Marilyn Strathern collects four working papers that reflect her ongoing involvement in multidisciplinarity projects and collaborations that are reshaping her own ancient university and, by implication, research universities everywhere. She focuses on the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park, but her fascination is with “recent moves within and beyond universities to value collaboration as a special source of creativity, to forge alliances between cognate disciplines, to experiment across the boundaries of academic disciplines and the performing arts, and to address diverse publics and non-academic interests” (p. vii).

At stake is an epochal response of state-based political economies to global regimes of competition. In this response, the transformation of science, technology, and knowledge-making institutions has become crucial to the remaking of competitive economies. At the heart of this transformation have been the intensive reflexive self-management of universities in formal terms (the proliferation of “audit” culture, benchmarking, and performance measures) and the penetration of social policy issues of ethics, accountability, and the interests of stakeholders into the heart of doing science. No humanistic field of scholarship or human science, in its agreeable backwaters, is left untouched by these developments.

In her penetrating observations on changes in the university landscape around her, Strathern also has the prospects for social anthropological research in mind. For anthropology, in particular, many pitfalls and many opportunities exist in this redrawing of the boundaries of science and society in the roving, interdisciplinary fervor of the contemporary university becoming more dynamically a core institution of political economy.

These papers are the latest phase in the evolution of a remarkable career that has moved from the era of Melanesian ethnography in its historical climax (but with her sustained bifocal perspective on home as well) to reproductive technologies as the new arena of kinship theory to the emergence of audit culture (issues moving her into the expanded role for certain academics in the United States and Britain as public-interest intellectuals) to the broader horizon of far-reaching change in her own university setting. Anthropology now begins not only at home but also in the quite exotic local entanglements of new forms of knowledge making of globalizing scale.

In making this new generic context of research itself an object of inquiry, Strathern is steady in her own style of doing anthropology. The classic terms of social anthropology—personhood, property, exchange, and comparison—remain legible and foundational throughout Strathern’s projects. Yet her personal success in agilely sustaining this tradition tends to divert attention from challenges to anthropology’s signature methods and forms of reporting. Still, these challenges (and opportunities) do not go unacknowledged by Strathern.

Following is a selection of four quotations from Strathern’s papers that stimulate new thinking about challenges to the function and form of ethnographic inquiry cast amid the current fervor for wide-ranging interdisciplinarity in knowledge making. I follow each quotation by a comment to encourage dialogue.

1. “Social anthropology has one trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection … a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact …” (pp. 5–6). This sentiment celebrates the serendipitous virtue of a loose method, perhaps too much, as an aesthetic of its tactical genius. But it does point to the realization that the valuable surplus dimensions of “data” in the processes of fieldwork emerge only later in the way that ethnography is processed in reception, among the community of anthropologists and others who respond to its textual forms. Norms for incorporating reception as an integral part of ethnographic knowledge making seem called for.

2. “[Ethnography allows] one to recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose … to anticipate a future need to know something that cannot be defined in the present” (p. 7). This is an appealing temporal refunctioning of ethnography toward emergent phenomena—ethnography that can document and articulate possibility. Anticipation of future crises, however, is like soothsaying, and the capacity to practice this function within ethnography needs examination.

3. “Anthropologists once regarded it their job to elicit reflexivity from their research subjects, but nowadays they are often presented with a high degree of already cultivated self-awareness and self-consciousness … presented with what one might call indigenous social analysis …” (p. 10). This is a statement of the key challenge to contemporary ethnography. Anthropologists encounter, not Other, but Counterpart, or epistemic partners, requiring a rethinking of all of the available tropes by which we constitute subjects, difference, and collaboration in ethnography as well as the genres of knowledge that might come from it. “Writing Culture” returns in a very different era!

4. “That conflicted subject is one which the dystopic conditions of accountability regimes have themselves created. The realisation of the impossibility of the programmatic ideal … is a realisation of its absurdity. And that means that other apprehensions of social reality are being created at the same time … [so] why not ‘anthropologise our evaluative practices’?” (p. 78). Here, in what she calls “the creativity of the repressed,” Strathern locates where epistemic partnership in the refunctioned collaboration of fieldwork might be found for ethnographers intervening within the new formally reflexive, socially aware regimes of knowledge.

Finally, I comment on the genre of working papers, so skillfully employed by Strathern, and what it suggests about the future of ethnography in the kind of critical inquiry that her project exemplifies. This genre creates an appealing work-in-progress environment that licenses the always-revisable, always-speculative character of ethnographic argument amid the morphing of the forms of knowledge making that are both its milieu and object. Could it be that the authoritative ethnographic text or article no longer has a secure place amid these anticipatory reports, working papers, memoranda, and talks on the moving ground of the contemporary?