Infrastructures in and of ethnography
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3519
Questo contributo invita a riflettere su alcune delle condizioni in cui viene portata avanti l’indagine etnografica. Prendendo spunto dal concetto di infrastruttura, comunemente inteso come l’insieme dei supporti pratici a sostegno di un’attività, ne estende la nozione così da includere idee o ipotesi che possono essere di supporto all’indagine stessa. Il saggio quindi prende in considerazione strutture di supporto e, allo stesso tempo, pratiche e ideative. Visibili a intermittenza, poste oltre l’ambito dei temi indagati, e pertanto molto meno esplicite rispetto ai contesti della ricerca, le infrastrutture del lavoro etnografico permettono di guardare alle cangianti circostanze dell’indagine etnografica. Queste ultime includono in maniera significativa i mutevoli orientamenti verso, o le mutevoli concettualizzazioni dei tipi di oggetto della conoscenza considerati come il fine ultimo del lavoro etnografico. Le riflessioni proposte si basano su materiale proveniente dall’Oceania, sia dell’inizio che della fine del secolo che Bronisław Malinowski ha inaugurato con il suo arrivo alle Trobriand nel distretto di Kiriwina nel 1915.
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Marilyn Strathern
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Infrastructures in and of ethnography
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Thematic section: The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography
2018-12-31
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2018-12-31
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Marilyn Strathern
2018/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3519
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University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
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Infrastructures in and of ethnography
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                                              2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 49-69




Infrastructures in and of ethnography
Marilyn STRATHERN
Cambridge University



ABSTRACT: This contribution invites reflection on some of the conditions under
which ethnographic enquiry is carried forward. Taking its cue from the concept of
infrastructure, commonly understood as the practical supports underpinning an
enterprise, it extends the notion to include ideas or assumptions that may be
sustaining the purpose of enquiry. It thus takes practical and ideational supports in
tandem. Intermittently visible, falling beyond the purview of the topics being
investigated, and thus rather less than explicit contexts for research, the
infrastructures of ethnographic work afford some insight into its changing
circumstances. Importantly, these include changing orientations towards or
conceptualizations of the kinds of objects of knowledge regarded as its ultimate
aim. The reflections are exercised on materials from Oceania, from both the
beginning and the end of the century that Bronislaw Malinowski inaugurated upon
his arrival in the Trobriand district of Kiriwina in 1915.
KEYWORDS: INFRASTRUCTURES, MALINOWSKI, ETHNOGRAPHY, MELANESIA, CONCEPTS, SUPPORTS.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Marilyn Strathern
Infrastructures in and of ethnography
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 49-69.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3519
50                                                                      MARILYN STRATHERN




     Preamble
    In the middle of discussing the reasons why Trobriand Islanders decide to
fill the yam houses of a chief in a competitive manner (kayasa), Malinowski
gives an account of what happened in 1918 at the Kiriwinan village of
Omarakana. Circumstances force him into what must be one of the most
famous digressions in the ethnographic record, an aside on Trobriand
cricket1. In a book devoted to agricultural practices (Coral Gardens, 1935)
cricket comes up in the context of some of the disputes that made that
season’s kayasa necessary. Comparing his Polish view of the «then newly
introduced» source of competition with that of the Islanders and again with
the view (as he rendered it) of the English – for whom cricket was «a
synonym for honour and sportsmanlike behaviour» (Malinowski 1935: 211-
212) – Malinowski notes it was at once a cause for violent quarrelling and
also served «as a newly invented system of gambling» (ibidem: 212). We shall
come back to gambling. In the meanwhile, what might seem intrusive to the
main account also gestures to a context for Trobriand life, a glimpse into
other circumstances, which somehow lie “outside” it.
    The notion of context, and the elucidation thereof, is frequently brought
forward as crucial to both the means and ends of ethnographic enquiry. Its
position in ethnographic accounts is itself highly contextual, we might say,
and among others Mitchell (2010: 12) has drawn explicit attention to the
importance of recognizing multiple contexts as so many diverse perspectives
on specific situations. Contexts are in this sense held to be illuminating of
the material in hand, even when – and whether or not seen as subject to pre-
selection (Widlock 2010) or to infinite regression (Schlecker, Hirsch 2001) –
it is known that more contexts could always be marshalled. In addition are
those not-yet articulated contexts such as we might apprehend in some of
Malinowski’s asides. These are not positioned to become reference points for
the discussion at that juncture; rather they seem to serve as reminders that
there is more going on that the discussion can attend to (they may, of

 Acknowledgements: With manifold thanks to Dorothy Zinn and Elisabeth Tauber, both as
convenors of the symposium, The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography, and as editors. I am
grateful to Sergio Jarillo for permission to cite his unpublished manuscript.
1. Malinowski’s style of writing is well known for its asides, sometimes comprising whole
topics and chapter sections, as for example in all the theoretical-ethnographic as well as
geographic stopping places that accompany his account of overseas voyaging and kula
exchange relations (1922).


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                    51


course, turn out to be precious resources for subsequent generations of
anthropologists engaged in quite different discussions). This article will
focus on some of the “outsides” of ethnographic research before they are, so
to speak, positioned as (explicit) contexts to it2.
   I propose to draw on the concept of infrastructure to capture something of
those outsides that appear as not insignificant supports to the ethnographic
enterprise. In the course of doing so, I shall not only talk about
infrastructures “of” that particular enterprise, but also thicken our sense of
the concept through one or two examples of ethnographic moments that
deploy it heuristically, infrastructures as they are encountered “in”
ethnography.


Infrastructures, of different kinds
   Certain current uses of the term infrastructure from beyond anthropology
would find within it something of a counterpart in the notion of pre-
condition, as in Green’s (2014) address to the «conditions of possibility» of
doing anthropology3. However, with Jensen and Winthereik’s4 reminder that
infrastructure was originally a military term designating fixed facilities, the
basis upon which a society or organization operates (roads, waterways,
power grids, schools, prisons are their examples), current usage that stresses
«a basic structure through which, or on top of which, other (organizational)
activities occur» tends to have a largely technological referent (Jensen,
Winthereik 2013: 2). At the same time other traditions of usage 5 aim for a
less reductive emphasis: whether in the form of roads or databases,
infrastructures «are entwined with cultural habits, with social and
economical organization, with professional and personal identities» (ibidem:
2). Either of these connotations may be found in ethnographic accounts. Yet
in thinking about infrastructures of ethnographic practice as such, not only
ethnographic writing but also the initial enquiries (as in “fieldwork”), we
may wish to ponder on another dimension as well. For want of a better
vocabulary, we may talk of ideational or conceptual infrastructures.

2. One might imagine them as “externalities” [after Michel Callon], although that concept
was first devised to point to consequences of (economic action) that lay beyond the focus of
an enterprise and were not thus accounted or costed as part of it. My focus here is on
preconditions rather than consequences.
3. The concept is also familiar to anthropologists from another perspective altogether: neo-
Marxism. Here the much disputed alignments of base (infrastructure) and superstructure
can be thought of as modulations of an overall partitioning of structure (see Humphrey 2018
for a recent exposition). This sense of the concept lies outside the present discussion.
4. They cite the historian Edwards 2003 on the origin of the term.

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52                                                                        MARILYN STRATHERN


    Consider again how Malinowksi positioned himself. Referring to the
number of times he had accompanied parties of gardeners to the inland
village of Omarakana, the Paramount Chief’s place, and back, he was able to
make a comprehensive recording and tabulation of harvest gifts in a more
complete manner than had been possible before (the baskets of yams ran to
tens of thousands). «On that occasion better than any other was I made to
understand how inextricably the economic side of chieftainship was bound
up with their political power» (Malinowski 1935: 217). If there was ever a
connection being made between familiarity born of long term residence and
the ability to synthesize apparently discrete data, here it was in a nutshell.
That observation about inextricability is immediately followed by another
aside: he recalls his lasting regret at not seeing the finale of this competitive
display. A spell of ill-health meant he had to leave Omarakana and move
into the verandah of his friend, the trader Billy Hancock, whose house was
on the shore of the lagoon.
    Here, also in a nutshell, are several dimensions of infrastructure. They
draw attention to some of the underpinnings and supports of
anthropological scholarship and to the place of ethnographic research within
it. The eminently practical conditions under which it is possible to undertake
such research at all come into view. Michael Young’s (2004) magnificent
biography of Malinowski makes it clear just what an uncertain venture
Malinowski’s sojourn on the Trobriands was, given all its contingencies and
serendipities. Hancock’s house, for example, turned out to offer a haven to
which Malinowski retreated from time to time, it being somewhere where he
could store his equipment and, with its darkroom, print his photographs. If
we call this a practical infrastructure6, then it has a second aspect to it,

5. The authors are referring to Science and Technology Studies here, later including
anthropology as a near neighbour (and see for example Harvey 2010; Morita and Jensen
2017; Nielson 2012). They pursue a quite different agenda from the one defined here, which
proceeds with respect to the well known anthropological interest in context. Thus their own
book is addressed to information infrastructures for enhancing modes of creating
accountability in aid development, including both monitoring technologies and aid
partnerships. Here infrastructure is taken not as “outside” but as “central” to new platforms
of action: «Making aid infrastructures entails forging new platforms for action that are
simultaneously imaginative and practical, simultaneously conceptual and technical»
(Jensen, Winthereik 2013: xv). At the same time, «infrastructures retain their own ingrained
inertia and sense of direction … [to the extent that] organizations seem to drift on top of
infrastructures whose installed bases makes them largely inert» (2013: 5, original emphasis).
For further discussion, see Carey and Pedersen 2017.
6. “Practical” is redundant as an epithet for infrastructure, or at least until we wish to
compare it with another kind of (“conceptual”) infrastructure, see below. The pair of terms
makes no sense on their own, although I hope to show they have some heuristic value for
the circumstances being described here.


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                   53


namely its entwinement in the professional and personal style by which
Malinowski conducted his observational practice. He combined participating
and listening, on the one hand, with, on the other, note-taking and
tabulating, the practical – as in praxis 7 – entailments of on-the-ground
enquiry. Entwined in this, too, would have been the anticipation of analysis
and writing. The end goal of his work is revealed in how he related that
subsequent insight to this activity, namely his insight into the connections
between economics and politics. In retrospect we can say that Malinowski
was simply connecting what the conventions of the time separated, but the
obvious point is that the frames of reference with which he came are not to
be discounted for their role in the way he went about his task. We might
suggest that these, potentially at least, comprised an ideational or conceptual
infrastructure.
   Needless to say, as soon as we envisage Malinowski in his office at LSE or
writing away in the house at Oberbozen, those latter frames of reference will
appear as the theoretical context of his contribution to the discipline, and
there was nothing to prevent such frames of reference being explicitly
summoned during the course of enquiries in the Trobriands. However, my
interest here is in conceptual supports at the moment at which they occupy
an implicit, taken for granted position; in other words, when they are doing
their work as “outside” the ethnographic enquiry in hand, and when, as far
as the ethnographer is concerned, they are not yet transformed into or
positioned as contexts for it. Otherwise put, from everything that the
ethnographer mentally brings with him or her we might be interested in
discerning what seems to be playing an infrastructural role. That may be as
essential to the task as diverse practical infrastructures. It goes without
saying that the same ethnographer is crucially dependent on manifold
further supports from the people with whom enquiries are being pursued,
practical or ideational. The latter include those provided by local habits of
acting and thinking whose nature may allow absorption with lesser or
greater degrees of consciousness8. I leave the observation as itself no more
than an aside, a glimpse into an order of support on an altogether other, and
invariably multiple, scale.




7. Involving the embodiment or enactment of ideas, but generally comprehended by the
(Euro-American) actor as belonging to a world of action, as experiential, actual, workable,
effective. I keep with the term “practical” in its plainest, ordinary language sense.
8. My thanks to Andre Gingrich (conference comment) for making this point.

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54                                                                    MARILYN STRATHERN


Practical supports for ethnographic research
   First hand enquiry didn’t begin or end with Malinowski, but he defined it
in a distinctive way. It was in writing up his account that he came to
emphasize the advantages of this mode and the quality of information it
yielded. Yet its success was not guaranteed from the outset. Regardless of
the political issues that detained him on the Trobriands, such “fieldwork”
would not have been possible but for a range of practical supports.
   European attitudes to exploration, including the expectation of support
through governmental institutions, contributed to the possibility of carrying
out this kind of research, and spoke to the reach of colonialism. It would be
anachronistic to read back into Malinowski’s comportment on the
Trobriands what later became a critical dimension to ethnographic work
itself, including criticism of the consequences of colonial dominion.
Nonetheless that was one of its effects. Wanting nothing to do with basing
his knowledge on what was already defunct, that is, on reconstructing past
practices, he planned at one point to write an account of the changes
wrought by the new circumstances in which the early twentieth century
Islanders found themselves (Young 2004: 470). In any event, deliberately or
not, it was because he had revived interest in various “customs” (such as
funeral practices), which the administration had tried to suppress 9, that
Malinowski became a veritable thorn in the side of the Assistant Resident
Magistrate, Raynor Bellamy. Bellamy, who (in Young’s [2004: 382] words)
«did more than anyone to set the colonial scene and establish the conditions
of Malinowski’s fieldwork [in Kiriwina]», had trained as a medical man and
was pursuing a programme of modernization; thus his population statistics
were the most reliable in the whole of the Territory of Papua at the time, and
he all but eliminated venereal disease (2004: 386-7). In the early days of
1915 Malinowski had boarded with him. Noting Malinowski’s subsequent
failure to acknowledge Bellamy’s support, or any of his writings on the
Trobriands, Young (2004: 389) repeats that it was Bellamy who created «the
largely favourable conditions – administrative and medical – under which he
conducted his fieldwork». The very possibilities of freedom for open-ended
enquiry based on long-term residence, with all that implied for personal
security, the willingness of Trobrianders to cooperate, and so forth, were
facilitated by the colonial infrastructure. Of course, many anthropologists
have not hesitated to make that point and to subsequently query the role
that all this might have played in ethnographic writing.
9. Such as village burial; sorcery; power of the chiefs; polygamy: «Malinowski took the
liberal view that government intervention was unwarranted and essentially destructive of
native institutions» (Young 2004: 389).


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                 55


   We may contrast the “outside” position that Bellamy’s practical supports
apparently occupied in Malinowski’s scheme of things with a further arena
crucial to the success of the very idea of fieldwork, as it came to be
formulated, and one that was treated as an overt context for it. When
Malinowski first came to write up his Trobriand material, in the foreground
of his presentation (in Argonauts [1922]) were the prejudices of his imagined
audience, or rather the prejudices the anthropologist found among the
British. Such people did not think Oceania was a blank because so few
anthropological studies had been done there; on the contrary, they already
knew that it was full of savages who were either unruly or else over-ruled by
the dictates of custom. This outside was brought into an explicit framing of
the research endeavour. In its face came Malinowski’s brilliant diatribe
against uninformed hypotheses about «primitive economics». Part of his
advocacy was that there was no substitute for first hand knowledge. This was
exactly the impulse that underwrote the experimental sciences of the time,
and that had been behind earlier voyages to the Papuan Coast area (such as
the Haddon expeditions to the Torres Straits Islands). Indeed, the person
now recalled as the British epitome of armchair anthropology, James Frazer,
had had a similar impulse – let’s actually talk to people who live there – so
Frazer consulted missionaries, planters and anyone who would correspond
with him from their first hand knowledge 10. Subsequent anthropologists
have learnt to dismiss that way of doing things, precisely because of what
was to follow – as Malinowski himself proclaimed, he consulted the
Islanders directly.
   What made such research possible in Malinowski’s time – the network of
government officers, traders, missionaries and so on, including their interest
or at least neutrality, and the transport and trade connection that underlay
this – was not invisible but was external to the central project. Similar
circumstances continued in many places well beyond colonialism. One
thinks, for example, of the role that extensive postcolonial development,
and diverse policy initiatives, have had in continuing governmental funding
for anthropology. At the same time, the success of ethnographic research
had its own life, and has endured as a model for studies under quite
different, non-colonial, non-policy oriented, infrastructural conditions
(apropos the UK, one might think of British village studies, which got under
way after the second world war). The extent to which ethnographic research
anywhere requires practical supports, and is consequently embedded in
diverse locales (whatever the locale is, and it need not be localized) should
not be underestimated.

10. Indeed, such enquiries were not a negligible part of Malinowski’s own studies on the
Trobriands.

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56                                                                       MARILYN STRATHERN



   When such supporting practices become themselves objects of attention
then they morph into contexts for research and contexts to be researched;
here infrastructures of ethnographic practice can become infrastructures in
such practice. What emerge as objects of attention will depend on the
interests of the moment. Thinking of Dr Bellamy and his administrative
efforts on the Trobriands, we probably find it easier to reflect back on the
crucial context of the “colonial” supports of Malinowski’s research than we
do on the medical infrastructure that colonization afforded, and everything
else besides, including communications. Just what, we might ask, lay behind
Malinowski’s ability to write from the Trobriands in 1918 to Papua’s recently
appointed Chief Medical Officer (William Strong) for advice, because he was
feeling particularly rotten, and receive a written reply, from wherever the
Officer happened to be at the time (Young 2004: 478-9)? Equally obviously,
then, there will always be a relationship between the factors that the
anthropologist highlights and those that remain outside.
   Alice Street’s (2014) study of a modern Papua New Guinean hospital in
Madang directly addresses the infrastructure of this enterprise (the term is in
the subtitle of her monograph). Her questions are all about how it is that
certain medical practices are sustained in a context where the administrative
delivery of funding, medicine, expertise and even statistics is precarious. «X-
ray machines do not work well in the hot and humid climate, pathology
machines are old and difficult to calibrate, and the reagents stored in fridges
are rendered unreliable by the frequent power cuts» (Street 2014: 11).
Technology, and with it biomedicine, is imperilled in ways Papua’s former
Chief Medical Officer would never have encountered. She goes on: «weak
states, structural adjustment [international economic sanctions], and
extractive capital have led to the degradation of public health infrastructure»
(ibidem: 11)11. She does not mince the criticism.
   I take this as an example of those situations where anthropologists work
with acute awareness of the practical infrastructures of action, so that – as
objects of study – they are open to being re-conceptualized. One such
impetus lay behind the cultural critique of the 1980s-90s (for a subsequent
reprise see Marcus 2010). This began as a critical effort to make the practice
of ethnographic research as explicit as possible: its blind spot was that a

11. Of the Madang hospital she writes: «the visual operations of modern biomedicine
become intertwined with the visual politics of personhood in an unstable place where the
infrastructures for producing knowledge and governing populations are tenuous» (Street 2014:
13, my emphasis). She adds that its infrastructural poverty is also a scientific resource,
insofar as it is the basis of externally-funded research enclaves.


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                57


politically motivated focus on the conditions of “field” enquiry pushed
another infrastructural entity into the foreground. This was the
anthropologist’s person in term of his or her subjectivity.

Conceptual supports for ethnographic research
   It is fascinating that what was understood as Malinowski’s kind of
ethnography came to underpin a vision in British Social Anthropology that
he himself never brought to fruition. He had put in place a compelling rule of
thumb: anything might be significant! His asides and digressions are
interesting from this perspective. So such an approach seemingly
encouraged study in the round, and simply at the scale of showing the
interconnectedness of things it was one that produced huge dividends. But
he himself did not articulate what was to become a significant rationale for
undertaking ethnographic work. Over the course of the twentieth century,
developing ideas of social structure and social system supported a holistic
justification of a different order from Malinowski’s stated interest, largely in
terms of human nature, while also being one to which long-term research
immersement became the crucial accompaniment. Ethnographers came to
scale-up their findings as a matter of imagining the ultimate object of
enquiry being “society” or “culture”. When explained these work as
contexts, but they are also candidates for enduring infrastructural support.
   Conceptual or ideational infrastructures will be as much subject to change
as anything else. These days, anthropologists no longer subscribe in an
unreflective way to those concepts of society or culture. Nonetheless,
perhaps we might recognize the organizing work they once did, how it was
that they shaped the purpose of enquiry, not least in encouraging a broad
view of what fell within one’s scope. Anthropologists still continue to refer
to “social” or “cultural” issues or relations, even though the terms have
become simple place-holders for the methodological imperative to
demonstrate some kind of coherence or interaction between apparently
diverse elements, without presupposing a specifiable whole. This leads to a
question. What stands in for holism today, for the wider picture that seemed
summoned (at least in retrospect) when mid-century anthropologists came
to write up, that is, when they were creating an ethnography 12? Are there,
these days, embracing visions that provides infrastructural supports for an
embracing method?


12. For some of the diverse ways in which the theoretical construct of holism has been
treated in anthropology, see Otto and Bubandt 2010.

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58                                                                      MARILYN STRATHERN


   An analogue to the very need for that question is suggested in a recent
criticism of modern organization theory (du Gay, Vikkelsø 2017). The
authors’ own statement of purpose points to the need to remedy the fact
that «OT [Organizational Theory] has dispensed or lost touch with the
“classical stance”, has increasingly adopted a “metaphysical stance”, and, in
doing so, has increasingly assisted the disappearance of its own core object –
“formal organization”» (ibidem: 20). They point how, over the last quarter
century, contemporary organization scholars have transcended the topic of
formal organizations by a focus on networks, and similar multitudinous
complex relationships (capabilities, assemblages, action-nets) often
imagined as exerting their agency in the abstract. These are in turn acted
upon as universal imperatives external to the specificity of organizational
form and function; the empirical effect is that attention gets drawn away
from the task of organization and towards implementing the generic value
(e.g. sustaining “networks”). And formality can no longer be taken as central
to organizations. Indeed it seems that formal organizations may stand in a
similar relationship to present-day organizational research as holistic
notions of “society” or “culture” or “structure” do to certain present day
anthropological horizons. In du Gay and Vikkelsø’s eyes this move has come
at too high a price. Anthropology, however, is not in quite the same position.
   Today’s general social science orientation to networking and the like –
the former surely past any theoretical peak, regardless of its continuing
utility – is familiar enough within anthropology. Yet long before “networks”
became methodologically salient, anthropology was already engaging with
an equally flexible construct, viz. relations and relationships. By relations I
refer to both conceptual or logical relations (between entities of all kinds)
and to interpersonal social relations (pace Pina-Cabral 2017); they have a far
wider reach than the organizational concept of network, although they can
be imagined in such terms too13. We can properly talk of an enduring
“relational infrastructure” (to borrow from Holbraad and Pederson [2017:
270] a phrase they apply to the ontological turn) as one of anthropology’s
most significant and most enduring conceptual supports. Insofar as the
discipline investigates relations through enacting relations, the process is
personified when research venues are defined through interpersonal
relations. That said, as contexts they are one thing, as infrastructure
another.


13. One could cite many examples, among them: Dasʼ (2015: 89 my emphasis) hope that
ethnography «will make for deeper understanding of the web of connections between [in this
case] familial neglect and institutional neglect without reducing one to the other».


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                 59


   Consider Street’s relational supports in Madang. As always, and she writes
with great empathy, what emerged as crucial were the relations that she
formed, in this case not just with hospital patients but with the medical
establishment who were also an audience for her book. «It is always difficult
as an anthropologist», she says, «to write critically about persons and
practices where we work» (2014: 11). Her public agonizing over this (in her
monograph) was underlined in a conversation when we met in Port Moresby
in 2015: returning for subsequent visits made “fieldwork”, she said, harder
and harder14. The people she knew there she now knew too well; knowing so
much, or apparently so, made asking (research) questions more and more
pointless – or if not pointless for her, simply incomprehensible or even
insulting for the acquaintances to whom she felt very close.
   Here a necessary relational infrastructure has become explicit – but not
as infrastructure. Rather her network of relations had morphed into
something else, that is, it no longer supported the anthropologist’s research
in the same way. Turning the hospital’s supports, including relations with
the staff, into a study that addressed infrastructure (infrastructure “in” the
ethnography) thus set severe problems for ethnographic writing. Writing a
critical account, as she felt compelled to do, compromised those relations,
both as practical supports (offering enablements of all kinds) and as
conceptual supports (all the protocols of getting on with people, maintaining
rapport, interviewing, talking). For the relations seemingly dropped away as
supports and become relations scaled-up in what was experienced as a
different register, that is, in “personal” terms (see Riles 2000: 61-69). A
significant element here was that valuing a personal cast to relations,
implying their contrast with other kinds of relations, would have been
appreciated by the urban / medical elite.
   Relations may develop in other ways. It is even possible to deliberately
scale up a relational infrastructure, as Sergio Jarillo (n.d.) did the same year
(2015). Organizing a symposium in the town of Alotau to commemorate the
centenary of Malinowski’s arrival in the region, he mobilized diverse
networks among Trobrianders and other Milne Bay people, including
national ministers and politicians, international anthropologists, local
schools, and so forth. A good number of the descendents of the Trobriand
chiefs whom Malinowski knew were there, give and take local politics, to
create a meeting of a kind that might have surprised his (Malinowski’s)
younger self. The subtitle of Jarillo’s write-up, The academic conference as
ethnographic performance, gives the gist of his analysis: «the anthropology
conference, seen as research practice, prove[d] successful in readmitting

14. Alice Street, personal communication, 2015. I am very grateful for her permission to
refer to this.

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60                                                                      MARILYN STRATHERN


ethnographic subjects [such as the said chiefs] into anthropological
dialogues» (Jarillo n.d., abstract). So relations with these ethnographic
subjects continued as supports for anthropological dialogue.
   The occasion was conducted with considerable diplomacy. I wonder
whether that was, in part, enabled by the fact that no-one knew everything
that was happening. Its success may thus have owed something to way in
which multiple networks were being activated simultaneously, so that
several different concourses of interactions could go on without too much
interference from one another. The mélange can be understood less as
falling short of an idea of comprehensive communication than as actually
entailing a necessary ignorance, an occlusion of the ramifications of
relations, the partial isolation of actors from one another. There was
certainly no single axis of confrontation. However, there was also another
factor, owed largely to the circumspectness of the Trobriand men and
women present. Their sense of rank and protocol introduced a formality into
the situation: apart from oratorical display, there were betel nut exchanges
going on here, ceremonial tokens handed out there. This gave the occasion
an aesthetic form way beyond the procedures of an anthropological meeting.
   To describe it thus turns this short 3-4 day conference in Alotau into a
circumscribed arena of its own. It might have been an ethnographic object
for Jarillo, who had spent lengthy research time on the Trobriands, and for
whom this was yet another venue; for me – simply attending on this brief
occasion – it could not possibly be an ethnographic object, even with his
write-up. The conceptual supports in terms of interpersonal relations were
(for me) missing.
   It would probably take a focused enquiry into the nature of meetings to
reveal the possibility of such supports. There might be something to be
learnt, for instance, from the diverse contexts analyzed by anthropologists
collaborating in what they explicitly refer to as An ethnography of meeting
(Brown, Reed, Yarrow 2017). Theirs is a call rather like du Gay and Vikkelsø’s
advocated return to the study of how formal organizations work. Brown,
Reed and Yarrow give a distinctive focus to meetings by their attention to
the mundane forms through which the former operate. These include how
relations “within” meeting spaces relate to their transformations “beyond” –
the internal and external contexts of these relations – with respect to
«institutional structure, time, space, and society» (Brown, Reed, Yarrow
2017: 15)15. One aim is to move away from recent attacks on bureaucratic
15. This interpenetration (relations inside / outside) may address some of du Gay and
Vikkelsø’s (e.g. 2017: 61) disquiet when too much emphasis is given to extrinsic “contexts”
under which (their example) formal organization disappears through being interpreted
through other phenomena that then appear to be the relevant subject matter.


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                 61


conduct and open up room for less reductive approaches, indeed to
complexify what is concretely going on in a meeting in terms of situated
practices, disputes and hesitations, ethical nuances. As already implied,
relations internal to meetings are relations that also have an outside to
them, not just one but diversely so – and the contributors to this collection
were free to bring in whatever outside perspective gave them an analytical
vantage point. That said, it would take actual participation in the meetings
described here to appreciate what might work as an implicit infrastructure in
relation to one’s own conduct.

Two “Oceanias”
   I suggested that, from everything that keeps the ethnographer company in
his or her head, we might be interested in discerning what seems to be playing
an infrastructural role. Given the aspirations of the ethnographic enterprise,
as opposed to other kinds of research, potential candidates include what in the
past might have supported a “holistic” enterprise, and latterly – until recently,
that is, given that the concept no longer holds its once confidential promises
(Riles 2017) – perhaps a “global” one. I also suggested that as an adjunct to
the explicit concept of context, infrastructures might be usefully apprehended
as outside the scope of enquiry. Yet how does one recognize an “outside”?
Rather than hypothecate, I enroll some contemporary ethnography to sketch
what certain anthropologists appear to have taken as conceptual
infrastructures of their work.
   Two recent issues of a regional anthropological journal, Oceania, throw
light on the kinds of objects of enquiry some present-day ethnographic work is
intended to illuminate. Each is an edited special issue (November 2014 and
March 2015). One deals with work in Melanesia (here Papua New Guinea and
Fiji), the other drawing more widely on Oceania, but both include articles on
the Trobriand Islands.
   The first, edited by Anthony Pickles, is addressed to gambling, in the form
of card playing. Recall that aside of Malinowski’s. His nine-word phrase, «as
well as a newly invented system of gambling», is thankfully noted in the
literature on Melanesian gambling as one of the earliest references to this
activity, which over more than a century still seems to convey a sense of
modernity. There is an ambiguity in Malinowksi’s phrasing, however, a function
perhaps of its throw-away “outside” status. I have interpreted his phrase
(above) as referring to cricket allowing new possibilities for gambling, a
metaphor he also used in relation to luck in the kula (Mosko 2014: 242)16.
16. Luck here also has reference to magic, and Mosko warns that it would be a mistake to
elide Trobriand concepts with the impersonal kind of luck often imagined by Euro-
Americans.

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62                                                                       MARILYN STRATHERN


However Pickles (2014: 211), like Mark Mosko, picks it up as a reference to
the card playing that became the synonym of gambling throughout Papua
New Guinea, and as a practice that accompanied the equally introduced
cricket.
   Pickles takes present day gambling as an indigenous analytic: his
argument is that gambling provides people with the reflexive resources to
comment on many aspects of their lives – on their relations with one
another, on new sources of inequality and uncertainty, and on speed,
change and the nature of money17. He makes it clear where his “outside” is:
he is «determined to prevent an insular debate in which Melanesianist
accounts of gambling alienate themselves from gambling studies [more
broadly]», especially insofar as these have taken gambling as a metaphor
for understanding social life. «I invite readers to consider our portrayals of
indigenous ideas of “what gambling is about” as alternative theorizations
of gambling as a phenomenon» (2014: 219; 207). There is a need to make
them of interest. As he adds, that these theories of gambling may be based
upon apparently unusual cosmological premises does not prevent them
from intersecting productively with Euro-American forms. If that is
articulated as a context for the studies, the comparative potential remains
largely tacit, its power perhaps being of an infrastructural kind.
   More than that, gambling as an object of enquiry is being treated rather
like Brown, Reed and Yarrow’s meeting. Such objects of enquiry are
increasingly familiar in anthropological studies conscious of a global world.
An artefact, a topic, usually taking the grammatical form of a singular
substantive (“gambling”, “meeting”), becomes a prism through which one
may see the delineation of much larger issues. In a sense, the more
compact the substantive is, the more dramatic its folding out. The
conceptual support is there in that assumption of its microcosmic import,
the world in a grain of sand. In practical terms, each contribution to this
collection of articles had conventional long-term ethnographic research in
the background, although apropos the article on Trobriand gambling,
Mosko’s work (see 2017) is based not only on many “fieldwork” trips but
also on extensive intellectual interchanges with Kiriwinan chiefs among
others.

17. Pickles writes in his own paper: «games can be seen to act as “analytics”, not simply by
reflecting indigenous predilections, but in the manner in which gambling invites
participants to engage with the way they want the future to be decided […] and to craft
microcosmic iterations of their idealized forms of causality within relationships» (2014:
274). Pickles is by no means alone among anthropologists in treating (specific) indigenous
practices as analytically astute theorizations.


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                     63


   The Afterword by Rebecca Cassidy (2014: 306) is too pointed not to cite.
Her PhD had been done on the UK thoroughbred racing industry; for a
postdoctoral project, she writes about a particular glimpse of what we might
call a global phenomenon, economic insecurity.
      I was due to go to Albania to study shifting landscapes and economic insecurity
      but the unrest precipitated by the collapse of local Ponzi [pyramidal] schemes
      meant that I was not allowed to travel. Frustrated, I took a job with a firm of
      security guards. “White Knights” operated a simple racket, taking a little, but
      not too much, from companies in and around Cambridge [where she lived] who
      employed them to protect them from greedier thieves. […] Among the ex-cons
      and retired policemen who made up our ranks were two committed horserace
      bettors […] I was invited to join them to place a bet on a “sure thing” after
      helping one of them with his daughter’s pony (named Santa because he was
      bought with the proceeds of Christmas trees knocked off from one of our
      “clients”, a garden centre…). I had stumbled into fieldwork on economic
      uncertainty after all.

   Many years later Cassidy embarked on collaborative research addressing
the expansion of commercial gambling, and the global references are overt.
«My fieldwork coincided with global economic downturns, massive changes
in technology, and an associated period of regulation and normalization in
gambling» (2014: 307). Here is another kind of outside: competing accounts
and concomitant expectations from the investments that the global
gambling industry was itself making in research (funding research centres,
as well as charities set up to collect contributions towards research, journals
and conferences). This investigative apparatus, she argues was concerned to
present the individual gambler as a particular kind of subject. Indeed her
article speaks of the way in which «mainstream research turns gambling and
gamblers into knowable subjects» (2014: 307), leading to a proliferation of
studies to detect pathological gamblers, while leaving open-ended social
science approaches out in the cold. (Everyone is looking for a cure for
“problem gamblers”.) While in one sense this alter-research worked as a
context for her own, spurring her to be explicit about the consequences of
such an emphasis (one’s ambition cannot be limited, she says, to simply
providing «more adequate descriptions» of gambling [2014: 307]), the
relations she established with such interests and expectations had to be on
the “outside” of those relations she wished to set up in her own study. If in
this sense they were working as infrastructural supports, they are a reminder
that there is not necessarily anything benign in the notion of support 18.
18. Notions such as “support” or “enablement” carry, in English, the same kinds of positive
overtones that accompany “relations”, “social” and numerous other epithets (the same
goes, with reversed values, for those with negative overtones). It is virtually impossible to
shake these evaluations off, although through the notion of “infrastructure” I have tried to
convey as much neutrality as possible.

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64                                                                       MARILYN STRATHERN


   An article on the Trobriands also appears in the second Oceania issue, to
which I briefly turn. This was written by Katherine Lepani (2015), one of the
Pacific Islands residents among other researchers brought together by
Margaret Jolly in a large-scale project on gender and personhood. It provides
fresh ethnographic research on how Trobriand women perceive themselves
and the choices they have, while being explicitly framed by a theoretical
debate on personhood and agency. This is also how the editors of the special
issue cast the whole topic. It is, they say, through «exploring matters of deep
concern to the people with whom it engages, [that] this volume can also be
seen to reflect the current state of play with regard to large-scale topical
concerns in the anthropology of the Pacific» (Morgain, Taylor 2015: 4). That
scale is their “outside”. There is no need to defend the topics or to argue for
their interest. “Gender” and “personhood” are taken as axiomatically
informative of general social and cultural issues, indeed as abstract concepts
themselves they represent a kind of scaling-up of those matters of deep local
concern. However, by contrast with (the topics of) gambling or meeting, they
comprise a differently delineated object of enquiry. Theorizing about gender
and personhood is addressed to acknowledged issues of universal
significance in social life19. No microcosms here: they are the macrocosm.
   What distinguishes the new approaches advanced by this collection is
thus in large part to do with how new ethnography is newly theorized. The
editors hope their volume «inflects [old] questions in new ways» (Morgain,
Taylor 2015: 1). That there is a pertinent theoretical framework serves as a
built-in conceptual context. The accompanying certainty, that one’s study is
supported by the acknowledged interest of what one is studying, may or may
not be explicit, and perhaps has a counterpart in an even less explicit claim
to significance, one further below the threshold of perceived practice. This is
the idea that fresh fieldwork is to be justified by the theoretical or
conceptual refinement one will bring to these already-interesting topics.
Other refinements are also possible. Where, in this collection, “theoretical”
intervention is most lightly felt, the article’s more general purpose tends to
be drawn into regional political issues. The editors comment that together
the articles both challenge many of «the concepts that underpin social
science» and provide «critical insights into current [local] conditions and
concerns regarding transforming relations and articulations of gender and
personhood» (2015: 2, 1), and they mean critical as in social criticism.


19. It is hardly necessary to comment on the scope of the goal implied here, with respect to
earlier epochs of what was assumed to be of anthropological significance.


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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                65


   These heterogeneous examples offer a sample of insights into ideational
or conceptual supports that work as an implicit infrastructure to
ethnographic research, one equally in need of extensive practical supports.
The point at which the outside is drawn into view, whether as (external)
contexts or as (internal) topics for investigation, indexes or demonstrates
the generative potential of new research.

Conclusion
   This contribution has focused on a thoroughly traditional (geographical)
region of anthropological research, Oceania, not to produce a yardstick from
which to measure other circumstances, but to indicate some recurrent and
ever-changing issues over the last century. To regard the practical
conditions for ethnographic research as infrastructure perhaps makes it
easier to specify what altered circumstances do and do not allow. An obvious
(and very familiar) example applies to research that has interpersonal
relations at its core: the oft-cited difference between long term residence
among people where relations can only be renewed on the spot and
commitments to people with whom one can keep in touch by long distance
means. Perhaps less obvious are the sources of change that come with
unspoken assumptions concerning what is important about ethnographic
research as such. I have extended the ordinary English language concept of
infrastructure as a matter of practical preconditions to include conceptual or
ideational frameworks. It is only in order to effect such an extension that the
latter has been added to the former, as though it were another kind of
infrastructural dimension. In truth the two run together.
   One small part of Malinowski’s legacy is that laterality or relationality
that comes from an aside, always an implicit comparison, because always
evoking an elsewhere. When Malinowski brings in cricket to a discussion of
harvest gifts to high ranking chiefs this is one moment out of a multitude of
internal comparisons that he is making between diverse aspects of Trobriand
life. There is little chance of predicting in advance what will prove fruitful to
follow, or may be picked up decades later as of central interest. Nor can one
tell which relations will yield productive connections – in the end
Malinowski did not write his book on Trobriand social change. As when he
said, «I was made to understand how inextricably the economic side of
chieftainship was bound up with their political power», that lack of
predictability includes relations between analytical concepts. Importantly, a
digression from an object of enquiry can be turned around into perspectives
into or upon it, as gambling suddenly opens up a way of thinking about
harvest competitions.

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66                                                            MARILYN STRATHERN


   There are many desirables for anthropological research, and they have
never been equally attainable, nor should we overlook the fact that most
anthropological discussion proceeds (as here) on the basis of other people’s
ethnographies. Yet at some point, it is assumed, there will have been social
relationships; first hand knowledge; open-ended enquiry; internal
comparisons; people’s utterances and reflections; significant communica-
tions, and so forth. Ethnographic process – the investigation and the writing
together – has been an epitome of these desirables. It is in that combination
that crucial relations are created, although they are not always apparent. Not
least of such relations are those between the ethnographic enterprise and its
conditions of enablement, at once practical and ideational, serving or
working in the manner of infrastructures.




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INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY                                                67




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 Marilyn STRATHERN, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge, is
 (Hon.) Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA). In 2018
 she was awarded an International Balzan Prize in Social Anthropology. She is
 probably best known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological
 theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she pairs with
 After nature (1992), a comment on the UK under Thatcher. Her most recent book,
 Before and after gender (2016), is also one of her first, unpublished since the early
 1970s. Papua New Guinea is never far from her concerns, the last visit to Mt Hagen
 being in 2015.
 ms10026@cam.ac.uk




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Marilyn Strathern
Infrastructures in and of ethnography
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 49-69.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3519
