Scoping Recursivity
A Comment on Franklin and Napier
Martin Holbraad, University College London
Commenting on two papers that have appealed to the notion of ‘recursivity’ to articulate
new directions for anthropological thinking, this piece seeks to clarify the scope of a
recursive turn in contemporary anthropology, distinguishing it from elements of
recursivity that have always been present in the discipline’s epistemic procedures.
Keywords: immunology, knowledge, the native’s point of view, paternity, recursivity
Two articles in Cambridge Anthropology recently (Franklin [2013] in the last issue
and Napier [2013] in this issue) have masterfully illustrated that there is a profound
affinity between anthropology and recursivity. Take as a starting point, on the one hand,
Malinowski’s notion that anthropology is par excellence in the business of ‘grasp[ing]
the native’s point of view’ (1961: 25); and on the other, Franklin’s characterization of
recursivity as a form of ‘attention to the properties of the equipment you are using to
determine, or manage, the properties of something else’ (2013: 21). Now, as bits of
equipment for determining or managing the properties of anthropology and recursivity
respectively, such attempts at definition are nothing if not recursive themselves – the
attention I propose we pay to them here merely proves the point. In fact, understood in
the broadest sense, all knowledge is recursive, inasmuch as it always involves calibrating
the means of knowledge (empirical and analytical procedures, experimental protocols
and tools, scales of measurement, assumptions, concepts – in short, its ‘equipment’)
with the object of knowledge. Knowledge, one might even say, just is such a process of
calibration: to know something is recursively to adjust one’s body of knowledge to it
(an immunological procedure, to be sure, following Napier – a point to which I shall
return).
Still, Malinowski’s by now intuitive definition demonstrates a sense in which the
recursive character of anthropological knowledge is exemplary, or at least heightened.
It does so in two steps. First, it turns the analogy between means and objects of
knowledge, implied by Franklin’s characterization, into an explicit homology. In
anthropology means and objects do not only have ‘properties’ in common, to use
Franklin’s language, but are, more strictly, versions of the same thing, namely ‘points of
view’. To gain anthropological knowledge is to take a point of view on a point of view
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Martin Holbraad
– a recursive locution if ever there was one. Based on this mirror-like premise, then,
the second and more argonautical step completes the exemplary image of recursivity:
if what anthropology strives to ‘grasp’ is itself another way of grasping (taking a point
of view on a ‘native’ point of view), then the anthropologists’ attempts can only take
the form of a shift of perspective: to grasp the native’s point of view involves allowing
it to change one’s own. So while all knowledge involves adjusting means to objects in
some sense, anthropology presents a limit case insofar as it involves, in one way or
other (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2002; Strathern 1992, 2005: 135–62), an exchange of one
viewpoint for the other. The content of anthropological knowledge (the native’s point
of view) becomes its form (the anthropologist’s epistemic grasp of it). From which the
converse also follows: knowing anthropologically involves calibrating the properties
of that transformation itself, turning the form of anthropological knowledge into the
content of one’s attention once more. (Hence, arguably, the doggedly constitutive role
that ‘theory’ plays in anthropological inquiry, which colleagues from other disciplines
often notice and sometimes lament.)
As suggested by Franklin’s account of the trajectory of recursive arguments in the
history of anthropological debates about (debates about concepts of) conception, this
way of articulating the recursivity of anthropology is rather blunt. After all, the premise
of Franklin’s article is that the prospect of ‘a recursive anthropology’ is, if not itself
wholly new, then at least one that ‘prefigures[s] our current moment’, as Corsín Jimenez
(in press: 3) puts it in a commentary on the recursive properties of prototyping. So
how does this advertised sense of originality tally with the claim that the rudiments of
recursivity can be found in someone like Malinowski (or indeed Barnes, as Franklin
herself shows)? Certainly, having myself pinned a flag on recursive analysis as a
significant and distinctive move in contemporary anthropological theorizing (Holbraad
2012), I frequently encounter critical queries about just how new all this really is.
Franklin offers a sophisticated account of how in vitro reproductive techniques can
provide a platform (or ‘stem’) for rendering anthropology’s recursive horizon as open
as the recursive redefinitions of anthropos that these practices precipitate. Here I shall
draw rather (and recursively, of course!) on Napier’s marvellous biopolitical allegory
of contemporary immunology in order to sharpen the idea of recursivity in a way that
may clarify how its ‘current moment’ is rather different from the more generic sense in
which all anthropology (indeed all knowledge) is recursive. In doing so, I seek merely
to make explicit a core implication of Napier’s argument. The form of recursivity he
articulates for contemporary immunology loops recursively back onto the practice of
anthropology itself: the reconfiguration of Self and Other that immunology performs
becomes, in the very act of its anthropological analysis, a reconfiguration of Self and
Other in the practice of anthropology too – or, putting it in Malinowskian terminology,
a reconfiguration of the relationship between the analyst’s point of view (self) and the
native’s (other).
Napier’s allegory turns on a core distinction: the xenophobic body, in which the
immune system’s role is taken as a search-and-destroy mission to defend the sovereignty
of the body (self) from viral attack (other); and the xenophilic body, whose immune
system acts as a search engine of sorts, engaging viral information by generating a
sufficiently varied repertoire of cell mutations (the antibodies) to be able to anticipate
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viral structures in a way that allows it to form symbiotic relationships with them.
Now, it would be quite unfair to characterize anthropology as xenophobic in the stark
way Napier makes the claim for immunology. As Malinowski’s profoundly empathic
message indicates so emblematically, the best traditions of anthropological research
have well-nigh defined themselves in terms of their respect for the alterity of other
societies and cultures. Certainly, it would be absurd to suggest that anthropologists’
mission, like foot soldiers in a classically construed immune system for modern science
and society, has been somehow to destroy social and cultural others – quite the contrary
(e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1952).
Still, there is one significant sense in which anthropology has maintained a
xenophobic premise of sorts, in its epistemic strategies in particular. Modelling itself on
Enlightenment images of science as humans’ ever-widening epistemic sovereignty over
the world they inhabit, anthropology has tended to present its empathic engagements
with others as an exercise in the collective human effort to understand the world.
However, this lends a very specific configuration to the activity of grasping the native’s
point of view. For if they are to be imagined as helping to expand a body of knowledge
that has logical (as well as epistemic) priority, the recursive shifts of perspective that
Malinowski recommended must also be understood in irreducibly hierarchical terms:
‘grasping’ the native’s point of view is an act of affirming one’s epistemic sovereignty
over it.
Take as an illustration the famed ‘virgin birth’ debate that, as Franklin shows, was
so foundational to the development of social anthropology as a field of knowledge.
Supposedly, non-modern people of various kinds (including the usual suspects in
such debates –Australian Aborigines and Melanesians) underplay, or altogether lack,
knowledge of the facts of paternity in human reproduction. According to Malinowski
(1932, 1954), Trobriand islanders in the early twentieth century held human conception
to be the result of matrilineal ancestor spirits entering women through their bodily
orifices (men’s contribution is confined mainly to ‘opening the way’ for the spirit-foetus
and subsequently feeding it with their semen during intercourse). This set of ‘beliefs’, as
Malinowski calls them, is related to focal elements of Trobriand cosmology, which in
turn play a major role in making sense of Trobriand social organization, to which the
institution of matrilineages is fundamental. Grasping the native’s point of view, then,
involves seeing how its perplexing character (here expressed rather crassly as a case of
native ignorance or confusion) can be overcome when understood in relation to how a
totality of native beliefs and practices hang together.
While Malinowski’s work is admittedly dated as an exemplar of anthropological
analysis, it demonstrates in stark terms an order of recursivity that remains characteristic
of (what I’m calling) the ‘mainstream’ of anthropology to this day. In particular, it
demonstrates the two crucial moves of argument that anthropologists have made in
order to engage with the alterity of their objects of study without allowing it to threaten
the premises upon which their epistemic sovereignty is based. The first move is to
gloss native alterity in terms of the notion of ‘belief ’. Even as it delineates the bases of
native conceptions and practices as objects of study, this notion immediately neuters
their potential recursively to modify the bases of the anthropological conceptions
and practices that are brought to bear on them. Beliefs are things to which everyone
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is entitled, anthropologist and native alike, each to their own. Facilitated by this
conceptual apartheid, the second move assimilates native belief to anthropological
knowledge by showing the latter’s epistemic sovereignty over the former. Malinowski’s
particular manner of doing this involved a combination of ‘holism’ and ‘functionalism’
– but a whole roll-call of ‘theoretical positions’ in the discipline’s history can be
imagined as competing ways of delimiting the scope of the recursive effects of the
native’s point of view by trumping it analytically with our own (Holbraad 2010, 2012:
18–53). Notwithstanding their otherwise divergent theoretical orientations, what these
approaches share is a basic tendency to delimit recursivity as a matter of adjusting to
the native’s point of view a body of knowledge that that is imagined as having logical/
epistemic priority over it.
By contrast, the kind of recursivity Franklin and Napier’s articles instantiate implies
a wholesale reversal of the logical/epistemic priority of anthropological knowledge. By
analogy with the ‘new immunology’, Napier discusses this ‘new recursivity’ as a basic
epistemic xenophilia: Others are accorded logical priority over the terms of analysis
that are brought to bear on them, insofar as it is admitted that the latter may well be
inadequate to the former (indeed, this would make the native points of view in question
properly Other, constitutively lying beyond the analytical tools with which one is
equipped in trying to ‘grasp’ them). In such a case, note, grasping the native’s point of
view must involve a loss rather than an extension of the analyst’s epistemic sovereignty,
since here alterity features not just as an object of anthropological knowledge, but also
as its irreducible source.
Without going into the detail of how this epistemic reversal might operate in
practice (see Holbraad 2012: 237–65), we may use the analogy with immunology to
show how it inverts each of the two ‘xenophobic’ moves of argument I identified earlier
in relation to Malinowski and the mainstream approaches he, well, fathered. First,
just as, according to Napier, the new immunology depicts immune responses as the
body’s manner of engaging in symbiotic relations with viral information, so construing
Others as a source (rather than just an object) of anthropological knowledge implies
rendering relations between the two internal, in the philosophical sense (e.g., Moore
1922). Far from logically separate sets of beliefs or bodies of knowledge, the native’s
and the analyst’s point of view stand in a relationship of mutual constitution, in which
the native’s perspective is constituted as an artefact of anthropological knowledge,
and thereby (recursively) provides the terms with which that knowledge itself is
composed. Secondly, this internal relationship also implies a reversal of the flow of
knowledge (sensu Wagner 1977 and Corsín Jiménez 2011). Instead of construing the
production of knowledge as a matter of subjecting native beliefs to anthropological
analysis, extending the dominion of anthropological understanding and theorization
to include them also, knowledge is now imagined in reverse: the native’s point of view
provides the basis on which the very infrastructure of anthropological understanding
and theorization are transformed. So, much as with Napier’s new immunology, in this
form of anthropological engagement the Self becomes Other to itself, in order better
to engage with the Others that precipitate this transformation in the first place. Just as
Napier describes for the body’s production of antibodies, anthropology’s capacity to
engage with alterity emerges as a function of its capacity freely to transform its own
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analytical wherewithal. So the structural equivalents of antibodies in this analogy are
anthropologists’ acts of imagination, in which novel anthropological forms (analytical
concepts and procedures, methodological operations, etc.) are creatively generated to
match the novelty of the native points of view that precipitate them. Certainly, as Napier
emphasizes, this kind of operation is risky – Selves constituted by their vulnerability
to Others. And the risk, we might add, must also include itself in its own scope: to
the extent that the novel notions of recursivity articulated by Franklin and Napier in
their texts, or in my recursive commentary upon them, are generated recursively, they
too are constitutively on the line, subject to future transformation in directions as yet
unanticipated. The fun of the risk.
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Cultural Economy.
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Martin Holbraad teaches in the Anthropology Department of University College
London, where he co-runs the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture
Research Group (CROC). He co-edited Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts
Ethnographically (2007) and Technologies of the Imagination (Special Issue of Ethnos,
2009), and is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
(2012).
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