L’Homme

Revue française d’anthropologie

243-244 | 2022
Negative Ethics

Negative Strategies: An Afterword

Stratégies négatives : une postface

Marilyn Strathern

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/44036
DOI: 10.4000/lhomme.44036
ISSN: 1953-8103

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Date of publication: 25 December 2022
Number of pages: 189-204
ISBN: 978-2-7132-2921-3
ISSN: 0439-4216

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 Negative Strategies
An Afterword

Marilyn Strathern

Between them, the collected articles of this special issue offer a challenging
approach to an important arena of anthropological enquiry. Stimulated by
recent debate in the anthropology of ethics, they question the way in which
negative evaluations are often portrayed as though what actors experience
as assaults on values, livelihoods and persons also render such events as
somehow less than viable vectors of the social life that is ordinarily the
anthropologist’s subject matter. While the objection has been made on
many occasions, this collection’s direct address to “the negative” crystallises
the conundrum as an object of interest in its own terms. In this, the contri-
butors are well served by Olivia Howland and Tom Powell Davies’ focus
on ethical action. The backbone of their project, what holds these articles
together, is no less than a re-investigation of anthropological renderings of
moral and immoral action in the context of the ethical stances informing
people’s relations with one another. Such a concerted approach to negative
ethics will surely re-stoke what is already a considerable debate.
In complimenting the editors and authors for this collection, my remarks
are somewhat complementary. Taking up the opening provocation pertaining
to moral life, namely that “the negative is generative of social life and for
NEGATIVE ETHICS

anthropological analysis” (Howland and Powell Davies, p. 6, my emphasis),

I refract the illumination of this work through two registers. First, the success

Warm thanks to Corinna Howland and Tom Powell Davies for their invitation to
participate in this collection, which began with a workshop in Cambridge. Meeting the contributors
through their texts has been an additional and very rewarding exercise, one that literally postdates
the writing of them. Insofar as I am addressing the authors themselves, apologies for any glaring
misconstrual. Apologies, too, to all those colleagues whose words have also become my own;
in keeping the focus on these articles, I have avoided other referencing.

L’ HOM M E 243-244 / 2022, pp. 189 à 204

 of conceptual work lies in the (continuing) vitality of its concepts. I wish to
show some of the life that certain key concepts generate through the ways in
190
which they inform the analysis, revealing themselves in the composition of
the very articles as such. Second, in the scope of its arguments, this collection
lifts the cloying odour of the benign from expositions of social life. The
lift clears the air for a return to the question of “the social” in accounts of
ethical lives, to which I add a small footnote. Since the editors have already
made my own investment in some of these arguments apparent, the reader
is asked to forgive a further explanatory reference.
Over the course of her account of middle-class Harare Baptists, who are
themselves acquainted with English, Leanne Williams Green brings up an
issue concerning Anglophone anthropology, for whom English is obviously
the medium of expression. Whereas the editors cite an argument of mine
about sociality frequently being taken as inherently positive or benign, she
picks up a similar positive evaluation as it also applies to the notion of rela-
tionality. Both illustrate an ongoing concern (on my part) with the English
language as it is used in the course of exposition. More than a matter of
translation, anthropologists describing or explaining things—expounding
them to an assumed third party, their audience—often find themselves
deploying concepts whose connotations go against the grain of what they
wish to convey. Although as writers they are free to introduce new terms
or twist old ones, under such circumstances exposition must also entail
composing materials that will at once point to conceptual inadequacy in
the language of description and remain intelligible to the reader. I can only
pursue the case for English. Insofar as it is touched on here, the case may or
may not survive translation into French convention, especially since the case
rests in part on the peculiar warmth and weight with which English endows
terms/concepts to do with association, of which relation or relations is a
prime example. While that particular matter (identifying inappropriately
benign evaluations) is hopefully a useful background to what follows, this
collection prompts me to foreground other ways of bypassing conceptual
inadequacy and making one’s language work for the exposition in hand.
Thus, Taras Fedirko comments on one such expositional issue when he
refers to the deliberateness that it takes to keep simultaneously in focus both
“ethical choice and the structural shaping of ethical possibilities” (p. 66).
For my purposes, what are the key concepts in question?
Following her remarks on language usage, Williams Green adroitly jumps
into a social register. She conveys the strangeness of vernacular English
presumptions about relations by summoning the rather crude social map
that they often imply, with its spatial segregation of security and enmity. In
fact, “security” becomes a key analytic for her finely observed exploration of
Marilyn Strathern
the multivalent expectations that people hold of proximity and distance, to
which we shall return. The point here is to note the expositional manoeuvre
191
by which the inadequacy of that imagined, but very specific, social map is
shown up: it falls short, in truth fails, as a descriptive guide to Harare social
realities. “Failure” is one of the five patterns in negotiating the negative
through which Howland and Powell Davies frame their introduction to
the individual contributions in this special issue. While the last patterning,
frostiness or frigidity, demands separate treatment, the first four I adopt for
their facilitation in conceiving the impact of “the negative” on anthropolo-
gical exposition: focal point, foundation, failure and frisson. These become
(not in this order) key organising concepts for the first and longer part of
this Afterword. Regarding the quartet as signals of negative manoeuvering
or strategising, I ask about what we might call the ethics of anthropological
description. The question is how the Anglophone authors of this collection
have managed to neutralise some of the vernacular connotations implicit in
their medium of expression and turn their value-laden language to analytical
use. Negative strategies play a crucial role. The fifth pattern, as we shall see
in the second part, extends the commentary in another direction.

Four Organising Concepts

Although description of the four strategies is distributed across the diverse
articles, needless to say there are many overlaps and combinations to which
I hardly do justice; multiple possibilities are gestured in my remarks on
Williams Green’s article.
Frisson
Hesitation about their freight does not mean that the values carried by
English terms cannot also be turned to use. Thus, with reference to judgments
that herders and cultivators make of one another in the Argentinean Andes,
Olivia Angé deploys certain English expressions with emphasis. A familiar
contrast between “generosity” or “fairness” and “deceit” or “cheating” is
conveyed in no uncertain terms. What shows up the strangeness of English
conceptualisations is the unaccustomed sphere of transactions at the centre
of her analysis, where such evaluations are played out, namely, cambio barter.
“Barter” itself is not quite as one would expect, often involving long-term
relations by those who regard themselves as having ecologically distinct
NEGATIVE ETHICS

produce (meat and maize) to exchange with one another. The logic seems
less that of mutual need than of the mutual “otherness” (to use the term
foregrounded by Williams Green) of the parties to one another; it is this
that enables them to imagine exchanges of equal benefit to both. While,
under present conditions and especially given the effect of the market,
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 participants will articulate the monetary value of the items exchanged, the
crucial infrastructure is that of a relationship or partnership of trust. Yet
192
“trust” is not quite what an English-language reader would expect either.
It is here that the frisson of Angé’s nicely posed argument emerges.
Frisson lies in the heady, dizzy juxtaposition of the concepts of mistrust
and trust; rather than being held apart, she suggests that they speak to the
“combination of opposition and affinity” (p. 136) that is enacted through
cambio transactions. It appears to be the transactions as such that lend
themselves to equivocation. So, while regular partnerships turn strangers
into acquaintances and acquaintances over time into friends (also not
quite what an English-language reader would expect), the handing over
of items may be accompanied not only by mutual disparagement but also
by deliberate attempts at cheating. The verbal—and material—jousting
that follows can involve fraud and deception of a blatantly negative kind.
Moreover, the denigration is not on the part of the subject (as in the
seductive, self-deprecatory manner that elsewhere may well accompany
ceremonialised reciprocity), but is directed towards the partner other.
Although Angé notes the looming presence of market transactions, she
herself makes it clear that analysis has to go beyond any simple explanation
of opportunism based on self-interest of the economic kind. Rather, she
draws on a Moroccan ethnography to underline the ethic of distancing that
seems to be involved, that is, the ethic of not presuming the intentions of
the other party. Tolerance of mistrust emphasises a state of complementa-
rity, as here between ecological communities. In other words, at the very
moment of their heightened interpenetration, at the moment at which the
yield of one side’s land, work, knowledge and nurture is likely to become
the other’s bodily sustenance, constitution even, alterity may be re-instated
as a condition of interaction.
If a negative manoeuvre can be signalled by frisson, here it appears in
the exposition twice over. In the sequencing of the argument, there is the
way in which Angé gradually approaches the elucidation of mistrust, which
is eventually revealed as a very particular “form of relatedness” or “way of
relating” (p. 142, 150); this mode of relating becomes the other side of the
apparently obvious emphasis put on trust, and its accompanying conviviality,
spelled out in the first half of her article. Then there is frisson to the reader’s
realisation that what is categorically separated in the English duo, “trust”
and its negation “mis-trust”, is undone by how she describes their intimate
or proximate entwinement in these people’s expectations. I would almost be
tempted to reproduce an expression, awkward for its counter-intuitiveness
in English, as has been applied to Melanesian materials: where separateness
is integral to making relations, relations also separate.
Marilyn Strathern
 Foundation
Informing Powell Davies’ re-modelling of the ethics of food-sharing in 193
Melanesian life is a series of conceptual reversals or inversions that overthrow
long-established tenets in analyses of exchange relations. A wide-ranging
exposition, this article makes demand sharing the ground for all kinds of
Asmat transactions. The practice of demand sharing has at its heart the
forever present exclusion of those not party to the distribution or division;
with an Argentinean Andean echo, it is the inclusion in an act of sharing
that is valued, regardless of the material being shared. That food is a prin-
cipal (and highly moralised) vehicle of such manoeuvres gives a quotidian
force, a kind of speed perhaps, to the constant social (re-)alignments that
acts of sharing encourage and renew. More precisely, Powell Davies force-
fully indicates that what Asmat perceive to be in short supply are not so
much material resources as the relationships through which they may be
enjoyed. From this comes the aptness of his arresting title, hunger in a
world without scarcity: “one cannot test one’s relationships unless one has
run out of food” (p. 110). The article thereby undercuts a prime sequencing
of practical reason, anthropologically speaking, namely, that production
logically precedes distribution.
Again, it is the disparity between the actors that forms “the terrain
across which people relate” (p. 109), but the disparity is one relatively
under-described in the Melanesian corpus, namely, the duo put in place
between asker or demander (with nothing) and sharer or demandee (with
something). In Asmat, any sharing relation is axiomatically exclusive, since
there is always a third party who plays the negative role of being left out.
Here, the perspective of the excluded party re-casts the orientation of the
sharers, for potential sharers seemingly lose their differentiation from one
another; they are reduced to persons “eating it [the food] by themselves”
(p. 96), simply by virtue of their having refused the further interaction or
relationship now being posed.
The care with which Powell Davies draws all this out involves certain
disaggregations or decouplings of commonplaces in anthropological thinking
(such as the association between giving, obligation and time). Even where
his criticisms have well-known antecedents in academic debate, the effect is
foundation-shaking. The commonplaces include the axiomatic values that
NEGATIVE ETHICS

an Anglophone anthropology puts on Enlightenment notions of sociability

(generosity, orientation to another, and other emanations from the self ) as
indices of sociality, systemically blind to the coercions involved. He himself
is explicit, above all, about the negative strategy of positioning Asmat
demand sharing in relation to what have become conventional and, in this
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 sense, foundational readings of reciprocal exchange relations. Among other
things, neither demander nor demandee inevitably brings a previous history
194
of transactions to the request; indeed, his explicit comment on the Asmat
reluctance to shift or “exchange” perspectives, as a matter of reflexively taking
another’s viewpoint, feeds into frequent ethnographic observations on the
opacity of minds. (This turns out to be a nice provocation to the fact that
such opacity may flourish in terms of intersubjective relations, even where—
as in the Papua New Guinea Highlands—a reversal of perspectives is built
into certain institutions of exchange.) As the author’s sweep of references
to diverse anthropological arguments and disputations implies, upturning
previous positions is one of those foundational acts of negation by which
anthropology re-invents itself. There is an intriguing echo in what he says
about the strategies that drive the engine of Asmat socio-history, insofar as
people’s accounts of (founding) population movements, set in motion by
what is and is not shared, tend to be narrated as a series of disputes.
Focal Point
There is a distinct focal point to Fedirko’s closely argued exposition of
pre-invasion Ukrainian journalism: the antithesis (if I may call it thus) that
he sets up between two structural positions in the field of media and broad-
casting. It is an antithesis that delineates a pair of differently constructed
arenas, one of which, that of the self-ascribed independent journalists,
endorses a somewhat similar antithesis as its own focal point. This is an
orientation that seemingly does not apply in the same way to the so-called
oligarchic journalists. As with all these articles, close argument is accompa-
nied by close reporting of primary observations, and Fedirko explains that
his fieldwork focus was on the former rather than the latter. If there is any
skewing or imbalance in his own reporting in this particular article, to the
present reader it is an apposite parallel to what he is describing.
With engaging clarity and openness, the ethnographer points to the
co-existence of two positions that exist within the broad field of a journalistic
corps whose participants share information about one another’s practices,
and even sometimes kinship and friendship. This is a significant qualifi-
cation to the way in which he elucidates the contrasting characteristics of
these two positions. The contrast refers to allegiances or work trajectories
that might be glossed, on the one hand, as “independent”/“idealist” and,
on the other hand, “mainstream”/“pragmatist”. To those who adhere to the
former, the contrast can appear uncompromising: on the back foot as far
as careers, finance, audience sizes and so forth are concerned, they project
values of an “intense oppositional […] character” (Fedirko, p. 81). Indeed,
they validate their position by focusing on the other camp as the negative
Marilyn Strathern
counterpoint to everything that they stand for: scrupulousness, honesty,
reporting of an objective and non-instrumental nature. They thus distance
195
themselves from those who are embedded in the political-commercial world
of patrons and business-owners (the oligarchs) and who are inevitably
corrupted by interest and compromise. In taking a realist stand on the
fact that anyone’s interests influence what they do, it is precisely the art
of compromise that enables the latter journalists to negotiate the ubiquity
of everyone’s interests while producing the best, critical and professionally
executed journalism that they can.
The antithesis is analysed by the author in terms of contrasting ethical
positions: an ethics of values and an ethics of pragmatism. Following from
the perspectival analysis outlined by the editors, one wonders—with the
author—whether the dualism was more an artefact of the former than
the latter perspective; certainly, the two are not isomorphic. Pragmatism
is here understood as an ethical position that does not need to point to
the transcendent values by which it proceeds. (That that, too, may be
construed by a third party as a “value” has as much or as little purchase
as the notion that any stance, including idealist ones, generates its own
“interests”.) In other words, the pragmatist position does not need to
oppose or negate idealism. It need only avoid it. Its trump card is not a
competing value at all, but an apparently realist apprehension of human
behaviour that simply bypasses the antithesis, delimited by the way in which
it embraces the very concept of interest that the independent journalists
so freely denigrate. Or, to drive home the stimulus of the anthropological
exposition here and what is conveyed as a kind of analytical asymmetry
apropos the ethnographic case in hand, an ethics of values must have focal
points where an ethics of pragmatism need not. From this perspective, a
positive focal point (such as the transcendence of material interests) may
be immeasurably strengthened by a negative one. The negative focal point
of the values that the independent Ukrainian journalists uphold is indeed
starkly evinced by those who ignore such values and do not make them a
focal point, positive or negative, at all.
Now, what Fedirko makes of an analytical contrast between “distinct
structural positions” and “different kinds of people” (p. 85), within the arena
of Ukrainian journalism, prompts the thought that we glimpse a similar
contrast—under quite another guise—in the preoccupations of some of
NEGATIVE ETHICS

the urban residents of Harare. Far from keeping these apart, it seems that
the middle-class Baptists described by Williams Green would like to be
able to map positions onto persons. If security emerges as a principal value
in one’s need to keep oneself and one’s property safe, it would be hugely
reassuring if one could count on being protected by persons close and
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 known to one, by, for example, those working in the house or garden, or
met—in daylight or after dark—on familiar paths. Conversely, one could
196
then count on recognising signals of danger from suspect others. In reality,
however, a relative stranger can turn out to be a protector where a trusted
worker does not.
The relationship between security and insecurity might indicate a kinship
to the frisson of trust/mistrust that Angé describes; indeed, Williams Green
speaks effectively of the kind of double-sided “sociality produced in a
spacetime of mistrust” (p. 43). One could also refer to her own concluding
foundational observation about people’s presumptions: the co-occurrence of
commitments to care and practices of self-protection means that relating as
such inevitably becomes as much a matter of threat as of security. However,
I think it was apposite of Howland and Powell Davies to draw attention to
these Zimbabweans’ everyday concerns as coalescing around a negative focal
point. The negativity of that focal point is held in place by the potentially
mortal or injurious consequences of ignoring it. Personal biographies and
futures are at stake. If such consequences are an ever-present menace, they
are seemingly experienced as a result of exposure to situations from which
one has lost one’s means of protection. The extensions of persons by their
property, houses and belongings of all kinds extends the area of vulnera-
bility—and invites more and more imaginative means of exploiting it.
Apart from authorial skill in keeping apparently antithetical elements
in play, Williams Green’s exposition brings the negative into its own as a
distinct focal point in the process of social analysis. “Insecurity” is something
that the anthropologist’s interlocutors want to overcome or banish, and the
anthropologist offers a persuasive analysis of how this anxious desire is fed
by perpetual manifestations of social precarity, mushrooming from every
encounter. The negative focal point of the writer is thus a gathering-together
of all the ways in which security is under threat. These range from the
ambivalent figure of otherness in general, to the particularities of male-
volence (such as witchcraft) among close kin and neighbours or of alarming
embodiments of instability (as evinced in touts by comparison with what is
hoped from vendors). Above all, the author delineates the Baptists’ unique
dilemma in pursuing self-protection and the orderly, even wary, nurture
of resources; their double bind arises from accompanying admonitions of
care and love, which encourage them to help and thus engage with those
whose sinfulness is the suffering of an unpreventable disorder. Threat is thus
being articulated in the constitutive discourse of “order and disorder”, and
its associated laments for the situational inability of certain individuals “to
achieve the orderliness that would help to keep sin at bay” (p. 39).
Marilyn Strathern
 Failure
The editors follow Howland’s analysis of materials from the Peruvian 197
Andes by referring to failure, a point on which her article concludes. The
spectre of falling short of one’s own and others’ expectations is integral
to the asymmetries fashioned by lending and borrowing, insofar as they
include people—virtuous lenders—striving to exceed what is expected of
them. The negative strategies of the unfortunate borrower include pointing
to the suffering that he or she endures. Insofar as that takes away the sting
of admitting the inadequacy of his or her work, in this performance of the
worthy supplicant one affliction (needing to borrow) is seemingly mitigated
by another (misfortune), while the very difficulty of displaying worthiness
must negatively reinforce the reputational distance between the two parties.
In this densely woven and accomplished account, where the ethnographer
makes clear the sources and limitations of her information through scru-
pulously attending to the specificities of the conversations that she held,
what is also of interest is her own negative strategy in pursuit of a candid
account. We might call it the strategy of methodological failure. This aspect
of her exposition concerns language usage as a matter of where and what
can and cannot be spoken, and thus the ethical issue of when it is or is not
appropriate to enquire about something. At diverse junctures, Howland
describes herself feeling her way in her relations with people, sometimes
straightforwardly, sometimes ambiguously. Towards the end, she then draws
the reader’s attention to a moment when she is prevented from listening to
people talking, and to another when she fails to acquire information that
she might have casually gained from the company she was with. It is almost
as though these could be judged to be false steps, apparently falling short of
a hoped-for participation; yet in the end, they are to be judged otherwise.
The conversations from which (she says) she was being purposively excluded
concerned loan solicitations. Exclusions of some kind or other must be very
common in fieldwork, but it is not so often that the ethnographer-author
pauses to mention actual occurrences. In fact, I suggest that her references
to such occasions work superbly as a negative strategy to keep at bay the
reader’s curiosity. In effect, she is re-telling a lesson learnt, namely, that
she was collecting information in a social context where its circulation was
NEGATIVE ETHICS

a political-ethical issue and bound to have constraints on her own work.

By bringing this to the reader, perhaps her exposition also, if indirectly,
conveys something of the particular weight of information that falls upon
the afflicted: a leading preoccupation of those forced into borrowing is what
happens when a person’s failure becomes a source of local gossip.
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 Central to Howland’s account is a commentary on what, as editor, she
and Powell Davies refer to as perspectival moralism. Thus, she dwells on
198
the “extent to which inhabiting unequal structural positions within a
socio-economic field […] influences […] opportunities for ethical striving
available within these” (p. 182). It is intriguing how far this is removed
from (say) those Melanesian exchange reciprocities that are a negative foil
to Powell Davies’ ethnographic analysis, for the accurately labelled “give
and take” in this part of the Andes does not render returning a loan (debt)
as a counter-loan. Lending-and-borrowing is not analogous to the reversal
of perspectives that characterises the giving and receiving classically attri-
buted to gift economies. For there is no way in which a former borrower
can become a lender within the contours of the specific transaction that
they have set up. Rather, this article elucidates, while cancellation of the
debt is necessary for a person to recover others’ respect, it is hardly sufficient
in the long term; that person would need to bestow favour upon others
(including previous lenders) as a lender him- or herself.
At the same time, given the form that property takes in this region of
the Peruvian Andes, Howland remarks that lending-and-borrowing is not
commensurate with Asmat demand sharing either. For the latter, the person
asking is not necessarily betraying anything about their indigence or incapa-
city for work: the exclusion works there and then in terms of the presumed
relationship to which he or she is co-present, that is, the relationship between
those who are (already) sharing something. The reminder about exclusion
gives us a bridge into the next, and shorter, part of these words after the event.
To conclude this part: I hope to have shown something of the vitality
of negative strategies in the way in which the diverse expositions of this
collection have themselves been composed and presented to a scholarly
readership. (Lest anyone assume that attending to texts is only of “literary”
interest, it should be clear that the negative strategies in question respond
to specifically anthropological questions over choices of formulation,
terminology and such.) In this, negative strategies are enablers of ethno-
graphic-theoretical writing. More loudly we could say they are generative,
more quietly that they are facilitating. We have had several examples of such
facilitation. The negative strategies employed in these accounts go beyond
simple statements about conceptual inadequacy (where that is the case) by
demonstrating insight through enacting an affinity between the subject of
analysis and the object of it. The question, as always, is finding a congruent
(fair, responsible) medium of expression. While not merging with what their
interlocutors seem to be thinking or doing, since their theoretical concerns
guarantee that, our anthropologists are also participating in certain ideational
(including conceptual) fields for which their language is not necessarily
Marilyn Strathern
prepared. These are fields highly relevant to the expositional choices that
they must make as authors. Otherwise put, we may imagine them relaying
199
ideas both as though lessons were already learnt and as though they were
still learning from lessons hardly begun. The ethical brinkmanship of the
ethnographic moment, one might say.

Another View of Divisory Practices

Let us turn, then, to the fifth negative manoeuvre. Of the patterns
identified by Howland and Powell Davies, in their examination of competing
evaluations of what counts as moral or immoral, the fifth (frigidity or
frostiness) performs a useful negative function.
I do not present its elements as coalescing, in the same way as the four
just noted, into an organising concept relevant to the expositions of any or
all of these articles. Of course, one could always find cases where certain
kinds of activity were frozen out of an account, categories of persons ignored,
scholarly references omitted or swathes of cultural goings-on never getting
into the ethnography. Every analytical focus implies a penumbra of the
left-out; conversely, the generative aspect of deliberate omission can work
in terms of a sharper apprehension of that which is made visible or brought
into focus. But I do not wish to apply such a distancing manoeuvre to the
articles. Rather, I enact the self-same strategy in putting the possibility to one
side. This is because the fifth pattern touches on a set of issues that deserve
spelling out otherwise. These issues, from my point of view, far from being
distributed (non-exclusively) across all the articles, in effect divide them.
I momentarily part company from the orientation of this collection in order
to make one very small comment. While it was somewhat accidental that
my observations began with the articles by Angé and Powell Davis, I now
wish to deliberately juxtapose them and point to characteristics of certain
strands of their arguments not to be found in those presented by Fedirko,
Howland and Williams Green on the present occasion. The comment turns
on negative readings of social separation or exclusion. I proceed in two stages.
Return to the Social
Detaching the ethical from the social allows the editors to produce a
formulation of sociality as less a ground to (im)moral action than among
NEGATIVE ETHICS

its multiple figures; thus, one may enquire into what “visions of the social
that people conjure in making ethical judgments” (p. 14). Yet, some of our
authors intimate, the social is not completely contained thereby. As the
opening provocation indicated, the negative as a constituent part of moral
life is also generative of a social life conceived in other terms.
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 The observation in variously taken up in the articles themselves. Williams
Green begins by referring to “social relations generated out of suspicion”
200
(p. 33), while at the end firmly concurring with the collection as a whole that
“the negative in ethical life is productive of sociality” (p. 56). Talking gene-
rally of the sociality of barter relations, Angé writes of “negatively assessed
behaviours as an integral part of social life” (p. 142) and, as we have seen,
in particular that “accusations of cheating set out a specific mode of relation
peculiar to these Andean agriculturalists” (p. 151). Powell Davies asserts of
Asmat that “negative moral evaluations play a key role in animating social
processes” (p. 96). The social is directly articulated in Fedirko’s account as
power and interest. This potentially negative pair (for anthropologists and
journalists, of all stripes, alike) stands out in the way in which he proposes
to position his interlocutors’ stances: understanding cannot proceed without
beginning “with ‘the negative’—material interests—as both journalists’ emic
concern and a necessary part of explaining their ethics” (p. 64). Power rela-
tions spring from Howland’s article too. In concluding on the note of how
“the negative can be a generative possibility in the pursuit of good acts and
good selves” (p. 183), she openly shows that the advantages accruing to those
able to perform good acts, with largesse to distribute and a reputation to
be proud of, are inevitably exercised at the expense of those who lack both.
Whether taken for granted, or as an explicit analytic, “the social” winks in
and out of these expositions in sometimes unexpected ways.
That said, the collection as whole has firmly left behind those extensions
of the negative that present the very construct of society as vulnerable to
negative forces. When these articles speak of misfortune, mistrust, suspicion,
threat, danger, exclusion, the reader can recognise the social dimensions of
the subject positions seemingly involved. Yet there is another set of concep-
tualisations in English that somehow render social life itself as a potentially
suffering subject. This is verbally evinced when people talk of the “breaking”
of community ties, say, or of relationships that need “mending” or of
individuals “isolated” from collective intercourse. Such formulations may
be responding to situations in which certain (human) persons are treated
as less than human (or less than persons); such beings may be abandoned
to what seem the margins of interaction and attention, as appears to be
an Asmat fate for certain elderly kinsmen. But far more frequently, at
least in the not-so-distant past of Anglophone social anthropology, similar
formulations have appeared as though anthropology’s construct of “society”
could be put in peril by threats to its associative being, for example, to the
cohesiveness or solidarity that ostensibly defines it. Social life itself is here
imagined as coming under attack, and there may be no end to threatening
activities, such as unwelcome revolutions, witchcraft accusations, divorce
Marilyn Strathern
rates, commercial corruption, institutional decline, fake media and so on.
Disorder and disintegration are quickly conceived in this way, even where the
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attack on social life comes from other parts of social life. (When Ukrainian
neighbourhoods were wrecked by shelling, on the eve of which Fedirko
was writing, it was at the hands of an intentionally organised force.) One
upshot is that, in narratives of them, negative evaluations may themselves
be regarded as a disintegrative force that more positive engagement or
connection could overcome. It is important to register the difference that
this collection makes to such assumptions.
The collection is illuminating on another score. Social divisions are
sometimes interpreted by anthropologists along the negative lines just
noted, and this leads to a reason for creating a divide between the articles.
The (Anglophone) Enigma of Social Division
Needless to say, negative strategies proliferate as much as positive
ones, and we have encountered only a brief cross-section of the concepts,
values and dispositions that might be put under the flag of “the negative”.
However, rather than turning to more proliferation, the observer might
wish to introduce a restriction on how far to take the concept. Insofar
as negative strategies are as much facilitators of social life as the associa-
tional, linking and connecting practices that (especially Anglophone)
anthropologists often take as its principal registers, then negative strategies
are in themselves neither negative nor positive. They simply keep things
moving. Interactions, descriptions: this is surely true with respect to the
regeneration of social life and with respect to anthropological exposition
alike. In other words, the effects or outcomes of such strategies are only
negative up to a point.
At least, that is a claim I would make. It may in fact be easier to see how
such a conclusion applies to anthropological accounts than how it applies
to social life. Here, I turn to the generativity of division. The two articles
(from the Argentinean Andes and the Papuan coast), which I have singled
out from the rest, offer insight into a social logic that is not relevant to the
other materials being discussed for the purposes of this collection.
Angé is explicit about the way in which cambio barter creates the social
form of a “collective”. Herders and cultivators see themselves as categori-
cally divided by the produce, and everything that goes into its production,
NEGATIVE ETHICS

which passes between them. Conjoined as a pair (not the author’s term),
the collective is thus imagined as composed of two radically distinct sources
of life. In human terms, at the moment of their interactions, these appear
as distinct populations or communities. Indeed, where she writes of the
“combination” of affinity and opposition, one could as well talk of the
Negative Strategies: An Afterword
 “disjunction” as of the conjunction implied. But while the disjunctive
elements (notably deceit and cheating) may bring forth local excoriations
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(accusations of immoral behaviour) with evidently negative overtones, people
invested in cambio barter make every effort to keep the social division as
such alive. In this sense, it, and the crucial differentiations that it implies,
is affirmed as something that they value about themselves. Through making
the affirmation clear, Angé avoids the trap of an inappropriate evaluation
into which English speakers, especially native ones, often fall. This avoidance
at one reinforces and adds to the overall argument of the special issue: not
only is the negative full of social life but it is also the case that aspects of
social life are enacted through specific processes for which, in English at
least, an analytically negative overtone would simply be inappropriate. With
reference to notions of society, these can include not only disjunction and
division, but also an array of terms for concepts such as difference, sepa-
ration, exclusion and so forth. These are overtones that an anthropologist
might well have occasion to, and wish to, discard.
The point is underlined in Powell Davies’ usage of the verb “divide” as
an alternative to “distribute”: in order to be shared, food is divided among
people who, at this juncture, are joined in a collective act. This is the kind
of linguistic neutrality that one might indeed wish to have available for
describing social divisions, for example, the division of an Asmat clan
following a dispute. The event entails not so much the “breaking” of social
ties as a generative (indeed, in the case cited, expansive) re-alignment,
making two out of one. And, we are told, there is rather more to Asmat
food division than the mechanics of distribution alone. Relatedness is
generated from receiving a portion or part of a whole. By contrast with
everyday practices, food-sharing at ritual inter-clan feasts involves emphatic
aggregation and re-division, producing the former effect (aggregation) out
of the necessary differences between the participants. On such occasions,
social division between the congregating clans is strikingly enacted, indeed
brought into being, in the course of their aggregation. Perhaps the “feeling
of oneness”, on which an interlocutor remarked apropos the more unpre-
dictable everyday acts of sharing, replays (or, conversely, pointedly contrasts
with) what is collectively effected through ritual feasting. It is as though
something else were being put in place of the foundational differentiations
of clan groupings. Another kind of social division is thus routinely enacted
between those included in and excluded from the sharing. This is found
in the moralising mismatch between the points of view of those with and
without food. With the precision of neutrality, Powell Davies himself talks
of this as a disjunction, one that “is not a barrier to social relations, but
rather the condition from which they are formed” (p. 121).
Marilyn Strathern
 To have to actively discard the sentimental overtones, positive and
negative, which this constellation of terms (understood as varying aspects
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of dissociation) carries in Anglophone anthropology might seem astonishing
to practitioners of its Francophone counterpart. Here is not the place to go
into some of the reasons for presuming such an astonishment nor why the
subject matter of these two articles prompts a reflection on social division in
particular. I simply add that, in the context of an overall argument focused
on the making of evaluations, the hope is that enlarging the attention to
evaluation in this way has not been out of keeping.
I give Howland the last word. Following Christopher Gregory, she
refers to a different set of analytic terms, “which [also] betray underlying
sentiments” (p. 159)—the positive valorisation of “credit” and the negative
one of “debt”. The observation is thoroughly apposite for her material.
She reminds us that, whatever equivocations are thrown up by the various
concerns through which anthropologists reflect upon their subject matter,
their interlocutors in the heat of the moment may have no hesitation in
what they brand as good or bad. It was with interlocutors’ judgments that
the special issue began. Whereas the contrast between good and bad is
very often taken as some kind of reciprocal or self-evident parallel, what
Howland so vividly portrays for her locale in the Peruvian Andes are the
specifically asymmetrical techniques by which the moral bad can become a
“bad” social trap. As patrons need clients, lenders need borrowers; yet the
potential symmetry is undermined by the fact that it is the borrowers who
are locally depicted as the needy ones. Indeed, their neediness becomes the
subject of their own ethics of reflection and self-presentation. The clarity
with which Howland’s ethnographic-analytical observations come over here
is a characteristic of the collection as whole. It is an obvious point about
exposition, but the details with which she and her co-contributors furnish
the reader are not least of what makes these articles so generative.

University of Cambridge
Girton College, Cambridge (United Kingdom)
[email protected]