Cutting the Network

Cutting the Network Author(s): Marilyn Strathern Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep., 1996), pp. 517535 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034901 Accessed: 09/08/2010 11:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rai. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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CUTTING THE NETWORK MARILYNSTRATHERN

Universityof Cambridge

New technologieshavestimulatedthe rehearsalof old debatesaboutwhat is new andwhat is old in descriptionsof social life. This articleconsiderssome of the currentuses to which the conceptsof 'hybrids'and 'networks'arebeing put. It could be seen as followingLatour'scall for a symmetricalanthropologythatgatherstogethermodernand nonmodernforms of knowledge. In the process,the articlereflectson the power of analyticalnarrativesto extend endlessly,and on the interestingplacethatpropertyownershipholdsin a worldthatsometimesappearslimitless.

The owner of the Shell petrol distributionlicence for WestCameroonlives for part of the year in London, has childrentakingcourses in Britain,Franceand the United States, and keeps houses in both capitaland country (Rowlands 1995). The extent of his networkis shown in a sumptuouslifestyle.The business on which it is basedis run along hierarchicalprinciples;unmarriedyouths are sent to work for him in the hopes that he will set them up on their own. Rowlandsfinds an apt descriptionin an image the Bamilekepeople offered to Warnier:A notable[chef de famille]is a livingpiggybankfor the whole descent group: in him is containedthe plenitudeof blood receivedsince the creation, through a chain of ancestors'(translatedby Rowlands1995: 33, afterWarnier 1993: 126). Blood is a metonym for transmissiblelife essence, but only when channelledthrough those who take the title of 'father',ensuring that the contents of the bank are not dissipated.An heir undergoesan 'installationritual [that] transformshis body into the piggybankof the descent group, containing its blood and semen, which togetherwith camwoodand oil, also his possession, forms the corporateestateof the lineage'(Rowlands1995: 33). He must guard that container.The businessmanemphasizesthe importanceof containmentto his commercialoperations,for this allows him to refuse the claims of close kin while retainingtheir support,since it is from him that future prosperitywill flow. Consider Rowlands'sdeliberatephrasing:it is the man's body which is transformedinto the piggy bank. When Hageners,from the Highlandsof PapuaNew Guinea, remarkedthat women were like tradestores(M. Strathern1972:99, 120), the analogywas with the flow of money throughthe store:as the repositoryof nurturefrom her kin which she contains,a bride is also a 'store'or 'bank'of the wealth due her kin in return.ElsewhereMelanesianstranslateterms for bridewealthinto the English idioms of buying and selling (c? Thomas 1991: 194-6). Indeed monetary metaphorswould seem to flow like money itself, and like money act as condensed symbols of power. In turn, these persons imagined as repositories. J. Roy.anthrop. Inst.(N.S.) 2, 517-535

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Cameroonianbusinessmanand Highlands bride alike, would seem both to carrythe flow andtostopit.1That is, they hold it within themselves. The monetaryidioms throughwhich Melanesiansspeakof transactionssuch as bridewealthare often takenas a sign of commodity relations,whether of an indigenouskind (Gell 1992) or as the effect of exposureto wage labourand the world economy (Carrier1995: 95). It is not buying and selling as such, of course, that are at the heartof anthropologicalunderstandingsof commoditization, but the quality of relationships.The Hagen husbandwho speaksof his wife as a purchase,like somethingfrom a tradestore,awardshimself new freedoms. But in some formulations,the bride is also the tradestoreitself If so, then she is a store of wealth for otherswho benefitfrom their relationsthrough her, and it seems to be the personof the bride who, like the Cameroonian notable, containsthe possibilityof convertingthe fertile essence or nurtureof others into wealth. Twentieth-centuryEuro-Americans,2by contrast, do not like to imaginethemselvesas commoditizingpeople and do not, at least in the Englishvernacular,talkof bodies as piggybanks.Personsmay have property,be propertied,but are not propertythemselves.On the contrary,recognizingthe agency of the owner,3and thus keeping 'persons'separatefrom what may be owned as 'property',was a hard-won projectof their modernism. It was until recently,that is. Some of the transactionsin persoristhat characterizePapua New Guinea societies offer interestingtheoreticalresourcesfor thinkingabout recent EuroAmerican experiments with relationships. One issue is the incursion of commodities, especiallymoney, into kin relations,as in anxietiesvoiced over commercializing surrogacy agreements (see, for instance, Wolfram 1989; Ragone 1994: 124). The reverseis also pertinent,although not pursued here. Euro-Americandebates over transactionsin human tissue (see, for instance, Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995) offer interestingtheoreticalresourcesfor thinkingabout recentMelanesianexperimentswith commodities.In the 1960s and 1970s New Guinea Highlanderswere forevercommenting on money By all accounts'money' (shell valuables)had been presentfor a long time, but at that period 'money' (pounds and dollars) had also come on them as a new thing, an objectof overt speculationaboutsocialchange,an omen of a new era. Outsiders also worried about the incursion of kinship into commodity relations, how those tradestoreswould actually be run, since notions about obligationsto kin supposedlyinterferedwith the developmentof commerce. Parallelscannot be taken too far. The Cameroonianpiggy bank and the tradestorebridesuggestmixes of personand propertythatEuro-Americansfind unacceptable.Indeed, anthropologistshave traditionallydissipatedsuch strong images by talkingof bundles of rights, or by referringto 'bridewealth'rather than 'brideprice',and analysingthe ownershipof persons in terms of governance. Thus was the authoritysystem of the Maasai of Kenya translatedby Llewelyn-Davies (1981). However, she makes it perfectly clear that Maasai ownershipalso involvedrightsof alienation,exercisedoverhumanandnonhuman resources alike, and that it was therefore appropriateto refer to propertyin women. Jolly (1994) reportsthat on South Pentecost,Vanuatu,women have a 'price'(for which there is an indigenousterm)just as goods in tradestoresdo; men nowadays prefer to pay this in cash rather than with the traditional

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valuablesthey reservefor transactionsamong themselves (such as the purchase of rank). Now the benefitsand evils of money (Bloch & Parry1989) havebeen supplemented by a further subject for Euro-Americananxiety and speculation: technology.By all accounts'technology'(the machineage) has been presentfor a long time, but in the 1980s and 1990s 'technology'(hitech and micro) seems to strike people anew. It is ubiquitous,threatening,enabling,empowering,an omen of a new era.And if Hagen anxietieswere about how to controlthejlowof money (AJ. Strathern1979), these Euro-AmericananNietiesare aboutwhere to put limitson technologicalinventionsthat promise to run awaywith all the old categoricaldivisions (Warnock1985). These include the division between human and nonhuman.That divisionwas ordinarilyupheld (rendereddurable)by a host of others, including distinctionsbetween person and property,and between kinship and commerce.4Across diverse areas of life,5 they seemingly threatento fold in on one another,and notions about humanityand visions of technologicaldevelopmentthreatennewly to interferewith each other. This mutual interferenceis more interestingthan it might seem; I shall suggest that it bears comparisonwith gathering,stopping or containingflows of wealth or fertility.More generally,if increasingawarenessof the role of technology in human affairsnewly links human and nonhuman phenomena, does it invite us to re-think the kinds of flows of persons and things anthropologists have describedelsewhere?

Mixed narratives At the same time as anthropologistshave made explicit the artificialor ethnocentric natureof many of their analyticaldivisions,they find themse!vesliving in a culturalworld increasinglytolerantof narrativesthat displaya mixed nature. I refer to the combinationof human and nonhuman phenomenathat, in the 1980s and early 1990s, producedthe imageryof cyborgsand hybrids.This imageryhas been fed by the late twentieth-centuryEuro-Americandiscoveryof science as a source of culturaldiscourse (Franklin1995). Neither culture nor science is outside the other. In the case of the hybrid,combinationshave been pressedinto interpretative service to the point of surfeit. Narayan(1993: 29) was moved to identify an 'enactmentof hybridity'in anthropologicalwritings,citing nine works appearing between 1987-92. What is true inside anthropologyis also true outside. Culturesare everywhereinterpretedas hybridamalgams,whether of an indigenous kind or as the effect of exposureto one another:'almostevery discussion on cultural identity is now an evocation of the hybrid state' (Papastergiadis 1995: 9). The Cameroonianbusinessman'sbiographyseems anotherexample. However,Rowland'ssourceon the Bamilek6,Warnier,drawsattentionto a very particularkind of hybridobject, using the term hybridin the sense given it by Latour(1993) and to which I shall return.The object was the heterogeneous knowledge createdby a researchteam investigatinga company'sbusiness networks (Warnier1995: 107). The researchteamcompriseda networkof different competences. Their knowledge, a mix of technique cum social relationship,

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could be used to throw light on actualbusiness operations,althoughWarnier doubted its legitimacyin the eyes of experts.They were likely to be proprietorialover certaincomponentsof this knowledgeto whose pure form they could lay claim as 'puretechnicalities'. Warnier'scomment takes the tension between pure and hybrid forms to be partof the constructionof claimsbetween differentexperts.The interpretation of cultures has led to similar competition; in the hands of the hybridizers, however, the very concept of the hybrid signals a critique of separations,of categoricaldivisions,encompassingthatbetween the pure and the hybriditself 'Hybridity'is invokedas a force in the world. This appliesto the world created by certainforms of criticalnarrativein which the targetis interpretationas such, and the concept of the hybrida politicalmove to make some kinds of representations impossible (Bhabha 1994). Now, imagining the impossibility of representationis often renderedconcretethroughthe excoriationof boundaries decentralized (artificialdivides)or the celebrationof margins(deterritorialized, spaces).Such conceptualizationshave in turn been criticizedas re-enactingthe old inversionsof an us/themdividewhen one should be attendingthe processes 1995: 15; Purdom 1995). The huge critical of mutualtranslation(Papastergiadis onslaught against how to think the way different 'identities'impact on one anotherhas yielded a multitudeof hybridizingconcepts such as amalgamation, co-optationand conjuncture. Yetdespitethe surfeitof terms,there are constantappealsto what this or that writer leaves out; most regularly,appealsto power relations.It is as though the politics that lies within the image of hybriditydoes not do sufficientanalytical work - politics is re-createdas though it were also 'outside' the analysisof representations.Hence, too, the frequentappealsto categoriessuch as raceand genderwhich are presented,uninflected,prior to the work that the concept of the hybridis supposedto do in underminingthem ('powermust be thought in the hybridityof race and sexuality'[Bhabha1994: 251]). One reason may be that the languageof boundariesand culturaltranslation6raises inappropriate expectationsof social analysis.Such expectationsare both superfluousand insufficient:the complexityof people'sinteractionsas they might be apprehended sociologicallydoes not find a simple substitute in the subtlety with which categoricalboundariesmay be re-thought.For a start,the concept of boundary is one of the least subtle in the social science repertoire. It is therefore interestingto consider a recent sociological approachwhich hybridizesits tools of social analysis,and devises a new term: network.This is of coursean old term newly inflected.'Networks'(conventionalnetworkanalysis) have long been present, but now we have 'networks'(in actor-network theory) of a new kind. I deployedthe latterin referringto the mix of technical and social competencesin Wamier'sresearchteam,while juxtaposingthe older usage in regardto the company's range of contacts. But what do the new networksconvey about hybrids? Actor-networktheoristsset up narrationalfields in orderto show how effects are produced out of alliancesbetween human and nonhuman entities. The body,as a 'network'of materials,is one such narrativefor it gives off diverse signals,revealingskill,charismaand pathology(Law1994:183).7Thus Pasteur's discoveryof the microbe for anthraxdependedon a whole series of statistical,

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rhetoricaland operationalfactorsthat had to be held togetherin order to sustain, within a continuous networkof effects, the cruciallydemonstrativelinks between bacillus,disease,laboratory,field experimentand the life and death of individualanimals(Latour1988:84-92). The concept of networksummons the traceryof heterogeneouselements that constitute such an object or event, or string of circumstances,held together by social interactions:it is, in short, a hybrid imagined in a socially extended state. The concept of network gives analyticalpurchaseon those interactions.Latour(1993: 10-11) is explicit: the networkingactivityof interpretationsthat 'link in one continuous chain'representations, politics and the world of the scientific discovery creates mixed narratives.The theorist's interpretationsare as much networks as any other combinationof elements. For Latour,the rhetoricalpower of the hybrid rests on its critique of pure form, of which the archetypeis the critique of the separationof technology from society, culture from nature, and human from nonhuman. And this is indeed critique:in his terms, the work of 'translation'depends on the work of purification,and vice versa.At the same time, the hybridizedform appealsto a mixed their realitythatpure formswould conceal.Euro-Americanshave alwrays categories.It is (modernist) academic disciplines that have tried to pretend otherwise,and Latourcastigatesanthropologyas condemned to territoriesand unableto follow networks(1993: 116). Now, anthropologistsareperfectlycapable of following such networks, that is, of trackingbetween the Achuar and Arapesh(his examples)and, in the organizationof knowledge,between science and technology.8Indeed, in the spirit of his account (Euro-Americanshave alwayshad hybrids),anthropologistshave alwaysdone so in their 'translations' of 'other cultures'.As students of comparativeinquiry,however,they will not necessarilyend up with a critiqueof the same pure forms that bother EuroAmericans,such as technology and society. That is, their accounts will not necessarilylook like anything that could be applied to the social analysis of science and technology.In fact,we know thatanthropologistsare often diverted by kinship,and may attendinsteadto matterssuch as the flow of substanceor the applicationof marriagerules. In anthropologizingsome of these issues, however,I do not make appealsto other culturalrealitiessimply becauseI wish to dismiss the power of the EuroAmericanconceptsof hybridand network.The point is, rather,to extend them with social imagination.That includesseeing how they are put to work in their indigenous context, as well as how they might work in an exogenous one.9 It also includes attentionto the way they become operationalizedas manipulable or usable artefactsin people's pursuit of interests and their construction of relationships.In the home culture,partof theirpower will lie in their analogizing effect, in their resonancewith other concepts and other people's usages; outside the home culture, anthropologistsmust make their own interpretative decisions as to their utility.I proposeto utilize one characteristicof the hybrid, its apparentubiquity,and to considerhow this is supplementedby the concept of network.

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Can networkshavelengths? Latourrefersto the modem proliferationof hybridsas an outomeof purificatory practice.The more hybridsare suppressed- the more categoricaldivisions are made - the more they secretlybreed. Their present visibility is just that: the outcome of present awarenessof this process.Yet the capacityof hybrids to proliferateis also containedwithin them. For the very concept of the hybrid lends itself to endless narrativesof (about, containing)mixture, including the constant splicing of culturaldata in what a geneticist might call recombinant culturology.In fact, the concept can conjoin anything, a ubiquity consonant with the perceivedubiquityof culture itself I see the apprehensionof surfeit, then, as a moment of interpretativepause. Interpretationmust hold objects of reflectionstablelong enough to be of use. That holding stablemay be imagined as stopping a flow or cutting into an expanse,and perhapssome of the EuroAmericans'voiced concem over limits re-runs Derrida'squestion of how to 'stop'interpretation.How arewe to bring to rest expandablenarratives,not to speakof the culturalanthropologist'sendless productionof culturalmeanings (Munro in press)?'Cutting'is used as a metaphorby Derridahimself (1992, as cited by Fitzpatrickin press.) for the way one phenomenon stops the flow of others.Thus the force of 'law'cuts into a limitlessexpanseof 'justice',reducing it and renderingit expressible,creatingin the legaljudgment a manipulable objectof use;justice is operationalizedso as to producesocial effects. If I see in the network of some actor-networktheoristsa socially expanded hybrid, it is because they have captureda concept with similar propertiesof auto-limitlessness;that is, a concept which works indigenouslyas a metaphor for the endless extension and intermeshingof phenomena. A networkis an apt image for describingthe way one can link or enumerate disparateentities without makingassumptionsabout level or hierarchy.Points in a narrativecan be of any materialor form, and network seems a neutral phrasefor interconnectedness.Latour'sown symmetricalvision bringstogether not only human and nonhumanin the orderingof social life, but also insights from both modern and premodem societies. And that is the purpose of his democratizingnegative,Wehaveneverbeenmodern(1993). Modems divide society from technology,culturefrom nature,human from nonhuman,except that they do not - Euro-Americanmodernsare like anyone else in the hybridsthey make,even though they are rarelyas explicit.Before he castigatesanthropology for not going far enough, he praises the discipline both for creatinghybrid accounts (miNingnaturaland supernaturalin their ethnographies,politics and economics, demons and ecology)andfor uncoveringthe thinkingof those who make such hybridsexplicit (in dwelling on them, he says, such people in fact keep them in check). The divides of modern people's thinking do not correspond to the methods they actuallydeploy, and this is what people such as PapuaNew Guineanscan tell them. There are similarities,he implies, in the way everyoneputs hybridstogether:'Is Boyle's air pump any less strangethan the Arapeshspirithouses?'(1993: 115). For Euro-Americans,technologicaldevelopmentoffers a vision of the mixed forms implied by technique(nonhumanmaterialsmodifiedby human ingenuity, or human dispositionmoulded by tools). Network imageryoffers a vision of a social analysisthatwill treatsocial and technologicalitems alike;any entity

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or materialcan qualifyfor attention.Thus insteadof askingquestionsabout the relationshipof 'science' and 'society' in Pasteur'sdevelopmentof the anthrax vaccine, Latour(1988: 91) suggestswe follow what Pasteurdid and what his inventiondependedon. However,the power of such analyticalnetworksis also theirproblem:10theoretically,they arewithout limit. If diverseelements makeup a description,they seem as extensibleor involuted as the analysisis extensible or involuted. Analysisappearsable to take into account, and thus create, any numberof new forms.And one can alwaysdiscovernetworkswithin networks; this is the fractallogic that rendersany length a multiple of other lengths, or a link in a chain a chain of furtherlinks. Yet analysis,like interpretation,must have a point; it must be enactedas a stoppingplace. Now if networkshad lengthstheywould stop themselves.One kind of length is imagined by Latour:networks in action are longer the more powerful the 'allies' or technological mediators that can be drawn in. (Technology has a lengtheningeffect and, in his view,premodernstend to have limited networks.) We may also say that a network is as long as its different elements can be enumerated.This presupposesa summation;that is, enumerationcoming to rest in an identifiableobject (the sum). In coming to rest, the networkwould be 'cut' at a point, 'stopped'from furtherextension.How might that be done? It is worth consulting some of the actorswho put such images to use in their dealingswith one another. Cuttingnetworks Actor-networktheorists,and their alliesand critics,are interestedin the diverse props,to use Law's(1994) phrasing,thatsustainpeople'sactionsand in the way the props are held in place long enough to do so. Networks renderedcontingent on people'sinteractionsturn out to have a fragiletemporality.They do not last for ever;on the contrary,the question becomes how they are sustainedand made durable.They may seem to dependon continuitiesof identity(thatis, on homogeneity).But heterogeneousnetworksalso have their limits. I shall argue that if we take certainkinds of networksas sociallyexpandedhybridsthen we can takehybridsas condensednetworks.That condensationworks as a summation or stop. The Euro-Americanhybrid,as an image of dissolvedboundaries, indeed displacesthe image of boundarywhen it takesboundary'splace. I give two very brief illustrations,the first an instance in which the actors involved might well have recognizedthemselves as a network in the conventional social sense, and the second a case in which the social scientist might think of the chain of elements as a 'network' in Latour'ssense and of the resultantartefactas a hybrid.The perceivablenetworkin the first,andthe analytical hybrid in the second, both bring potentialextensions to a halt. In both cases these imagesof networkor hybridservethe furtheranceof claimsto ownership. In 1987 a Californiancorporationdiscovered the hepatitis C virus.11The virus was a discoveryin the sense of an unearthingof fresh knowledge about the world. But the means of detectingthe virus led to the invention of a blood test for which the corporationappliedfor, andwas granted,a patent.Patentsare claims to inventions;that is, to applicationsof someone's inventivenesswhich others technically could, but are forbidden to, utilize without acknowledgement. This test met all the modern criteriafor a patent. It was novel,

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producedby human interventionand, in the interestsof simultaneouslyprotecting and promoting competition, capableof industrialapplication.12As a result, the BritishNational Health Servicewill reportedlybe payingmore than ?2 for every hepatitisC test it administers- some 3 million a year.Apparently, the technologyfor the blood test is standard.What the inventorsaddedwas the genetic sequenceof the virus, maldngidentificationof the DNA an integralpart of the test. HepatitisC hadbeen underinvestigationfor twelveyearsbeforethe viruswas isolated.The patent counsel for the company that developed the test was reported as saying: 'We don't claim we did all the research,but we did the Dec 1 1994).Any one invenresearchthat solvedthe problem'(TheIndependent, which defines a scientific of knowledge the field by is possible tion only made truncatesthem. So it are long; patenting here community.The social networks a network rights of of or fragment segment mattersvery much over which to a scientific article In names forty another case, can be exercised. ownership not join in. The long did rest the application; a patent to six names became network of scientists that was formerly such an aid to knowledge becomes hastilycut. Ownership therebycurtailsrelationsbetween persons;owners exclude those who do not belong. Scientistsworking with referenceto one anotherwould no doubt recognize themselves as a social network, along the lines of conventionalsocial analysis ('networkanalysis').In this sense, the interestslinking the severalinvestigators of the virus were comparable:at the outset, any one of them was a potential claimant.The network as string of obligations,a chain of colleagues,a history of co-operation,would be sustainedby continuities of identity.However diverse their roles, participantsreplicated one another in the fact of their The patentintroducedthe question over what areathe network participation.13 spread;who participatedin the final spurt. The extent of a homogeneous network, such as this one, appearsto be bounded by the definition of who belongs to it. However, the divide, created for the purposesof the patent,between those who did and those who did not belong, was establishednot by some cessationof the flow of continuitybut by a quite extraneousfactor:the commercialpotentialof the work that turned a discoveryinto a patentableinvention.We could say that the prospectof ownership cut into the network.The claim to have done the researchthat solved 'the problem'justified a deliberateact of hybridization:co-operativeor competitive, the scientists'prior work could now be evaluatedby criteriafrom a different world altogether:that of commerce. Now, while we might expect our (not quite hypothetical)scientiststo talk of networks,we would be surprisedif they talkedof hybrids.However, an actornetwork theorist might well observe that the act of hybridizationwas doubly accomplishedin this instance,for it also involved a classic form of Latourian hybrid:the invention.An invention implies by definitionthat culturehas been addedto nature.The ingenuityof the inventoris held to change the character of an entity;intellectualactivityconferspropertyin it, as does the applicationof skill or labourwhich gives people (the possibilityof) propertyin products.14 Hence a person from whom the originaltissue comes finds it difficultto claim ownershipof cell lines subsequentlyproducedin the laboratory.Propertyrights

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cannot be claimedover an unalterednature;they applyonly to an alteredone. The inventor'sclaim is that human tissue has been demonstrablymodified by ingenuity,includingingenuityembodiedin technologicalprocess.An American commentaryon immortalcell lines, that is, cells infinitely reproduciblein the laboratory,is explicit. 'Manyhuman cells have alreadybeen grantedpatentsin the US on the basis that they would not exist but for the interventionof the who extractedandmanipulatedthem' (NewScinist,January12, 1991). "inventor", In the famous Moore litigation,15the man who tried to claim propertyrights in cells developedfrom tissue removedfrom his body during an operationlost the case. It was the claim to the heterogeneoushybrid,the fact that these cells had been immortalizedthrough human ingenuity, that was upheld. In fact Moore was castigatedby one judge (see Rabinow 1992) for his commercial motives, unseemly in relationto one's body but appropriatefor those developing technologywith commercialapplicationin mind. Between Moore and his opponents,the claims could be constructedas of differentorders;one claimed a body partas partof his person, the other an intellectualproductas a result of certainactivities.The hybridobject,then, the modifiedcell, gathereda network into itself; that is, it condensed into a single item diverseelements from technology, science and society,enumeratedtogetheras an invention and available for ownershipas property.In fact there is a good case for seeing propertyas a hybridizingartefactin itself, althoughI do not develop the point here. Ownership cuts both kinds of network, homogeneous and heterogeneous. First,it can truncatea chain of severalclaimants,otherwiseidentifiablethrough their social relationshipswith one another,dividing those who belong from those who do not. Belonging is thus given a boundary.Second, it can bring togethera networkof disparateelements summatedin an artefact(such as the invention) that holds or contains them all. If it is the perceived addition of human enterprisethatbestowspropertyrights,the humanelement addedto the nonhuman one, then the proof of that hybriditycurtailsother interests.As at once the thing that has become the object of a right, and the right of a person in it, propertyis, so to speak,a networkin manipulableform. The structureof these entailmentsand curtailmentsholds an interestbeyond the specificapplicationsnoted here. It is thus necessaryto spell out the fact that there is a culturalpredispositionamong Euro-Americansto imaginethat social relationshipsconcerncommonalitiesof identitybefore they concerndifference, and thatheterogeneityis inevitablein combiningthe humanwith the nonhuman. I turn now to networksthat are homogeneous in so far as they presupposea continuityof identitiesbetweenhumanandnonhumanforms,andheterogeneous in so fir as personsaredistinguishedfromone anotherby theirsocialrelationships. II

Stoppingpflow

Coppet'saccountof 'Are'areof the Solomon Islandsshows the power of making objectswhich can be manipulated.'Are'aredivide living creaturesinto three kinds. Cultivated plants have body, domesticatedpigs have both body and breath,while human beings also hold a name or 'image'.At death, the once living person is disaggregatedor decomposedinto these differentelements:the

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body,a productof nurturereceivedfrom others, is eaten as taro and vegetable food; breath is taken away in the breathof slaughteredpigs, while the image becomes an ancestor(Coppet 1994:42, 53, referring,it would seem, primarily to men). This ancestralimage is revealedas an enduringentity,as the person is strippedof body,breathand relationswith all other persons bar ancestorsand descendants.Interpersonaldebts are settled (Coppett 1994: 53), as elsewhere the memory of the deceasedis 'finished'(Battaglia1992). The living human being thus appearsto be a hybrid.But we would be mistaken to see this in the 'addition'of breathto body or in the 'modification'of breathingbody by ancestralimage. Each of the three components has its own manifestation,and if the amalgamatedhuman being is a person, so too we may think of each component as a person (a person is made up of persons), in continuities facilitatedby flows of money. I use the term 'person' since the human being is also conceived as an aggregationof relations;it can take the form of an objectavailablefor consumptionby those otherswho compose it. In these acts of consumption, the person is, so to speak, hybridized,dispersed among a networkof others. Nonhuman substitutesexist, then, for each of the forms (body,breath and image) that the human person takes. Through body and breath persons are interchangeablewith taro and pigs, both of which are living beings like themselves; in the case of their distinctive image, however, they become interchangeablewith non-living things.Ancestralimage appearsin the form of money; that is, stringsof shell beadsof varyinglengths.The image is composed of strandspresentedat earlierfuneralfeastsand destinedfor future ones. Shell money travelsfrom one funeralplatformto another,gatheringand dispersingas one might imaginea shadowythrongof ancestorsdoing; the fragmentationand recombinationof different strands in the dealings of everyday life, Coppet notes, anticipatethe money's appearanceas an entiretyat death.Everytransaction assiststhe circulationof fragmentsor segmentsof an image.This image is the deceased made present as an ancestor;for shell money is, in effect, an (1994:42), one of a person'spersons,so to speak,in nonhuman 'ancestor-image' form. What is this money? Money is divisible into standarizedportions, measured by the fathom containingtwenty-fourunits of fifty shells. It thus 'serves as a measuringrod, situatingon a single scale events as differentas the purchaseof ten tarosor of a canoe, a marriageor a murder,the amount of a funeralprestation, the paymentfor a ritualserviceor for an ensemble of musicians'(Coppet 1994: 40). Markingan event in monetaryterms gives it an official seal. It also builds up the person as a composite of past transactionswith diverse others. There is a furtherdimension to money.This stimulatorof flows can stop flow. Shell money has circulatorypower preciselybecauseother entities, events and productscan be convertedinto it: pastencountersand relationshipscirculatein condensedform in its 'body' (my metaphor).Now, at deaththere is a finalizing sequence of exchangesin which the living being's two other components become money; in one sequence taro is convertedinto money, in anotherpigs (Copet 1994: 53-4). The ancestor-imageencompassesboth, and the sequences stop at that point. Money thus becomes the repositoryor containerof prior interchanges.It is as an anticipationof the final cessationof flow at death that

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money at other points in life can stop other flows, most significantlyin homicide payments(Coppet 1994: 10-11). Where there has been a series of deaths, money alone stems the flow of revenge. 'Are'areare explicit about this finalizingsequence:they refer to it as a 'stop' or 'break',imaginedas a fall, as at sunset,or as the sinkingof a stone. Such stops can only be effected by means of shell money. In other types of exchange,by contrast,money is merelya contributoryelement;these include tied exchanges ('linkedsuccession')which connect events leadinginexorablyfrom one to another so that the giver's repaymentof a debt constitutes a new debt for the recipient.Any one prestationis also composed of 'returns',the smallest sequence in a cycle of exchanges;exchanges are thus made up of exchanges. Together,these activities bring about networks of different lengths: 'Are'are measurethe length of debt in an enlargingseriesof acts,from 'return'to 'linked succession' to 'stop', the last gatheringup all preceding flows into one moment.16 Like strands of shell money itself, these flows are simultaneously divisibleand indivisible.In short, networksare composed of both human and nonhumanentities;they differ in how they are absorbedor consumed. The mortuary ceremony that makes the deceased's networks visible also blocks their futureeffect. Old networksare cut by being gatheredup at a point (in the deceased),whose sociallyhybrid form is dispersedand thereby brings new networks into play. The relationshipsthat once sustained the deceased become recombinedin the personsof others. Bringingfw

back

If the 'Are'arepersonemergesfrom such transactionsas hybrid,then its heterogeneity comes from the way differences are sustained between the social relationsthat sustain it; the hybrid is an amalgamof social relations.In this Melanesiancase, it is made visible as a networkvia funerary,bridewealthand similarprestations,transactionsthat lay out the person in terms of the claims diverseothers have.And vice versa:the same transactionscondense claimsinto sociallymanipulableobjectsof consumption(things).Whatare, in a mannerof speaking,homogeneous, implyingcontinuitiesof identity,are the forms - human and nonhuman- that these objectsof consumptiontake (the body is the taro).With referenceto similartransactionson Tanga,Foster (1995: 166 sqq.) reminds us that it is an illusion to imagine that differencesof value lie in the intrinsicnatureof things:values are the outcome of relationalpractices.Thus 'identical'productsmay have 'different'values (cf Piot 1991). Coppet analysesexchangesin terms of a hierarchyof encompassment:from the tiniest interchangethat carries an expectationof a return, to the ritual compulsion by which people are linked through maldng paymentsrequiring further payments,to the capacityto gathersuch exchangesup in a mortuary prestationthat caps them all. Here they are condensedinto money.Money can, in turn, be spreadout and disaggregated.What is true of a man's death is also true of a woman's marriage.Bride-giversbestow on the husband's kin the potential for growth in their sister whom they have grown, and they receive back,and thus consume, evidenceof growth alreadyaccomplishedin the form of valuables.Here are objects with different values: reproductivewealth (a future wife) in return for a non-reproductivesister. Now a non-returnable

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portion of money ('money to stop the woman') is said to stop the woman's image;her kinsmen'sidentitywill no longer flow throughher. In addition,her kin receive furthermoney which they returnto the husband'sside in separate lots as money,taroand pigs. Her kin therebyre-create,as separatecomponents, the body,breathand image of the woman from the single gift of money. 'Are'areancestor-moneyis thus a condensed objectificationof the person who can be disaggregatedinto variousmanifestationsof relationswith others. The (homogeneous) network of elements that make up the person - human and nonhuman - is also a (heterogeneous)network of social relationships.In turn, the person acts as both containerand channel,blockingflow and bodying it forth. Kinship systems, as anthropologistsmodel them, have long providedanalogies to this kind of process. Consider those curtailmentsof claims that come with exogamy,sister-exchangeor cross-cousin marriage.If we imagine these protocolsas creatingnetworksof varyinglengths, then they have differentcapacities for sustaining flow or stopping it. Many kinship systems certainly presupposemeasurementsfor tracingthe extent of substance.Indeed we may take this as diagnosticof 'lineal'modes of kinship reckoning.Extensivenessof claims may be reckonedin terms of continuity of identity,as when a descent group whose members share common substance truncates claims over its members at the exogamic boundary;making new relationsthrough marriage stops the flow. Or old relationsmay have to be cancelledbefore new ones are produced.Or, again,the kind of marriagerule that invites persons to think of themselvesas marryingcousins or exchangingsiblingsinvites them to think of substanceas turningbackon itself Here networksare stoppedin the personsof relativeswho become the turningpoint for directingthe flow of fertilityback.17 On South Pentecost, shortly after the birth of a child, Sa-speakersmake a payment to the mother's kin for the loss of blood (jolly 1994: 146). This is among those called lo sal, 'inside the road, or path' (1994: 109). Perhapsthis particularpaymentcan be read as given both for the blood spilt at intercourse and birth (the reasonSa people give) and for the blood dammedup, no longer flowing with theirfertility;father'ssemen blocks mother's flow of blood (jolly 1994: 143). The child embodies maternalblood but cannot pass it on; instead, lifelong payments are due to the maternalkin. When the mother's brother receives a boar in recognitionof the blood which, while contributingto the child, has no forwardeffect, he is forbiddenfrom tying it up. Insteadthat role is performedby the mother'smother'sbrother,who in turn is forbiddenfrom eating it. The latter has alreadyeaten pigs given him earlierby the mother's brother (jolly 1994: 111-12); he is thus made presentbut cannot benefit from the flow of fertilitybeyond one generation.A sister's substance,then, is not passedon to her grandchildrenbut is stopped in her children.The grandchildren of cross-sexsiblings,preferredmarriagepartners,subsequentlyremakethe 'road'(Sa for 'marriage'):a man marriesinto the place from which his father's mother came. While these Melanesianchains - of persons, and of the wealth that flows along with them - are followed outwardsto a certainextent, some may turn aroundat key points and return.This may be accomplishedover time: previous generationsare reborn, persons making up other persons. In terms of social

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process, alternatingsocialitiescome to be effected by, among other means, the sustaineddifferencebetween flow thatspreadsand growth thatgathersor stops the flow.18.To energizeprocreativesubstanceeitherto disperseorreturn,it must be made different in the way its network is spreadout. 'Are'arebridewealth money fixes the woman'sancestralidentity,while taroandpig effect the transfer of her body and breathbetween kin groups. Each side retains,so to speak,its version of her. Whetheror not accompaniedby marriagerules,such procreativerelationships transactionsconstructnetworksof retend to shareone generalcharacteristic: strictedlength. Networks become measurable.They are measuredby people's indebtednessto one anotherthroughthe flow of objects,humanandnonhuman; those who give or receivewealth, or the people they standfor, become links in a specifiablechain. Claims can be conceptualizedas simultaneouslyresulting from ties of bodily substance and from previous transactions.So brides or ancestorsact as objects that may flow either with or againstthe flow of other objects (Wagner1977). Links appearin the chain when it becomes possible to exchange'different'objectsfor social consumption.By the same token, chains come to rest in these objects,human or nonhuman,at the point when actions can be takenwith them. Bridewealthlays out who shall receive at a woman's marriage,and anticipatesthe next generation of transactionsat her future daughter'smarriage. J. Weiner (1993a: 292) remarksthat in a relationallybased world 'the task confrontinghumans is not to sustainhuman relationships... [but] to place a limit on relationship'.Giving and receivingshell valuablesat marriagecontrols the flow of relationshipbetween affinal groups. So does the movement of persons. The paternalinheritanceof the Hagen bride terminateswith her; she is like the Vanuatumotherwhose blood is blockedat pregnancy,or the 'Are'are ancestor in whom all reciprocitiesare finished. At the point at which claims cease or turn back, they become truncatedby their intersectionwith other claims, signified by a hybrid figure (human being or wealth item or ritual substance)who gathersthem within, so that they are seen to stop in his or her person. III

One class of kinshipsystems in the anthropologicalrepertoireis notorious for havingno internalstops. Bilateralor cognatic(nonunilineal)kinshipreckoning allows that substanceflows, and evinces itself in individualpersonsbut it does not stop in them or turn back.Indeed, indigenesmay tell themselvesthat they are all related - trace far enough back and everyone shares substancewith everyone else.19As a response to such systems, there was, in the 1950s and 1960s, much anthropologicaldebate about cutting networks. These debates addressedthe problem of potentiallyendless networksof relationsthat seemingly did not cut themselves.One could traceforeveroutwards.Fromthis came the presumptionthat therewas no measurebeyondthe dictatesof contingency: bilateralkinship appearedto have no inbuilt boundariesof its own. It was arguedthat in orderto creategroups,for example,ramifyingkin ties had to be cut throughother principlesof social organization.

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I would argue that what was appliedto analysinggroup formation in such societieswere the very mechanismsthatdo in factgive bilateralkin networksof the Englishkind a self-limitingcharacter(Edwards& Strathernn.d.). One kind withfactorsof in conjunction of reckoningnever operatesalone; it alwaysoperates a different order. From the anthropologist'scomparativeviewpoint, 'kinship' has to lie in the combination. Here we have the Euro-Americanhybrid:not just an expanse 'cut into' by other phenomenabut a specificabridgementof natureand culture. Social relations depend on multitudinous factors that truncate the potential of forever-ramifyingbiologicalrelations.Biologicalrelatedness- 'blood ties' - can thus be cut by failureto accordsocial recognition(someone is forgotten),just as social relationshipscan be cut by appealto biological principles (dividing 'real'kin from others). So in practiceone does not trace connexions for ever; converselythe most intimate group is also open to discoveringcontacts they never knew existed. Factorsfrom diverse domains can affect the reach of an otherwisehomogeneous networkbasedon 'blood'or 'family'. Whatis interestingaboutEnglishbilateralism,then, is that the basison which everyone might say they are related(biologicaland genetic connexion) can be reckonedseparatelyfrom the trafficof social relations.This gives us both continuitiesand discontinuitiesof identity.In so faras biology and society are taken as distinct domains, we can see why the users of English culture presume an identityof interestsin social relationsand why they presume heterogeneityin mixes of human and nonhuman.In Melanesianterms I might want to say that these Euro-Americansimagine a boundaryto the person that makes internal with others). flows of substanceradicallydifferentfrom externalones (interactions That also gives a tenacityto their ideasaboutraceand sexuality:continuitiesare somehow within and discontinuitiessomehow outside. While my argumentshave been pitched very generally,I would assert that such generalizationslie 'within'the specificitiesof social life as well as 'outside' them. ConsiderSteve, in Simpson'saccountof the 'unclearfamily'constituted throughparentaldivorce.20 Steve's narrationof his 'family life' places him at the centre of a network of relationships which carryvaryingloads in terms of affect and commitment. For example, he sees himself as a 'father'to six children. However, the way in which fatherhoodis expressedand experienced by Steve in relationto each of his childrenis variable.The label 'father'condensesand concealsvaryinglevels of financialand emotional commitment, differentresidentialarrangements and variablequantitiesof contact (1994: 834).

Steve is at once a (singular)fatherand containswithin his fatherhooda rangeof elements. They comprise connexions with persons, different social practices, resourcesand materials,heterogeneouselements from which, in this passage, Simpson has selecteda few. Disaggregatedinto its components,it would seem that the figureof the father expandsto bring in a rangeof referencepoints;yet it also contractsin so far as only a small set of componentsis singled out: what Steve means by 'father'is likely to encompassmore than can ever be specified.21When the specification is reduced to distinguishableelements, as in commitments defined as both financialand emotional,then we can referto the resultantconstruct,the father who shows both, as a hybrid.As a kinsperson,then, this figure constitutesa

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condensed image whose dispersed, network version is distributed between separableordersof fact (money,emotion). English and other Euro-Americanbilateralsystems of kinshipjoin together disparatereasonsfor relatedness.They arepremissedon conservingontological differencebetween domains:on imaginingthatthe affectiverelationsof kinship are materiallydifferentfrom the flux of economic life, or that the transmission of substanceoperatesunder laws of biology separatefrom social laws, or that individualpersonsarenaturalbeingsmodifiedby society.Here the earlierexamples of invention have a particularpoint in my narrative.The inventoris a kind of enhancedagent.All human agentsare inventors(creators)in a modern,EuroAmericansense: the person is substanceplus the animatingself-inventiveness of agency,a combinationof distinctelements.The elements may be regardedas 'added'together,'modifying'one anotherin the same way as culture modifies nature. If, in Melanesianterms, Euro-Americanssometimes seek to sustain a differencebetween internaland externalflows (body and intellect versus biology and culture,and so forth), it is becauseeach can be presentedas havingits own impetus or logic. For they can be turned to use separatelyas well as in conjunction,as I have indicatedin respectof conceptsof ownership.Belonging marksrelationsbasedon continuitiesof identity,and thus the separationof pure forms,while propertypresupposesdiscontinuity,and the conjunctionof human enterprisewith nonhumanresources. I havewilfully mixed old and new - the old networksof networkanalysisand kinshiptheory,and the new ones of actornetworktheory.It has led me to think about an indigenous, Euro-Americanmechanism for cutting: 'ownership'. Ownershipis powerfulbecauseof its double effect, as simultaneouslya matter of belongingand of property.Euro-Americanswill not have to look farin order to determine network length; they have alwaysknown that belonging divides and propertydisowns. So where technology might enlargenetworks,proprietorshipcan be guaranteedto cut them down to size. Perhaps,in this, the 'Are'arenotion of 'stop' as a prestationthat is a resting place, repositoryor turningpoint bearscomparisonwith, though by no means assimilationto, the notions of ownershipI have sketchedhere. These notions challenge the interpretivepossibility of limitlessness:the kinds of interests, social or personal,that invite extensionalso truncateit, and hybridsthat appear able to mix anvthingcan serve as boundariesto claims.

NOTES This article is in memory of Jeffrey Clark, and his account (1991) of pearlshellsthat flow and pearlshellsthat grow. Alan Macfarlanehas contributedinvaluablecomments on ideas of property,and I am furthergratefulto the severalcomments of the ESRC seminaron Technology as Skilled Practice convened by Penny Harvey at the University of Manchesterwhich heard a version of this article.Comments from Annelise Riles, Simon Harrisonand the Journal's anonymousreadershave been much to its improvement.Thanks to those who have given me permissionto cite as yet unpublishedworks: Peter Fitzpatrick,IrisJean-Klein,Christopher Taylor,Nicholas Thomas. 1 Taylor (n.d.) focuses on 'flow' and 'blockage'in certain Central and East African understandingsof channels of potency. A. Weiner (1992) and Godelier (1995) have commented on similarissues to differenttheoreticalends, as hasJ. Weiner (1995a;1995b). 2 I personifya discoursefor expositionalconvenience.

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3 One of the Journal'sreaderscommented on the role of legal thinking in such separations. Indeed, one might take the development of the law as historicallycrucial to that modernist commonplace,the distinction between subject and object. If the eighteenth-centurydevelopment of copyrightlaw, for instance,turned on claimingauthors'paternityin relationto products, through the concept of commercialprofit it also renderedauthors'works separablefrom their persons. 4 The distinctionsdo not preclude but make more powerful the attachmentof persons to their property.Propertyis of course integralto family life, not to speakof inheritanceand family businesses. 5 There are innumerablesuch pairsof terms in English (human and nonhuman,culture and nature,law and society, person and propertyand so forth). These merographicconnexions are a source of flexibilityin Euro-Americanconceptualizations,giving a particularinflection to the 'layersof redundancy'one expectsin culturallife (Battaglia1993: 439). As similarbut not identical constructs,such pairs sustain one another. Indeed, that none of them is identicalto another is part of their rhetoricalpower, since similarcontrastsappearto hold across severaldiscrete (all slightlydifferent)fields. Thus one can talk of an embryo as human but not a person, while makingmoral discriminationsbetween human and nonhuman,person and property. 6 Papastergiadis(1995: 14-15) gives the exampleof Lotman's(1991) 'semiosphere'.'For Lotman, the semiosphereis in a constant state of hybridity.It always oscillates between identity and alterity,and this tension is most evident at its boundaries'.Boundariesare contained in those first-personforms that differentiateself from other. In Lotman's (1991: 131) phrase, 'Everyculture begins by dividing the world into "its own" internalspace and "their"external space'. This is the dangerous nonsense of which European xenophobia is formed (Stolcke 1995). It will be clear that I do no more than brush the tip of recent culturalcritiques;for an anthropologicalcommentary,see the essaysedited by Fardon1995. 7 When Law (1994: 18-19) defines network, he remarksthat it does not have much to do with standardsociologicalusage as in the traditionof kinship studies. I suggest to the contrary that English kinship offers an interestingmodel of networks that concern links not just between persons but between human and nonhuman entities. This is touched on at the end of the article. 8 The tools of their discipline include methods of classificationand comparisonthat are, arguably, an effect of the same Euro-Americanscientific imaginationwith which they battle in every ethnographicdescription. 9 Whereasthe brief referencesto Melanesiathat follow distil extensive ethnographicenquiry, the referencesto Euro-Americanincidentsare ethnographicallyanecdotal;that is, no more than examplesof the culturallypossible. Their value lies in their distillationof reflectionon analytical models within the discipline. 10And they are not innocent (Riles 1994). The observer'sor writer'scounter-rhetoricalpractice in deconstructingnarrativesof unity carriesits own politics (Jean-Kleinn.d.), as does the easy assimilationof conjunctureto the concept of hybridity(Thomas in press). 11I have used the exampleelsewhere (Strathernn.d.) from the point of view of the element 'added'by human enterprise.The detailsare as The Independentreportedthem on December 1st 1994, following a High Court rulingenforcingthe patentin this country. 12Critics have pointed out that there is only one set of DNA sequences to be identified in the human genome, and no claims to identificationcould be challengedby further inventions; the patentis protectingthe companyfrom competition,not promotingcompetition. 13Hill and Turpin (1995: 145) quote the Vice-Presidentfor Science and Technology at IBM who observed in 1991: 'Most large companiesin the world are extensivelycross-licensedwith each other. Exclusivelicences are almost non-existent.The key is not ownership, it is access'. Of course the key is ownership, but ownership of a network or segments of it along which 'access',like money, flows. 14'No skill or labour has been exercisedon it; and there has been no change in its character': a dissentingjudge refutingclaims made to propertyin a corpse, quoted in Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995: 80. Such principlesare of course open to contestationin the way they are appliedin specificcases;I do not have to add that which persons claim propertywill depend on the relationsof production. 15 Moore v Regentsof the Universityof California, 1990, is taken as a locus classicus for debate concerning human tissue developed as the basis for a commercialproduct (Nuffield Council

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on Bioethics 1995: 72). The phrasingin this paragraphis mine. The court was tryinga preliminary point of law as to whether a person had propertyrights in tissue taken from the body (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1995 includes a summaryof the judgment). Rabinow 1992 offers a full and fascinatinganthropologicalcomment. 16A distinctionbetween those killed by other persons (death by homicide) and those killed by ancestors(death by illness) alters the sequences here. I should add both that I have put my own interpretationon Coppet's analysisand that my extractsdo not do justice to his fine, holistic account. 17The exegeses of severalMelanesianistsare relevanthere, but I truncatethat chain of collaborativework in referringto one: J. Weiner (1993b)invokes a delightfulsuccession of resting placesin his descriptionof the winged Foi pearlshellcapturingin hardenedform the life-giving force of birds in flight, while certainshells set aside in houses immobilize the life-giving force of shells in constantcirculation. 18 In a positive mode; negative modes would include uncontrolled flow or unproductive blockageor obstruction(Taylorn.d). 19 However, in contrastto universesof kin where affines are alreadyconsanguines(see, for instance,Kapadia[1994] on South India),for Euro-Americansthe possibilityis either rhetorical or belongs to the class of bizarretruths. 20 Networks (in Latour'ssense) arise as a result of 'translation',that is, the mobilizationof claims and interests by which people traverseor assemble components of their lives. While Steve and his present wife try to 'treat'all the children equally, his mother-in-law cuts the network: she ignores Steve's children from his earlier marriagesand gives treats only to her daughter'schildren (Simpson 1994: 835). 21This observationderivesfrom Wagner's(1986) descriptionof contractionand expansionin perceptualprocess. The figure of the father serves as a single 'iconic' image, while containing specifiable,'symbolic',possibilitieswithin itself. These act as codes or referencepoints for the image, but they alwaysadd up to less than the whole. I should note that in this work Wagner is concernedwith the 'flow' of imagerywhich is 'stopped'by the specifyingpracticeof symbolic reference.My focus here is with anotherside of that process:the endless abilityto create more and more referencepoints, as in a narrative,or bring more and more elements into play, which is 'stopped'by the singularityof the image as a particular,usableobject. Law (n.d.) observes that actor network theory createslinks in the very process of creatingobjects of study. The 'objectof study' thus cuts potentialnetworks,by drawingthings to a particularencompassing point or image.

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Couper a travers le reseau R6sund

Les nouvelles technologies ont rouvert un vieux d6bat concernant les descriptionsde la vie sociale et les approchesconsid6rees novatricesou surann6es.RWpondantI l'appel lance par Latour,qui pr6ne une anthropologiesymrtrique r6unissantles formes de savoir modernes et non-modernes, l'article considere les concepts d'hybride et de reseau tels qu'ils sont utilises aujourd'hui.Ce faisant, il pr6sente une r6flexion sur le pouvoir d'extension infinie de la narrationanalytique,et sur la placetout a faitint6ressantequ'occupe le droit de propri6t6 dans un monde apparemmentsans limites.

CB2 3Rf, FreeSchoolLane, Cambridge, Universityof Cambridge, Department of SocialAnthropology, U.K