Six
Nostalgia and the New Genetics

Marilyn Strathern

Let me state my problem at the outset. It is how to keep the self without being nostalgic. The nostalgia I wish to avoid is that of traditionalism; I intend nothing sentimental in the term "keep." "Sustain" might be a more apposite term, but were I to write "make" or "practice" or some such activity word, I would already have divested the self of the only way in which it can appear—in making, working, doing. I have always been wary of "the self" as an object of enquiry: I recognize "myself" in what I do but have the very strong sense that it is not my job, so to speak, to recognize other people's selves, since that is something only they can do for themselves.

The personal pronouns should make it clear where the self in this chapter appears.^[1] It appears in a position for which I wish to argue. In having to argue for it, I also of course resist it. A position cannot be held without movement between positions, and it is this reflexive in which "I" am caught. I should add that the self in question is not to be grasped as a subject (jealous of its liberty), nor as an individual (yearning for uniqueness), nor as a person (present in others' acknowledgment), nor indeed as a predicate of discourse, though all these belong to late-twentieth-century renditions of how the self appears "to be" aware. That is because I do not wish representation on it.^[2] If "the desiring, relating, actualising self is an invention of the second half of the twentieth century [a Euro-American twentieth century, that is]" (Rose 1990, xii), then its representation is already subsumed by convention. There is absolutely no point in piling on more attempts, reinventing the convention. Nikolas Rose's sequence of chapter headings has already said it: Maximising the Mind, Obliged to Be Free, Technologies of Autonomy. The last named chapter concludes with the observation: "The self that is liberated is obliged to live its life tied to the project of its own identity" (1990, 244).

For the self can only be "liberated" within a milieu of representations that would also have it otherwise. There is no end, so to speak, to the representational fix.

I want to do something else, self-consciously in a late-twentieth-century way, and make myself have an effect. Not producing the effect of a self, or giving evidence for it, or making "it" effective, for these would be to recreate late modern representationalism. If the effect is of anything, it will be of the rhetoric I use. And since in writing this introduction I already know what the conclusion will be, I can tell you at the outset that I have failed. That is, I do not think I will have accomplished the persuasion I wanted; indeed it will become clear that I arrive instead at a rhetorical impasse. One could say I succumb to my own resistance to my argument. The only comfort of course is that had I succeeded, the success of the effect would indeed have belonged to the rhetoric.

The argument is about how to sustain certain understandings of the world in a context where those understandings are written off by others as traditionalist or premodern, or, where they are not written off, are sentimentalized exactly for the same reason—in short, where they suffer too much representation. My problem is to appear neither traditionalist nor sentimental. The understandings in question concern the kind of critical response an anthropologist might want to make to current thinking about the new genetics, and in particular how to manage anthropology's relational premises. "My" problem is accordingly commuted into the problem of how to keep relationships in view without being nostalgic. It is arguing for this position that is the problem. I lay the argument out as a plot, since I had hoped some of its persuasiveness might have come from the manner of its unfolding. It will take some setting up.

The Setup

In considering ways in which degrees of kin have been computed in the European past, Jack Goody (1983, 134ff.) traces diverse representational maneuvers. The human body, reckoning from the head (apical ancestor) to the shoulder, elbow, down to the nails, offered one articulation of the Germanic calculus that the eleventh-century church had adopted in preference to the former Roman system. But both the computation and the means of representation were subject to dispute. He reports that canonical authors in the twelfth century followed a distinction between the "trunk" (or stem) and the "degrees." The trunk was the point of departure for reckoning degrees, but there was a dispute as to whether the point of departure should be a brother,

father, or grandfather. In effect, "the trunk comprised a group of which the blood was seen as identical" (1983, 139); this could mean a set of siblings, a couple, or an individual and descendants, and each of these sets gave rise to its own system of reckoning.

Goody argues that as a property holder that stood to gain from bequests, the church had a double interest in how kinship was reckoned. It wanted to expand the range of kin prohibited from marrying (who would otherwise consolidate familial property), yet narrow the span of property heirs. The change to a Germanic computation accomplished the first, while the second motivated an emphasis away from the fraternal unity that was a feature of the Germanic system either onto the unity of the matrimonial couple, and thus onto a "direct" line of descent, or else onto the individual as a point of reference. In this last mode the trunk was assimilated to an ipse (self). He adds: "The visual representation of consanguinity . . . no longer consisted simply of the ordering of terms for relationships . . . but was based on an ego-oriented scheme that facilitated the computation of degrees and was in line . . . with the increasing emphasis on individuality" (1983, 142). Reinventing, in fact, a visual device already present in manuscripts then some five hundred years old, the medieval church rendered the self at once in the singular and as a node in a set of relationships.

Although dealing with historical materials, Goody writes as a social anthropologist. His particular concern is to relate such representational strategies to the interests the church then had in the devolution of property (and thus in the definition of heirs and successors), but this in turn is part of a larger comparative enterprise in which he defines European kinship by contrast first with Oriental and then with non-Eurasian systems. I draw on it as an example of anthropology's commitment to a relational view of human behavior. Relational can be taken in multiple senses: it refers to persons' interactions with other persons (the church was competing with other property holders), to the way representations work off one another (the "one flesh" of the matrimonial couple was played off against the blood bond of siblings),^[3] and to the comparisons at the heart of analysis (different modes of kin reckoning). It is a commitment to a relational view that I also wish to keep for myself.

In twentieth-century anthropology this relational view is commonly concretized in the elementary concept of "relationship." I have suggested elsewhere (1992) that the study of relationships between persons (as in kin relationships) in turn keeps^[4] concrete the conceptualization of relations between phenomena (whether as objects of study or as the concepts that are the means of study). In one sense relationships are infinitely extendable; in another sense

relationships are also constraints. The creative possibility afforded by one mode of expression is already prefigured by its relationship to others. So any set of relations is always selective. In the same way, a commitment is always partisan.

A brief exemplification of partisanship is the order. One of the elements that has sustained my interest in feminist scholarship is its relational premise. If one cannot understand the lives of "women" without also understanding the lives of "men," and vice versa, it is also the case that one cannot understand academic feminist practice without appreciating its double relationship to liberation politics on the one hand and to critiques of modernity on the other. Yet I inevitably introduce a piece of mischief in referring to feminist issues. I know perfectly well that it is a very partial reading of feminist practice to claim a relational view for its premises. Feminist practice is equally premised on essentialist understandings:^[5] womanhood is not to be understood simply in terms of conditions set up by these various relationships but is itself to be addressed as a condition. Indeed, a historically important component of feminist politics has always been the effort to de -relationalize women, to disown the implicit comparison, to seek descriptions not dependent on masculinist ones. Such de-relationizing was the first step toward being able to grasp "the multiple differences of condition and experience glossed and/or derived by categorical statements concerning 'women'" (Stanley 1992, 241).

When I draw on feminist scholarship, then, I am made aware of my own partisanship. It is introduced here to make concrete the partisanship of my commitment to "a relational view," precisely because such scholarship has already made that view concrete and already embeds it in arguments from which it can never be extricated. How to make an argument concrete when everything is already concrete might be another way of rephrasing the problem I have set myself, "faithful to the insight that one never thinks in a void" perhaps. That phrase is from Rosi Braidotti's (1991, 3) rendering of certain poststructuralist thinkers who present themselves (after Gilles, Deleuze) with "questions organised around the problematisation of ideas in the 'nomadic style.'" She refers to her own dealings with the "forked formula" of (in her case) "woman and/in philosophy" as proceeding through a "carefully considered nomadism" (1991, 13). Perhaps a relational view, if not comparative anthropology itself, is already nomadic.

One might take the contrast between tradition and modernity as a similar forked formula. In introducing early European kin reckoning I wanted to give a sense of concreteness to certain present-day practices (including kin reckoning) by reference to other equally concrete renditions. At the same

time these renditions are also suggestive antecedents. Yet it would be a mistake to see certain elements as traditional to European forms simply because one can find evidence of them in the past. The very contrast between the traditional and the modern is a contemporary (modernist) differentiation (cf. Robertson 1992, 152), and one can read current practices either way. An anthropologist might observe, for instance, that twentieth-century Euro-Americans who pursue their personal genealogies to find some originating location for their family are using them as their own parents or grandparents might have used them. However, it is a recent phenomenon and, given its enablement by telecommunications, high-speed transport, and commercial services that specialize in tracing family histories, perhaps a modern one as well, to turn such findings into "family gatherings." Such gatherings acknowledge what people take to be modern conditions of living—they expect to be geographically scattered through migration, occupation, or lifestyle. There is nothing traditional about getting everyone together for such reasons , though the endeavor echoes tradition (family gatherings at festivals or life crises) and in gathering those who are related through common ancestors the endeavor appears to be activating links that belong to the past.^[6]

Perhaps it is no surprise that in contrast with other types of modern relationships, then, kinship itself may appear "traditional." Thus Anthony Giddens's open and diverse modernity is "a post-traditional order" played out against what is conceptualized as "pre-modern contexts" (1991, 189). It is "kinship ties" that offer him an example of "the prime external anchoring of the individual's life experience in most pre-modern contexts" (1991, 147; cf. Harris 1990, 53). Thus do kinship ties enter our descriptions in already concrete ways.

However, there are changes afoot, and Giddens also refers to Judith Stacey's study in California's Silicon Valley. Here "individuals are actively restructuring new forms of gender and kinship relations out of the detritus of pre-established forms of family life"—"recombinant families" (Giddens 1991, 177). The metaphorical allusion is to recombinant DNA technology or what in general parlance is known as genetic manipulation (recombinant DNA is the hybrid produced by joining pieces of DNA from different sources). But new ways of thinking about the coming together of persons made concrete in reference to contemporary genetic technology also set up the problems for the relational view that concerns me here.

I want to consider the effect of taking the new genetics literally rather than metaphorically, and in particular its effect on certain contemporary understandings of identity. I have said that my problem is the relationship of everything one knows to the parts one wants to make use of, and I suggested a

parallel with my reaction to feminist practice: I know it is based on a position that at times must be taken for its essentialist virtues, yet what I want to draw from it are its relational implications. The new genetics also invites us to witness a fabrication of an essentialist understanding of human identity. In this case, however, I cannot, as in feminist debate, draw out a relational interpretation from the same body of scholarship: I can only oppose a relational view that comes from outside current genetic representations.

By the new genetics^[7] I mean the new prominence that has been given to Euro-American knowledge about the genetic makeup of persons through the development of gene therapy (based on DNA recombinant technology) and the international human genome project (mapping the genome, that is, all the genes found in the cells of human beings). As long as genes were regarded as mechanisms whose complexity could only be guessed at, their role in explaining human affairs was relatively circumscribed. But the global mapping of the genome as a huge and complex organization now promises to rival anything Euro-Americans knew about the complexity of social or cultural life.

There are two rhetorical issues here. The first is the instant way in which that possibility has been popularly translated into the possibility of predicting not just disease patterns through a lifetime but behavioral characteristics. The director of the British Centre for Policy Studies, founded by two members of the then Conservative government,^[8] was not so long ago reported as dismissing British social research ("at worst Marxist, at best stale Fabian"), instead commending his listeners to the genetic determinism of Richard Herrnstein, the Harvard author of Crime and Human Nature . Herrnstein was reported on the same occasion as saying that in parts of Europe 60 to 70 percent of criminal behavior was inherited, and a reporter extracted from him the admission that "there are different genes for different classes" (The Independent , May 21, 1990, original emphasis). All this is reportage, of course, though the social context in which these remarks were allegedly uttered included a representative from the British prime minister and from the Home Office, and their general import seems to have been clear. Genes offer explanations for behavior where others have failed, and policy makers are interested. Geneticists would no doubt be appalled. In explaining the current state of play in genetic technology to the public (e.g., Weatherall 1991), workers in the field are invariably careful to draw attention to interactional and environmental factors. Yet their qualifications seem to make little dent on the widespread understanding that if the genome is the entire map then eventually individual items of behavior will be traced to their individual components.^[9]

But while existing arguments might well make most Euro-Americans very

cautious about a genetic determinism that claims to account for social disorder, other applications of genetic knowledge have already been pressed into practice. The following month, The Independent (June 10, 1990) reported that a man who had pleaded guilty to having had sexual intercourse with his daughter was cleared of the charge of incest on the grounds that "he was not her father."^[10] DNA testing (genetic fingerprinting) had shown he was not genetically related. Genetic fingerprinting is a technique that uses certain sequences of what otherwise appear to be "useless" bits of DNA but which have the property of being repeated many times, the pattern of repetition being unique to the individual. A person can thus be matched to his or her own cells. The current media image of a genetic fingerprint is the bar code that can be read at the checkout.

A new window seems to have been opened, then, on personal identity. It is as though what were once drawn in terms of social connections between persons can now be made present within the individual him- or herself. This leads to the second rhetorical issue.

If the first issue concerns the ease with which new understandings have been literally seized upon, and ones which privilege representation of the individual person as a bundle of individual genes, the second issue concerns the difficulty of finding new metaphors for a relational view. The need to do so is given in the kind of understandings such as those just quoted, for they set up "genetic" knowledge as bypassing "social" knowledge and, in so doing, give the individual an essentialist character.^[11] Feminist politics is necessarily relational in that it exists in the necessity to make explicit the consequences of structures, institutions, and values for those whom they do not appear to privilege; if I can draw a relational view from within the praxis of feminist debate, it is because that debate is already relationally situated. With respect to the new genetics, on the other hand, I find myself wishing to create relationships for the knowledge it brings—to make explicit its context in human affairs; to uncover the concrete example that will show that the potential of the human genome for explaining human behavior is not self-sufficient. Even when offered new ways of visualizing the interconnectedness of all humankind^[12] —and across species no less—I find myself not wishing to give the new genetics that rhetorical power. Hence my suspicion of the metaphor of recombinant families.

One might argue, however, that the geneticist's view of the importance of environmental factors in the development of organisms, which makes the contribution of genes something of a contingency, in affording an interactionist model also does afford a set of relational metaphors. (Lewontin [1992, 33] strikingly observes that "the external forces, what we usually think of as

'environment,' are themselves partly a consequence of the activities of the organism itself as it produces and consumes the conditions of its own existence.") Yet such a model already makes the idea of relationship concrete in one specific way. It deals with "the relationship between" an organism and its environment, and however much one sees each as the precipitate of the other, it does not provide a model for interaction between organisms in the way that models of social life deal with interactions between persons. There is a further hesitation; to find relational metaphors in these genetic representations simultaneously endorses the primacy of biological knowledge over anything else we know about the social and cultural contexts of human life. If one is to continue to give those contexts prominence, and I am committed to doing so, then perhaps relational metaphors should come from social and cultural factors themselves. That then creates its own problem: seeing such factors as "outside" the organism, and somehow secondary in turn to it, endorses current understandings of biological process as prior.

Now given that genetic endowment is (for Euro-Americans) in the first place to do with the inheritance of characteristics, and thus implies a connection between the carriers of them, it would seem that there is one area at least in which one could recover a relational view of the person: not recombinant families but kinship itself. Genes do not just provide an individual with identity, they also relate persons to one another and give them an identity as "relatives" (in English to refer to a person as a "relative" is to imply a kin relationship). Moreover, that genetic knowledge is ever only part of what constitutes people's enactment of relationships, and in that sense cannot pretend to encompass everything that is implied in being a relative. I return to the point that kinship may well have held a premier place in twentieth-century anthropological theory precisely because it is so evidently about the way people manage relationships. Surely even to begin to talk about persons related in this way will evoke a sense of social and cultural context, and thus a relational ground for genetic knowledge. However, to find a rhetorical solution in kinship also recreates the problem, as we shall see.

The Narratives

The New Genetics

Dorothy Nelkin, who writes in the fields of both social science and law, has for long been concerned with "the social power of biological information."^[13] Of interest in the present context is a recent article by Nelkin and a legal colleague, Rochelle Dreyfuss, on the jurisprudence of genetics. It is a commentary on the way, the authors say, "genetics has profoundly altered the

perception of personhood within our culture" (Dreyfuss and Nelkin 1992, 315). The article provides an American text that encapsulates the rhetorical issues bothering me, and I quote from it extensively (notes omitted).

The decision to fund [the Human Genome] Initiative, the largest biology project in the history of science, at a time of significant budgetary constraints suggests its political currency. Scientists have recently developed genetic tests, familiar from the diagnostic technologies used to identify genetic abnormalities in fetuses and newborn infants, to find the markers indicating predisposition to certain single-gene disorders such as Huntington's disease. This success has bred the hope that more complex conditions, such as cancer, drug dependency, and mental illness, will ultimately be predictable and has enhanced the appeal of theories that explain human behavior in biological terms. . . . Institutions, including employers, insurers, and educators, look to biological tests to guide placement and avoid risk. Interest in genetics is also apparent in legal discourse. . . . [T]here has been a shift from essentially metaphorical uses of genetic concepts to an incorporation of biological principles into the substance of legal doctrine. . . . [G]enetic information is increasingly suggested as a tool for deciding cases in a wide variety of fields, including torts, criminal, trust and estate, family, and labor law. (1992, 313–314)

The last point can be corroborated in Britain. The Independent (August 12, 1992) reported DNA fingerprinting being used to substantiate a claim to a £100,000 inheritance.

Dreyfuss and Nelkin point to what they call "genetic essentialism" in the way the law is newly drawing on biology. They argue that it plays into existing cultural preconceptions about the biological basis of personhood. The importance of individual characteristics has been seen in

psychological definitions [that] emphasize the internal developmental factors that form personality and shape identity. In western philosophy, personhood rests on the individual's ability to exercise free choice. According to Derek Parfit: "[T]o be a person, a being must be self-conscious, aware of its identity and its continued existence over time." (1992, 317)

It is this individualism that becomes overdetermined. They continue:

Modern science provides support for defining personhood biologically, according to genetic characteristics. Geneticists are uncovering the inherited qualities that influence the course of life from childhood to old age. . . . Such tests yield only probabilistic information, for the relationship between disposition and actual expression generally remains unknown. Yet expectations about the predictive possibilities of genetic tests have created a new category of person—the presymptomatically ill, the person "at risk" . . .^[14] (1992, 318)

Society appropriates science to support prevailing values, sometimes extending it beyond the limits of well-accepted knowledge. Thus, the enthusiasm of some

members of the scientific community draws public attention to genetic relationships. . . . Those unable to conceive seek out surrogate mothers in order to have genetically related children. Films and articles on parent-child relationships suggest the importance of genetic integrity, of "flesh and blood." Genealogy services are flourishing as people pursue their roots. "How to" books and articles written for adoptees stress the importance of finding one's natural or birth parents and suggest that knowing one's genetic heritage is a way to define identity. The very concept of identity is defined more in biological than in social terms. (1992, 319)

Despite the enthusiasm for genetic "relationships," the authors' concern is that the privileging of such relationships in human affairs will not be seen to lie in social practice but will be seen as a simple manifestation of "the genes" themselves. They conclude:

Observing these trends, we define a concept called "genetic essentialism." Genetic essentialism posits that personal traits are predictable and permanent, determined at conception, "hard-wired" into the human constitution. If comprehensively known and understood these inherent qualities would largely explain past performance and could predict future behavior. (1992, 320–321)

Dreyfuss and Nelkin report, then, on what seems an emphatic cultural bias toward interpreting genetic knowledge as the source of other kinds of knowledge. The authors' point is that biological reasoning is being introduced into the law as literal fact when the very relationship between genetic constitution and the person as an entity with which the law must deal is in their view socially or culturally constructed. In addition, they note the specific emphasis that Euro-American culture places on the person as an individual. It is this view of the person as an individual that is doubly sustained in the idea of psychological and genetic uniqueness. In order to show the extent to which "this ideology minimizes the importance of social context" (1992, 321), they set out to show that other definitions of the person are possible. They do so in a way that dispels any fear anthropologists might have that their knowledge was of no use to anyone.

Anthropological studies demonstrate that personhood is a socially-defined concept. That is, the understanding of what it means to be a person and what rights are associated with personhood varies from culture to culture. . . . Examples from cultures other than our own illustrate that the social identity of an individual is not a universal concept, but rather is defined by the community as part of its system of social relationships. Many societies perceive the person in terms of group identification. For example, in Bali, the use of personal names is usually avoided. More important are names that indicate relationships, such as birth order, status, and most commonly, familial relationships. Because a person is understood contextually, names will change in the course of a lifetime to reflect

status in the family. A man is called by the name of his children, prefaced by "father-of," or "grandfather-of," or "great-grandfather-of." Thus, personhood in Bali is defined by social placement. (1992, 316–317)

Having established the importance of social context for the way non-Euro-Americans may understand the person, Dreyfus and Nelkin suggest that the new genetics has effected a significant transformation within Euro-American culture. It will influence the way the law in future handles issues that in the past have been based in what they call "community."

Scientific and legal changes are interrelated. Both the cultural beliefs that shape science and the knowledge that emerges from science are readily incorporated into legal doctrine. Thus, the transformation of "personhood" into an essentially genetic concept has important consequences for legal thought. If personal identity is no longer understood in relational terms, then doctrines dealing with community—relationships among people—must be reconsidered. Because genetic essentialism is a deterministic concept, it negates assumptions about free will, thereby putting into question much of the law concerning responsibility, intent, condemnation, and punishment. (1992, 321)

But wait a moment. "If personal identity is no longer understood in relational terms . . ." No longer? Looking back over their argument one realizes that they use the anthropological material to introduce a double universal where the anthropologists might want to claim only one. As they said, anthropology demonstrates that personhood is a socially defined concept, that is, it is part of the human condition to live as social beings, and that includes having ideas about other human beings, personhood being just such an idea. In the particular forms they take, we recognize such ideas as cultural creations. We can indeed take this as a universal. But this is then conflated with a second claim that also appears in their argument as a universal.

Dreyfuss and Nelkin use the Bali example to present a particular image of personhood. The example turns on the importance to the Balinese of the contextualization of the person in social relationships, and on how they visualize this. Balinese do to kinship through names what Euro-Americans do through (say) genealogical trees: the changing name makes concrete a perception of the social nexus in which persons live. However, although Dreyfuss and Nelkin are carefully specific (they actually contrast "cultures that perceive the person in relational terms [e.g., Bali]" with "those that emphasize the importance of the individual" [1992, 317]), the rhetorical place that the Balinese hold in their account suggests otherwise. It is as though this particular (Balinese) image of personhood illustrated a fundamental universal truth about all manifestations of personhood.^[15] In fact, as the authors are also aware, Balinese are being as rhetorical in this image of personhood as

they are in the way they wish to make relationships visible (in their case, through the system of names; cf. Cohen 1990).

Now one could say that when Balinese define persons contextually, they are making relations socially visible, whereas when Euro-Americans define persons as individuals through biological criteria they conceal the social context in which relations are sustained, although in the second case "social context" would either have to be shown as ideologically present but subordinate or else as an analytic construct on the observer's part. Conversely one could say that Balinese in turn conceal the individuality of persons, or that the Bali counterpart to Euro-American individualism is not individualism at all but is the unique "position" that social placement creates for each person. Yet none of this would imply that some kind of generic or universal view of personal identity in relational terms is being superseded by the new genetic essentialism.

However, suppose that Dreyfuss and Nelkin are merely being rhetorical about the fact that in Euro-American culture one can certainly witness such a displacement. They would then be reporting on a simple historical sequence, and indeed that is what they elsewhere imply. The law that once rested on a double base of both individual and what they call community values is being invited to emphasize one at the expense of the other. And they draw on Euro-American ideas of kinship to show where a relational understanding of personal identity once existed, pointing specifically to the institution of the family as a setting for community values.

Forget patriarchy for a moment and read this:

When the family was regarded as the primary setting for care, education, and emotional support, stability was one of the law's central goals; familial relationships were rarely disturbed. Divorce was difficult. Courts often resolved paternity disputes using devices such as [estoppel rules]. . . . These estoppel rules^[16] . . . may have originated in a non-technological society's search for a method to determine the fact of paternity. But they also preserved the status quo. By assuring children continued contact with the significant persons of their lives, these rules evidenced the high value placed on social relationships. (1992, 321–322)

Then they go on to draw the parallel:

When the person is reconceptualized as a genetic entity and forging genetic relationships becomes a goal, legal protection for these social interests weakens. For example, Johnson v. Calvert , a case the [American] press described as "genetics vs. environment," was a dispute over the custody of a child conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). The Calverts donated their gametes (egg and sperm) to create a so-called test tube baby. Because the wife could not

sustain a pregnancy, the couple hired Johnson to carry the fertilized embryo to term in her womb. The dispute began after Johnson refused to relinquish the child, Christopher, at his birth. When genetic tests revealed a high probability that the Calverts were Christopher's biological parents, the court awarded them sole custody. . . . Thus the court defined the child as a genetic entity—a packet of genes—on the assumption that shared genes are the crucial basis of human relationships.

Genetic essentialism has also affected other parental relationships. Thus, legal protection generally is not accorded to the tie between a child born to a lesbian mother and her non-gestational partner no matter how long the relationship between the two parties has endured. (1992, 323–324 passim)

Their examples move from cases where we might consider relationships well bypassed (not all relationships seem worth upholding simply because they are evidence of "the relational"), to those where the bypassing of relationships seems, as they want us to see, an injustice. Despite that equivocation I accept their principal point, that insofar as genetic essentialism is given such an emphasis in people's explanations of human affairs, it is important to focus attention on the issues this emphasis neglects: the relational understanding of persons and personal identity.

Yet to find such an understanding in kinship recreates the problem for me. And that is because of the way kinship is being made concrete: the appeal is to tradition. Any political move to rescue a relational view from the past surely becomes its own undertaker. Anything one might want to say about the contemporary relevance of Euro-American family relationships is already compromised by presenting its roots in previous times, never mind among the Balinese. It seems all too nostalgic. Do not master narratives rather easily include opposition to themselves as nostalgia, that is, as already internalized and captured alternatives? (The words are Kathryn Sutherland's, personal communication). As a potential master narrative the new genetics needs no tradition to back it up, and most emphatically it is not yet a subject for the nostalgia industry. Rather, it is (about) our technological future, and thus speaks rhetorically of immediate concerns.

Nostalgia

Here I must state a desire.^[17] I would like to be convinced by Dreyfuss and Nelkin; I welcome their use of anthropology; I sympathize with their cause and appreciate the remarkable set of issues they have opened up for discussion. I am also apprehensive about appearing to detract from their clear and important message. It is the rhetoric, not the message, that is at issue. I believe their defense of a relational view also gives reasons for others to ignore it. For in the context of arguments about genetic innovation, culture itself,

and thus the force of the argument about cultural variability, seems lost in the sense of loss it conveys. Roland Robertson (1992, 159) cites Frederic Jameson on the point: culture, he says, "is a 'privileged area in which to witness' the current appetite for images of the past."^[18] Here is the rhetorical place the Balinese seem to hold in Dreyfuss and Nelkin's account: they illustrate what no longer seems true for us. Let me examine this form of nostalgia.

Robertson catalogues the various senses of loss which previous forms of nostalgia have articulated, as well as offering a critique of what he calls the kind of modern synthetic nostalgia (after T. Nairn) built into the origins of sociology, and its acceleration in late-twentieth-century evocations of the past. The result is seen in nostalgic theories about the present. He suggests that contemporary society is in a new phase of globalization that is generating a "diffuse kind of wilful, synthetic nostalgia amounting to something like the global institutionalisation of the nostalgic attitude. All the more reason," he adds, "to eliminate nostalgia from social theory as analysis and thematize it as an object of sociological analysis" (1992, 158). It is, he says, a theory of nostalgia that we need. Nostalgia not only carries negative overtone, it has lost a kind of innocence. To point out that something is nostalgic draws attention to its deliberate evasion of the present.

This last phrase (after Hutcheon) comes from Debbora Battaglia's (n.d.) consideration of nostalgia in the lives of late-twentieth-century Trobriand Islanders. It prompts me to adapt Robertson's injunction about shifting from means of analysis to object of enquiry; perhaps (to paraphrase) one can eliminate nostalgia from cultural theory and thematize it as an object of cultural analysis.

Battaglia makes it clear that in one sense there is no way that, as a Euro-American, I can be nostalgic about the kind of past that makes Trobriand Islanders nostalgic. Indeed, in considering how islanders living in the capital of Papua New Guinea deal with their reenactments of the past, she finds herself describing another kind of nostalgia, and one that seemingly lies outside the history to which Robertson refers. This enables me to turn nostalgia into a forked formula. If "culture" can be mobilized to convey a sense of loss, "cultural analysis" suggests that the one thing we have not lost is a sense of nostalgia. Now the Euro-American nostalgia that Robertson calls synthetic is nostalgia for past conceptual systems, for cherished values, for kinds of behavior, that is, for "tradition" or for "culture." But Euro-Americans also have nostalgia for persons and places and land. While we might imagine that we could share other people's nostalgia for a vanishing culture, we cannot share it for the particular persons they miss or the places they have left. Here your

(their) nostalgia is most emphatically not my (our) nostalgia. This is the sense in which Trobriand elaborations are distinctive.

If I evoke Trobrianders, it is not for them to be "my Balinese." On the contrary it is to make concrete a simple distinction between a nostalgia for past customs and practices and a nostalgia for (say) persons and places. These mobilize different ways of embodying the past in the present. The point is exemplified in Richard Werbner's (1991, 109) recent account of Kalanga living in Zimbabwe. Personal narratives given by elders from a single family divide into two genres (though he refers only to the first as "nostalgia"). Although both narratives of the past deal with people and events, he suggests that the one is cast in terms of an irreversible break between past and present, when the narrator looks back to good times where conditions of life were qualitatively different, while the other is a catalogue of cautionary recollections about how the significance of people's acts carry forward in time, when the circumstantial details about disputes and inheritance are forewarnings for present relationships. With respect to the first, insofar as Euro-Americans regard themselves as custodians of (the self-appointed representers of) world history or world culture, then for me as a Euro-American the narrator's loss is also my loss. With respect to the second, however, I can only draw an analogy between the details of the narrator's life and my own and am relieved I do not have to worry over the same things. In short, there is a different rhetorical effect to these genres.

Synthetic nostalgia mourns for what is missing from the present, and thus creates representations of the past as the place where what is gone was once present. Dreyfuss and Nelkin mourn the fact that relational views of the person—and the legal framework of the community they associate with these views—were once present in "the family." Trobrianders in Port Moresby may similarly speak wistfully, in synthetic vein, of being displaced in time and space. At the same time, when they evoke the past, it is also to evoke the social context of relationships "at home," and these relationships have a substantive effect on the living, present capacity of Trobrianders to act in town. An example would be the kinds of feelings aroused by planting the highly prized yam in urban soil in order to enact relationships that at home depended on the place (among other things) where the yams were planted. It is not just that feelings are aroused, but that they must be aroused. The planting is only efficacious if the planter can imbue it with his own attachment to the act and thus by recalling relationships already in place (see further, Battaglia 1992). Such nostalgia as accompanies the Trobriand recall of an origin is a way of making explicit the fact of origin, an attachment to a

past that is and can only be realized in the present. The origin of the act does not, as it were, exist till the act is done.

In their own evocations of the past, Battaglia makes evident, Euro-Americans may avoid the sentimentality of synthetic nostalgia by irony, that is, by awareness of the contrariness of imagining a "real" distance between past and present. The idea of tradition encapsulates the view that one can relive what one is already separated from. Family gatherings can be carried off with irony in this way. However, these Trobriand reenactments do not need irony; she calls them "nostalgic practice." In these contexts, the past is the substance of (present) relationships: it is, so to speak, being acted out now. And I want to borrow this second notion of nostalgia, not in order to make Trobriand culture relevant to a Euro-American one, but in order to grasp a rhetorical possibility that the practice of their substantive enactments offer. Let me refine Dreyfuss and Nelkin's appeal to kinship. Let me imagine a "kinship" for contemporary Euro-American practices that deals with the past as tradition but where the past is at the same time more than tradition. I imagine it not only with synthetic but also with substantive nostalgia.

Synthetic nostalgia would come from thinking that the relational view of personal identity is best exhibited in the past. That is, that past configurations of family relations provided not just examples but exemplars of a relational view, and ones that have since been transformed by modernity. As a consequence, the past is taken as a real preexisting entity by virtue of its break from the present. Only if one keeps the break in mind can one overcome nostalgia with irony. At the same time, it becomes vaguely phoney to "recreate" the past in the present, to think of bringing back large families or the significance of relationships. However positively one may regard the values in question, to take values for their traditional status assigns them to tradition. We can rejoice or regret, but what is always reinforced is the passing of tradition. So the past itself acquires its presence, in this mode, by being the subject of representation.

Substantive nostalgia would come from thinking that kinship is the constitution of the past in the present, the enacting of obligations because a prior relationship exists, belonging to a family because of one's name, being a child because one's parents had children. Kinship exists in these ties. There is no possibility of an ironic break here because the presence of the past is not affected by whether or not one represents it. Insofar as it displays its own effect, and thus needs no representation, then one might add that there is no break with one's origins and no distance to mediate. Evidence of its being practiced lies in the relationships themselves.

It is probably difficult for Euro-Americans to talk of the second type of nostalgia without recalling the first, for their late-twentieth-century discourse of innovation and technology that is heavy with the newness of the present (Campbell 1992) continually asserts the breaks with the past that recreates all nostalgia as synthetic nostalgia. To evoke family, kinship, and relationships is often to be nostalgic in this sense. Nonetheless, one could perhaps make out a case for substantive nostalgia—the always-present effect of relationships, the necessary contemporaneity of working through the origins of one's obligations and feelings—and thus a case for the significance of a relational view not as part of a traditional but as part of a modern world. (Since one would wish to collapse the distinction between tradition and modernity, technically one would have to speak of a postmodern world.) A relational view would consequently appear not as the trait of some epoch or culture, which can always be written off, but as a pointer to the inevitable relationships in which individual persons are enmeshed. And here Dreyfuss and Nelkin's choice was surely right—here kinship surely comes into its own as a concrete and contemporary mode for visualizing the substantive effect of prior relations.

Thus one could argue that the anthropologist has to take Euro-American kinship constructs as significantly as he or she takes them anywhere. They do not belong to 'tradition' except insofar as they are represented as such. Rather, they contribute to the making of persons in the present world, including those who have to live the impossible politics of the enterprise culture (Heelas and Morris 1992). But making kinship constructs constitutive of the present in this particular manner presents me with the most taxing problem of all. It is, of course, one of my own making.

The Sting

The problem is this. Were I to translate the American anxieties that have been so well voiced into ones to which I can respond from the vantage point of English kinship, I would be forced to acknowledge that English kinship was never only about relating. If only it were otherwise! If only I could take refuge in the simple idea that kinship only attends to relationships, I could then draw on the workings of kin relationships as an internal cultural critique on genetic essentialism—shorn of all breaks with the past, naturally, and with thoroughly contemporary import. But I am done in by my own reflections on English constructs, and doubly insofar as I take them as an exemplar of Euro-Americanism. English kinship constructs, it seems to me, are as much

about reproducing the essentialism of individuality as they are about relational definitions of personal identity. That is precisely their contemporary power.

The evidence is already there in the Dreyfuss and Nelkin article when the authors refer to the biological view of personhood. Where does that come from but Euro-American ideas about procreation, the uniqueness of flesh and blood ties, the significance of nurturing persons to the point of their leaving home and being able to do without parents, and so forth? In fact, one could go back over their text and reread all their evidence for genetic essentialism as evidence of Euro-American kinship thinking. For example, it is not a desire for genes that makes a person seek surrogacy, but a desire to be a parent by having a child of one's own. The genetic connection is instantiated as a kin relationship, and if it is instantiated as a relationship, what is simultaneously instantiated is the uniqueness of the individual child. This uniqueness may be seen from one of two perspectives. Uniqueness may be attributed to the child's placement in a circle of relatives (cf. Edwards et al. 1993); here the individual is the outcome of relationships. But from the very possibility of being able to "see" these relationships "in" the individual person also come Strathern's three facts of English kinship: the individuality of persons, the diversity of characteristics, and the individual's ability to reproduce individuals (1992, 14, 22, 53). These facts belong to a thoroughly modern epoch.

Such kinship constructs offer their own forked formula. Indeed in retrospect (that is, with present preoccupations in mind) one might look back at those medieval computations of degree of relatedness: when the "self" (ipse ) was put at the heart of schemes of reckoning, the same genealogy yielded both the tracing of relationships and the centring of the individual as a point of reference. A similar duplex is present in the recent debates to which Dreyfuss and Nelkin give voice. Both sides of the debate are recreated within the very material (kin relationships) they (and I) would like to enlist, in a much more partisan way, on one side alone. Indeed this is where we find culture, in the constant re-creation of the reasons for our problems, in the holographic distribution (Oyama 1985, 114; cf. Wagner 1991) of motifs over a field.

One cannot then go to one bit of culture (kin relationships) to rescue us from other bits (genetic essentialism). What one can perhaps do is expose partisanship as such. Genetic essentialism is as real a part and culturally as much a part of Euro-American thinking as is the value Euro-Americans put on relationships and a relational view.^[19] When it leads to bigotry, new forms of racism, intolerance, and the threat of a "genetic underclass" (Nelkin 1992,

190), it cannot be disowned as cultural fact; it can be disowned as thoroughly one-sided, narrow-minded, and prejudiced, in short as partisan.

An anthropology that evades the individualism built into Euro-American kinship constructs simply commits synthetic nostalgia. Yet in pointing to this individualism, I am at the same time locating the (cultural) origins of the significance currently attached to genetic essentialism. I am practicing substantive nostalgia. Indeed, we may turn it around the other way and say that modern understandings of genetics afford a powerful idiom for making the Trobriand practice of substantive nostalgia concrete for us. Euro-American ideas about genetic influence imagine a literal embodiment of genetic information whose original is unknown till the moment it takes effect in the manifestation of some characteristic or other. That is, what was laid down in the past exists in the effect it has in the present. I am shortsighted because, among other things, of the genes my ancestors carried, and thereby I make those genes evident and manifest their contemporary presence. At least, that is my understanding of the way genetics was always pressed into the service of kinship thinking.

Like Dreyfuss and Nelkin, I have borrowed from a non–Euro-American culture, although in my case not a visualization of a relational view of the person but a visualization of a kind of nostalgia. Like them I did so in order to contrast a culturally prevalent miasma with a different state of affairs. Unlike them I have a rhetorical end in view which does not wish to make my preferred mode a traditional one, that is, claim a kind of shared past. On the one hand, I want to avoid synthetic nostalgia for bygone cultures. Substantive nostalgia, on the other hand, seems attractive insofar as it is about the making of a particular present. Yet this other fork lands me in a similar impasse. For substantive nostalgia leads me to apprehend exactly how past ideas about the biological base to English kinship (to choose among Euro-American exemplars) endure, like so many forewarnings, in the present fascination with genetics.

However, the new genetics is the sting in the tail of the sting. Its applications are imagined in a highly anticipatory mode; its creation of the presymptomatically ill, its eagerness to prevent characteristics appearing before they can do harm, its concern with what will happen before anything is made present, all give a new edge to Dreyfuss and Nelkin's critique of genetic essentialism. It is as though selves could be erased before they appear. That is, it is as though they could be worked on (the potential characteristics carried by genes) before one knows how to interpret their effects. The very relationship between "the gene" and everything that leads it to have a material pres-

ence becomes notionally bypassable, most notably in ideas attributed to single-gene diagnosis but generally in the kinds of therapies imagined for the future. One might turn after all, then, to an older genetics to find a relational imagery encapsulated there, not in order to resurrect the restricted idea of "a relationship" between organism and environment but to resurrect the interpretive effort that goes into the explanation of manifest characteristics. The geneticist's interactionist paradigm implied that genes never exhibited themselves .^[20] Insofar as they are mediated by (the form of) their manifestation they are also mediated by persons in the analytical effort required to assess their effect. It is such effort that reminds us of the partisanship of all interpretations; it also makes evident the relational matrix of the effect persons have on one another.

Yet much popular rhetoric would see no interpretive mediation necessary—genes are imagined as the messages themselves.^[21] Which returns me to my rhetorical problem: how to keep relationships in view without being nostalgic. I have offered an interpretation of nostalgia that substitutes appeal to the past with acknowledgment of the present, but that solves not at all how to keep relationships in view. It is no comfort that only a relational view of cultural process could yield the insight that kinship is connected to other aspects of Euro-American culture, and that only a relational view enables one to specify the power that essentialist imagery has on the late-twentieth-century imagining of "real" personal identity. From where do I find the metaphors to make that relational view as concrete to apprehend as the new genetics itself?

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