Those familiar with Marilyn Strathern’s innovations in the study of kinship will not find much unexpected in Kinship, Law and the Unexpected because the book contains materials that Strathern has presented previously. Nonetheless, by juxtaposing these pieces, Strathern explores interfaces at which the “complexities and ambiguities of relationships” confront other formative components of Euro-American epistemologies including concepts of science, society, property, ownership, and “the language and imagery of individuals” (p. 27).

First, Strathern demonstrates how biotechnology, as applied science, has been “drawn ‘into’ society” (p. 10) as a resource for reconfiguring social relationships. But “biotechnology has (also) become an arena in which society speaks back” (p. 17). In this context, Strathern looks at how the conjunctive and disjunctive messages inscribed around divorce, in vitro fertilization, and the unity–separation that relate a woman and her fetus as the domain of recombinant families come into contact with Euro-American constructs of individual persons.

Strathern then examines the obverse scenario: how science is already part of society. But she is too cursory in her treatment of science, reducing the reflexive layers and specific practices of multiple sciences to one generic formula. Nevertheless, she notes that science is duplex in formulation, “allowing ideas to appear alongside of and be co-produced with critiques of them” (p. 34). For 20th century structural-functional kinship theorists, kinship as inherently relational was foregrounded even though this dictum crosscut overt cultural logics concerning the a priori existence of individuals. Equally, folk reformulations of relationships in current-day recombinant families “take knowledge … as informative of kinship” (p. 48). Following SarahFranklin, Strathern notes that the “conditions of feasibility” that allow recombinant families to be discursively formulated are “already built into the conception of kinship as a hybrid of individual and society, of natural and cultural facts” (p. 48).

Strathern explores how the production of scientific knowledge is inherently relational, contrasting with other ideas of authorship in which texts are seen as unique creations of independent authors. Scientific authors create knowledge relationally in two senses. First, information is transformed into knowledge by bringing one bit of information into relations with seemingly disparate fragments, making others aware of “its context or grounds” (p. 63). Second, scientific knowledge is generated in a (socially) relational way, frequently marked by group authorship (lending scientific knowledge further legitimacy, in contrast to the way multiple authorship may subtract value from single-authored texts in other fields). This seeming diversion into the history of knowledge production lets Strathern explore the flows that intermix these broad conceptual relations within the domain of family–kin relations.

In part 2, “The Arithmetic of Ownership,” Strathern compares Euro-American and Melanesian notions of knowledge transmission, outlining the contours of Euro-American patent law as compared with New Ireland Malanggan production and use of masks–objects that embody the essence of dead persons and are displayed briefly for ceremonial purposes and then quickly discarded (p. 96). Here, Strathern wishes readers to consider the familiar anthropological ground of categorical incommensurability with her astute recognition that anthropological narratives “forever translate diverse and multiple worlds into versions of—perspectives on—the same world” (p. 91). New Ireland people view their products as artifacts acquired, not as inventions. Their central concern is with the right to reproduce what others have long reproduced. In contrast, Euro-American law allows patents for cell lines that simply involve the transcription of a “natural code into a new medium” (p. 108). Here, the idea of invention becomes problematic, and the boundaries of nature must be perpetually renegotiated.

Strathern then expands on shortcircuits that occur as very different worldviews are woven together. She explores how Euro-American ownership over body parts becomes viable even as English law prohibits ownership of an entire person. When Euro-American legal precedents are transported to Papua New Guinea, however, misunderstandings emerge; Strathern analyzes specific cases to illustrate how complexities of social personhood and identity are negotiated in performative settings. In Miriam’s case—an instance of mortuary gifts owed to maternal kin—Strathern argues that Miriam is not commodified as part of a “head payment” in holistic, individualist, terms (p. 114). Rather, this case shows how New Guinea residents frequently reify persons in performative settings to objectify certain relationships by momentarily eclipsing others that weave persons into arrays of meaningful social relations. Understanding the complexities that constitute Miriam’s social personhood is sacrificed in the courtroom, and her condition is stereotyped as “misguided tradition” to be supplanted with representations of New Guinea as truly modern. Cases like this also speak to the contested domain of human rights, which pits “supra-local universalism” against a dialectic of locally negotiated notions of human rights vested in concrete contexts and specific historical and biographical circumstances.

Finally, Strathern uses ownership to contrast Euro-American and Melanesian epistemologies of person and relationship. She suggests a Melanesian perspectivism modeled on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s view of persons as “being in the appropriate and necessary ontological state to exercise” the right to reproduce certain objects. She argues that this right of “making duplicates” constitutes “the capacity for creation” in Melanesia, unlike Euro-American ideas in which objects and ideas, through their very objectification, are possessible, and the “source of creativity is not passed on, … [but] is left intact in the … original author or inventor” as a distinguishing mark of individual persons exercising their own will (pp. 152, 154).

These last chapters I found most rewarding, perhaps because they indulge the anthropological fancy of coming to understand typifications of one’s own cultural milieu through comparisons with others’ perspectives. The entire book is an insightful overview of several threads of Strathern’s recent work and engages readers in probing discussions that continue to make the study of kinship in its varied epistemological frames a worthy pursuit.

[references, author index, subject index.]