Partial Connections

This book challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials. Marilyn Strathern focuses on a problem normally regarded as commonplace: that of scale or proportion. She combines a wide-ranging interest in current theoretical issues with a minute attention to the cultural details of social life, attempting to conserve a sense of proportion between them. Strathern gives equal weight to two areas of contemporary debate. One concerns the writing of anthropology and the representation of societies where all lives seem complex, the other the future of cross-cultural comparison in a field where "too much" seems known. The ethnographic focus of this book, Melanesian anthropology, exemplifies the levels and contexts through which Melanesianists have managed the compexity of their own accounts while, at the same time, unfolding an indigenous commentary on proportion and the mixing of forms. She reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of images that remain to be explained.