What’s in an argument? Reflections on knowledge exchanges

Abstract

This article draws on a turn of events in the speaker’s long association with Papua New Guinea in the Pacific. Pacific Island academics have made it clear that anthropologists should be explicit about ‘knowledge exchange’. Knowledge transfers take innumerable forms; in the case of the anthropologist, however, it often seems that expert knowledge is more taken than given. Thinking comparatively about academic practice, is there any future for potential ‘exchanges’ as forms of interdisciplinarity, say, or of argument between points of view? The article takes the concept of an academic argument to ask about its counterparts in non-academic milieux of knowledge-making in one part of the Pacific.

I Introduction

Going beyond anthropologists’ inevitable juxtaposition of the analytical language in which they speak and the vernaculars that they study, wherever they are, I am intrigued by the kinds of conceptual resources on which anthropology can draw for analogies between diverse contexts. (I refer to sociocultural anthropology.) This has been a long-standing interest of mine—and my hope is that it may be of interest enough to share.

If we think of the Melanesian Pacific and the area I know best, Papua New Guinea (PNG), we are at the end of a century of fine detailed ethnographic study, yet the result is less than cumulative: each moment of study is informed by the concerns of its own present that may no longer speak to ours. Familiar monographs suddenly appear old fashioned. One way of keeping those accounts alive is to read them with current interests in mind. So, for example, when some 20 years ago intellectual property issues suddenly broke the bounds of legal discourse and became a more general part of academic parlance, there was more to it than subjecting issues to do with cultural traditions to debates about property rights. For the anthropologist, it introduced new ways of thinking about human creativity and the claims made in its name, and it provided a new vocabulary for investigating intellectual life. Of course this form of ‘property’ carries a baggage, and in this case a specifically European baggage, but it also turned into a resource for the fresh analysis of what one might otherwise have thought were ‘old’ materials. And, also of course, such traffic in conceptual resources can go both ways.

In pondering on traffic in conceptual resources, I take the European—or rather Euro-American—side of the equation as seriously as the Melanesian side; I shall try to think comparatively, unlikely as it may sound, about ‘academic practice’ for instance. I do so in a context where people wish to see a two-way flow.

II A call for action

At the end of the 2008 biennial conference of the European Society for Oceanists (referring to Oceania or the Pacific Islands), a round-table of Pacific Island academics urged their colleagues to acknowledge the obligations activated by their relations in that part of the world—and ‘to recognize the responsibilities to Oceanic people, to the Academy and to Civil Society that come with the exchange of expert knowledge’.

Given that this part of the world is renowned for its exchange systems, I was struck with that reference to ‘exchange’, and momentarily imagined this was a Pacific Island neologism for ‘transfer’ as in ‘knowledge transfer’. However, it quickly became apparent that in the UK at least knowledge exchange has, for quite some time, been used in conjunction with knowledge transfer. (The BBC and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council uses the term for a collaborative and strategic research partnership; the Natural Environment Research Council refers to knowledge exchange in its claims to be contributing to the country’s economic life and well-being.) No surprise that the phrase also sits alongside calls for academics in general to make their expert knowledge useful. And here I recovered my sense that there was something distinctively Oceanic or certainly Melanesian about the round-table call to consider knowledge exchange. In the demand to face up to the obligations of relationships, the Pacific Island academics were endorsing an exchange value of a particular kind. It was not that normally found alongside use value in commodity transactions but that of the gift with its relationship-creating potential. A successful exchange would be the beginning, not the end, of future interchange.

This article works through some of the implications of the responsibilities and obligations with which anthropologists are charged by those with whom they work and does so by addressing certain matters in academic life—and when I say academic, or use an inclusive ‘we’, that includes the interests of Pacific Island academics as much as anyone.

III Introducing debate

It might in fact be useful to prise ‘knowledge exchange’ away from its twin ‘knowledge transfer’. That funding bodies such as government agencies and research councils value knowledge for its usefulness is simply part of the life of contemporary academia, above all exemplified whenever expert knowledge appears transferable. Indeed, within higher education, the idea of knowledge transfer is deeply embedded in the language of performance indicators and the administration of learning outcomes. Let me keep ‘knowledge transfer’, then, for those very admirable aims that seek to justify the support universities receive from the public purse. That frees up the idea of ‘knowledge exchange’ for anthropological analysis, as one might wish to apply, say, to the kinds of interactions imagined by the Pacific Island scholars. And we should get to work on it as scholars indeed would, by appraising both terms—knowledge and exchange. For it is only through keeping our capacities for criticism alive that we know ourselves as scholars as well as academics.

One of the problems for the contemporary academic—and one of the achievements of modern university administration—is the way the need to demonstrate the usefulness of knowledge slides into the validation of knowledge in management terms. Through good management comes the democracy of smooth communication. Knowledge transfer presumes such smoothness. On the one hand, the coming together of expertise is seen as highly desirable in elucidating problems in the real world; on the other hand, it is often assumed that the only deficit is an informational one, and (technical issues aside) relaying sufficient information is the work of those who claim expert knowledge. But there is a cost from all this to scholarly life.

It is against the smoothness of communication that Stengers (2011), speaking as a philosopher of science, extolls the value of controversy (cf. Callon et al. 2009). Her target is the unproblematic way in which it is assumed that technology can harness science to its efforts. She writes in praise of divergence, in the sense that there is no learning if there is no possible backlash, and if what you address is not able to display its own divergence. By ‘own divergence’ she means not divergent from and thus in relation to another, but a trajectory defined on its own terms. She excoriates the technoscience that ‘is in the process of redefining our own worlds in terms that makes them available for its comparative operation’ (Stengers 2011: 58, my italics). Proponents of technological innovation aligning themselves with what they claim is scientific objectivity stand against an academically pursued science based on doubt. Deliberately melodramatic, Stengers [Winthereik (2011: 78) suggests] foretells the death of science when the habits of criticism and counterproposition come to be submerged in the cause of technical solutions, that is, death by the knowledge management. ²

Challenged in a verbal presentation to reflect more positively on a transformed future for the relationship between industry and science, she said science would die (‘I’m a Darwinist; species don’t transform, they die!’, cited by Winthereik 2011: 77). What would die was what allowed scientific practices to diverge along their own lines of flight. Controversy and scientific debate produce disparities that mean comparison between views can never be (in Stengers’ words) unilateral. No one party is in charge of the bases of comparison. This is not the democracy of smooth communication but a democracy of contrasting views and conflicting opinions. ³

I think there is something to be learnt from Stengers’ outburst. If she sees controversy as the very life of science, shouldn’t we take it in a larger sense as the very life of academia? To be melodramatic, one could say that academics have a responsibility to generate controversy, even an obligation to those who would learn from them to do so. Now controversy is born of positions that reproduce their differences. Maybe this gives us a basis for thinking of ‘knowledge exchange’—as opposed to knowledge transfer—in a European or Euro-American context as well (cf. Noble 2007). Let me make three preliminary observations.

First, in relation to no one party being in charge of the bases of comparison. Here, one of anthropology’s favourite concepts, ‘culture’, is at once culprit and exemplar. When it comes to comparing phenomena ‘across cultures’, the very idea of culture has already appropriated the basis for comparison. When, as inevitably in their descriptions, anthropologists thus appropriate the grounds of comparison then they make themselves responsible for the outcome, and for the way they use concepts. However, they have more than their own concepts to hand. What is there to be learnt from anthropology’s academic practices—not findings or analyses or theories but practices within academia?

Second, then, where do we find frequent or systematic recourse to controversy? It is specifically routinised in academic argument by virtue of the fact that arguments involve disciplines, and controversy flourishes both within and between disciplines. In the company of others, one may be heard as speaking for one’s own subject; within, one may be engaging colleagues in vigorous disputes, whether they call on common premises or appeal to radically divergent schools of thought. An outsider may be amazed that anthropology cannot agree on a definition of, precisely, its favourite concept, culture! The insider’s view makes that disagreement generative: certainly, we shall never agree, not for as long as the discipline flourishes! Academic debate works as a device for and a context for airing disagreements. And it is about knowledge. Of all academic practices, then, and using the term to cover argument and controversy given shape by disciplinary usage, I focus on the habit of debate.

Finally, there is the question of underlying assumptions to be found in any practice. Debate develops disagreement as a specific form of interchange that itself entails an agreement (an agreement if necessary to disagree). However, if one goes beyond the arena of academic debate, as in the kind of knowledge exchange I want to talk about here, what about premises that are so different that they manifest what some would say are less positions in a debate and more like incommensurable worldviews (Povinelli 2001) or even divergences in cognitive behaviour (Lloyd 2007). There may be no agreement about what ‘knowledge’ is. Absence of agreement about knowledge will in turn affect what on earth one might mean by knowledge exchange. I take this as my starting point.

IV What is knowledge?

What is ‘knowledge’ when a question about one story is answered by juxtaposition with another story, and when the listener is meant to combine both of them with what he or she already knows? This is how the anthropologist Crook describes conversational turns in Bolivip, PNG. He adds that listeners are invariably invited to perceive (other people’s) stories ‘in the form of themselves, as if they were a projection animating their own concerns’ (2007: 30). We also have to ask what kind of ‘exchange’ might be going on here. I shall return to Bolivip in a moment.

Far away from Bolivip, on the Rai coast of PNG’s Madang Province live the people of Reite. Here Leach describes knowledge in the form of narratives; these are potent stories that have an effect on the landscape as they do on persons. They are not marked out as an intellectual activity. Rather, differences ‘are between kinds of people, with different control over knowledge, not between intellectual and other forms of activity’ (2009: 181). ⁴ In fact, people would only talk of knowledge that they themselves ‘owned’—and Leach adds that for anything passed on to another the owner would remain liable for its effects. ‘[E]xpressing knowledge amounts to claiming inclusion in the relationships (including those to land and spirits) that generated the knowledge’ in the first place (2009: 182). What the Bolivip storyteller does by embracing the listener in the narrative itself—for there it is the listener who ‘completes’ the narrative—is re-played by the people of Reite when they make connections through knowledge: knowledge ‘being a part of one’s make-up… [is] something that connects one to others’ (ibid.: 182). In fact, Leach suggests that in this kind of transmission, we are witnessing something analogous to what English speakers would call ‘kinship’. It is a kinship rooted in particular places; land underwrites the social relationships it nurtures, and knowledge inheres in it (as a ‘place’). ‘Knowledge connects people, to one another as kin’, Leach (ibid.: 183) writes. ‘If kinship is about the production of persons, relations focused on, and made possible by, the emergence of knowledge are the basis of kinship’ (ibid.: 184). He means this knowledge, and not bits of biological material, is the substance [his term, ibid.] that connects people in close relationships.

The ‘sharing’ of knowledge that makes kinship in turn affects what it might mean to ‘exchange’. In Reite regular exchange is not of knowledge itself but of the products of knowledge: the wealth and food that a place produces. These are given to people from other places, primarily affines (in-laws) and maternal kin, as in competitive displays (palem) that acknowledge their nurturing contributions. ⁵ Affinal kin are thus connected in a manner quite distinctive from what binds people of a single place together. Affines are connected through the demonstrable effects of the potency and efficacy of knowledge; they enjoy the products of knowledge without controlling its source, for that belong to others. For Reite we might want to reserve the concept of ‘exchange’, as against sharing, for a particular kind of kin engagement.

Controlling the source of knowledge is a phenomenon often glossed in terms of ownership as though the inclusions and exclusions here generated property relations. Let us listen to an anthropologist who himself comes from PNG. Moutu (2009), revisiting the famous Iatmul, like Bolivip and Reite also of PNG, attempts to redeem the concept of ownership from its property connotations. If knowledge can be seen as a form of kinship, ownership can be seen as a form of naming. In commenting on the potency of names, and the fact that personal names are also place names, he observes:

Names give identity by establishing specific limits and boundaries around that which they name. That which they name carries a semiotic and social significance because they anticipate the conduct of relationships between people. This is where names function in ways that are reminiscent of the character of ownership and its ability to designate owners and to delineate the limits of ownership. (ibid.: 313)

The limits of ownership include a name’s association with a place (‘specific named areas of land’, ibid.: 316). In such a context, he says, people can only create things out of what they already own. ⁶ Not in a property sense, I would add, not because people have the freedom to dispose of what is theirs, but in the kinship sense, because they keep the source of reproductive energy, their creativity, distinct from the products or creations that manifest that creativity.

Perhaps like these anthropologists who have worked in PNG, and who use ‘knowledge’ as a gloss on vernacular terms, we should not be shy about the term itself. But we would have to deprive the concept of one of its principal connotations in English, namely its capacity for convertibility. In English, knowledge is often taken as something that can be converted into information and is thus ripe, so to speak, for communication. Indeed, in knowledge transfer for the public good, it is openly stated that knowledge should be so converted—this is the essence of what is meant by ‘expert knowledge’ in the very idea of such transfer. Stripped of this connotation, we would have to say for these Melanesian contexts that certain kinds of knowledge may be transmitted only under circumstances that create something like kinship between the parties. Otherwise put, what is shared as knowledge is not easily convertible into information.

However, this generalisation needs some modifying. Both Kalinoe (2004) and Simet (2000), PNG lawyer and anthropologist respectively, would differentiate between kinds of knowledge and make a special place for expert knowledge. What has been said about ownership and kinship applies specifically to the knowledge, such as that of names and myths, to which access is restricted, by contrast with everyday or public knowledge that requires no special techniques of transmission. I come back to Bolivip. In addition to the challenge Bolivip lay down for storytelling, they give a special inflection to advice or expert knowledge, that is, knowledge that requires specific acts of transmission. It may include words of special moral advice. Crook was very struck by a moment that is worth rehearsing in full:

It is the moment when having faked an incision into his left thigh by using his right hand, and telling me that he has opened his thigh and shown me his lamlam (knowledge, advice) inside, Dominicus Sulumeng presses his hand on my skin and insists that now his skin has gone onto mine, and that my skin has gone onto his: he says, having exchanged care for advice, that we are ‘one skin’. (2007: 29; see also Eggertsson 2002)

There is a possibility of exchange, but not because different kinds of knowledge or expertise flow from one person to another in a communicative act, nor in the sense encountered in Reite where the products of knowledge were given to affines from other places. An ‘exchange’ is envisaged by the ethnographer because of internal divisions between seniors and juniors; in return for food or other acts of care that will nourish their skin, older people are prepared to impart to younger people some of the stories they know. In other words, the solicitude of the recipient of this knowledge is regarded as ‘growing’ the body of the recipient of nurture, with whose his own is now connected (Crook 1999). ⁷ Crook also alludes to kinship. ‘In Bolivip knowledge is composed through other people’s bodily resources – from sources equivalent to those in conception – and ventures forth in the form of a person’ (2007: 29). ⁸

In fact, the act of transmission is everything but an act of communication in an informational sense. For all the Bolivip distinctions between seniors and juniors, and paternal and maternal kin for that matter, it creates no external ‘other’. This observation is more startling than one might think. Foundational to Euro-American knowledge transfer ideology, an external ‘other’ is always there waiting in the wings—a user, a public [as in publics], a technocrat, a policymaker, who can, crucially and necessarily, validate the conversion of knowledge into information and thus give evidence of information flow. On the contrary, Dominicus’ act was an act of closure. Crook continues with his account of what Dominicus bestowed on him: ‘As long as the “advice” does not pass outside his person – newly expanded to encompass me – then it creates knowledge in no one else’ (ibid.).

These examples query the ease with which one might talk of (expert) knowledge and of exchange. To apply the Euro-American concept of knowledge exchange to these contexts, one would have to strip ‘knowledge’ of the presumption of unimpeded information and strip ‘exchange’ of the idea that a two-way flow is only evident when it crosses boundaries already in existence. But then one of anthropology’s responsibilities is to keep its vocabulary open to an absence of agreement, of agreement that would otherwise pre-empt analysis. Although I have not gone into the nuances that these particular scholars differently highlight, not agreeing on how terms may be applied is probably part of the job.

V Making cultural difference a point of view

Specific as they also are, such kinship, and relational-based connotations of knowledge and exchange, are hardly confined to PNG. ⁹ Let me show them at work in a situation that was self-consciously ‘cross-cultural’, and in a situation that demanded an outcome (in terms of recommendations) and could therefore tolerate disagreement only to a certain extent. Here, the concept of culture had already appropriated the viewpoint from which comparison would be made. Comparison was being contained just as debate can be contained. In fact, the example on which I draw showed debate being appropriated for ends not dissimilar to those of knowledge management. I briefly detail a confrontation of sorts, then, in an interdisciplinary group of academics and museum personnel, as well as practising lawyers, hearing petitions from First Nation representatives. It will lead to further questions about knowledge exchange.

When the UK Working Group on Human Remains in Museum Collections (DCMS 2003) was preparing its report, published in 2003, ¹⁰ it heard commentaries from scientific and other experts, and had representations from various interested communities who put across their view of the matter. The matter was to draw up guidelines to assist UK legislation for the tenure and repatriation of human remains currently being held in museums. Particular interest had been generated by requests from Australian Aboriginal activists. The remains ranged from whole skeletons to samples of tissue, bone and hair, in one way or another comprising body parts. Scientific interest in such materials was justified by the medical information the remains were capable of yielding as well as by the information they held about human evolution. It was feared that ‘knowledge’ would be lost with repatriation, that is, knowledge only experts could extract.

Statements from indigenous or First Nations people in Australia, as well as from New Zealand and North America, were put side by side with the scientific view. The Australian Aboriginal representatives talked about something quite different: kinship. They pointed out that the Aborigines were related to their ancestors, the scientists were not. This made the Aborigines (relatives) different kinds of people from the scientists (strangers). ¹¹ They themselves did not inhabit a position from which an ancestor could also be a specimen. For, as different kinds of people, their relationship to the human remains gave the two parties claims of a quite different order. The one could not just put itself in the other’s shoes. To the Aborigines, there was nothing more they needed to know in terms of information about themselves in order to press their claims, only the business of proving how they were related, through dance, song and other evidences of entitlement. Knowing the conduct and meaning of such performances would, in turn, only be effective when deployed by those with the right to use them. That effectiveness could not be transferred through acquiring someone else’s ‘knowledge’.

The UK Working Group was very sympathetic and bent over backwards to be open to cultural sensitivities. But they did so, albeit with compassion and respect, on the basis of the very connotations of expert knowledge that I had to strip away in order to talk about PNG. The premise the Working Group endorsed was that knowledge is something that people habitually convert into information in their communications with one another; it follows that when people say things about themselves they are imparting information. In the English vernacular, information about oneself is simultaneously information about the world, one’s position in it (Strathern 2005: 4–6). This is the nub. So, when people disagree or have competing demands, the form of their interchange appears like a debate. That is, the positions people are defending or promulgating become assimilated to positions in an argument. The device of debate, people agree, fruitfully opens up information about the nature of the world. More simply, sharing information is widely regarded as one route to reaching agreement.

In the Working Group’s view, the point of the exercise was precisely to come to an agreement. The DCMS report assumed that information and communication was at stake. It further assumed that this could take care of differences across cultures: cultural difference can be contained or controlled like any other difference of viewpoint, indeed as a difference of viewpoint. The document itself was constructed out of diverse discussions, statements and representations, creating the sense of a confrontation between two main ‘sides’—as I have already described them—differentiated by their positions in an imagined interchange, each with its viewpoint or perspective. ¹² For the Working Group expected that either side might attempt to persuade the other to see the force of the argument being put forward. One or other viewpoint, or a balance of them or a compromise position, would inform the Working Group’s recommendations. The discussion as reflected in the final report ultimately framed these as perspectives that could be compared. Thus, in suggesting that one way forward might be independently supervised resolution procedures, the report notes that among the benefits of this proposal it would ‘foster a mood of understanding among parties’ (DCMS 2003: 157).

It does not require a moment to see that this is in itself to take the viewpoint of one side (thereby determining the terms of the comparison), the Working Group being an organ of government trying to reach a peaceable outcome that would be widely acceptable. Many of the First Nations representatives refused to share the grounding assumption here. From what they said, it appeared that the difference between the two sides could not be reduced to a difference of viewpoint or perspective. It could not be reduced to the idea that with discussion and information they would appreciate the context from which the scientists were operating and shift their own viewpoint accordingly. Or that informing the Working Group of the context from which they, the First Nations people, were operating would offer the basis of a compromise agreement. ¹³ Some of this was expressed in terms of the repeated refusal to acknowledge that their ancestors were in any sense scientific specimens (cf. Hollowell and Nicholas 2009: 150).

At the time (cf. Strathern 2009), I drew the inference that to these representatives the difference between the two parties was not one of ‘perspective’ and was not be understood by reference to ‘context’. I now observe that there was no agreement ‘to debate’. But can we ask whether or not the Working Group’s procedures and its meetings with First Nation representatives might be re-imagined through the concept of ‘knowledge exchange’? Something quite close to this emerged from those scientists (in their statements to the Working Group) who said that in return for handing over material they hoped to be able to extract knowledge from it first, with the understanding that such knowledge would be as available to the claimants as to anyone. It was to remain a one-sided hope. The Aboriginal response is more neatly summed up in the old-fashioned concept of ‘repatriation’.

Insofar as the enquiry was, on the part of museum representatives, an attempt to manage cultural difference, it was also an attempt to use the structure of debate managerially. Far from fanning controversy, the aim was to reduce it. As subsequently it turned out, in some of the claims that were pressed after the report’s recommendation that museums should set up procedures for repatriation, museum personnel found themselves sometimes making a quasi-kinship response. In one case I am thinking of, when everything else was in balance, compassion for the human suffering that had been inflicted in the past influenced the outcome. The DCMS Report had indeed gone into the suffering in some detail. We could conclude either that something had been communicated from the claimant’s side—to take a Euro-American perspective—or—closer to the identity that concerned the Aboriginal peoples—that the latter’s presence as persons had after all had an effect in eliciting an ethic of care.

I have offered two extremes. Something like ‘knowledge exchange’ taking place within the handful of PNG contexts to which I referred queried the use of the English terms, or demanded that they be recast. Terms are left open: nothing unusual here for the anthropologist. This was followed by the DCMS efforts to control cultural differences through a managerial model of debate, where differences would be resolved through agreement on a mutual way forward. It is not clear here what the idea of knowledge exchange would have added. Discussion and consultation as instruments of knowledge management: nothing unusual here for the contemporary academic.

Simply being sympathetic about cultural difference is not going to provide a basis for exchange, whether it is assumed that the only problem is that of translation and communication or whether it is assumed that the identities that debate mobilises are not created by it but pre-exist the confrontation. Let us turn to a third arena. Among academics themselves there is a mode of interaction by which anthropologists can begin to appreciate the tenacity with which people onto hold their views, and the reproduction of difference that is entailed.

VI Academic debate

The mode is that of debate as it is practised in academia. There is nothing magic about debate itself. —I have deliberately used the term in the context of the Working Group to point up some of its cultural baggage. —But there are other Euro-American traditions of debate, and to one of these I now turn.

Academic debate returns us both to the special place of controversy in scholarly interchanges and to what one might perceive as an academic—and especially anthropological—responsibility. It is foreshadowed in concerns familiar to anthropologists when they consider interpretation and the role of the interpreter in exegesis. Thus, Crook (2007: 28) poses a version of a question anthropologists have been asking themselves for many years: is ‘anthropology limited to translating other world views into fictions of its own making’?

Crook’s own answer leads us to the genre of controversy. But I have to follow his borrowing from Bolivip to get there. Not directly: it would be a mistake, he suggests, to think that Bolivip offer ‘analyses’ of their social life that the anthropologist can simply translate into their own idioms. But, indirectly, Bolivip can show us how to reconfigure anthropological argument. The puzzling feature of Bolivip narrative style where so often only half a story is told comes into its own as a model for the distribution of responsibility. Crook (2009: 30) spells this out in a way that I now gloss and turn to my own advantage. Just as Bolivip people make a listener responsible for completing the story, so the anthropologist has a responsibility towards them, that is, towards the stories they tell, to complete them in terms faithful to his or her own discipline. Faithful, but transformed by the interchange. In Crook’s words, what would anthropological knowledge look like ‘when seen as composing a person through knowledge-making activities, when the connections in the world reflect connections between people…?’ If this is an exchange, what is exchanged is not knowledge but a responsibility ¹⁴ for others.

If one were to borrow from Bolivip, then, it would be in terms of a certain epistemological practice. Not of knowledge in the sense of information but knowledge as the process of putting different relationships together. What Crook offers is a Bolivip version of Euro-American knowledge practices, what he calls the ‘textual person’. The text as a person. (The act of borrowing that Crook performs creates a distinction between borrower and lender in terms of their antecedents, so I here specify the origins of the kinds of academic practices I am talking about as ‘Euro-American’.) He is not translating a Euro-American concept of ‘knowledge’ through a Bolivip idiom but transforming our understanding of it through this mediating figure. The ‘textual person’ combines different relationships, such as relations between data and theory, or between literal and figurative tropes (e.g., Crook 2007: 218). The idea of the textual person points to a text’s capacity to animate analytic and social relations in others. In academia, it has to effect the appearance of both being composed of others (other writers) and being a singular entity (original authorship). Persons and texts are alike in this specific regard.

Crook’s audience is primarily anthropological, the extension to academic practice being mine. And while the obviousness of the loan might do for anthropology, to do the Euro-American thing and communicate it, we need something a bit more friendly to the English vernacular. So let me take this loan one step further. It is a step that will in fact conceal the Bolivip origins. I shall re-render the textual person in Euro-American terms, ones can be widely understood in higher education and beyond.

‘Academic debate’ will fit! In other words, we can see such debate as an indigenous (Euro-American) counterpart to the textual person. It meets both criteria. On the one hand, we need to translate the ‘textual’ back into a form that displays its different origins as a person does, and ‘debate’ that relies on a sequence of positions is a good example; on the other hand, in lieu of ‘person’ we need an abstraction faithful to Euro-American abstractions, of which ‘academic’ is a prime example in pointing to the specialisms (disciplines) by which Euro-Americans divide up knowledge of their world. The entity we arrive at, academic debate, is premised not on the sociality (kinship) by which persons encompass one another, which would be the Bolivip idiom, but on the idea that knowledge is parcelled out among different disciplines—or subgroups within disciplines, or theories held by different schools of thought—each with its own expertise. In sum, academic debate, as a vernacular Euro-American rendering of the textual person, has at its heart the perpetual combination and recombination of elements. This is a precondition for controversy.

Of course one would expect most academics to imagine they have their own direct access to the notion of ‘academic debate’. Who needs a detour via the ideas of Bolivip people or the conceit of their ethnographer whom they inspired to re-think Euro-American knowledge practices? Well, in all the specialisms that abound, that is probably part of anthropologists’ work: to be open to their own constructions to the extent of yielding themselves up as in need of help from elsewhere. The detour through Bolivip means that the anthropologist at least can see what has been usefully stripped from the concept of debate, namely the idea that all that is relevant to a discussion is allowing the expression of different ‘points of view’. (This was the Working Group’s assumption.) What is especially a feature of debate among scholars and academics, the kind of ‘person’ their texts make, is the engagement of many voices in combination and recombination way beyond the supposition that the only issue is reproducing multiple viewpoints. Rather (in Euro-American idiom) the issue is constructing multidimensional knowledge of the world (Lloyd 2007) where controversy is a fundamental impetus (Dascal 2009). That is because of a structural feature that academic debate shares with no other. It revolves around disciplines. Across the sciences, arts and humanities, there are of course many different models of interdisciplinary exchanges, as there are of disputes between schools of thought within disciplines. Some engagements work easily, some are highly fraught. But all of them suppose that certain paradigms, theories, materials and so forth are entrenched and defensible in disciplinary or subdisciplinary terms. As a consequence, and sometimes to the bemusement of outsiders, academics are committed to knowledge as a perpetually contested domain.

Arguments that take the form of academic disputations all in some measure engage with disciplines, then, whether within or between them. (The argument over the scope of ‘culture’ is of interest within anthropology as much as between anthropology and other areas of study.) Debate is not just a matter of style, because disciplines are not unitary entities—in fact disciplines exist to promote argument within themselves, over issues on which there is of course agreement that there is a matter to be argued. There will always be an excess, something left over to argue further, through the constant creation of new objects of enquiry and the reconstruction of new antecedents to support them. What I represent here in a rather fatalistic language can also be re-imagined as a question of responsibility, that is, practitioners’ responsibility towards their disciplines. Controversy ensures that no one conceptual apparatus will govern the grounds of comparison.

Much as combination and recombination is integral to the textual person, or indeed to kinship for that matter, controversy is structurally embedded in what academics do. A brief but specific example makes the point.

Although I have been concerned largely with Europe in the figure of the UK, let me expand the field in terms of what I have referred to as ‘Euro-American’ more broadly. I do not think an American example does violence to my argument, and it is very apt. The recent history of anthropology in the United States (Segal and Yanagisako 2005), with its proliferating divisions, rifts and cross currents is suggestive. What is fascinating is the way in which relations reproduce themselves. I take forward a specific observation from the US anthropologist Lederman (2005).

Lederman observes (ibid.: 54–55) that there is a family resemblance between the kinds of disconnections ¹⁵ that exist among the subfields or (sub)disciplines of US anthropology at large and those that split these subfields within; they are radical enough for Lederman to call them two cultures. ¹⁶ The ‘two cultures’ within anthropological practice are, broadly, ‘positivist (elsewhere objectivist) and interpretivist’, or ‘essentialist and contextualising’, ways of knowing (ibid.: 50). In fact, she says:

Our disagreements about the subfields are part of a rift that is not confined to anthropology, not even to academic discourse. This fault line … runs through American culture (ibid.).

The consequence is that the divisions keep their form across different scales—and can thus seem to separate whole disciplinary domains from one another, and indeed academic enterprises from other forms of enterprise (ibid.: 56). What divides the (physical) sciences and (literary) humanities divides elements within the social sciences, within anthropology, and within sub-disciplines of anthropology.

However, there is no simple binary divide. ‘Both positions are both real and partial. In practice, positivist and interpretive approaches are mutually implicated in a tangled skein of hierarchies, conflicts, and compatibilities with regard to their modes of engaging and representing the world’ (ibid.: 52–53). Of course as arguments rage within departments, and groups split and coalesce, the drama seems an innovation each time. ¹⁷

Interdisciplinary differences promote the idea of knowledge transfer in the managerial sense—an information flow across contexts. But is there something here that the anthropologist could use in thinking about knowledge exchange? It is clear that there is no single divide to cross. Rather, any distinction between (say) the knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor, or between different specialisms and theories, or between two contrasting vernaculars, gets reproduced in the course of the interchange. We may say that it is the exchange that creates the distinctions, and in debate creates them as controversy.

Reflecting on divisions between the four fields within American anthropology (sociocultural, linguistic, archaeological and physical) as they affected the famous splitting of the Stanford Department in 1998, ¹⁸ Yanagisako (2005) also sees the discipline tracking issues beyond itself, not just in an intellectual arena but a political and social one. ¹⁹ However, she prefaces her account by reference to two divergent narratives about the fate of the four fields as they apply to American university departments. One narrative sees historical accident everywhere; the other speaks with regret of increasing specialisation. In this second scenario, practitioners felt everything (that is, everything that should have held together, viz. the four fields) was fragmenting—the fear of internal internecine conflict was the fear of disciplinary balkanisation (ibid.: 78). Let us pause for a moment here. For what is implied is that the division into the four fields within single departments had once worked to relate different branches of anthropology to one another.

What is combined and re-combined can—in a moment of controversy—also be separated. Distinctions work to divide positions from one another as intellectual stances that imply social configurations among the actors (cf. Abbott 2001). These positions coalesce in turn around substantive and thus specifiable sets of values whose contrariness is reproducible at every level of engagement. But in the real-life example we have also stumbled across an unexpected outcome to Euro-American knowledge practices: divisions can have the effect of bringing entities into relation with one another. After all, was it not the anticipated division between scientific experts and cultural claimants that was at the basis of the Working Party desire to engage them both, to relate the one to the other, in its text?

VII End

Focussing on academic debate and understanding its consequences for social practice is to apprehend how diverse points of view replicate themselves. And let us be reminded that the distinction between interpretivist and positivist approaches in the social sciences can be taken to quite radical extremes, almost as though diverse ontologies were at stake. ²⁰ There is nothing magical about disciplines; it is just that controversy among academics gives us a model for knowledge exchange that does not have immediate utilitarian or ‘transferable’ goals. I have tried to indicate how embedded it is in discipline-based processes. But that does not mean there is anything automatic about animating debate, any more than there is anything automatic about bringing a new generation of kinspersons into the world. Indeed academics find themselves responsible for the flourishing of debate and controversy. If anthropologists, in particular, impart anything by opening up their thigh (the ‘world’), and demonstrating the veins and blood vessels of critical encounter, they might have discharged a small part of their obligations too.

This was there all along in the injunction—the hope—of the Pacific Island academics with which I began. They wanted anthropologists ‘to recognize the responsibilities to Oceanic people, to the Academy and to Civil Society that come with the exchange of expert knowledge’. It was an invitation to include in our responsibilities care for our discipline, and for its relational potential.