Differentiation and encompassment: A critique of Alfred Gell’s theory of the abduction of creativity.

James Leach, King’s College, Cambridge. 
King’s College, King’s Parade, Cambridge CB2 1ST. james.leach@kings.cam.ac.uk

Research Fellow and Director of Studies in Anthropology, King’s College Cambridge and Associate Lecturer, Dept. of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. 
Field research: Madang Province, Papua New Guinea 1994-5, 1999, 2000-2001. Kinship, creativity, environment and artistic production, ownership and intellectual property.  (Creative Land. Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. 2003 Berghahn Books.)
U.K.: 2002 to present, with participants in Art-Science collaborations, and Open Source software programmers. Writings on knowledge production, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, multiple authorship and models of ownership. 
Awarded JB Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art 2000 (Royal Anthropological Institute) and The Philip Leverhulme Prize 2004.

Differentiation and encompassment: A critique of Alfred Gell’s theory of creativity.

Abstract
This article takes the current institutional interest in interdisciplinary work as a starting point.  Ethnography of an interdisciplinary project, one which brought together artists and scientists with the aim of ‘nurturing synergy between them’ and ‘developing new creative partnerships’ raises a series of linked questions about the recognition of creative work, how disciplines and approaches are related to the people who embody them, and how the objects produced will be distinguished from more conventional art and science. I approach these questions through the work of Alfred Gell on the enchantment and agency of art objects. Using Gell’s work in this way reveals similarities in fundamental assumptions held by the ethnographic subjects of the article (facilitators and collaborators involved in Sci-Art projects) and of Gell himself. I show that the similarity lies in a very particular notion of the person, and of the operation of creativity: things Gell uses the concept of abduction to address. I conclude that these structuring assumptions create problems around the recognition of collaborative inputs for those engaged in the scheme I outline. They also undermine the otherwise exceptional promise and interest of Gell’s writings on the agency of objects.

Introduction
The place of objects in anthropological investigation has, all too often, been secondary to the cultural and social. Objects are fitted into cultural contexts, while ‘things’ often are discussed only as the necessary material backdrop to the workings of society . Culture can be read from objects through symbolic analysis, sense is made of their form and use by reference to prior cultural systems of meaning (Strathern 1990). It is as if the category of the material, the inanimate, was a pre-analytic given, one of the basic building blocks upon which a social or cultural theory of meaning could (unreflexively) be built. That is, because the material and the object world exist in particular relation to the person of the analyst, and this relation is so thoroughly naturalised as to appear given by the human condition, much anthropological theory has relied upon ‘things’ material stability of form and substance, opposing objects to the persons who act, create and utilise them. ‘Things’ then populate our descriptions of others’ worlds with our own distinctions between mind (spirit) and matter, subjects and objects, agents and patients. One might say that we are already used to ‘thinking through things’. There seems work to do in becoming conscious of the effects these ‘thinkings’ have on the outcome of our endeavours.
This volume has the aim of making some of the consequences of this naturalisation apparent. We also positively suggest where we might take an analysis of the social world which does not define it as separate from (albeit connected to) the world of objects and things. I take this challenge here in the following terms: The way that people are connected to what they produce, and the terms of their claims upon those productions (Hirsch and Strathern 2004) reveal assumptions about the nature of the person which are already embedded in particular schemes for object production. One can ask certain question following from this. What is it that the person does in order to be recognisable as a person? How does this relate to ‘things’? What effect do their intentions and actions have? A old model of civilisation posited that the effects people have are on the environment that surrounds them; on things. It is the progressive specialisation and development of these effects that marks the vital stages of human history.  Through the modification of the external, object world, persons come to realise themselves as civilised beings of the kind who rightfully control the world, and are connected to it through ownership of various kinds (see Pocock 1992). 
In this chapter, I examine the correlations between a recent and powerful theory of objects which professes to move beyond previous understandings, and contemporary object production (of a very particular kind). The correlations tell us something about the analysts embedded-ness in the same series of assumptions about things as those involved in this object production. Creativity is the focus of my analysis as it is in the mechanisms for the recognition of creativity that the process of making things and persons in the form they appear, can be seen.  I begin with a very contemporary interest in the boundaries of knowledge practices, and the (creative) potential to cross them through novel object production. It is the notion of the agency of these objects, and thus how they relate to persons, that points me initially to Alfred Gell’s theories of abduction, agency and the mind. And that puts us squarely in the territory of thinking through how persons and things are equivalent.

Analysts and Practitioners
Interdisciplinary initiatives abound, and inside academia as well as beyond it we hear of the importance of working across boundaries and making new connections. This article addresses some of the issues that these imperatives precipitate. My focus is on an initiative that sought to bring visual artists into collaboration with research scientists. The scheme’s originators intended that outcomes would include artworks and/or technological artefacts that reflected their collaborative origin. Bringing vision and expertise from different domains into the production of novel and possibly valuable objects, participants understood the potential for an interdisciplinary, and ‘inter-cultural’ exchange between kinds of knowledge and skill. This was to result in object production. These objects were to have novel and interesting effects (see Footnote 16 below), to act as ‘agents’ (to use Alfred Gell’s term) of a particular kind. Moreover, facilitators were interested in the processes, networks, and ‘social’ outcomes as forms of ‘object’ production (Leach 2005). In other words, the distinction between persons, processes, and objects seemed blurred, just as in Alfred Gell’s theory of the object-nexus (Gell 1998). Social scientists were included as expert ‘evaluators’ of the scheme as it was thought that capturing the social dynamic might be equivalent to capturing new forms of creativity, making the lessons learned available for others to utilise. Is such evaluation the evaluation of agency in Gell’s terms? That is, of the extension of persons through the object nexus? What would such an approach to this collaboration reveal, and what would it obscure? 
This paper was written specifically attempting to use Gell’s theories, developed in a number of writings and brought together in Art and Agency (1998) to think about art-science collaborations. It has ended up as a kind of exploratory critique of Gell. My impulse to produce a critique comes from the very promise of Gell’s work. Art and Agency suggests the kind of theory I myself am trying to advance (see Leach 2002). However, as many have recognised, Art and Agency contains different strands, some of which seem contradictory (Layton 2003: 458). In this chapter I will focus on how the intellect and causation are problematic in Gell’s argument. It is worth doing so, I believe, as these aspects lie at the heart of what is innovative in the book. In one reading, one can understand Gell as describing how objects and people enter into networks of relationships in which they are not differentiated on the basis of their ability to cause other persons to act. The idea of the ‘causal nexus’ in Gell mitigates against the necessity of viewing the individual as the only agentive component in generative social processes. 
However, Gell’s project to overcome conventional subject/object distinctions is undermined in my opinion when thing-to-thing and thing-to-person relations are modelled as if any object with agency must demonstrate an intellect, and a will, which derive directly from a human actor. If there were no mind to animate the causal nexus, there would be no art work and no agent, in spite of his attempt to level to playing field between persons and objects in our theorising. A particular conception of the mind, as the source of creativity, and moreover, the individual mind contained within a single person lies behind this. I do not look to Melanesia, where one might expect to find the notion of the individual author destabilised, but rather to artistic and scientific collaboration in the UK to reveal this aspect of Gell’s thinking. 
My approach to Gell stems from the kinds of issues that interdisciplinary collaborations pose to practitioners, (specifically of the Sci-Art collaborations I have been participating in). The link I make is that these issues arise because of similar conceptual relations (which I go on to elaborate) to those implied in Gell’s theory itself. So whereas we might say sci-art collaborators are genuinely struggling (because of the interdisciplinary intent) with the consequences of a (deeply embedded) way of imagining persons and knowledge, Gell’s theory in Art and Agency is limited because it does not move beyond a similar conception of the artist/author. To state this plainly, I believe that Gell’s approach to creativity shares fundamental assumptions with the ethnographic subjects I discuss. 
Creativity is not an explicit focus of Gell’s in Art and Agency. However I seek here to uncover the implicit theory of creativity embedded in his use of the notion of ‘abduction’. Gell’s analytic position on the agency of objects, and the extension of persons through the abduction of their agency from those objects, is structured by assumptions about persons embedded in the language of cognitive science which Gell enthusiastically adopts. Paradoxically, Gell’s theory was directly inspired by Marilyn Strathern’s writings on the partible nature of persons in Melanesia.  She has famously outlined how objects substitute or stand in for persons in ritual, and exchange contexts (Strathern 1988, and see Gell 1999). However, in Gell, the possibility of describing the reality of multiple relational referents for both objects and persons is obscured by the way creativity itself is envisaged. 
I focus upon what I call the ‘differentiated’ nature of those persons who collaborate in Sci-Art, and how this initial difference is understood as a source of creative potential. The differentiation of persons, and of kinds of knowledge, is seen as a pre-requisite for the development of collaborative outcomes, and for the power and success of these outcomes. My argument then utilises transformations between states of individuation (through differentiation), and states of encompassment, where many people’s collaborative endeavour is made to appear as the outcome of a single mind’s internal labouring. 

The New Technology Arts Fellowships
A pilot scheme in interdisciplinary collaboration was begun in Cambridge U.K. in January 2002. I was asked to participate as a social scientific observer, and to write an evaluation of the project, which was called the New Technology Arts Fellowships (NTAF). NTAF was a partnership between the Arts Council of England, Crucible, which is an interdisciplinary network of researchers in Cambridge University, Kettle’s Yard (the contemporary art gallery of the University of Cambridge, and The Junction CDC (an Arts and Music venue in the city). NTAF intended to move collaborations between scientists and artists on from a recent vogue, which is to have artists utilise images from science to make interesting or arresting visual presentations. Those behind NTAF stated that artists utilising imaging techniques within science to make art is little more than a marketing exercise for science, highlighting the potential to make science accessible to a wider public though the presentational skills of artists. In NTAF, artists and scientists/technologists were encouraged to collaborate on the same projects, bringing vision and expertise from different domains into the production of objects. There was a research element, in other words, an exploration of new technologies in a novel way. And there was an explicit aim of fostering creativity too, of adding to science, and to art, through new combinations of the knowledge and vision in each. Thus the focus was on embryonic technologies, looking to influence their development.
The scheme, which began in January 2002, involved the recruitment of three artists who came to Cambridge as visiting Fellows. This was for what was called ‘Phase 1’. Phase 1 was the period of establishing collaborative working relationships between these artists and scientific collaborators. Phase 1 fellowships lasted for six months, in which the artist-fellows were asked to reside for 30 days each in Cambridge. During this time they were introduced, depending on their stated interests, to scientists and technology researchers whose work appeared to offer the promise of collaboration. Phase 1 ended with an ‘Exposition of Work in Progress’ at Kettle’s Yard - a gallery display of the collaborative work. I come back to the gallery display later in the paper. 
The idea of NTAF was to foster new creative partnerships. Its aim was ‘To create new models of interdisciplinary collaboration’.   The web-based publicity continues, ‘the scheme aims to bring together creative individuals from different fields and nurture synergy between them.’ There is an explicit focus on creativity, which is to be made present by bringing together different knowledge bases, and different approaches to knowledge and object production. While it was left ambiguous as to where the actual outcome was to be located, it was also made explicit that the scheme was intended ‘To produce innovative outputs in arts and technology.’   The publicity material goes on:  ‘The range of possible outcomes looked for from the scheme include new art works, academic papers in a range of disciplines, product development, patent registration, and financing for commercial exploitation.’  
Here then is a conscious attempt to have input from various sources. One of the questions this project seemed to address, in its consciously open-ended and process-centred focus, was how commensurate highly specialised and intricate forms of knowledge are. Acknowledging a complex world, and a complex differentiated knowledge about it, ‘knowledge’ is made into an overarching category that then encompasses difference and specialisation. It is on this basis that such a collaboration could be envisaged. Beneath the difference, there is a commonality. Art and science are both ‘knowledge practices’. 
What was the effect that these collaborations were to have? In the end they looked to the production of new kinds of object. And it would be in the effect these objects could have (as art works, as technology), that the scheme would achieve its long list of aims. In fact, such an object-outcome seems absolutely ripe for Gell’s descriptive and analytic apparatus. 

Gell’s theory of the abduction of agency
In Art and Agency, Gell discusses how art objects are a ‘nexus’ of social relations, how they have effects, how they embody intentions, carry agency and produce results in the field of social relations in which they are embedded.  He distinguishes between the ‘causal milieu’ (that is, things that happen because of well-known physical laws), and those things which are apparent against the causal milieu (the happenings which point to agents) and which have their significant effect in and on social relations and persons. 
Gell begins with the observation that an anthropological theory of art cannot be concerned with aesthetics. It is social relations that anthropologists study, and any discussion of art must locate the art work within the social relations which produce it, and in which it has its effect. He borrows from the language of cognitive science to outline how it is that objects can have effects upon persons, and thus be seen as agents in their own right. It is the idea that objects index their producer’s agency that I am most interested in. Objects are not representations, not vehicles for symbols, in this theory. Idols, for example, do not provide the focus for beliefs because they externally embody a representation, a symbol, which is linked (in the mind) to other symbols, embedded in other representations (see Boyer 1994).  Idols, to the extent they are significant, operate in social relations. It is here, not as vehicles for representational meaning, that they have their effect. Gell then defines his interest as ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’ (1998: 7) He calls the objects he discusses (the idol, for example) ‘indexes’. Indexes are material objects that permit a particular cognitive operation which Gell defines as ‘the abduction of agency’. 
An index is a sign from which a causal inference can be drawn. Gell gives the examples of a smile that betokens friendliness, or smoke which betokens fire.  The cognitive operation here is not the same as that which is utilised when I say ‘two plus two equals four’ Or when I say that a dog is an animal. Indexes are not part of a calculus, a tautology in which one thing leads inevitably to the next. Nor is the abduction of agency a process of deduction. Smoke is an index of fire even though we know smoke does not have to mean fire. Thus we need another term for the inferences we bring to bear on indices. This term is abduction.  Abduction is a synthetic inference based on a combination of a causal inference and representational inference. Or in Boyer’s language, ‘a variety of non - demonstrative inference, based on the logical fallacy of affirming the antecedent from the consequent’ (1994: 14). Boyer makes a distinction between true premise (fire produces smoke) and not true inference (that particular smoke is produced by a fire). He uses this to show how, with true premises, people can arrive at irrational (untrue) conclusions. Gell takes this language (abduction) and utilises it as a metaphor. He tells us how it is possible that inference in the mode of abduction is made true. He describes forms of thought which could not stand up to much philosophical scrutiny, ‘but which are none the less socially and cognitively practicable’ (1998: 17). 
What of a picture of a person smiling? The viewer attributes ‘friendliness’ to the person in picture. This is abduction. And Gell tells us that through the object (the picture) we have access to another person’s mind. We see the person in the picture as well disposed. The inferential schemes (abduction) we use to look at objects are very like the ones we bring to bear on social others for Gell.  Smoke is a ‘natural sign’. It is the outcome of a physical, causal process. However, if we took smoke to indicate someone having set fire to something (a bonfire in a garden, or a swidden burning are Gell’s examples) then smoke itself becomes an artefactual index. It is an artefact that has become the index of another’s person’s agency.  Gell writes of a flint tool as just such an artefactual index. We can abduct, from the object, the intention of the maker; that was, to make a tool, to open shell fish, to eat, and so forth. In many cases, the abduction of such agency makes the person who is in the vicinity of the object respond. Objects become an index of another’s agency which causes the viewer to act in turn. They thus become social agents in themselves. 
What though is agency?  Gell says it is what distinguishes physical happenings -- things that physical laws can explain -- from ‘actions’. ‘Actions’ imply intention. And intention implies a mind. Gell tells us that anything that is seen to act intentionally (animals, objects) in some residual sense is thought to have a mind, and as human minds are the only ones we know, these are ones that get imputed to things. Gell has a wonderful passage about ‘vehicular animism’, ‘a widespread belief in our society’ (1998: 17).
Cars, Gell points out, have ethnicities, and personalities. But more, it is very hard for an owner not to see their car as a body part, a prosthesis. We all know cars are not agents or body parts, but a means of transport. Yet, think of the travelling  sales representative, Gell says. He presents a neat and tidy appearance, smart suit and brushed hair, as an index of business competence. One abducts from his appearance that he is a sensible, reliable and trustworthy person. His car falls squarely into the overall impression. Big BMW’s mean (German) bankers, Mondeo’s mean sales reps. The car then, like shining teeth, is a part of his person.  This works in reverse. An attack on one’s car is attack on one’s person. It is usual to feel outrage, to take it as a personal blow. And this goes even further. When one’s car breaks down far from home on a dark night in the rain, it is seen as act of treachery. The car is morally and personally culpable. In this case, the car has exhibited agency. It has done something to you.  It may be an ‘error’ to impute agency to a car - but nevertheless it happens.  The attribution of agency to objects is basic to Gell’s theory. 
His concept of agency then is relational. For every agent, there is a patient who is acted upon. Human agency is exercised in the material world. Material/physical cause and effect is the background against which human agency is visible. Intent is initiated in the minds of actors, and intent is often to effect the state of mind of others. This can be achieved though the mediation of the physical world.  Thus for Gell, agents are recognisable because something in the causal milieu surrounding them is changed in a way we must attribute to the actions of a non-physical law, in other words, to another’s intention (agency).  
Not only can we abduct agency from objects -- that is, they embody others intentions -- but the index itself makes possible the intention. Cars and works of art cannot actually act in themselves. But no one ever said they could. Rather they act on and within social relations. It is there that their significant effect is felt. (It might be pointed out here that these objects actually ‘act’ upon persons, not ‘in social relations’ other than to the extent that all human experience is grounded in the social (broadly conceived as in this volume). ‘Social relations’ as a category independent of things is as much a reification as is ‘material objects’. But I digress)
Take land mines. Are they agents? No says Gell, it is those who lay them that are the agents of destruction. But hold on, he says, what is a person who lays a landmine without a mine to lay? He is no longer an agent of destruction. Like the salesman and his car, landmines are part of what makes the soldier the agent that he is. Land mines then are how the social agent who is a soldier realises his agency. They are the objective embodiments of his power and capacity to will their use. There is no one-way causation here, but rather a vision of the mutual constitution of persons and things in a relational process, a dispersed creativity. But this vision is fleeting. Alongside it is the argument that objects are how agency manifests itself (is mediated), how social agency is realised. My objection to this is not that I believe objects act independently of social relations, but firstly, that it is always an individual agency which is mediated (one agent always encompasses any number of others in the effect they have on a patient). Secondly, that this individual agency is always the imposition of subjectivity onto an inert material world. I go onto elaborate these points below.
Gell says that the kinds of index with which an anthropological theory has to deal are those objects which ‘have the capacity to index their ‘origins’ in an act of manufacture’ (1998: 23 original emphasis). Without wishing to labour the point, this is also what NTAF set out to achieve. That is, produce objects which have the capacity to index their origin in a unique process of collaboration.

Objects and Persons
We have seen that Gell writes of how art objects stand for persons and carry their intention or agency into an expanding social milieu. But interestingly, the kinds of objects that Gell analyses are either those produced by an artist in the conventional sense of European art-history, or they are ritual, religious, or otherwise ‘marked’ objects in other cultures. Gell discusses the difficulty that the philosopher/critic Danto has in seeing these ritual or religious objects as ‘art’, as they have no identifiable maker (1999: 192). A very important point. But he goes on to say in one of the papers foundational to the theory developed in Art and Agency (‘Vogel’s Net’) that objects such as the Zande hunting net displayed by curator Susan Vogel are used ‘either as part of specific rituals… or at the very least in a highly ritualised manner’ (ibid.: 197). His point in that argument is to make clear that traps, nets and other ‘artefacts’ can indeed be seen as art works precisely because one can read from them both the intentions, and indeed the dispositions, of the makers. They stand for those persons in a revealing manner, and were extensions of their person in the world despite the fact that there is no named author.  Gell is concerned with the manufacture, and with the brilliance (specialisation) of the artist or craftsman in making objects. The objects objectify the relations and skills of production (1999: 163), and thus capture the attention of the viewer. 
NTAF was about combining different kinds of knowledge in a process of object manufacture. But, paradoxically, it is not knowledge in the abstract that was being combined, rather it was people who were brought together by the scheme. We could think of this in the following way: Where does specialist knowledge exist? One might answer in books and journals. But the skills required to read and understand such things are embodied in persons. Hence we have a variety of persons here. Each somehow carries or represents knowledge of a specific kind. Experts carry around understandings that can never be fully translated or represented. And to emphasise this interpersonal aspect the language used in the project was one of relationship, network, interaction. A question for the participants became that of where the outcome was to be located. What would ‘embody’ the knowledge that was produced? This is a question about form. And that in turn is dependent on the process of generation (Whitehead 1929). 
There were a number of answers offered to this question during a two-day workshop convened to review the progress of the various collaborative partnerships. One answer was that the outcome may be located in individual persons. That is, in their biographical development. Their skills and resources to undertake future work and future collaborations were to be enhanced. Or it was suggested that it may be located in a product. That is, in a technical object or process which is the outcome and presentational form of the collaboration. Hence we have something like a relationally constituted entity. It was also said that the outcome might perhaps appear in networks and ‘clusters’ of people.  The significant thing here is also form. External relations constitute the internal make up of bodies, Gell tells us. Especially where those bodies are bodies of human construction. But we might want to add that ownership makes separations in terms of such metaphors. These kinds of entities, objects, persons, bodies, already have built into them modes of connection, disconnection and therefore ownership.

Differentiation
The designers of NTAF clearly imagine that the value of disciplines is in their specialisation. They imagine disciplines as a cumulative creation of knowledge. There is a biography, not unlike that of the expert, whereby more and more intricate understandings that build upon past knowledge need more and more specialised languages for their representation and communication. The more differentiated and specialised the discipline becomes, the more its knowledge is contained and restricted by its boundaries. Similarly, an artist has a progressive biography. 
The impetus for this collaboration was made explicit in these terms. There is an increasing specialisation of disciplines. This reflects an ever increasingly differentiated and specialised knowledge. How is one discipline to talk to another, what is the relevance of one kind of knowledge to another? These are questions which are asked more widely than in NTAF, and they situate NTAF as part of a wider series of interdisciplinary experiments (See Strathern, n.d.) and moves to make institutional space available for new forms of collaboration.
Great art is seen here as universal art, and thus despite the differences, it is like great science. More depth and detail is equal to potentially more applicability to specific problems. This is also a model of progression, so more specialisation also leads to better technology. And thus there is always an embedding of the knowledge and skills of a discipline within boundaries. It is the entity within this boundary, a kind of corporation or body, which is both potentially more effective, but at the same time, more different from other bodies or disciplines through specialisation. The body progressively develops more potential at the same time that its internal make-up becomes less and less communicable beyond itself. The idea of complexity, lying behind both art and science when they are successful, is one way that participants expressed the idea that there is a common denominator to all their skills.
Progressive specialisation has the result of proliferating entities. Sub-disciplines spring up, new disciplines to understand phenomena that come into view because of previous advances. One has, (much like a common idea of history, or a common notion of kinship) more and more diverse and different people. At any scale, one can see multiplication of entities in the world (Starthern 1991: xiv, and see Leach 2003a). Differentiation itself provides the possibility for ever-new forms to emerge, all entities are hybrid, and each new hybrid entity provides a new possibility for combination in novel and differentiated form. 
NTAF facilitators in some ways imagined that one might make an intervention which does not just proliferate more entities, but that from this diversity, some kind of integrated whole might be created. Such an entity would reflect the diversity of knowledge in the world by encompassing within its own form, different elements.  The whole might be recaptured. Objects might be produced which demonstrate a re-embedding of different disciplines and knowledges within a single entity -- a single object which might stand in the image of ‘Renaissance Man’ -- encapsulating the vision of art with the knowledge base of science.
The object, made of multiple relational in-puts, is another kind of ‘person’ that stands for the persons who authored it. But despite this being exactly the description of objects that Gell uses (‘there is an insensible transition between ‘works of art’ in artefact form and human beings: in terms of the networks of human social agency, they may be regarded as almost entirely equivalent’ (1998: 153), it is not the multiple inputs (relations) that make objects equivalent to persons, but the fact that people read agency from them. Note, in the following passage, that it is not the multiple persons involved in the manufacture of objects that allows them stand for persons, but rather, that the agency of an individual creator can be abducted from them. It is this that allows their personhood to be distributed: ‘Any one social individual is the sum of their relations (distributed over biographical time and space) with other persons… Our inner personhood seems to consist of replications of what we are externally… So bearing this in mind, it may not be so aberrant to suggest that what persons are externally (and collectively) is a kind of enlarged replication of what they are internally… Especially if… we consider ‘persons’… to apply to all the objects and/or events in the milieu from which agency or personhood can be abducted’ (1998: 222). Objects here are part of the external form of a person, as the way the agency of the artist or producer can be read from them in some ways defines the contours of the person themselves in the external social milieu. 
But what about objects whose status as ‘made objects’ (Gell 1999: 163) is similarly constituted by a number of differentiated inputs? Could we not describe the socially produced objects of collaborative endeavour as ‘the sum of their relations’. Indeed, it is the promise of objects and outcomes that will be the sum of new kinds of relationship which NTAF holds out. But this equally seems to draw us away from the formulation Gell relies upon, where it is the agency of the producer undifferentiated in the object’s appearance, which may be read off from technically virtuous, beautifully made, objects. 
The above is not quite an accurate description of course, as Gell does describe objects which are the outcome of ‘a sequence of actions performed by another agent (artist) or multitude of agents, in the instance of collective works of art such a cathedrals’ (1998: 67). But note how the collectivity is undifferentiated in the agency that can be read from the object. In fact, Gell has an encompassing ‘person’ who can be read, in the instance of objects produced by one person or set of persons, for another: the ‘recipient’ (1998: 24). 
In NTAF, it was the differentiation between the persons who have input, their embodiment of different kinds of knowledge and approach, which was vital. Otherwise there would be (no need for) collaboration. Thus we have a problem apparent, not unrelated to a problem participants found themselves facing, of how the creation is connected to particular persons, how one person’s agency is to be ‘read from’ the object when it contains many inputs.  More pertinently, as I come onto below, the question for participants was that of how one person’s input is to be made distinct in order that they can be recognised as a creative person. There is no sense ever in Gell that who originated the index may be at issue. 

Exposition
In the gallery setting, problems were apparent in the way skilled work and agency could be read from the art objects. It was a cause of discord and disruption. In the case of one technical collaborator, the fact that his contribution to an image (which was used on the publicity material) was never acknowledged, was a source of complaint. He threatened to withdraw his help from the collaboration. Further, the fact that the institution he worked for within the University was not credited either was used as material back up for the threat. The collaboration would not only lose his skilled input, but also the resources of his institution that had been relied upon up until this point. It must be said that the artist in question, despite producing two technically sophisticated demonstrations of his ideas, did not acknowledge his scientific collaborators input either. Both technician and scientist were subsumed in the overall appearance of the work as the outcome of the artist’s vision and effort. 
In the gallery exhibition, artists gave talks about their collaborations, and answered questions from the audience on the theme of science in art and art in science. At this point, one of the facilitators later told me that he had been angered and upset that his part in the process was hidden by one artist. The narrative the artist told was one of miraculous co-incidence. Their need’s and interest’s were exactly matched by a scientific collaborator whom they had come across early on in research visits to Cambridge. The implication was that it was part of their skill to locate and co-opt this scientist’s work, an aspect of the artistic practice demonstrated by the installation. The facilitator who had established this artist’s meetings with scientists, and who was, in fact, the research supervisor of the scientist in question, was angered that they had been painted out of the picture of creativity being generated. 

Cleverness
Why should this (very familiar) kind of conflict occur? Well, there is an answer in Gell, albeit not consciously to the same question. ‘The person is understood as the sum total of the indexes which testify, in life and subsequently, to the biographical existence of this or that individual’ (1998: 222-3). Authorship and recognition are vital for the self-perception of persons. Indeed productive work externalising the internal capacities of individuals is, one could argue, foundational of a kind of personhood. Gell here describes uncannily accurately a particular construction of the person, defined through what they possess, as aspects of what they create externally reflecting inner qualities, as if this was a universal definition of personhood.
And at the back of this conception of the person is a bias in Gell towards the mind and cleverness as the source of innovative value creation. Throughout Gell’s project of developing an anthropological approach to art, the theme of technical virtuosity stands clearly forth. From his childhood rapture with a matchstick model of Salisbury cathedral (MacFarlane 2003: 125) to his interest in Duchamp, or his explanation of how Trobriand canoe prows work to bedazzle their viewers, it is in the technique that Gell locates the source of wonder. He tells us (in distinguishing art objects from other objects) that ‘art objects are the only objects around which are beautifully made, or made beautiful.’  It is ‘their characteristics as made objects, as products of techniques’ (1999: 163), which makes them interesting. 
This focus on technical virtuosity is developed in Art and Agency through the theory of abduction, and of the way art objects achieve their value. In ‘Vogel’s Net’ Gell refers to Simmel. Modifying Simmel’s theory of value, Gell describes how it is the resistance to comprehension, rather than merely to crude possession, that makes art works valuable. ‘Simmel’s theory, as it stands, implies that it is the difficulty of access to an object which makes it valuable…’ (1999: 168). ‘The value of a work of art, as Simmel suggests, is a function of the way in which it resists us.’ Gell goes on, ‘The resistance which they offer, and which creates and sustains desire, is to being possessed in an intellectual rather than a material sense… since it transcends my understanding, I am forced to construe as magical’ (169). It is the attention given to the making of objects which marks their significance as works of art (1998: 68). Technique is an attribute of an agent. Gell’s argument is ultimately premised on a kind of individualism which is exemplified by the embodiment of specialisation within disciplines or within experts.
Similarly, Gell focuses on the intellectual prowess of successful Kula traders in the Trobriand Islands. Success is achieved, ‘only through knowledge, intelligence, and calculation. For success to accrue, the Kula operator must possess a superior capacity to engage in strategic action, which necessitates a comprehensive internal model of the external field within which Kula valuables move about’ (1998: 231, original emphasis, reference removed).  It is clear then that whether we are speaking of Duchamp, of Vermeer, or of Kula traders, creativity which is read as agency and power, lies within the person, and within their mind, or genius. ‘Duchamp is, (or was) an individual mind, one particular person exercising one particular agency.’ (1998: 250). This has consequences for the way people are connected to objects, and to one another. 

Power and Claims
When Gell writes of agency, he is explicitly discussing power. Power to influence the minds and actions of others. The question that arises in the context of NTAF collaborations is how it is that objects come to be seen as the extension of particular persons. In other words, it is the location of the source of power to effect the social milieu which interests me here. How is it that an art work, or indeed a piece of technology, becomes exclusively associated with one artist or technologist or ‘Recipient’? And here we are into the realm of claims and ownership, most apparent in the proceedings of NTAF at the point in which the collaboration was shown to have an outcome. In other words, the moment the objects produced were to have their effect. I turn to Strathern here for help in formulating the way in which persons in the particular mode she characterises as Western, make their claims. She writes, 
‘Whether people perceive power as a piece of property, estate, a personal attribute, an ability, or as an effect revealed in the reactions of others, power also has the status of a proposition. Propositions evoke their context, and in being context dependent are inherently contestable. An extreme example is a proposition framed as a claim, for a claim derives its character from the adversary context of counterclaim’ (1988: 119). 
The status of the artist in the gallery exposition is already a kind of claim, a claim over the creation of the object on display. ‘Claims’, Strathern tells us, are ‘seen as the outcomes of particular moments of revelation’ (ibid.).
How then do such claims work in practice? The issue of where the outcome of the collaboration is to be located is one thing that I have now discussed at length. There is also the linked issue of where the outcome will be revealed or presented. Now in the gallery setting, it seems obvious that it will be the artist who stands forth. The institution is set up for the display of works which are attributed to artist-creators. There was an explicit discussion during NTAF in which the kinds of arena or sphere in which outcomes would be located was opened up. Thus it was said that a scientist who, having been pushed in his work into new discoveries and directions because of the vision or demands of the artist-collaborator, would present these findings in scholarly publications, journal articles, or papers at conferences. In other words, there is also a place in which scientists can demonstrate their work, and see themselves extended through the circulation of its outcomes. 
Claims and counter claims arise when one person, one party to the collaboration is eclipsed or encompassed by another in a particular context. But this oscillation between collaborative endeavour, and re-immersion in the context of one’s specialisation, is a necessary part of a collaboration explicitly premised on the combination of difference. Differentiation is as necessary to the process as is the combination (encompassment) of differentiated elements in a coherent output. Where the problems arise is in the way these processes of differentiation are obscured as already existing differences between persons. In other words, one person, because of their status as ‘scientist’ encompasses the scientific development, as if the fact that they are a scientist is not being produced at one and the same time as the development of their knowledge through collaboration with an artist. Instead of ‘synergy’, successful outcomes – those that have a register for their effect – are always either art works, or scientific discoveries.  In any moment of presentation, one person and their specialisation is fore-grounded, it seems at the expense of others. This appears then as a moment of encompassment. The work of the technologist is encompassed by the artist, or the contribution of the facilitator is claimed as part of the creative process (genius, fortune) of the artist themselves. The mechanism of this encompassment is central to my argument here. 
Strathern discusses how western anthropologists are inclined to interpret initiation rituals in Melanesia not as moments of differentiation, but in fact as moments which confirm the intrinsic, or internal, nature of the person being initiated. I make use of this formulation as the process described is directly paralleled in the way that encompassment of other’s work by an artist, or a scientist, appears to confirm their internal specification as this kind of person, and thus as embodying within themselves the kind of creativity which is evidenced by the object produced. Encompassment then is both of the work of others and other disciplines in any moment of presentation, and of the specialisation of particular kinds of knowledge production within the minds of certain individuals. Strathern writes of interpreting initiations: ‘Western formulations of identity of a unitary kind would lead one to expect that men become more male by associating with things definable as exclusively male; an intrinsic attribute (maleness) would be elaborated with extra attributes of the same nature (more maleness). The more removed from female matters, on this Western model, the more permanently male is the identity…’ (1988: 123).  
Strathern was discussing gender when viewed in the mode of Western possessive individualism. One could reasonably substitute other aspects of ‘identity’ for gender, however. It seems the case that disciplinary training in science makes one progressively ‘more’ a scientist. A lifetime’s practice of art makes one an artist. The continual elaboration of internalised knowledge and practice in the mode of one or another knowledge form comes to be definitional of the person as if the person belonged in, and to, a particular domain of knowledge, and as if in turn their knowledge of that domain belonged to them. The idiom of ownership, of certain properties being attributed to persons which defines their self, is crucial to how and why claims are made and or disputed. Why else would ideas of authorship, recognition, and projects-as-part of the person’s own biographical development be so apparent in these collaborations? And it is because of thinking in this mode that Gell is able to write, ‘The person is thus understood as the sum total of the indexes which testify, in life and subsequently, to the biographical existence of this or that individual’ (1998: 222-3).

Conclusion
It has become commonplace to hear of the importance of interdisciplinary initiatives, and of the necessity for flexible and creative individuals. One way of achieving the latter is to educate people across disciplines. When there are inter-disciplinary collaborations the ‘hybrid’ nature of products results in claims made about the value of certain kinds of input. (Artists bring vision, etc.) One of the many fascinations of such collaborations is how persons themselves are seen to be already differentiated through their disciplinary training. In certain cases, making use of different perspectives, it is hoped, will allow the production of objects which themselves combine different kinds of knowledge, and thus appeal to consumers, audiences and users in multiple ways. Knowledge of multiple kinds is not only built into the object through manufacture, this knowledge reflects the multiple distinctions within society because disciplines are taken as representative of certain kinds of social reality. 
NTAF organisers were interested in the intellect itself as a site of powerful combination. The outputs of the intellect must appear in physical form if they are to be realised. Once realised in an object, creativity can no longer be in that object because that lies in the mind (or ‘cleverness’) of the producer. Agency may inhere or be abducted from that object, and that is the agency of creative or innovative power, but creativity is absent. It cannot be anything more than represented by the object. (And in this, we see the working of assumptions about how material objects can only represent social reality, addressed in Thinking Through Things more broadly.) It is this representation which makes for the enchantment which Gell is so focussed upon, ‘the enchantment which is immanent in all kinds of technical activity’ (1999: 163-4). 
There are some contradictions apparent once one brings artists into collaboration with scientists. The question is how one maintains the idea of the great and creative individual once the process of collaboration is made explicit as part of the art work itself. Artist encompasses scientists/technologists in a gallery setting. Scientists present their findings in context of journals and scientific conferences. Technologists apply for patents. In all cases they may acknowledge others’ input, but in the presentation, they encompass these others. At any time that the object has an effect, it is always displayed as if it were more to do with one person than another. It is the sequence: external world – mental representation – internal modification of representations – imposition of form upon external world: that lies behind this. Encompassment then is initially of others’ input in the individual creative mind, and then the extension of this principle through institutional contexts set up to recognise differentiated, individual kinds of knowledge/product.
What this points to is what I have called appropriative creativity, a current model for how things come into being, and one reliant upon an impermeable subject/object divide. Gell has not conceived of art (or other) objects as products of collaboration in the sense it was used within NTAF, and therefore as standing for different, discernible agents. This blind spot is not only Gell's problem, but is a consequence of wider notions of the person and of creativity exemplified by the whole structure and process of NTAF.
Specialisation, knowledge and creativity, when seen as internal to persons, can only be attributed to individual minds. When collaborators are in the same sphere of action (co-authors of a paper within a discipline for example) they can be equally represented as if  they were equally present in the object. But this ‘as if’ is very important. When the collaborators are from different disciplines, and have different arenas in which to present themselves through their object productions, then it no longer looks like the objects stand for all the people, but rather, that they stand for particular persons. In fact, in the moment of display, the effect of ownership in the mode of western appropriation can be seen to operate. The mechanism of this operation might be described as creativity-as-intellectual-encompassment.
There are the two sides of Gell, and also the two sides of NTAF. In both cases, both sides appear at the same time. NTAF needs concrete realisation in the form of object outputs, but these result in encompassing claims. Gell needs objects for people to abduct agency from, but in his theory, this abduction is always ultimately of the creator of the object, who through technique or skill, is having an effect through the object. The transcendence of the abstracted intellect / will combination finds resonances with a Euro-American tendency to locate reason or knowledge in the individual mind, and thus reproduces the self through its operation on the object world. It is this constitution of personhood through a focus on a particular mode of creativity that Gell relies upon. When all is said and done, we are left with the individual mind and its representations, and with the idea that non-humans can only be agents by proxy: There are real subjects, namely we ourselves, and then there are those second-class citizens of subject-dom (i.e. objects and the like).
Why does this matter? Well, in NTAF it seems that such constructions undermine the aim of collaborative production. In Gell, a specifically non-representational theory of art turns out to be about the representation of social agency by objects. For Gell, objects can only have effect as representations of others’ minds and agency. This then is at heart a representational theory of meaning, and this in turn undermines what I see as the potential for analysing objects that have the effect of agents in systems of generative relations between persons. The individual/multiple is one aspect of getting to this, because of the logical necessity for creativity to be individual if it is seen as something that happens in a restricted physical location (the brain). The implication of the representational theory is that this is the only location for meaning making, therefore we are always returned in the end to the (individual) subject and the object world beyond them. 
My objection then is to the theory of the abduction of agency and the notion that we should treat an object as an index of something else. I point out that questions about what an object is an index of may obscure something that is very important about the object in diverse contexts. One way of looking at artists and scientists squabbling over who should be credited is to see them as locked into a model where it is the abduction of agency that is what matters about an object, and where there are conventional clues (labels naming the artist, etc.) which assist that abduction of agency. Once one refuses abduction and says that agency belongs to the art-object, or in other words admits that the art object has a life of its own for which the producer(s) can claim at best partial credit or responsibility, then the squabble appears (even more) ridiculous (but then so does the label claiming responsibility). The case study presented here is a good demonstration of how, even when one gets people from different disciplines collaborating with a view to producing effective art-objects, the model of 'author/artist'-encompassment continues to re-assert itself.
Learning from both Melanesian ideas and practices, and indeed from recent initiatives such as NTAF which look to go beyond the assumed models, we might ‘think through things’ to new analytic positions, and to recognition of alternative models of creative endeavour. This will require a rather thoroughgoing overhaul of the descriptive language we use (not something I have achieved here), and one which takes account of the ways in which our own practices form the theoretical cast we describe others’ worlds within. 

Acknowledgements: Discussions with Alice Street, and her input, were foundational to the arguments developed in this paper. The same could be said of Martin Holbraad, who asked some difficult questions. Thanks are due to my collaborators on NTAF, particularly Alan Blackwell, Lizzie Muller, Eugine Terentjev and Simon Biggs. The paper was initially written for Georgina Born’s panel at the ASA Decennial Conference, Manchester, July 14-18th 2003. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro kindly commented upon an early version, as did Gabriella Aspraki. Goldsmiths College Anthropology Department made many useful suggestions. Thanks are also due to Robin Osborne, Souhmya Venkatisan, Harri Englund, Ami Henare, Ludek Broz, Adam Reed and Eric Hirsch. Daniel Miller kindly commented in public on the argument. A long list, and I have not always managed to take their comments on board, for which the chapter is the poorer.

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