-in, externally driven and consensual limits on our own agency. Or at least that is my hope, a hope which is the ultimate honouring of bureaucratic magic and the faith it sustains in the power of description to amend conceptualizations of how the world “really is,” and with that improved perception to somehow yield a better outcome. (Lea 2008: 237) To begin with this thoroughly conflicted situation dispenses with the thought that interventions are conflict-free. Yet I have to share the hope that Lea expresses. For someone whose tools of work include making descriptions, it is close to the hope that anthropologists responding to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have powerfully expressed as a matter of retooling (Riles, Miyazaki, and Genda 2012). You don’t abandon your tools: you go back to the tools you already have and reconstruct them according to the current situation. But in the case of those anthropologists dealing with the aftermath of the natural disasters in Japan, you do it with the professionals.5 In a commentary on the Australian material, and with Graeber’s (this volume) contribution in mind, Salmond (pers. comm.)6 poses a similar relational question, this time with respect to anthropologists/bureaucrats and the subjects of their inquiries. There are other ways of interacting, other forms of attentiveness, that might make of the latter something more than a means for im- proving the internal processes of the former. Of course. Nonetheless, just how rela- tions themselves come into focus as an object of knowledge is of moment in itself. 5. The authors’ disciplines cover anthropology, law, and labor economics. I am very grate- ful to them for permission to cite this work, intended for Japanese professionals—from one set of professionals to another—as yet unpublished in English. “Retooling” is not to be taken lightly, and in evoking a collaborative endpoint Riles (2013) lays out some of the interpersonal and epistemic complexities of this instance. 6. She trenchantly turns the critique of bureaucrats’ concerns with their own self-elab- oration back on anthropology itself, a stance with which Lea would sympathize. I am grateful for permission to cite her thoughtful and illuminating comments, which come from a review for Hau that she de-anonymized. Let me add here that I am at the same time grateful to the several anonymous reviewers of the draft, some of whose words I have also borrowed. 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 23–37 Marilyn Strathern 26 Inside and outside the discipline In the invitation to pursue threads of thought across material that lies as much out- side anthropology as within it, what strength might a thread have? Rather than as a road to go down or rope to hang onto, and without the regular patterning of warp and weft, I take a thread to be something that can be caught, both caught hold of and getting itself caught onto what is in its vicinity. Although going somewhere be- cause it is coming from somewhere, a thread gains what striated substance it has in becoming entangled with other threads just as (at the moment when) the entangle- ments (knots) seem to make further tracing impossible.