Property, Substance, and Effect

Description

In engaging essays, celebrated anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reflects on the complexities of social life. Property, Substance, and Effect draws on Marilyn Strathern’s longstanding interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations are brought into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge that these essays bring together.
Twenty years have not diminished the interest in the book’s opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist’s ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Whether one lives in Papua New Guinea or Great Britain, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for reflection—and for the kind of lateral reflection afforded through the “ethnographic effect.” Marilyn Strathern is professor emeritus of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of many books, including Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life, also published by HAU Books. 

Preface
CHAPTER 1
The Ethnographic Effect
PART I
EFFECTS
CHAPTER 2
Pre-figured Features
CHAPTER 3
The Aesthetics of Substance
CHAPTER 4
Refusing Information
PART II
PROPERTIES
CHAPTER  5
New Economic Forms: A Report
CHAPTER 6
The New Modernities
CHAPTER 7
Divisions of Interest and Languages of Ownership
PART III
SUBSTANCES
CHAPTER  8
Potential Property: Intellectual Rights and Property in Persons
CHAPTER 9
What is Intellectual Property After?
CHAPTER 10
Puzzles of Scale
 
CHAPTER I CONCLUDED
The Ethnographic Effect II
Notes
Bibliography