Janet Carsten

About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond

1. Introduction Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones 2. Houses and hierarchies in island Southeast Asia Roxana Waterson 3. The resurrection of the house amongst the Zafimaniry of Madagascar Maurice Bloch 4. The hearth-group, the conjugal couple and the symbolism of the rice meal among the Kelabit of Sarawak Monica Janowski 5. Houses in Langkawi: stable structures or mobile homes? Janet Carsten 6. Having your house and eating it: houses and siblings in Ara, South Sulawesi Thomas Gibson 7. The Lio house: building, category, idea, value Signe Howell 8. Houses and hierarchy: the view from a South Moluccan society Susan McKinnon 9. Houses, places and people: community and continuity in Guiana Peter Riviere 10. The houses of Mebengokre (Kayapo) of Central Brazil: a new door to their social organization Vanessa Lea 11. Inside-out and back-to-front: the Maloca and the house in northwest Amazonia Stephen Hugh-Jones.

Inside-out and back-to-front: the androgynous house in Northwest Amazonia

I n recent years it has become increasingly evident that the small, fragmented tribes of Amazonian ethnography, twin products of colonial genocide and academic classificatory ethnogenesis, are poor guides for understanding an area once integrated by complex regional systems. If anthropologists have long recognized a fundamental unity beneath the manifest linguistic and cultural diversity of Amazonia, progress towards synthesis has been relatively slow. In studies of kinship, progress has often been hampered by the use of outmoded and alien theoretical models which delimit an artificially narrow field of study and square uneasily with local idioms. Although there are a number of publications on architectural and spatial symbolism in different parts of lowland South America, many treat architecture as a sphere of analysis relatively independent from kinship and social structure. In this chapter I want to extend previous explorations of the significance of Northwest Amazonian architecture in a new direction by suggesting that their communal longhouses provide the eastern Tukanoan-speaking peoples with a way of conceptualizing their own social structure, one which is misrepresented and distorted when translated as unilineal descent. At the same time, I shall examine whether such native idioms are usefully included under Levi-Strausss (1983a, 1987) general rubric of ‘house societies’. My argument can be summarized as follows. Tukanoan social structure has typically been characterized in terms of patrilineal descent, virilocal residence, symmetric alliance, and a Dravidian relationship terminology, and described as an open-ended social system made up of a number of intermarrying exogamous language groups each internally divided into sets of ranked clans.

Introduction: blood will out

What is blood? The many meanings of blood vividly attest to its polyvalent qualities and its unusual capacity for accruing layers of symbolic resonance. Life and death; nurturance and violence; connection and exclusion; kinship and sacrifice – the associations multiply, flowing between domains in a quite uncontainable manner. Whether expressed in the rhetoric of familial, racial, ethnic, or national exclusion, or in calls to violent action, idioms of blood often have exceptional emotional force. Drawing together the historical and ethnographic case studies presented in this volume – from the literal presence of blood in spaces of blood donation to the metaphorical deployment of sanguinary idioms in depictions of the economy – this introduction examines bloods special qualities as bodily substance, material, and metaphor. In sketching out a ‘theory of blood’, it suggests why such a comparative undertaking might be of value.

What kinship does—and how

Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

‘Searching for the truth’: tracing the moral properties of blood in Malaysian clinical pathology labs

This paper begins with a remarkable moment in contemporary Malaysian politics when a contested blood sample of the leader of the opposition was claimed by some as having the capacity to ‘reveal the truth’ about his character. What is it about blood that gives it this iconic status? Drawing on research carried out in hospital clinical pathology labs and blood banks in Penang, the paper shows how blood samples, far from being detached from persons, may accrue layers of meaning as they travel round the lab. This occurs partly through the special properties of blood, and partly through the socially embedded interventions of laboratory staff. Tracing the social life of blood also allows us to grasp how the separation between domains of social life, which is fundamental to an ideology of modernity, must be laboriously achieved, and can often be only precariously maintained. In the case of blood, however, the stakes may be unusually high when the boundaries between, for example, biomedicine and politics or kinship become over-permeable or threaten to collapse.

‘Searching for the truth’: tracing the moral properties of blood in Malaysian clinical pathology labs: ‘Searching for the truth’

This paper begins with a remarkable moment in contemporary Malaysian politics when a contested blood sample of the leader of the opposition was claimed by some as having the capacity to ‘reveal the truth’ about his character. What is it about blood that gives it this iconic status? Drawing on research carried out in hospital clinical pathology labs and blood banks in Penang, the paper shows how blood samples, far from being detached from persons, may accrue layers of meaning as they travel round the lab. This occurs partly through the special properties of blood, and partly through the socially embedded interventions of laboratory staff. Tracing the social life of blood also allows us to grasp how the separation between domains of social life, which is fundamental to an ideology of modernity, must be laboriously achieved, and can often be only precariously maintained. In the case of blood, however, the stakes may be unusually high when the boundaries between, for example, biomedicine and politics or kinship become over-permeable or threaten to collapse.

Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows

This article begins with a remarkable moment in contemporary Malaysian politics when a contested blood sample of the leader of the opposition was claimed by some as having the capacity to ‘reveal the truth’ about his character. What is it about blood that gives it this iconic status? Drawing on research in hospital clinical pathology labs and blood banks in Penang, the article shows how blood samples, far from being detached from persons, may accrue layers of meaning as they travel round the lab. This occurs partly through the special properties of blood, and partly through the socially embedded interventions of laboratory staff. Tracing the social life of blood also allows us to grasp how the separations between domains of social life, which is fundamental to an ideology of modernity, must be laboriously achieved, and can often be only precariously maintained. In the case of blood, however, the stakes may be unusually high when the boundaries between, for example, biomedicine and politics or kinship become over-permeable or threaten to collapse.

An Interview with Marilyn Strathern: Kinship and Career

The interview was conducted in September 1996 in Cambridge. Marilyn Strathern (MS) and Janet Carsten (JC) had been colleagues at the University of Manchester’s Department of Social Anthropology until September 1993, when Marilyn Strathern left to take up the William Wyse Professorship at the University of Cambridge, where she remained until retirement in 2008. Janet Carsten joined Edinburgh in October of the same year, where she is presently Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology. (Supplementary questions, reflecting back on the earlier interview, were put to Marilyn Strathern by the editors of the special issue in 2013.)

Introduction: reason and passion – the parallel worlds of ethnography and biography

The Introduction sets the frame for the issue, and draws out the interconnections between the essays through a discussion of our three core themes: biography, its transmission, and associated moral resonances and implications. We show how this collection differs from earlier reflexive and gendered approaches in arguing for a more integrated vision of ethnography and biography. We highlight how the biographical and the ethnographic are thoroughly entangled in relation to the conditions of possibility that we share and in which we act, as well as in the open-ended process of attending to the here and now, the hidden and the embedded, from multiple perspectives. Accordingly, we recuperate biography for the ethnographic project, not as a tangential exercise but by placing it, as a morally-inflected exercise of transmission, at the centre of our issue.

About the House: Contents

1. Introduction Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones 2. Houses and hierarchies in island Southeast Asia Roxana Waterson 3. The resurrection of the house amongst the Zafimaniry of Madagascar Maurice Bloch 4. The hearth-group, the conjugal couple and the symbolism of the rice meal among the Kelabit of Sarawak Monica Janowski 5. Houses in Langkawi: stable structures or mobile homes? Janet Carsten 6. Having your house and eating it: houses and siblings in Ara, South Sulawesi Thomas Gibson 7. The Lio house: building, category, idea, value Signe Howell 8. Houses and hierarchy: the view from a South Moluccan society Susan McKinnon 9. Houses, places and people: community and continuity in Guiana Peter Riviere 10. The houses of Mebengokre (Kayapo) of Central Brazil: a new door to their social organization Vanessa Lea 11. Inside-out and back-to-front: the Maloca and the house in northwest Amazonia Stephen Hugh-Jones.