Special Section: Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision

Theory, Culture & Society

2017, Vol. 34(7–8) 75–97
Differential Geometry, ! The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:

the Informational sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0263276417730600

Surface and Oceanic journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Art: The Role of

Pattern in Knowledge
Economies
Susanne Küchler
University College London

Abstract
Graphic pattern (e.g. geometric design) and number-based code (e.g. digital sequen-
cing) can store and transmit complex information more efficiently than referential
modes of representation. The analysis of the two genres and their relation to one
another has not advanced significantly beyond a general classification based on
motion-centred geometries of symmetry. This article examines an intriguing example
of patchwork coverlets from the maritime societies of Oceania, where information
referencing a complex genealogical system is lodged in geometric designs. By drawing
attention to the interplay of graphic pattern and number-based code and its role in
the knowledge economies of maritime societies, the article offers new insight into
possible ways of designing a digital informational surface that captures the behaviour
of an operational system, allowing both for differentiation and integration.

Keywords
algebraic systems, differential geometry, informational surfaces, maritime navigation,
pattern analysis

To anyone accustomed to a landscape of lines,1 the sea may appear flat

and lacking in distinctive views that could aid navigation. The study of
the navigation practices of Micronesian Islanders has shown, however,
that seascape carries information in the form of an interplay of visible
and invisible elements (Gell, 1985; Gladwin, 1970). The calculated rela-
tion between wind, current and underwater elevations is indexed by the

Corresponding author: Susanne Küchler. Email: [email protected]

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
76 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

crests of waves whose shape is sensed as they hit the canoe one by one in
a sequence modelled in distinctly patterned yet otherwise non-represen-
tational artefacts.
Three different types of so-called stick charts exist: an abstract chart
that serves as a prototype of the behaviour of the system, used for
instruction; and two charts mapping actual locations, actual islands
and specific landing sites (Ascher, 2002: 89–125). Rather than voyaging
being a process aided by mapping the movement of the canoe between
islands in relation to independent and pre-existing variables, the
Micronesian voyager thus maps the canoe’s journey by assigning spatial
and metric values to this temporal process, thus rendering the canoe itself
stationary, with iterative and repetitive patterns of surface swells moving
past until a certain sequence and articulation of waves finally enable the
recognition of the anticipated island (Hutchins, 1995: 118).
The stick charts are in effect mapping the journey as an assemblage of
differentiated, three-dimensional neighbouring spaces, whose sequence
and magnitude is captured both as prototype and as record of the experi-
ence of relations underpinning the complex systemic interplay of
currents, winds and elevations. As prototypes, stick charts are at once
metric and geometric, modelling relations and their systemic behaviour
across visible and invisible domains. They are in fact exemplifying the
enigma of seemingly representational surfaces that reference relations
whose immanent relational constitution makes them virtually impossible
to unravel and which nevertheless inform understanding of complex sys-
temic relations across analogous domains.2
We might disregard the epistemic work such prototypes do as cultur-
ally specific and limited to maritime navigation, and yet by doing so we
would miss out on understanding how stick charts can be engaged with
knowingly and what difference the way they are engaged with makes in
culture and society. For as instruments of instruction and recollection,
Micronesian stick charts draw out ideas that transcend the specific con-
text of their use and cultivate an aesthetic that canonizes informational
content in a way that is, as we shall see, of peculiar relevance to the
operation of knowledge economies within wider Oceania. The ubiquity,
translatability and continuity of the ideas that inform the capture of
seascape as a system of sequences and relations which make strategic
navigation possible is evidenced by artefacts produced across island
Polynesia whose central role in rituals sustaining social polities of great
complexity spanning many generations is well known (Brunt et al., 2011).
There is the late-18th-century figure-shaped casket from the island of
Rurutu that is famous for its surface budding with iterated and replicated
miniature extensions of itself; and the so-called ‘God staff’, the only
remaining artefact from the pre-Christian era in the Cook Islands, cov-
ered along the length of its 7 metre shaft with iterated and self-similar
figures. Both artefacts were central to the practice of secondary burial
Küchler 77

and key to establishing an artificial sociability that encompassed both the

living and the dead (Babadzan, 1993, 2003).
The ritual, which the Cook Islands in Eastern Polynesia shared with
Tahiti and Hawaii, had three stages, each being defined in relation to the
manipulation of this mummy-like object: the unwrapping of the object,
effecting the death or departure of the dead; the exchange of feathers and
of cloth as the distributing of the remains of the dead; the re-assemblage
or ‘renewal’ of the object, invoking the return and emplacement of the
dead and the period of abundance. This ritual established a contractual
relation with the multitude of the dead, while also giving visual expres-
sion to genealogical relatedness in iterative, transitively replicated and
fractal images. When these rituals ceased to be practised with the con-
version to Christianity, women in these islands took over the task of
managing a complex system of genealogy supporting some of the most
hierarchical social systems in the world.
From Hawaii to Tahiti and the Cook Islands in a region known as
Eastern Polynesia, the artefacts that sustain the knowledge of the genea-
logical system today take the form of assemblages of pieces of cloth into
precisely measured patchwork coverlets known as tivaivai (tifaifai)
(Arkana, 1986; Hammond, 1986; Jones, 1973; Küchler and Eimke,
2009) (see Figure 1). Exchanged as gifts in events that punctuate the
life cycle of people and social groups, the knowledge of the metric under-
pinning the assemblages, and acting as vehicle for the ideas pertaining to
the navigation of genealogical relations, extends beyond the islands to
the furthest reaches of transnational communities. Patchwork today
effectively blends the heterogeneity of the local with the global, creating
social polities that differentiate themselves in terms of the scale of their
reach and the heterogeneity of their composition.
This article will argue that the enigma of a prototype which references
relations both external and internal to itself raises a question that reaches
far beyond the confines of particular maritime societies in which it serves
to model the behaviour of complex social, political and even ecological
systems, as anthropologist Frederick Damon’s (2016) recent reanalysis of
the construction of canoes in the Massim region of island Melanesia in
relation to environmental knowledge has shown. From stick charts to
figurative assemblages to patchwork and canoes, the prototypical arte-
facts of Oceania have in common that they model the behaviour of com-
plex systems by interpolating shape and sequence in ways that defy our
expectation of a distinction of graphic (e.g. geometric designs) versus
metric coding (e.g. digital sequencing). The question, in the words of
historian of mathematics Albert Lautman (2011), is what relation
between ‘mathematics, ideas and the physical real’ might allow such
artefacts to perform as vehicles of epistemology.
The question of the mathematics and the ideas that inform the diverse
artefacts of Oceania, I will argue in this article, cannot be dissociated
78 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

Figure 1. Tivaivai Taorei, Cook Islands, Rarotonga, 2003. Photo: Author’s own.

from the experience of the maritime environment, which requires infor-

mation to be moved across distances to be engaged with as knowledge via
forms that reflect the highly artificial sociality such transmission creates
as well as the technical command over complex relations between visible
and invisible forces of which the sequence and shapes of waves at the
surface of the ocean are an observable qualisign (cf. Simmel, 1950). In
fact, the stick chart and its analogous prototype, the patchwork, throw
up ideas of space-time we can recognize as those of differential geometry,
drawing out the idea of space not as an exterior, measured and thus finite
entity, but as existing between points, each of differential value.3 It is not
insignificant to my discussion of the enigma of the geometric prototype
that the ideas underpinning differential geometry have informed the
interest in cinematography uniting the work of Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze, both having been acutely aware of the science of the
19th-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–66), who first
described the approach to curved three-dimensional space, departing in
his treatment of space as mathematical object from the existing Euclidean
approach that had investigated the straight line and the plane (Duffy,
2013: 89–117). Riemann had conceived of a surface as a topological space
composed of points that form neighbourhoods, which themselves map
onto a complex plane consisting of potentially infinitely many ‘sheets’
that have many complicated structures and interconnections (Duffy,
2013: 108). Deleuze’s (1993 [1988]) early work on the ‘fold’ draws on
Küchler 79

Riemann’s work to capture the relation between mathematics and ideas

that underpinned the formalized aesthetic known as the Baroque, and it
is this work that has inspired the analysis of Oceanic prototypes extended
here, rather than his better-known work on the manifold and self-orga-
nizing branching interconnections, captured as the ‘rhizome’ in his work
on A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]).
With Riemannian differential geometry in mind we can return with
fresh eyes to the formalized aesthetic made manifest on surfaces used for
instruction and recollection and engaged with knowledgeably to ask how
it is that they sustain social systems of great complexity and resilience
(Starr, 2013).4 This article will take as its case study the piecework
coverlets made in the Cook Islands. Its archipelago of 15 small islands
scattered over 2 million square kilometres, stretching between Tonga and
Samoa and French Polynesia, is inhabited by Maori-speaking peoples
who are known to practise the most complex genealogical system, differ-
entiating not just between elder and younger brother, who compete over
access to partially genealogically ordained and partially achieved power,
but also between autochthonous and foreign forms associated with
access to power over people and power over land. A person’s life project
is informed by genealogically qualified relations that are expressed quan-
titatively in the measure applied to three distinct and yet interconnected
modalities of assemblage, all made to be gifted at major life ceremonies
and stored in trunks until they are rendered permanently invisible by
being wrapped around the dead in the grave. The coverlets are assembled
from precisely measured and counted composite parts that are repeated
over the surface of the cloth in a symmetrical, iteratively replicated and
transitively arranged pattern, ostensibly featuring flowers whose striking
verisimilitude can equally be represented by abstract patterns composed
of coloured pieces cut into geometric shapes such as diamonds, hexagons
or octagons. This paper will concern itself with the question of the
‘workings’ of such an assembled surface whose aesthetics is key to an
understanding of relations that are as complex as they are vital to every-
day decision-making and life-defining strategies (Siikala, 1991).
Sociability in the Cook Islands is as ‘stylized’ (cf. Simmel, 1950) as its
coverlets, with the assemblages visible as patterns on the surfaces of
patchwork being fanned out as gifts throughout a woman’s life cycle,
cloaking near and distant relations into economically effective polities.
Everything that moves, from money through to building materials for
houses, travels along the path taken by coverlets that are sent out by
households into the furthest reaches of the many transnational commu-
nities where Cook Islanders have set up home away from the islands.
The polity rarely comes together physically in one place, except for two
occasions that mark the role of patchwork as modelling ideas vital to an
economy driven by the knowledge of how to achieve such an assemblage:
the first such occasion is the first haircutting of the first-born son of a
80 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

woman heading a household, whose coming of age is marked with a

ceremonial cutting of his hair, seated upon a stitched patchwork and
listening to the narration of his place in the genealogy that defines the
relations of which he will be a part; the second such occasion is the burial
of the head of the household or a close relation, who is buried wrapped in
the patchwork coverlets returned by the extended polity to be lowered
into the tomb-like structure that sits, in the shape of a miniature house,
next to the house once occupied by the deceased. The polities, in short,
are image based, yet these images are not merely metaphorically referen-
cing an emblematic allegiance, but are themselves the gateway to access-
ing the knowledge that ensures effective membership.
As the early 20th-century German sociologist Georg Simmel (2005
[1916]) stated so brilliantly in his essay on Rembrandt, when sociability
is artificial ‘the art of social forms is equal to the social forms of art’.5
Important here is Simmel’s argument in his essay against a perception-
dominated approach, in that he foregrounds not the seen, but rather the
role of imagination in deduction.6 What is the relation, we may ask with
Simmel in mind, between the patterned assemblage of pieces on the sur-
face of the patchwork and the genealogical imagination that allows the
patchwork to offer access to knowledge vital to claiming land and rights
associated with the complex management of the distributed polities of the
Cook Islands? For, as the young boy sits on the patchwork, and as the
layers of patchwork cloak the body in the grave, an idea of society is
given form to that is as plastic as it is graspable only in the abstract.
Patchwork indeed gives form to an understanding of the nature of a
biographical relation and how to extend it beyond the person. It does this
not just with reference to its own composition, but to its formal relation
to other patchwork, with every patchwork articulating a specific modal-
ity of relation in its construction (Figure 2). As in the instruments that
guide the navigation between islands, there are three technical modes of
assemblage for three different types of biographical relation: work col-
leagues and friends as well as all short-term connections associated with
sharing the experience of a specific place are gifted a coverlet made as a
cut-out – a so-called ‘manu’ or ‘bird’ design – made by folding a large
piece of cloth four times and cutting a design into the thus folded mater-
ial so that, when unfolded, the pattern is replicated four-fold across the
surface in such a manner that foreground and background are oscillating
to the eye; relatives by marriage, especially relations defined with refer-
ence to the marriage of brother and sister, are gifted coverlets made as
appliqué design – a so-called ta taura or cut-and-linked design – whereby
the cut-out shapes are repeated and arranged symmetrically in a circular
motion across the surface of the coverlet; and, finally, a grandmother
gifts a taorei or piecework design to her adopted granddaughter who, as
‘foreigner’, repeats the path taken by an apical ancestor whose arrival
on the island is recalled to legitimize power over land. Taorei are the
Küchler 81

Figure 2. Cook Islands tivaivai at exhibition, Rarotonga 2003 – taorei, ta taura and manu
Source: Photo by author.

most complex coverlets, produced only in the Cook Islands, which are
famous for their complex genealogical system (Siikala, 1996). The taorei
piecework is composed of identical, iteratively replicated and transitively
arranged core patterns (pu), made of precisely measured, identically cut
pieces in work that is divided between four to eight women, each stitch-
ing a triangular part of the core pattern known and recalled as a sequence
of numbers and colours. In ways that are to be unravelled in the course
of this article, it is the number sequence that serves as key to allowing the
assemblage of pieces at the surface of the patchwork to instruct and
remind people of the precise positioning of persons and their polities in
the complex system of genealogy and its resulting polities.
It is to this latter piecework coverlet in the main that I will direct
attention in this article. In doing so, I will expose the algebraic logic
and the geometric imagination it gives rise to at work in the construction
of what may seem a flat, merely decorative surface, and show how it is
that the workings of the genealogical system can be deduced from a
seemingly abstract surface pattern (Küchler and Were, 2005).
Patchwork is a vehicle for navigating biographical relations and to plot
life projects with as much surety as the navigation of the ocean, and it is
its formalized aesthetic surfacing as pattern that serves to instruct,
remind and inform, turning a mere artefact into an epistemic tool.
Before returning to unravelling how patchwork is able to do its epistemic
82 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

work, it is necessary to digress just a little to the ideas surrounding

personhood and, most importantly, time that the patchwork has to
encounter – ideas that are well known for their ubiquitous and lasting
nature across the island societies of Oceania (cf. Henari et al., 2007).

Information, Immanence and Closure

The attention to surface not just as mediating interface for complex sys-
tems, but as modelling in its composition the behaviour of the system of
which it is itself a part is no longer an exotic notion, as the philosophy
and engineering of robotics and computer interaction proceed to give
shape to material processes that are interlacing thought, action and
world in a duality of action and action representation (Clark, 2001;
Gallese, 2000; Wiberg and Robles, 2010). This contemporary fascination
with surface as ‘meshwork’ (Ingold, 2008) of mind and action opens up
an opportunity for us to revisit the question of how surfaces work and
the difference they make to society and culture, and much thinking has
been devoted to this already in anthropology. From explorations of how
we think through and with things to explanations of how ways of know-
ing and doing are inscribed into even the most mundane of objects, there
is no shortage of theorists concerned with the question of how mind
and material world cohere (Henari et al., 2007; Knappett, 2005;
Malafouris, 2013). Although these theories are brilliant and persuasive,
the problem with them is that they propose that artefacts work as vehi-
cles for the human propensity to extend their minds into the world,
rather than exposing, via ethnography, the subtle interrelation between
mind making and world making in ways that account for the difference
made by ‘mindware’ to culture and society.
There is no doubt that artefacts function as surfaces that, on account
of their referential qualities, play a vital role in assisting distributed cog-
nition and the extending of persons beyond the physical and temporal
confines of biographically imagined relations (Gell, 1998). The problem
occurs when we broaden this argument to societies, such as the
Polynesian Maori, where information (energy/light) is conceived as per-
vasive and where not its distribution, but its arrest, in the sense of achiev-
ing immanence in bodies, places and things, is a matter of concern,
thought to safeguard well-being, fecundity and prosperity alike. How
to achieve immanence is subject to a number of actions upon bodies
and body-like entities, from rivers to land to anything that grows or
emerges from it. Artefacts that punctuate transitions in the life cycle,
such as birth and death, serve to achieve closure analogically by standing
in for persons whose internally held relations are temporally exposed and
in danger of dissipating.
The idea of closure as key to connectivity and of relational immanence
is not easily reconciled with an interpretative framework that assumes
Küchler 83

linear point configurations (networks) and the emblematic expression of

relations to govern the making of informational surfaces. As surfaces
that are guided by an idea of closure tend to be made of fabric and
fabric-like materials that are malleable, neighbourhood-creating and
iterative in their relation to one another, as they serve to cloak and
contain, artefacts that serve such closure tend to be classified as ‘textile’.
I am not so much concerned here with underscoring the gendered impli-
cations of this classification as with the oversight that follows such
classification – placing seemingly two-dimensional artefacts in opposition
to three-dimensional sculpture – but with the underpinning geometric
assumption grounded in Euclidean geometry that has hindered a pro-
ductive approach to such flat surfaces and their informational capacity.
Surfaces that, on account of their flat and surface-patterned form,
cordon, sift or funnel what is inside or outside, behind and in front,
and assign spatial values to temporal sequences, offering up to future
actions ideas that have never been thought and habits that never were,
are still lost to theory, awaiting recovery via an approach that uncovers
the mathematical and geometric thinking that dwells in seemingly
innocuous folds, requiring an imagination that is able to translate two-
dimensional into three-dimensional form and back again.
Anthropology is well versed in studying artefacts whose surfaces dis-
play patterns that lack apparent representational capacity and yet permit
an ordering to be deduced whose systemic logic is of interest to both the
ethnographic and the Kantian project – which has enchanted many – of
illustrating qualities of the psychic unity of humankind or deep structures
of the human mind (Forge, 1973; Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Washburn and
Crowe, 1988, 2004). More recently the advent of chaos theory in anthro-
pology (Mosko, 2005: 17; Mosko and Damon, 2005) has led to a return
to a concern with questions directed to the nature of the logic at work in
abstract patterning, drawing on articulations of fractals, self-similarity
and holography in graphic systems that are drawn, danced, plaited or
beaten into surfaces, both on and off the body. This approach sets out to
give recognition to the non-linearity and self-organization at work in
complex social systems, drawing for inspiration on the classical work
of the anthropologist Edmund Leach (1954) that had shown non-linear
topological systems to serve as a model of political relations in Highland
Burma and on the work of Louis Dumont (1980), whose theory of hier-
archy shows the relation between purity and impurity in India to follow a
series of recursive and reversible inclusions rather than a linear series of
inequalities (cf. Kapferer, 2010).
My problem with chaos theory, and its implicit approach to modelling
social systems based on their affinity with self-organizing natural systems,
is its divergence from classical work inspired by the structuralism of
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963a, 1963b) and the early 20th-century
American anthropologist Franz Boas (1911, 1927), who had been
84 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

concerned with the question of how such systems are engaged with know-
ledgeably. In relation to the material discussed in this article, the question
of how abstract pattern is intentionally applied so as to achieve closure
and yet retain a systemic capacity that binds the one into the many
reasserts itself with a force to which only the recent work of Patrice
Maniglier (2006) attempts to do justice. There is no space here to elab-
orate on the recovery of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss for a philo-
sophical anthropology, and it will have to suffice to point to Maniglier’s
work as justification for the return to Lévi-Strauss’s (1963a, 1963b, 1969)
much ignored insight into what he so aptly called the ‘canonical formula’,
whose manifestations resonate across sensorial registers and are as
mobile as they are intuitively recognized and engaged with imaginatively
as people are cognizant of their intersubjective validity.
For Lévi-Strauss had understood the role of mathematics in deducing
the understanding of relation, which is delivered in its potency only by
pattern, and used this insight to create the rigorous method directed to
studying the seemingly random data on which anthropology still relies
today. Seemingly unremarkable surfaces, visible as graphic designs
drawn into the sand, twisted into string, plaited into palm fronds or
woven into vines, were first understood by the early anthropologist
Abel Deacon (1934), who came to be stationed, at the start of the First
World War, as a missionary on the island of Ambrym in the archipelago
of Vanuatu, south-west of mainland New Guinea in island Oceania.
Trained in natural sciences in Cambridge, and thus acquainted with
mathematics and physics, Deacon was able to translate the geometric
diagrams that were drawn, plaited and lashed by the islanders into an
algebraic system called in mathematics a noncommutative group, which
emphasizes relations between objects and rules of combination that allow
for a coherent formal interpretation and prediction of transformations.
The realization that patterns can be ‘read’ as a system of elements (such
as real numbers) together with a system of abstract rules for their com-
bination so that two sides of a formula can be transformed in relation to
one another proved revolutionary in anthropology, its logic used by
Lévi-Strauss to decode further the data left by Deacon, revealing the
existence of the most complex marriage system known to us, consisting
of six classes (Lévi-Strauss, 1969). It was the discovery of what Lévi-
Strauss termed the ‘canonical formula’, consisting of the operational
quality of so-called quaternion groups, that enabled him to create the
basis for the rigorous study of the quality or behaviour of kinship
systems based on observable and quantified relations (Gell, 1998: 56;
Lévi-Strauss, 1963a, 1963b; Morava, 2003, 2005: 60).
It is not that Lévi-Strauss’s insight into the role of the ‘canonical
formula’ in allowing the translation of three-dimensional into two-
dimensional imagination had been totally lost to anthropology, but its
mathematical properties enabling systems of transformation and
Küchler 85

identification that are both knowable and manipulatable had somehow

vanished from view. Anthropologists thus made reference to graphic
surfaces as capable of modelling complex social and biographical rela-
tions, offering a de-centred analytical vantage point that allows for the
conception of social ‘wholes’ by those who, all too often, are deemed to
require the anthropologist to reconstruct how a society works (Rio,
2007). Others, such as Frederick Damon (2016), have shown that
seemingly non-graphic artefacts, such as canoes, encode the logic of
the interplay of complex ecological and social systems, and permit a
qualitative understanding of the strategic circulation of resource use
across the diverse island ecologies based on the systematic study of the
wood used in the construction of canoes. Much of this work is in part
inspired by earlier work on body counting in Papua New Guinea by
Jadran Mimica (1988) and Aletta Biersack (1982) that had shown
number systems to convey the logic underpinning complex cosmological
systems, arguing, by leaning on Lévi-Strauss, that systems of body count-
ing illustrate an alternative logic of calculative thought that exists in
parallel to Western science, where numbers are manipulated in the
abstract, independent of pattern (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1966).
Meanwhile, however, the analysis of abstract pattern itself followed a
different route altogether. While not removing its analysis entirely from
mathematics (Ascher, 2002), the idea that abstract pattern is an index
of an idea of relation that finds its expression in mathematical imagin-
ation was largely lost to anthropology as studies of pattern systems took
their lead from the now classical work on pattern analysis by Dorothy
Washburn and David Crowe (1988, 2004). By proposing a study of pat-
tern classification in terms of the properties of symmetry, Washburn and
Crowe encouraged an approach that traces gestures, so-called symmetry
motions, that are active in the production of pattern, governed by
motion-centric geometries that repeat a single pattern or parts of a pat-
tern in regular ways, with the motion maintaining the distance between
the parts of a pattern. These symmetry-producing motions are: transla-
tion (a shift by a given distance along a line), rotation about a point in a
plane, mirror reflection across a line in a plane, and glide reflection
(translation followed by mirror reflection). No relation is established
with algebraic elements and rules for their combination that permit rota-
tions of imagined geometric figures in three-dimensional space even in
the work of the late Alfred Gell (1998: 164), whose analysis of
Marquesan art recognizes the ‘psychological saliency of style’ and the
importance of the geometric logic that permits the translation of a three-
dimensional into a two-dimensional image.7 Missed is a solution to the
question of how such a translation, correctly identified by Gell as an
‘informational gesture’, could be executed intentionally and engaged
with knowledgeably, enabling pattern to inform via deduction in
more than a generic manner. Even the work of the American ethno-
86 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

mathematician Maria Ascher (2002), whose insight that the very idea of
relation is an inherently mathematical one allowed her to expose the
mathematics at work in diverse graphic systems, misses the chance to
expose the systemic relation between algebraic and geometric imagin-
ation, and the difference that the understanding of such a relation may
make to how complex systems are imagined to behave and are engaged
with forethought and strategic intent.
Support in suggesting that the idea of informational gesture alone may
not suffice comes from a surprising corner, the work of the philosopher
Michel Serres. In his work entitled Atlas (1994), Serres reflects on the
emerging culture of information in which local and global phenomena
are mapped by sequential, reversible and entropic flows that are made
accessible to understanding via surfaces that reference the relational
nature of topologically apprehended actions (cf. Connor, 2004).
Serres’s denunciation of linear thought, preoccupied with tracking the
movement of solid objects such as bodies in space, allows him to chal-
lenge our conventional understanding of surface as a flat and metric
form, instead presenting it as ‘folded’ time, a way of mapping time by
giving it a spatial value by marking the infinitesimal neighbourhood of
each point. Serres uses the idea of fabric to allude to the sequential
relations between such neighbourhoods that compose the seemingly
linear point configuration of a surface. Rather than allowing us to rely
on a simple model of similitude in identifying the informational capacity
of fabric, the topology immanent in fabric forces us to connect an ‘inner’
and imagined (imaged) rotation of a geometrically conceived surface with
the relational nature of action that is drawn attention to in the external
shape of a surface, an interlacing of image, surface and relational action
that was conceived of long ago in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s
Faltentheorie (Bredekamp, 2008). Fabric thus anticipates and recalls
sequence as it unfolds in novel assemblages, always different and yet
connected, perfectly exemplifying Peirce’s theory of the index, itself
based on the reappraisal of the logic of relation based on topology
(Burch, 1991), in its gesturing capacity.
To understand how surface can do the work of both connectivity and
closure, we need to return to the work of Serres (1994), and to the nature
of the patterned surface as topological and therefore geometric entity.
Topology, the study of the spatial properties of things that remain invari-
ant under deformation, is concerned with a complex of space, time,
matter and process made manifest in the material imagination at work
in weaving and shaping foldable, stretchable materials. Rather than
directing attention to exact measurement for its own sake, topology
captures spatial relations, such as continuity, neighbourhood, insideness
and outsideness, disjunction and connection. Within a topological frame
of reference, patterns originate from the application of number systems
such as those forming the quaternion group, whose conceptual
Küchler 87

manipulation precedes the production of the pattern itself. We can com-

pare the conceptual work supporting such patterns to that active in the
manipulation of a Rubik’s Cube, conducive of a vision of the world in
which the environment is no longer outside, but inside, invisible to the
eye and yet conceptually accessible and predictable. Rotatable, to give off
multiple and coexisting views, the surfaces of such artefacts are thus
refractions of a single image in the round, inviting an idea of algebraic
logic in which singularity and multiple iterations of one are the same
(Glowczewski, 1989; Mimica, 1988; Myers, 2004; Povinelli, 2002;
Wagner, 1992).
The geometric logic afforded by topology thus throws a light on how it
is that a geometric surface can assign spatial value to temporal phenom-
ena, a task of unique significance in island worlds, in which all intentional
action is conducted at a distance and in relation to worlds whose work-
ings need to be made commensurate with what can be known by obser-
vation (Harrison, 2007). To fully grasp, however, how this patterned
surface serves to index a closure and thus to demarcate and identify a
singular person and associated object via its manifold topologically
imagined nexus of relations, we need to return to the algebraic system
at work in the example of the Cook Islands piecework coverlet and to the
mathematical ideas of Bernhard Riemann that imagine space as com-
posed of a multiplicity of heterogeneous and yet inherently relational
points. We will see that there is a rather surprising connection between
the assembling of pieces of coloured cloth and the metric identification of
a nexus of relations underpinning the complex genealogical system of
the Cook Islands. As layers of patchwork cloak the body in the grave,
gathering up the many persons identified as relations during life, a clos-
ure is achieved that is the ultimate expression of pervasive connectivity
by turning the many back into one – an enigma that cannot be seen, but
that issues forth an idea that binds people together more effectively and
lastingly than words.

Seascape Ontology and the Modelling

of Complex Hierarchy
The paradoxical idea behind Cook Islands patchwork and its assemblage
in the iterated patterns known as tivaivai is that of a manifold of one. A
manifold directs attention to itself in terms of its magnitude rather than
the exact quantity represented. So it is that it is not important to Cook
Islanders how many coverlets were cut and sewn by a woman during her
lifetime and sent out as gifts to punctuate the life cycle of the relations she
attached to herself, how many are returned to be lowered into her grave,
or how many pieces cut from fabric in fact make up an individual cover-
let. The manifold of coverlets in a grave or of the pattern comprising a
single coverlet is judged only as relative in relation to others along a
88 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

continuum (more or less). The idea of the manifold is in fact commen-

surate with the idea of singularity. A brief excurse into ethnography will
help to explain how this idea manifests itself around the making and
deploying of coverlets and how it is a key to understanding the import-
ance of the algebraic system that serves the instruction and recall of
patterns and the understanding they help to deduce.
In the Cook Islands there are hardly any houses that do not have a
grave on their front lawn, usually just outside the veranda or the entrance
door, where women tend to sit and stitch their tivaivai. The grave struc-
ture is a large, underground and tiled tomb that resembles the house of
the living, with foundation, platform and raised roof-structure. Although
occasionally fenced in, the tomb is not a sacrosanct space, but a place
that is fully integrated into domestic life – washing may be hung up to
dry beneath the roof and flowerpots often decorate the platform beneath.
Entering the house from the front, one inevitably walks past the grave.
A sense of the central place occupied by the tomb emerges also from
newspapers, where death days are memorialized by large columns of
announcements, alongside those of birth and weddings. The departed,
some of them having died 60 years ago, are recalled here with attention to
detail: alongside a list of the names of families that have descended from
the deceased are pictures and recalled events that evince a personal touch.
The dead, we realize, have not fully departed, but continue to share a
transitory space with the living for a number of years. Only with the final
anniversary, when the years after the burial equal the age of the person at
death, is the person allowed to sink into the collective memory of ances-
tral connections, which connect the living with an apical ancestor. The
many social relations who make up the biography of a person’s life thus
merge into the singularity of the apical ancestor in a process that is
foreshadowed by the reconstitution of the social body of the deceased
via the layering of the corpse with shrouds travelling in reverse, each
coverlet signifying a relation made and sustained in life. In this way,
the many relations that informed the life project of a person are in
death becoming one again, synonymous with an apical ancestor.
We will see that this idea of the collapsing of the many into one is
central to the experience of the stitching of the tivaivai, which, though a
communal act, sees many women pulling the thread together as if they
were one body. We will also see it in the idea of a pattern that can be
stitched as one or replicated across the surface in as many – often tran-
sitively arranged – iterations as possible (restricted only by the size of the
pieces of cloth that compose a pattern). Patterns are also internally mani-
fold in that the assemblage of pieces can project varying ‘views’ (internal,
external, sideways, top-down) on what ostensibly, although misleadingly,
is seen to be depicted (usually flowers). Thus relations are created
between any number of patchwork coverlets made by a woman during
her life.
Küchler 89

Tivaivai coverlets are the essential operatives of the idea of the polity
or the social body equipped with offices and forms of power that outlast
the mortal body of persons. And it is because there are many polities
even on one and the same island in the Cooks that the idea of the one
goes hand-in-hand with a seemingly competing notion of multiplicity,
where difference rather than sameness matters (Küchler and Eimke,
2009; Siikala, 1996: 47–53). Cook Islands genealogy and its resulting
system of hierarchy is of astonishing complexity when compared to
that of other Maori-speaking populations in Hawaii and Tahiti, where
the principal distinction is a matter of birth alone, distinguishing younger
from elder brothers. In the Cook Islands a second factor is added to that
of birth, and this is the path taken by the apical ancestor and the location
of the arrival of the canoe on the island. Being able to trace one’s own
path to the path of an ancestor legitimizes power over land, its access and
its distribution. Relative position via autochthonous birth is marked by
an appliqué coverlet (ta taura) that is gifted between households linked
through marriage, and the power that such coverlets affirm is distinctive
in terms of its reach and extension across generations conjoined by living
memory. Knowledge of the path taken by the foreign element, however,
is far more complex and difficult to ascertain, as it requires being able to
translate the navigator’s experience of the epic landing site into a formal
system that encourages or enables recognition, and hence its own valid-
ation as knowledge. It is, as we will see, the assemblage of pieces of pre-
cisely measured and cut cloth (taorei) into a pattern that can be repeated
over and over again that achieves this effect of validation, gifted, poign-
antly, by a grandmother who is herself foreign-born to her own adopted
granddaughter, both repeating the journey taken by the apical ancestor.
It is important to describe the construction of the taorei in some detail,
so as to convey how the pattern indexes both the epical path and the
future relations it manifests. Composed of several thousand coloured
squares or hexagons cut from shredded, readily coloured, roughly
woven cotton imported from China, the core pattern of a taorei is a
singular assemblage of a number of pieces of cloth of the same shape
(usually a hexagon) and size, differing only in their colour. The core
pattern is arranged in the shape of a square, and this squared core pat-
tern is then replicated in an iterative and transitive manner across the
surface of the quilt, which measures 3.5 to 5 square metres in total.
Considerable variation is possible in how the core pattern is arranged:
it can be enlarged to fill the entire surface of the quilt, or it may be
replicated in either a horizontal or diagonally offset symmetry across
the surface of the patchwork. A piecework coverlet of this kind is care-
fully planned and worked out mathematically in order to avoid the situ-
ation that coloured cloth is left over or that not enough has been bought,
as cloth available on the island is bought in bales whose colour changes
subtly with each purchase, thus making the completion of a badly
90 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

planned coverlet impossible. The planning starts with the metric of the
core pattern.
The composition of the core pattern follows a number sequence
recalled and told to others by the woman leading a sewing bee as num-
bers of coloured patches are threaded in the order specified and taken
home by each woman to sew the component section of the core motif.
Each core pattern is stitched by two women, with the pattern itself being
divided into triangular parts that mirror each other exactly. The number
of times the core pattern is repeated across the surface of the quilt, each
demanding two women for sewing, depends on the number of women
working together in the sewing bee and will have been reflected already in
the size of the individual pieces of cloth. The number sequence, which
appears as the outer framing row of coloured patches on each of the two
sides of the triangle, gives the order of operation, allowing subsequent
internal rows to be recalled and offered up as a number of coloured
patches to the group of workers.
Core patterns are thus metric in kind, remembered and told to others
who are working together to stitch a coverlet. The number sequences
running along the outer frame or path (pu) of the two sides of each
triangle, doubled to create a square, are identical and are identifiable
as noncommutative number sets, with the order in which the numbers
are presented as coloured pieces being significant. The internal rows of
each triangle are deduced from the sequence of the outer row, although
some woman take the liberty of creating their own internal, doubled
designs, deviating from the mathematics laid down in the path (pu) of
the pattern. In mathematics we know such algebraic systems as forming
quaternion groups, and Cook Islands women make use of this mathem-
atical idea of a relation between two identical sets of sequences of num-
bers and rules for their combination. It is certainly not the case that Cook
Islands women are consciously constructing quaternion quilts, but they
are using what Claude Lévi-Strauss has aptly called the ‘canonical
formula’ to imagine a complex system of numerical relations whose
epistemic purchase we can begin to grasp when delving deeper into the
question of how tivaivai works and what it does (Fischer, 2005).
We now understand that number sequences and their relation to one
another evince the idea that any new sequence is never new but only a
transformation of an existing relation, in much the same way as Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1963a) has shown for cycles of myth. Quaternion number
systems are also used in digital rotation of geometric objects, making the
reference of sequence to the wave formations associated with the landing
site of an apical ancestor’s canoe not as strange as it might first seem. In
fact, the sequence of numbers along the sides of a patched pattern serve to
translate a three-dimensional geometric object, topologically conceived,
into a two-dimensional surface, thus allowing the relation between the
pattern and the wave formations characteristic for the landing site.
Küchler 91

The giving and the receiving of tivaivai connects those who may be
living apart for most of their lives, but they also demarcate moments of
endings and beginnings of sequences of biographically charted events.
In more than one way, each new tivaivai anticipates other ones to be
made in the future, budding like the flowers on a tree. We may think of
its surface as a skin-like, self-replicating and layered-cloth thing, whose
successive folding and unfolding traces the frequent departures and the
many returns that mark Cook Islands life. Marking points of departure
and new beginnings, the stitched surface is a shroud that conjoins per-
sons as its ties together those who are divided by fate and circumstance in
life, at the same time as it differentiates those inhabiting the same small
island. No doubt as a result of the complex system of hierarchy at work
in the Cook Islands (Siikala, 1991), social differentiation is marked on
the islands, with persons and households multiply intersecting with com-
peting narrations of biographical relations as a result of intermarriage
between distinct image-based polities. The sewing bee operated by
women heading distinct households exists at the fault line of identity
and differentiation, with each group sharing a bank account and acting
as a unit in all aspects of economic and political life. The knowledge with
which women engage sewing tivaivai as core economic and political activ-
ity enables them to assert an idea of relation whose metric is shared and
yet differentiated.
Anthropologists like to build models that have comparative signifi-
cance and that also reflect the logic applied to understanding the behav-
iour of systems at the micro level of local life in ways Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1966) famously termed ‘the science of the concrete’. The models
proposed by anthropologists that enable one to understand the logical
ordering that is permitting the distinct scales of sociality to be compre-
hended and to be predicted in their relation to one another have always
been informed by mathematics, moving from a simple model of magni-
fication to one of fractal organization whereby parts are encompassed by
the whole, and the whole is generative of the parts which are infused by
the whole (cf. Kapferer, 2010: 191). While on the one hand the iterative
construction of the tivaivai appears to resonate with this latter model,
fractality as the value ascribed to social relations works only as long as
we disregard the operative idea behind the tivaivai, which as assemblage
invokes a translation of a three-dimensional rotational object into a two-
dimensional surface using a metric that is specific to each assemblage
while evoking the same elements and principles of combination. The
concept of fractality suggests a flat and homogeneous space, yet it is
not helpful when trying to comprehend the differential curvature of
wave formations associated with the different locations that are recalled
by origin narratives and mapped by tivaivai.
Riemannian differential geometry invoked in this article makes sense
of such patchwork and the model of social relations it resonates with in
92 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

that each patchwork, while mapping a local Euclidian space, is continu-

ous globally as it uses the same metric rules for its assemblage and yet
locally discrete as it deploys distinct elements. By accentuating the
conception and valuation of locality as a differential principle while
informing it with a shared metric, the piecework coverlet points to a
model of society that is uniquely suited to capture the dynamic of
maritime socialities, whose global reach is complemented by internal
differentiation and by an acute sense of the relational and social value
of the local and the individual. Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, whose
interest in cinematography was fuelled by their knowledge of
Riemannian ‘infinitesimal’ or differential geometry, would have likened
tivaivai to the difference made by film to our own understanding of the
seemingly incongruent relation between multiplicity and singularity, con-
nectivity and closure (Duffy, 2013: 104). The formalized aesthetics of a
surface that works in a Riemannian manner may well be far closer to our
own experience than we may have expected.

Conclusion
Cook Islanders’ preoccupation with the making of large surfaces com-
posed of patches carries on largely unnoticed. Like so many textile arts, it
evokes little interest in anyone who is not a ‘maker’, something that is to
do with our misconception that flat surfaces are inert and shallow.
A composite of iterative stuff like sand and threads, and inherently
mobile and performative, the patterned surfaces described in this article
co-articulate action and the representation of action in ways that demand
we conceive of and imagine topological, transformative and systemic
relations that invite multiple views on a continuous multiplicity of
local space. The workings of the surfaces discussed in this article resonate
with ideas of multiplicity and closure, and forms of sociability, whose
social effects are resonant with complex systems of hierarchy and an
acceptance of instability and transformation. It is the recognition of
assemblages on the surface of coverlets as the qualitative identification
of local space via quantitative means that binds people to each other
passionately, and with a persistence and reach that surpasses the limita-
tions of memory.
Untrained in the art of abstract metric modelling, lacking the vocabu-
lary to attend to a logic of relation that dwells in the concrete, and ill
equipped to think with geometry in mind or to relate what is visible with
what is invisible, it is unsurprising that social science has such a hard task
in theoretically appraising what patterned surfaces are, how they work
and what they do. That the surfaces discussed in this article are at home
in maritime societies, in which information exchange operates across vast
distances, should make us look at our own preconceptions around metric
coding and the possibility of formalized informational surfaces that
Küchler 93

connect while achieving closure, and rethink how surfaces can bind an
inner, profoundly imagistic and yet metric and geometric world with an
intentional relation to the world. It is by recognizing the relation between
mathematics, ideas and the ‘physical real’, captured by Albert Lautman
(2011) and recalling the work on differential geometry by Bernhard
Riemann, that we can understand the kind of worlding in which infor-
mational surfaces can thrive.

Notes
1. As described by Tim Ingold (2007) in his treatise on our penchant for navi-
gating by walking along paths that have a beginning and end with lots of
memorable views in between.
2. I refer here to the essay by Walter Benjamin on ‘The task of the translator’,
published in his collected essays, vol. 1 (Benjamin, 1996). See also the work
by Patrice Maniglier (2006, 2013) on the enigma of the sign whose relations
are immanent (‘it represents itself within itself’ [Maniglier, 2013: 108]).
3. In contrast to Euclidean ‘finite’ geometry of three-dimensional linear point
configurations, differential geometry considers curved three-dimensional
spaces. It was first theorized in 1863 by Bernhard Riemann, who extended
Euclidean geometry to non-flat spaces. Rather than operating according to a
geometry of local spaces, as Euclidean geometry does, Riemannian infinitesi-
mal or differential geometry operates according to a conception of space that
is global, but constituted by an assemblage of locally discrete and therefore
heterogeneous spaces (see Duffy, 2013: 104).
4. The realization that ideas of relation are captured by mathematics has inev-
itable implications for social science that has far too long remained ignorant
of the fact that the idea of relation is fundamentally a mathematical one
(Ascher, 2002; Gell, 1998; Krämer and Bredekamp, 2013).
5. This idea, first articulated in Simmel’s 1916 essay on Rembrandt (Simmel,
2005 [1916]), and his later writings on artificial sociability and the sociology
of aesthetics, are captured in De La Fuente’s (2008) essay on the sociology–
aesthetics nexus in Georg Simmel’s thought.
6. ‘Much of what we believe we ‘‘see’’ directly is in fact not seen at all, but
rather, as one says, is ‘‘deduced’’’ (Simmel, 2005 [1916]: 17).
7. Dimensional translation has been famously analysed by Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1963b) in his work on split representation, involving the characteristic split-
ting of an image so that two halves face one another, which can be traced
across both Asian and American art. By tracing the splitting of an image to
the actions informing the process of the creation of this pattern via the trans-
lation of an image from three-dimensional into two-dimensional form, Lévi-
Strauss was able to draw a parallel with the characteristic collapsing of the
concept of person with a socially effective office in ways symptomatic of
hierarchical societies in which men compete over structurally and genealogic-
ally conferred status that outlasts the individual person.

References
Arkana, Elizabeth (1986) Hawaiian Quilting: A Fine Art. Honolulu: Hawaiian
Mission Children’s Society.
94 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

Ascher, Marcia (2002) Mathematics Elsewhere. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.
Babadzan, Alain (1993) Les depouilles des dieux: Essai sur la re´ligion tahitienne a
l’e´poque de la de´couverte. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences.
Babadzan, Alain (2003) The gods stripped bare. In: Colchester, Chloe (ed.)
Clothing the Pacific. Oxford: Berg, pp. 25–51.
Benjamin, Walter (1996) The task of the translator. In: Bullock, Marcus and
Jennings, Michael (eds) Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1:
1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Biersack, Aletta (1982) The logic of misplaced correctness: Paiela body counting
and the nature of the primitive mind. American Anthropologist 84(4): 811–829.
Boas, Franz (1911) Introduction. In: Boas, Franz (ed.) Handbook of the
American Indian Languages. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. (Reprinted 1966, University of
Nebraska Press.).
Boas, Franz (1927) Primitive Art. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press.
Bredekamp, Horst (2008) Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’
Theater der Natur und Kunst. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Brunt, Peter, Thomas, Nicholas, Mellon, Sean, Bolton, Lissant, Wilson, Deidre,
Skinner, Damien and Küchler, Susanne (2011) Art in Oceania: A New
History. London: Thames and Hudson.
Burch, Robert (1991) A Peircean Reduction Thesis: The Foundations of
Topological Logic. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press.
Clark, Andy (2001) Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive
Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Connor, Simon (2004) Topologies: Michel Serres and the shapes of thought.
Anglistik 15: 105–117.
Damon, Frederick (2016) Trees, Knots and the Outrigger: Environmental
Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring. Oxford: Berghahn.
De La Fuente, Eduardo (2008) The art of social forms and the social forms of
art: The sociology–aesthetics nexus in Georg Simmel’s thought. Sociological
Theory 26(4): 344–363.
Deacon, Abel B (1934) Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides, ed.
Wedgewood, Camilla H. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles (1993 [1988]) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Conley,
Tom. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis, MN:
Minnesota University Press.
Duffy, Simon (2013) Bergson and Riemann on qualitative multiplicity.
In: Duffy, Simon (ed.) Deleuze and the History of Mathematics. London:
Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 89–117.
Dumont, Louis (1980) Homo Hierarchicus, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Fischer, Gwen L (2005) The quaternion quilts. Focus 25(1): 4–5.
Forge, Anthony (1973) Style and meaning in Sepik art. In: Primitive Art and
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 169–192.
Gallese, Vittorio (2000) The inner sense of action: Agency and motor represen-
tation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(10): 23–40.
Küchler 95

Gell, Alfred (1985) How to read a map: Remarks on the practical logic of
navigation. Man (NS) 20(2): 271–286.
Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gladwin, Thomas (1970) The Past is a Big Bird. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Glowczweski, Barbara (1989) A topological approach to Australian cosmology
and social organisation. Mankind 19(3): 227–240.
Hammond, Joyce (1986) Polynesian women and Tifaifai fabrications of identity.
Journal of American Folklore 99(393): 259–279.
Harrison, Simon (2007) Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict
in Melanesia and the West. Oxford: Berghahn.
Henari, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin and Wastell, Sari (2007) Introduction:
Thinking through things. In: Henari, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin and
Wastell, Sari (eds) Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts
Ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 1–31.
Hutchins, Edwin (1995) Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ingold, Tim (2007) Lines: A Short History. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim (2008) Bindings against boundaries: Entanglements of life in an
open world. Environment and Planning A 40(8): 1796–1810.
Jones, Stella (1973) Hawaiian Quilts. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press.
Kapferer, Bruce (2010) Louis Dumont and a holist anthropology. In: Otto, Ton
and Brubant, Nils (eds) Experiments in Holism. London: Blackwell
Publishing, pp. 187–208.
Knappett, Carl (2005) Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press.
Krämer, Sybille and Bredekamp, Horst (2013) Culture, technology, cultural
techniques – moving beyond text. Theory, Culture & Society 30(6): 20–29.
Küchler, Susanne and Were, Graeme (2005) Pacific Pattern. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Küchler, Susanne and Eimke, Andrea (2009) Tivaivai: The Social Fabric of the
Cook Islands. (photos A. Eimke). London: British Museum Press.
Lautman, Albert (2011) Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, trans. Duffy,
S. London: Continuum.
Leach, Edmund (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin
Social Structure. London: London School of Economics and Political
Sciences.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963a) The structural study of myth. In: Lévi-Strauss,
Claude (ed.) Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, trans. Jacobson, Claire and
Schoepf, Brooke G. New York: Basic Books, pp. 202–208.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963b) Split representation in the art of Asia and America.
In: Lévi-Strauss, Claude (ed.) Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, trans. Jacobson,
Claire and Schoepf, Brooke G. New York: Basic Books, pp. 245–269.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966) The science of the concrete. In: Lévi-Strauss, Claude
(ed.) The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–22.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. Belle,
James H., von Sturmer, John R. and Needham, Rodney. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
Malafouris, Lambros (2013) How Things Shape the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
96 Theory, Culture & Society 34(7–8)

Maniglier, Patrice (2006) La vie enigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance

du structuralisme. Paris: Editions Leo Scheer.
Maniglier, Patrice (2013) The order of things. In: Falzon, Christopher, O’Leary,
Timothy and Sawicki, Jana (eds) A Companion to Foucault. London:
Blackwell, pp. 103–121.
Mimica, Jadran (1988) Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the
Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Morava, Jack (2003) On the canonical formula of C. Lévi-Strauss. Cornell
University Library, Mathematics Subject Classification.
03G30,91Dxx,92Hxx. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0306174
(accessed 6 September 2017).
Morava, Jack (2005) From Lévi-Strauss to chaos and complexity. In: Mosko,
Mark and Damon, Frederick (eds) On the Order of Chaos: Social
Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 47–64.
Mosko, Mark (2005) Introduction: A (re)turn to chaos. In: Mosko, Mark and
Frederick, Damon (eds) On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the
Science of Chaos. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–47.
Mosko, Mark and Damon, Frederick (2005) On the Order of Chaos: Social
Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. Oxford: Berghahn.
Myers, Fred (2004) Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange.
American Ethnologist 31(1): 1–16.
Povinelli, Elizabeth (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and
the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Rio, Knut (2007) The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on
Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Serres, Michel (1994) Atlas. Paris: Editions Julliard.
Siikala, Jukka (1991) Akatokamava: Myth, History and Society in the Southern
Cook Islands. Auckland: The Polynesian Society in Association with the
Finnish Anthropological Society, Helsinki.
Siikala, Jukka (1996) The elder and the younger – Foreign and autochthonous
origin and hierarchy in the Cook Islands. In: Fox, James and Sather, Clifford
(eds) Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian
Ethnography. Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 43–54.
Simmel, Georg (1950) Sociability: An example of pure, or formal sociology. In:
The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and edited by Wolff, Kurt H.
New York: Free Press, pp. 40–57.
Simmel, Georg (2005 [1916]) Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art,
trans. and edited by Scott, Alan and Staubmann, Helmut. New York:
Routledge.
Starr, Gabrielle (2013) Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wagner, Roy (1992) The fractal person. In: Godelier, Maurice and Strathern,
Marilyn (eds) Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in
Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–174.
Washburn, Dorothy and Crowe, David (1988) Symmetry of Culture: Theory
and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Küchler 97

Washburn, Dorothy and Crowe, David (2004) Symmetry Comes of Age: The
Role of Pattern in Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Wiberg, Mikael and Robles, Erika (2010) Computational composition:
Aesthetics, materials and interaction design. International Journal of Design
4(2): 65–76.

Susanne Küchler is Professor of Anthropology and Material Culture at

University College London. She has conducted long-term ethnographic
fieldwork in both island Melanesia and Eastern Polynesia on the arte-
facts of knowledge economies. Her work on the history of the take-up or
rejection and the contemporary transformations of cloth and clothing in
Oceania has led to comparative work on materials and society. Her
research more recently has focused on the cognitive work of images
against the background of a comparative inquiry into the relation
between mathematics and the modelling of complex systems in the arte-
facts operative in Oceanic knowledge economies.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section on
‘Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision,’ edited by Rebecca Coleman and
Liz Oakley-Brown