Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3058
Riprendendo la celebre figura del rizoma elaborata da Deleuze e Guattari, questo articolo capovolge l’idea filosofica per chiedersi cosa si possa imparare da questa riflessione aperta riguardo alle piante. Allo stesso tempo, il resoconto riduce il rizoma alle sue varietà coltivate e allarga la nozione di pianta alle persone ad essa associate. Uno stimolo proviene dalla recente designazione di Patrimonio dell’umanità di un sito del Monte Hagen, Papua Nuova Guinea, per aver fornito la prova della coltivazione preistorica di piante riprodotte principalmente attraverso modalità vegetative. Seguendo la precorritrice descrizione di Haudricourt sull’igname, e le implicazioni sulla clonazione come stile di vita (oltre che come modo di pensare), l’articolo riflette su un tema che è indissolubilmente legato al rizoma inteso come pianta coltivata: le azioni della gente. Le piante rizomatiche sono descritte accuratamente come molteplicità. Alcuni interrogativi posti riguardano la natura dei diversi contrasti che sono o non sono implicati. L’onere della dimostrazione etnografica riposa su materiale proveniente da Papua Nuova Guinea, mentre la natura provvisoria del resto risulterà evidente.
application/pdf
2239-625X
3058
2
en
Marilyn Strathern
Anuac
Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
6
Keynote
2017-12-31
2017-11-17
2017-12-31
2017-12-31
23-44
1
Marilyn Strathern
2017/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3058
23
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
2239-625X
2
en
44
Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/3058/2789
6
                                              2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44




Gathered fields
A tale about rhizomes
Marilyn STRATHERN
University of Cambridge



ABSTRACT: A return to Deleuze and Guattari’s famous figure of the rhizome, this paper
turns the philosophical idea around by asking what we might learn, from their open-
ended exposition of it, about plants. The account at once reduces the rhizome to its
cultivated varieties and enlarges the notion of a plant by the people joined to it. A
stimulus comes from the recent World Heritage designation of a site in Mt Hagen,
Papua New Guinea, for its evidence of the prehistoric cultivation of plants preferentially
propagated by vegetative means. Following Haudricourt’s early exposition of the yam
and the implications of cloning as a way of life (as well as a way of thought), the paper
elaborates on what is indissolubly tied to the rhizome as a cultivated plant, people’s
actions. Rhizomic plants are well described as multiplicities. Some questions are asked
about the nature of diverse contrasts that are or are not implied. The burden of
ethnographic demonstration is with the Papua New Guinean material; the provisional
nature of the rest will be apparent.
KEYWORDS: DELEUZE AND GUATTARI, RHIZOME, PREHISTORIC CULTIVATION, TIME, PAPUA NEW GUINEA.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Marilyn Strathern
Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3058
24                                                                           MARILYN STRATHERN



   No-one is going to mistake a metaphor or analogy drawn from plant life
for a lesson in natural history or gardening cycles *. Yet there must be many
whose consciousness of the special properties of rhizomes came first through
a philosophical thesis. I refer of course to Deleuze and Guattari’s opening
chapter in A thousand plateaus (2004). As Ingold (2000: 140) asserts,
«whether the image is botanically accurate need not concern us here», a
prelude to his own exploration of the suggestiveness of the rhizome. What is
extraordinary, in retrospect, is just how much information about rhizomic
plants the two social theorists actually pack into a few pages. By that point,
however, the reader must know that the plant affords no ordinary metaphor.
The philosophers’ rhizome has already done its work as a burrowing and
channelling of thought, and – in case the reader did not notice – it is rapidly
divested of exclusively botanical reference (animal packs are rhizomes, and
so on). So when we are informed about the plant it is already an example of
the idea.
   Through a series of short commentaries, I offer some reflections on ways
in which it might continue to be interesting to think about the life of
rhizomes. It can hardly be as a supplement to their original purpose, which
was to support a new image of thought, in Viveiros de Castro’s (2010: 222)
phrase. Rather, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the rhizomic aspect
of concepts to think about the plant1.

* This comes from an address (Beginnings: nature-culture revisited) to the 4th Biennial
national conference of ANUAC, 2015 on Life environments and imagined environments, at the
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. I am immensely grateful to the convenors for their
invitation and for the stimulus of the occasion, and to Dorothy Zinn, Elisabeth Tauber and
the University for their hospitality. A part was rehearsed as Relations of imagination: playing
a few tricks, for a seminar on The anthropology of the imagination, at the Musée du Quai
Branly in 2016; my thanks include those to Carlo Severi, Giovanni da Col and Anne-
Christine Taylor. It was only on completing the paper that I realized it is in some respects a
sequel to Cutting the network (Strathern 1996).
   A visit to Mount Hagen (Kuk area) in 2015 was made possible by a Leverhulme Emeritus
Fellowship, for which I record my gratitude, by the hospitality and intellectual
companionship of Ru Kundil, Henry Ru, Cathy Moka, among others, and by the unfailing
support and enthusiasm of Andrew Moutu, to which I also add John Muke’s interest. Tim
Denham gave invaluable help in Canberra, and I must add a word of thanks to Matthew
Spriggs for a piece of prompt action. Françoise Barbira-Freedman will know why I am talking
about people and plants.
1. To complete the thought: so whether the account that follows is philosophically pertinent
need not concern us here. The exercise is not at all the same as that involved in the debate
about nomads that Jensen and Rödje (2010) discuss; it is a little closer to Pedersen’s (2017)
treatment.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                               25


The signification of rhizomes
   The philosophers’ rhizome was a wedge to prise open the structurings of
European thought dominated by, on the one hand, the arborescent figure of
the branching and rooting tree and, on the other, the succession of life in an
agriculture based on seeds. What connects tree and seed is genealogical
thinking, the Western imaginary of «fields carved from the forest [and]
populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species
lineages» (Deleuze, Guattari 2004: 20). As Ingold (2000: 422) summarizes it,
they link the agricultural practice of sowing seeds from an ancestral stock,
«every seed an individual entity», to «a peculiarly Western ontology of
transcendence, and to a genealogical model of relatedness … by contrast with
a non-Western ontology of immanence». Theirs was a deliberate act of
conceptual displacement: it took a mind-shifting pairing of images to show
how through an apprehension of the world philosophy can re-think its mode
of apprehension. The rhizome was only one among several figurative moves,
but the whole point was that it did not come out of nowhere. It was
continually referred to what was already in place; its logic had to be «al-
together different» (Deleuze, Guattari 2004: 13) from the traced, re-
productive logic of the tree or seed.
   For, as a subterranean stem, a rhizome is «absolutely» different from roots
and radicles. It assumes diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all
directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers, channelling everywhere.
Above all, its mode of travel could not be more alien from the root of a tree,
which spreads by dividing itself over and over again, with the binary logic
that is «the spiritual reality of the root-tree» (2004: 5). In tension with this,
the otherwise unspecified rhizome has a sense of the wild and unruly about
it. Clearly, however, the absolute difference cannot itself be a dualism,
whether axiological or ontological, as it is put. This impossibility is already
figured, given that «in nature roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral,
and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one» or
«plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects» (2004:
5, 7). Thought, as they say, lags behind nature.
   It is precisely because the life of the botanical rhizome is explored in some
detail that it can be drawn upon as Ingold does, although in his case not so
much to liberate thinking from the constraints of lineal and hierarchical
reasoning as to return to the contexts of lived experience. However, he ends
up suggesting that fungal mycelium, with its underground network, might
serve as a better image for the contrasts he pursues. Deleuze and Guattari
have already pointed to the lateral transmission of DNA and its implication
for evolutionary schemas. «Such lateral gene transfer could make it

                                         2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
26                                                                          MARILYN STRATHERN


extremely difficult to arrive at a root for the tree of life», writes Helmreich
(2009: 82, 83), referring to the explicit joining of «evolutionary notions of
relatedness» with «calls for rhizomatic, reticulated representation as an
alternative to the linearity of the tree diagram»2. Lateral gene transfer is, he
continues, and relatively speaking, newly coming into legibility among
molecular biologists and microbiologists. There is a time lag here. It
becomes irresistible to suggest that nature, as it becomes known, is catching
up with thought3.
   Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome had shown how the (Euro-American)
mind might conceptualize itself as opening up to an expanse of possibilities,
a reality where nothing is ever encountered at its beginning or its end. So
what they have taken from the plant is a highly generalized but potent
imagining of its underground stems and runners, its ability to turn up in
diverse locations, its multiplication without fixed origin or destination. The
rhizome’s spread interferes with any ordered apprehensions of organization,
or of management and control by linear (arborescent) principles. What they
find in the plant (since each is always several, the singular is also a
multiplicity of forms) is led by their general knowledge of human affairs,
which has just such characteristics. Yet it becomes interesting to
contemplate the time involved, the ephemerality of these Euro-American
imaginings. Anthropologists always knew that trees came along with their
environments (contexts in other words), but they now know that what look
like single trees are likely to be parts of extended networks of livings things,
whether or not they are imagined as in communication. Such thinking is a
beneficiary of specific attention to the interconnectedness or symbiosis of
phenomena, and across the human-nonhuman divide as recently broached
in the pages of this journal (Benadusi, Lutri, Sturm 2016; Breda 2016), in
addition to decades of attrition of the old binarisms that were once so
seductive. As new understandings come into view, previous figures are dis-
placed; anthropologists have their own routes to thinking that trees were
always rhizomic.
2. Helmreich makes an explicit reference to A thousand plateaus, both here and apropos the
aphorism, «we form a rhizome with our viruses» (Deleuze, Guattari 2004: 11), where he goes
on to talk about what we now know about viruses as vectors of differentiation in the
microbial sea (Helmreich 2001: 192). Deleuze and Guattari had cited a 1975 paper on the
role of the virus in evolution, noting its suggestion of reticular schemas with
communications between branches after they have become differentiated.
3. But this holds back from going as far as Bowker’s suggestion. Bringing in a notion of
different worlds, Bowker (2010: 127) suggests the philosophers’ rhizome «is as accurate for
the natural world (with lateral gene transfer being more the rule than the exception) as it is
for the worlds they described».


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                   27


   Speaking of plants, if the tree can start looking distinctly rhizomic, one
may ask about the potency of imagining a rhizome that is distinctly
arborescent, subject to trimming and training. Before elaborating on this, let
me redress the figurative or imagistic balance: Deleuze and Guattari also
talked of seeds.

The potent seed
   There is another sense in which the rhizome did not come out of nowhere:
it was already characteristic of a nexus of existing practices, but in Deleuze
and Guattari’s terms ones that belonged to the “East” rather the “West”.
«The East presents a different figure [from that of the plantation]: a relation
to the steppe and the garden … rather than forest and field; cultivation of
tubers by fragmentation of the individual … Does not the East, Oceania in
particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect
to the Western model of the tree?» (2004: 20). In short, what is “missing”
from dominant Western modellings of thought processes chimes with what
exists somewhere else. That sense of what is missing uncannily echoes a
characteristically Oceanic response to the incursion of ”the West” in the
form of (white) colonial rule. Millenarian-like movements were overtly
based, among other things, on the supposition that an essential ingredient
was missing from indigenous people’s present-day lives, an ingredient that
had once been part of their past (and stolen from them) or of a joint past
with whites (from which they had – to their disadvantage – diverged).
   Answering a question posed to him in 1972 by Yali, the leader of a
millenarian movement (or “cargo cult”) from the lowlands of Papua New
Guinea, «why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [things,
technology, know-how] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people
had little cargo of our own?» (1999: 14), Diamond seems to be answering the
very question many of his tens of thousands of readers will also have
articulated. However Euro-Americans very quickly turn the question into an-
other one: “Why haven’t other people developed like us?”, that is, self-
evidently they cannot be like us. Diamond’s answer provides an argument in
altogether another tenor. They are like us; the differences Yali saw are not a
matter of basic endowment (as was implied) but of contingencies of a
historical or environmental kind that, evinced in long chains of cause and
effect, have bestowed advantages through cumulative outcomes 4. Nonethe-
4. Errington and Gewertz (2004: 25) argue that Diamond failed to grasp the fact that Papua
New Guinean questions about cargo were not questions about white men’s things as such,
but about the nature of colonial relationships between whites and blacks, and the manifest
inequality they enacted. Diamond’s own concern is to disentangle the evident technological
superiority of certain peoples over others – military prowess, state formation, demographic
increase and such – from the notion that such superiority has anything to do with the innate
characteristics of particular populations.

                                            2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
28                                                               MARILYN STRATHERN


less the premises of the two views converge. Both imply a particular
temporal framework, that is, an idea of development through time that
changes the characteristics of people and their circumstances, and that leads
to traceable, differentiated outcomes. If we call it evolutionary thinking, this
is evolution under the sign of the tree rather than the rhizome. It is an
approach to time that carries the signature of genealogical thinking, the one
that gave us ever-expanding systems and hierarchical structures, and a God
who reaps and sows.
   A large part of Diamond’s exposition of what he subsumes under historical
or environmental contingency concerns the role that certain species played
in the development of agriculture; this includes the domestication of plants
and animals that encouraged sedentarization, accumulation of surpluses,
property formation, and so forth. To a well known origin story, he adds some
less well known twists, such as the role of animal domestication in the
creation of disease and, as human populations grew, plague. It begins with a
particular emphasis at the outset, the potency of seed.
   His account of the first steps towards population intensification was
focused on the advantages afforded by cereals. While agriculture arose in
many parts of the world, he observed, European and Asian grains were easier
to store, and richer in protein, than tropical species such as bananas or root
crops. If it seems too easy to read back from what happened to its purported
beginnings, this is not what Diamond intends. Yet, with its emphasis on the
opportunities people had and their readiness to exploit them, his writing has
a rhetorical force that encourages teleological thinking: what was missing
that others did not progress to where “we” (we of industrial-colonial-
capitalism) are now? This is where seeds play a crucial role. A principal
factor that led to the beginnings of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent would
have been people’s «unconscious selection» (Diamond 1999: 115) of what
must initially have been a chance mutation, the blocking of the automatic
shattering of wild wheat and barley stalks, which meant that instead of
falling to the ground to germinate the grains remained on the stalk and
could be picked. This changed, he observes, the selective conditions acting
on the plants. People had interfered, in other words, in the process of
propagation.

Oceanic entailments
   The term “rhizome” pops up rather erratically in attempts at classification,
indeed weaves in and out of other terms. These are most easily grasped in
their particular manifestations. Thus if a rhizome is the main stem of a plant



2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                     29


(ginger, turmeric), and sends out both roots and shoots, a stolon or runner
sprouts from existing stems and generates new shoots at the end
(strawberry, sago). A tuber may be a thickened part of either a rhizome or a
stolon enlarged for storage (yam, potato), while corms (taro, banana, crocus),
structurally plant stems, may be likened to “bulbs”. What they have in
common is what makes for their nomadic proliferation, namely the ability of
a stem to throw out shoots and/or roots from its nodes that then take on
their own existence as clones of the original. In terms of cloning they are like
other species that propagate from budding nodes such as the herbaceous
sugarcane.
   “Clone” is a term used by the linguist and botanist Haudricourt (1964),
and it was he who, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004: 20) words, articulated a
crucial difference here as the ground for an opposition between philosophies
of transcendence and immanence. The opposition was between Western
(seed) agriculture, based on a chosen lineage containing variable individuals,
and Eastern horticulture, based on a small number of individuals derived
from a wide range of clones. That there is a multitude of species involved in
the latter is of indifference to the two social theorists 5; their examples range
across wild and domestic types, and indeed they would no doubt refuse that
distinction. But, as the citation makes clear, Haudricourt’s interest was
focused on the cultivated rhizome. What would the philosophical rhizome
look like if one’s model were specifically tied to what is found across many
parts of the tropical world: rhizome cultivars?6
   I follow through the nod to Oceania with a focus on Papua New Guinea
(PNG) and its neighbours. Among such cultivars are taro, yam, ginger,
banana and sweet potato. Taro and yam are ancient Papua New Guinean
food staples. In the case of taro, the corm is a swollen part of the stem that
serves as an organ of storage, just as the yam tuber does. The growth of yams
is dramatically bi-polar – first throwing out shoots that gather nutrients
above ground, and then storing the nutrients underground, in the tuber,
assisted by roots (for a recent evocation, see Battaglia 2017: 280). People
manage both parts of the process; indeed, Battaglia talks of how Trobriand
Islanders appreciate the solicitude with which yams must be controlled and
guided. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideational rhizomes create a mesh of canals
or channels. Where long yams are cultivated, they are trained to grow by the
5. That there is an ideational multiplicity – “the rhizome” is not one plant, let alone only a
plant – is of course what would be expected.
6. This is already to truncate the image of the rhizome. The ethnographic documentation
that follows at once acknowledges and lodges interpretations with specific authors: I do not
use them critically, and some of the interpretations may be disputed or otherwise in doubt.

                                             2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
30                                                              MARILYN STRATHERN


vertical holes that people make in the ground to receive them (e.g. Ambrym,
Vanuatu, Rio 2007: 109). Coupaye (2013: 90), who describes the Abelam
process in detail, asks whether we should not think of the yam as an artefact
quite as much as food or as a living, sentient being. He adds that this “multi-
dimensionality” comes from the fact that people intentionally make them
such.
   Another proliferation: the qualities on which one seizes for conceptual
purposes, as ethnographers have done. The parent taro corm, from which
suckers sprout, may be called the “mother” (Wola, Sillitoe 1983: 37). The
Ambrym work of tending growing yam foliage is said to be like looking after
a child, while the tuber is likened to a man providing nourishment, and the
fragment to be planted like a soon-to-be rotting “father” entering his grave
(Rio 2007: 113-115). For Trobriand Islanders, yams are killed when they are
harvested and killed all over again when they are cooked (Mosko 2009: 687,
693). Cooking is a little death, we might say. The point is that the plant that
was a source of its own growth now itself ceases to grow (Battaglia 1995: 85).
Without venturing into accounts of sacrifice and the spirits of the dead, the
resonance between what happens to yams and what happens to people is
clearly not fortuitous. As Mosko (2010: 1256-7) describes, following
Malinowski, gardeners and their wives are the parents (“mother” and
“father”) of yam tubers, their children. In this matrilineal milieu, yams for
re-planting are like daughters, capable of bearing offspring; as agents of ex-
change and feeding other people, yams for eating are likened to sons. Freshly
harvested exchange yams, still weak and vulnerable to the sun, must be
protected by a shelter similar to a mother’s birth cloak.
   The question, what would the philosophical rhizome look like if one’s
model were a cultivar, needs re-phrasing. If the plant is already after the
thought, then the question becomes: what would the (tropical) cultivar look
like – how would one describe it – if one’s model were the rhizome? The
philosophical rhizome is about certain kinds of multiplicities; just so for the
plant/artefact. And here the first response seems rather obvious. Any answer
would have take into account the fact that the cultivar is already the out-
come of attention, of people’s actions. For what is equally obvious is that
soon as one introduces people’s diverse orientations, their manifold
impulses for acting, figurative usage becomes distinctly rhizomic: no one
account can epitomize all the qualities and properties that a plant bears.
   A second response would be to consider a crucial aspect of that attention:
the process of propagation. I discuss propagation (of which there are many
aspects) from two temporal vantage points.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                       31


Propagation in prehistory
   It was by contrast with the cultivated plants of the tropical world that
Diamond focused on seeds. Rhizomes and the other cultivars found in PNG
did not just happen to be reproductively “seedless”, their seeding properties
ignored. Notably in the case of bananas, as Diamond says (1999: 113, 117),
which today rank next to rice, wheat and maize in world importance as a food
crop, seeds were in effect bred out of them. Prehistoric plant selection
encouraged growth of starch content7.
   Certain varieties of yam (Dioscorea), taro (Colocasia), sugarcane and
banana all seemed to have originated in Papua New Guinea, in the case of
the last two reaching parts of Asia (and in the case of banana, Africa) before
being re-introduced into PNG. (This was, needless to say, all long before
Europeans traversed the Pacific). Most edible bananas in the world belong to
a type originally the outcome of what people in the PNG region were doing
(Perrier et al. 2011)8. The archaeologist Denham (2017: 42) refers to
«domesticatory relationships» in the co-existence of plants and people in
order to suggest a gradient, «degrees of domestication [that] reflect the
cumulative effects of human interference in the life cycle and dispersal of
plants».
   Substantial evidence comes from an excavation begun nearly fifty years
ago by a team of Australian and Papua New Guinean archaeologists (Golson
et al 2017). Few other sites of early cultivation in the world are preserved as
well as at Kuk, in Mt Hagen (Western Highlands, PNG). In 2008 UNESCO
declared it of World Heritage status. Underneath contemporary gardens lie
both networks and layers of drainage ditches and channels, along with other
features, the oldest of which can be dated to 10,000 BP. Major deforestation
in the vicinity began at this time, and between 10–7,000 years ago, all the

7. Apropos bananas, «seed suppression, namely the reduction in the size of seeds so that
they are no longer viable, is selected for by people because it increases the size of the edible
pulp or starchy part of the fruit» (Denham 2017: 43). The sterility of some cultivars (varieties
of yam and taro) allowed for greater starch to be produced.
8. Genetic research on bananas and plantains, for example, tells of sub-species derived from
PNG that could only have travelled into island South East Asia through human contact.
There will have been mutations in different locales but the plants as such require
continuous re-planting. Initial hybridization in both Western Melanesia and in South East
Asia apparently led to sterile varieties spreading as far as Africa and returning to PNG,
where cloning over extremely long periods resulted in numerous cultivated varieties
through the conservation of mutants. The movements began 11,000 years ago, although
some forms of plant management date back to before then. In broad terms, the beginnings
of this activity was co-terminous with the development of seed crops in the Middle East and
China more than 9,000 BP (dates are all calibrated).

                                              2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
32                                                                         MARILYN STRATHERN


main food crops (and I focus on taro, yam, sugarcane and banana) were being
exploited at Kuk itself, although the evidence for their cultivation – rather
than just processing – is equivocal. The first clear evidence of cultivation
practices go back to a horizon of 7,000–6,500 BP; especially abundant at the
site are phytoliths from bananas. Subsequent remains of mounding and
ditching show people attending to both water tolerant plants such as taro
and water intolerant plants such as yam, as well as devising methods of
recycling nutrients through mulching.
   Today’s gardens conserve the evidence. What can be seen on the surface is
the present-day landscape; precisely because of the gardens maintained
above the excavation, the present landscape can also be seen – a second time
round – as a living index of the archaeological record 9. Indeed, the
archaeologists have indicated that planting food crops on top is fine while
planting deep rooting trees is not – rhizomes not roots! There has been
painstaking documentation of how particular persons in the local population
exercise their specific relationship to the land in question, one ordinarily
demonstrated by personal knowledge of occupation and usage. Some of
those living there, however, dwell on a further relationship: between present
people and that far distant population who first cultivated the soil.
Speculations abound. But among them seems to be the conviction of an
analogical equation, a crucial (dis)placement: as present day people make
gardens on this spot so too did those who dug there all those thousands of
years before. This is less a matter of claims to lineal continuity than of
bringing into mind, so to speak, those previous persons whose work is em-
bodied in a landscape formed by similar techniques of cultivation. An
observer might add that there is more than analogy here: vegetative
propagation means that there is a sense in which past and present gardens
are dealing with different generations of the “same” plant material.
   Such present-day Hagen gardeners are not claiming a line of ancestry, but
rather pointing to the particularity of their land and the food it grows. At the
same time people travel in search of constant differentiation in what they
circulate among themselves10. They certainly make this true of their plants.
Propagation through selection continues in gardeners’ regular exchange of
plant material and their sustained interest in finding new variations, as is
reported in diverse places across PNG (Angkaiyakmin, Crook 2007: 55;
9. The bid to UNESCO was made with this in mind (Muke, Denham 2017: 464). Since I avoid
the agricultural terminology here, I note that the official reference is to “The Kuk Early
Agricultural Site”.
10. The observation is prompted by, although the situation could not be farther from, that of
Pedersen’s (2017) nomadic Darhad Mongolians who instead want the world to repeat itself.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                  33


Gawigl, Schneider 2017: 80-82; Maenge, Panoff forthcoming). Needless to
say regeneration through cloning requires continual planting: as is the fate
of cultivars, they travel mainly by being (re)planted somewhere (else) 11. Re-
generation through cloning also means that cultivated plants, as rhizomes,
yield nodes and buds and shoots and runners that can be easily transported.

Propagation now
   There is another side to propagation. Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 20) took
from Haudricourt the difference between agriculture based on seed
cultivation and horticulture involving what they call the «cultivation of
tubers by the fragmentation of the individual». Fragmentation of the
individual: what kind of body is this? People’s actions come in here. Telban
(1998: 162) observes of Ambonwari that, when it comes to people, the human
body is seen through its activity.
   How do people propagate rhizomes? Dividing tubers from one another in
the Trobriand case and setting aside some for planting. But in many places
people propagate rhizomes by cutting the tops off the tubers or corms, or
otherwise detaching parts of the underground stem, which are then pushed
into the ground leaving the remainder to be eaten. What gives rise to new
tubers or corms is the part that is broken off for planting. The planted
material rots away once new shoots emerge from it. If Wola speak of the
parent taro corm from which suckers sprout as the “mother” (see above),
Abelam speak thus of yam fragments, the “mother” or “placenta” that will
nurture the new tubers (Coupaye 2013: 40), that is, indicating the part that is
broken off to be planted. Banana and sugarcane are cloned through cutting,
or through separating cuttings from the rootstock. Thus one slices through
the old corm or base of a banana that has already fruited, in order to detach
its suckers from the growing points (on the corm) that will form new growth;
however the sucker must be detached with its own growing point, a fragment
of the old material, intact. Sweet potatoes, a relatively recent introduction,
are cultivated directly from (overground) cut vines.
   From this sequence of activities one cannot separate how people relate to
the rhizomes from among all the plants to which they attend – and we have
not begun to talk about cordylines (Panoff forthcoming) or trees (Damon

11. In the eyes of many Papua New Guineans, however, planting does not axiomatically
ensure that the plant stays there; once in the care of particular gardeners, who may or may
not pay them sufficient attention, the souls of both taro and yam may have reason to wander
away. If they have come from somewhere else they can go off too, in a kind of reverse
movement.

                                            2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
34                                                                        MARILYN STRATHERN


2017)12. In the case of the crops, I am strongly inclined to sidestep any
“botanical” definition of rhizomes and gather diverse varieties together in
terms of the actions people perform 13. Their actions, their bodily engage-
ment, are not just on but – as PNG ethnographers stress over and again – for
the plants, who often need enticement and encouragement to grow. If one
wanted to say what was distinctive, then, about these staple crops, about
these plants that are more than plants, it is the manner of propagation. The
English language fails us here, since that manner may have to encompass
both the plant’s willingness to be propagated vegetatively and people’s
assistance in the matter. Insofar as the plant follows the thought, for present
purposes we can gather together all these vegetatively propagated beings as
“rhizomes”14.
   What model of regeneration is implied? Because of their own sexual
models of reproduction, Euro-Americans designate vegetative propagation
“asexual”. But that negative characterization obliterates the positive one:
the act of cutting. Momentarily it would seem to interfere with thinking of
these tropical cultivars as rhizomes. I return to this.
   Vegetative propagation requires separating generative matter from what
is to be eaten, often although not always from the very same body. To return
to Battaglia’s insight, new potential for growth is detached from what in
being harvested has stopped growing. This sequence challenges how Euro-
Americans might think of parent and child as old and new life. It is when an
individual taro or yam is cut that the new parent emerges: it begins as the
severed fragment. Only after it is cut does the replanted corm or piece of
tuber yield up its nutrients, feeding the new shoots soon to be growing above
ground before it itself shrivels and dies. Indeed it appears that what is parent
and what is child are equally matters of “becoming” 15; propagation
(separation) is the moment at which they both emerge.

12. I have neglected any mention of idioms based on trees, of which much is reported across
PNG. Thus in Hagen a person’s “root people” can include maternal as well as paternal kin,
and one Hagen image of kin relations is prompted by the image of the way the roots of trees
become entangled with one another. Another stresses the upstanding support a tree trunk
gives to a men’s house. But one would have to have examined people’s relationships with
trees before deciding whether these were “arborescent” figures or not.
13. A “social” definition if you like.
14. «Even though people know that many vegetatively propagated plants can be reproduced
from seed, cultivators in New Guinea propagate them vegetatively, a preference that has
been documented elsewhere in the world» (Denham 2017: 41, my emphasis).
15. See Schneider (2017: 213), on how the bride’s father comes into being at the moment of
her separation from him at marriage.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                     35


   Certain idiomatic usages in old Hagen seem to support this emphasis,
most notably the way a wife’s detachment from her natal kin might, in this
patrilineal regime, be described as her being “cut” from them. At a woman’s
bridewealth, among the gifts of shells that sever her from her natal kin, one
destined for her own mother’s brother is sometimes called “head cutting”,
being given with no expectation of return (others may be reciprocated). The
bridewealth as a whole might be referred to as wealth given for the head of
the bride who has been cut off from her people, on an analogy with “man
head” compensation payments for war deaths 16. Contrary to what it might
seem, these transfers were not the termination of relations. Quite the
opposite, in both cases, the expectation was that they would lead to future
transactions between the men on each side. So a future intensification of
relations sprang from an act of severance. Also springing from that act of
severance were the children the wife bore for her husband’s clan on his clan
land; the mother’s nurture came from what was created as an elsewhere.
Here the idiom of regeneration is explicitly vegetative. What is distinctive
about people, as opposed to other kinds of being, including nonhuman
metapersons (“spirits”), is what they have in common with plants: they are
planted from cuttings. In Hagen it is not just that they are sometimes called
“cuttings people”, it is their recognized name for themselves (Strauss 1990)17.

The time of the rhizome
   Yet is this not how these plant rhizomes start looking arborescent? In
these Papua New Guinean cultivars we find beings that are selected, trained,
trimmed and cut; their channels do not run anywhere. They seem both
“rhizomic” and “arborescent” . On the one hand is their rhizomic prehistory,
at its largest extent domesticatory relationships spreading over Asia and into
Africa and, in the case of some of them, looping back into Papua New

16. A woman “dies” twice, we might say, once when she is initially cut off from her natal kin
and all over again in the following generation, as the mother of a bride, when she eats the
pig that signifies the ultimate remoteness of her kin to her descendants (Strathern 2012: 10).
17. Mbo(cutting)wamb(people). Mbo, and its reference to planting as an activity (the cutting
or offshoot is intended to be planted), is distinguished from the term for “root”, which is
readily used for embeddedness in the soil or clan / actions for which one is responsible / the
cause of outcomes, and so on. (In the European idiom of the time, Strauss also translates
mbo, cutting or offshoot, as “seedling”, just as anthropologists have referred to yams laid
aside for replanting as “seed yams”). “Cuttings people” as a translation for mbowamb is an
example of a double entendre in English that is pertinent to the Hagen sense of the phrase:
while mbo does not refer to making a cut, the English idiom encompasses both that and the
being of the shoot that is the new point of growth.

                                             2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
36                                                              MARILYN STRATHERN


Guinea. Not to speak of today’s constant movement of local crops across
garden areas. On the other hand lies the arborescent need for continual
planting in this or that place, without which plants could not move such
distances. Thus there is also continuity through a binary process. It is this
that gives a literal dimension to the archaeologists’ desire to promote the
present-day landscape as a living embodiment of the past. Give and take
genetic mutations along the way, the banana you see now is the very plant
you could have seen then, showing you that it has been repeatedly cut at the
appropriate moment. – Like Hagen women cut time and again from their
clans of origin to bring new life to other soil. – And that vegetative cut is
dramatically binary, as we have seen, separating planting material into what
will grow and what has finished growing.
   Viveiros de Castro (2010: 236-7) reminds us that becoming is a movement
that deterritorializes, a non-processual movement, by contrast with and in
counterpoint to production. It is the atemporal middle freed from the points
that might give memory a measure, and «it is deterritorialization that makes
the aggregate of the molecular components “hold together”» (Deleuze,
Guattari 2014: 324). A far cry from filiative reproduction, as Viveiros de
Castro adds. I swerve from the fascinating account of filiation and alliance
that follows in order to take temporal “deterritorialization” in another
direction. It could not be more fitting for the debates that once arose over
agnatic filiation and group recruitment in the PNG Highlands, given the
shallowness of genealogies and the way people were transplanted across clan
territories. I do not go into detail, and simply note that non-agnatic
identities were conserved over a relatively short time span, so that
differentiated origins in one generation might fade in the next, or next but
one. A similar “absence” of memory may define the presentism of one epoch
as distinct from another.
   For it is apposite to remark upon certain of the temporal realities that
support the PNG propagators of rhizomes in their task. In doing so I suggest
a non-aborescent way of interpreting that cutting binary. From this vantage
point, those acts of severance in fact contribute not just to how cultivars are
propagated, but to a sense in which cultivars may by the very deliberateness
of such acts indeed be (seen as, described as) rhizomes.
   I say the PNG propagators rather than growers for propagating is what
people know how to do. Growing, as we have seen, is something altogether
else. It cannot be taken for granted. There is in these societies a constant
preoccupation with growth, especially because what is often uppermost in


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                        37


people’s minds is how much the effort to have things flourish depends on
themselves, on their moral condition, on the input of human endeavour and
action, including here their relations with ancestral ghosts and other meta-
persons. So what kind of temporal relationship keeps growth and non-
growth apart? Without that, one moment could not be cut or severed from
another, this generation from that. People do not just grow either: they have
to be grown18. And when Hageners come to identify new growing points,
sisters and daughters are at once the growing points of a clan and severed
from it to the benefit of others. The act of detachment creates a new horizon
of growth. It seems there has to be a death each time – stopping as well as
starting, cutting as well as planting.
   In trying to render what I take to be the view one might have found in old
Hagen, I put it that each detachment creates a “new time”, one that replaces
a former state of affairs: a displacement of one temporal horizon by another.
Suppose we were to resurrect Gellner’s vocabulary concerning evolutionary
and episodic time, after McDowell (1985; see Scaglion 1999), in accounting
for the perception of radical discontinuities between past and present 19, but
apply it to the kind of present people are in, then that kind of cutting is a
signature of an episodic present20. Evolutionary presentism, the outcome of
the kind of cause and effect sequences that come with time’s irreversible
flow, have already been illustrated in Diamond’s schema and the view of
propagation in prehistory. Episodic presentism may require further ex-
plication. It registers not so much a sequencing of “time”, a concept that
belongs to an evolutionary present, as much as the effect of people’s actions
upon one another (on both the people and their actions). This does not
exclude repetition, or the circumstances under which people’s actions may
recover those of a previous present – less a matter of traceable succession
than a rehearsal of a regenerative moment that gives the present generation
its own chance of regeneration. This is what Haudricourt was pointing to in
his “yam civilisation”. It is characteristic of so-called cargo-cult thinking: a
conviction in the about-to-be displacement of one regime by another. It is

18. This is not the place to go into the ramifications (of male initiation, for example), but the
relative growth cycles of men and women may be a source of local comment in terms of how
much assistance each needs.
19. She writes from Bun in the Sepik, the same general area as Ambonwari and Abelam. In
such a present, change is not incremental (memorized) but always «total, drastic and
radical» (McDowell 1985: 33).
20. Strathern n.d. provides a justification of sorts for this view. The contrast derived here
was not envisaged in Gellner’s usage; episodic also appears with other connotations, for
example, Telban (1998: 158) follows Ricoeur’s usage for a kind of narrational (linear) time.

                                               2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
38                                                                               MARILYN STRATHERN


also articulated, I think, in the way one or two people 21 at today’s Kuk
thought about the prehistoric site: they were literally in/at the place of those
who had first planted (and been “planted” there), unknown as the latter
were. Finally, an episodic present is evoked in the practices of propagation,
as I have described them. It is when a particular taro is cut that the new
(soon-to-die) parent emerges: it begins as the severed part. Every
detachment, a fresh horizon. Is some of the anxiety concerning growth about
how one ensures that a future “new time” (epoch), in PNG parlance, will
confirm the generative potentiality of the present?
   Cutting is at once an entry into, a repetition of and a confirmation of, a
plateau-like state of affairs, occasionally described as “timeless” (e.g.
Scaglion 1999), and what I have here termed an episodic present. If a
rhizomic being were to take action with respect to its condition of being, with
no possibility of an evolutionary reference point, is “cutting” itself what it
would indeed be doing?
   Speculatively, then, think what the cultivar as (this latter kind of) rhizome
brings to mind. It gives us an image of the stopping and starting of re-
generative life; it gives us placement and displacement, rootedness and
travel, non-growth and growth. Perhaps, too, in filiative terms it gives us the
motivation by which one set of people nourish the fortunes of another in
order to gain new life for themselves in the future (clan exogamy), entailing
– asymmetrically when it is a case of privileging either the mother’s or the
father’s side – the repetitive truncation of lineal flow (the death of the
discarded parent)22.

Gathered fields
   This account has nothing to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical
exercise as such23. Or rather, it treats their exercise in the same way as they
treat the rhizome. It takes what they afford us, the image or figure they draw,
as a stimulus to thinking about the plant (tropical, cultivated). Why this
particular affordance? Because like the rhizome for them, to which they

21. I am sure more widely held than this, but on my visit in 2015 only a few people explicitly
expressed it thus.
22. Here, and in the previous reference to filiation, I give a nod to a set of issues briefly at the
centre of theorization about the nature of PNG Highlands societies, concerning the lineality
of “descent groups” (e.g. clans) and the nature of ties with non-lineal (affinal and other) kin.
23. Nor with decolonizing indigenous metaphysics (Viveiros de Castro 2014), although it is
because of this endeavour that Viveiros de Castro has been such an apposite guide for this
tale.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                     39


lovingly return time and again, their writing travels so luxuriantly that it
encourages one to burrow through language. My own interest is in the
qualities people in PNG bring out from the plant during the course of their
interactions with it. Those interactions include a degree of solicitude that it
is hard to convey in English; it best rendered perhaps in Coupaye’s (2013: 44)
description of just how sensitive yams are to people, being aware of when
they pass by, reacting to their smell, and allowing people to undertake
special actions in relation to them.
   Let us conclude with a comment on some of the contrasts mentioned here.
To turn to Viveiros de Castro (2010: 226; and see 2014: 118-19) for the last
time, he notes how we would be misled to take A thousand plateaus as
revelling in dyads. Root-tree and canal-rhizome are not in antithesis as
opposed models would be, but are opposed asymmetrically: the one offers a
model, while the other overturns the practice of modelling. Now during the
course of the book, the tree presumably subsumes seeds (since the latter do
not sustain their original imagistic power), and the contrast between
horticulture (gardens) and agriculture (fields) falls from view. However,
“field” is briefly re-written at one point: in science new fields open up out of
the excesses of the old, forming a heterogeneous or smooth space of
multiplicities (Deleuze, Guattari 2004: 409). This is observed in the midst of
their own series of formulations, but the way in which one field arises from
another serves my own purpose. To put it in terms of the two modes of
presentism, an evolutionary present conceives both itself and its episodic
counterpart with which it is in contrast; necessarily, in the Papua New
Guinea case, the latter’s recurrent repetition of presents, for all their breaks
with one another, is altogether outside of this particular contrast. When the
displacement of old by new fields takes time into account, as the
evolutionary view does, the outcome cannot be displacement of like by like,
for the present both knows itself as the only possible reality and en-
compasses the past from which it is now divided.
   The «values and philosophies» (Haudricourt’s phrasing) of transcendence
and immanence were always in a political sense asymmetrical 24. We might
say the same of agriculture, which subsumes horticulture, but not vice versa.
These values and philosophies further endorse an evolutionary sense of
time’s flow. Would we have to endorse something like an episodic present in
order to ignore the temporalities here? When Ingold talks about the
difference between transcendence and immanence as a matter of different
24. In historical-political (evolutionary) time, that is: transcendentalist regimes of thought
encompass immanentist modes, but the reverse is not true; my acknowledgement to Alan
Strathern on this point (see Strathern 2017).

                                             2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
40                                                                        MARILYN STRATHERN


ontologies, there seems an episodic symmetry to the formula. One is either
in the one or in the other. This may be a source of insight. Attributing im-
manentism to Hagen thought, he quite beautifully sums up its horticulture:
«every cutting or offshoot is itself a section of a path of growth, one of the
reticulate networks of paths comprising the garden as a whole. Every strand
of this network, which Deleuze and Guattari liken to a rhizome, is the em-
bodiment of a relationship» (Ingold 2000: 422). The opposition between
horticulture and agriculture is but a node along a path of discrimination, in
his case between divergent imaginings of the social realities on which
anthropologists draw. At the same time, this symmetricizing contrast of
Western and non-Western “ontologies” works by closing off the ideational
polarization that keeps Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic “and” aborescent
poles of conceptualization in asymmetrical tension.
   For the episodic presentism of some of the kinds of activities I have
described with respect to PNG cultivation (not horticulture for there is no
agriculture) the anthropological task is to convey the distinctiveness of life
whose divisions are cut otherwise. Not a negative but a positive image: the
distinctiveness of each clan’s territory and its ancestral supports 25. One is
unique (a multiplicity) not because one is the only person or clan with
ancestors but because others’ ancestors have nothing to do with oneself. The
concept of culture does not quite grasp the point, nor does imagining that
various attributes add up to an ontology (see Holbraad’s criticism, 2017: 42).
Attributes, qualities, cannot be bundled together, for there is nothing to
contain them all. What it is to be in the middle, the plateau of the present,
does not rest on a contrast (it has no boundaries, is not a model). Yet if I
draw on an episodic vocabulary for how a tropical cultivar becomes a
rhizome, what is implied in the “contrast” with an evolutionary one?
   The contrast emerges in the description of something that itself does not
rely on contrast. That something is rather simple, namely the way in which
everything people see around them can be gathered together in a manner
that relays back to them that this is how the world is 26. It is not the gathering
of this and that, as a system of knowledge would have it, but more the
gathering to a person or persons of each and all of their actions. In a
provisional way we might describe the realities so enacted as “gathered
fields”.
25. Or the distinctiveness of the “spirit” domains of metapersons (Sahlins 2017), but I have
not dwelled on this side of tropical cultivars.
26. Toren (2012: 76) says something similar albeit in a different context: apropos ontogeny,
she writes of «the manifold processes in and through which we imagine the inexhaustible
world that warrants our imagination».


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                               41



REFERENCES
Battaglia, Debbora, 1995, On practical nostalgia: Self-prospecting among urban
      Trobrianders, in Rhetorics of self-making, Debbora Battaglia, ed, Berkeley,
      University of California Press: 77-96.
Battaglia, Debbora, 2017, Aeroponic Gardens and their magic: Plants / persons /
      ethics in suspension, History and Anthropology, 28, 3: 263-292.
Benadusi, Mara, Alessandro Lutri, Circe Sturm, 2016, Composing a common world:
      Reflections around the ontological turn in anthropology, Anuac, 5, 2: 79-98.
Bowker, Geoffrey, 2010, A plea for pleats, in Deleuzian intersections: Science,
      Technology, Anthropology, Casper Bruun Jensen, Kjetil Rödje, eds, Oxford,
      Berghahn: 123-138.
Breda, Nadia, 2016, The plant in between: Analogism and entanglement in an
      Italian community of anthroposophists, Anuac, 5, 2: 131-157.
Coupaye, Ludovic, 2013, Growing artefacts, displaying relationships: Yams, art and
      technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea, Oxford,
      Berghahn.
Crook, Tony, 2007, Exchanging skin: Anthropological knowledge, secrecy and Bolivip,
      Papua New Guinea, Oxford, Oxford University Press for The British Academy.
Damon, Frederik H., 2017, Trees, knots and outriggers: Environmental knowledge in
      the Northeast Kula Ring, Oxford, Berghahn.
Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2004 [1980], A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
      Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London, Continuum, The Athlone Press
      Ltd.
Denham, Tim, 2017, Domesticatory relationships in the New Guinea Highlands, in
      Ten thousand years of cultivation at Kuk swamp in the Highlands of Papua New
      Guinea (Terra Australis 62), Jack Golson et al, eds, The Australian National
      University, Canberra, ANU Press: 39-49.
Diamond, Jared, 1999 [1997], Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies,
      New York, W. W. Norton and Company.
Errington, Frederick, Deborah Gewertz, 2004, Yali’s question: Sugar, culture and
      history, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Golson, Jack, Tim Denham, Philip Hughes, Pamela Swadling, John Muke, eds, 2017,
      Ten thousand years of cultivation at Kuk swamp in the Highlands of Papua New
      Guinea (Terra Australis 62), The Australian National University, Canberra, ANU
      Press.
Haudricourt, André, 1964, Nature et culture dans la civilisation de l’igname: L’ori-
      gine des clones et des clans, L’Homme, 4, 1: 93-104.
Helmreich, Stefan, 2009, Alien Ocean: Anthropological voyages in microbial seas,
      Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.


                                         2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
42                                                                      MARILYN STRATHERN


Holbraad, Martin, 2017, The contingency of concepts: Transcendental deduction
      and ethnographic expression in anthropological thinking, in Comparative
      metaphysics: Ontology after anthropology, Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon,
      Peter Skafish, eds, London, Rowman and Littlefield International: 133-158.
Ingold, Tim, 2000, The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling
      and skill, London, Routledge.
Iteanu, André, 1999, Synchronisations among the Orokaiva, Social Anthropology, 7,
      3: 265-78.
Jensen, Casper Bruun, Kjetil Rödje, 2010, Introduction, in Deleuzian intersections:
      Science, Technology, Anthropology, Casper Bruun Jensen, Kjetil Rödje, eds,
      Oxford, Berghahn: 1-35.
McDowell, Nancy, 1985, Past and future: The nature of episodic time in Bun, in
      History and Ethnohistory in Papua New Guinea, Deborah B. Gewertz, Edward L.
      Schieffelin, eds, Oceania Monographs, Sydney, University of Sydney, Oceania
      Publications: 26-39.
Mosko, Mark, 2009 The fractal yam: Botanical imagery and human agency in the
      Trobriands, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (n.s.), 15, 4: 679-700.
Mosko, Mark, 2010, Deep wholes: Fractal holography in Trobriand agency and
      culture, in Experiments in holism: Theory and practice in contemporary anthro-
      pology, Tom Otto, Nils Bubandt, eds, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell: 150-173.
Muke, John, Tim Denham, 2017, Kuk phase 8: Heritage issues to 2008, in Ten
      thousand years of cultivation at Kuk swamp in the Highlands of Papua New
      Guinea (Terra Australis 62), Jack Golson et al, eds, The Australian National
      University, Canberra, ANU Press: 457-467.
Perrier, Xavier, Edmond De Langhe, Mark Donohue, Tim Denham, 2011, Multi-
      disciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domestication, Proceedings of
      the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 28, 11311-11318.
Panoff, Françoise, (forthcoming [1972]), Maenge gardens: A study of Maenge relation-
      ship to domesticates, Françoise Barbira-Freedman, ed, Marseilles, pacific-credo
      Publications.
Pedersen, Morten, 2017, Moving to remain the same: An anthropological theory of
      nomadism, in Comparative metaphysics: Ontology after anthropology, Pierre
      Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, Peter Skafish, eds, London, Rowman and
      Littlefield International: 221-245.
Rio, Knut, 2007, The power of perspective: Social ontology and agency on Ambrym
      Island, Vanuatu, Oxford, Berghahn.
Sahlins, Marshall, 2017, The original political society, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic
      Theory, 7, 2: 91-128.
Scaglion, Richard, 1999, Yam cycles and timeless time in Melanesia, Ethnology, 38, 3:
      211-225.
Schneider, Almut, 2017, La vie qui vient d’ailleurs: Mouvements, échanges et rituels
      dans les Hautes-Terres de la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, Münster, Lit Verlag.


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
GATHERED FIELDS: A TALE ABOUT RHIZOMES                                                43


Sillitoe, Paul, 1983, Roots of the earth: Crops in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea,
       Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Stasch, Rupert, 2009, Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place,
       Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Strathern, Alan, 2017, Global patterns of ruler conversion to Islam and the logic of
       empirical religiosity, in Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History,
       Andrew C.S. Peacock, ed, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 21-55.
Strathern, Marilyn, 1996, Cutting the network, Journal of the Royal Anthropological
       Institute, (n.s.), 2, 3: 517-535.
Strathern, Marilyn, 2012, Eating (and feeding), Cambridge Anthropology, 30, 2: 1-14.
Strathern, Marilyn, n.d., A clash of ontologies? Time, law and science in Papua New
       Guinea, for colloquium, Science in the forest and science in the past, convenors
       Mauro Almeida, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Geoffrey Lloyd, Aparecida
       Vilaça, Cambridge, 2017.
Telban, Borut, 1998, Dancing through time: A Sepik cosmology, Oxford, Clarendon
       Press.
Toren, Christina, 2012, Imagining the world that warrants our imagination: The
       revelation of ontogeny, Cambridge Anthropology, 30, 1: 64-79.
Strauss, Hermann, 1990 [1962], The mi-culture of the Mount Hagen people, Papua
       New Guinea, edited by Gabriele Stürzenhofecker and Andrew Strathern, trans.
       Brian Shields, Ethnology monographs 13, University of Pittsburgh,
       Department of Anthropology.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2010, Intensive filiation and demonic alliance, in
       Deleuzian intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, Casper Bruun
       Jensen, Kjetil Rödje, eds, Oxford, Berghahn: 219-253.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2014 [2009], Cannibal metaphysics for a post-structural
       anthropology, edited and translated by Peter Skafish, Minneapolis MN,
       Univocal Publishing.




                                          2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44
                                          2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44




 Marilyn STRATHERN, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge, is
 (Hon.) Life President of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA).
 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
Gathered fields: A tale about rhizomes
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2017: 23-44.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3058
