Full Description
The concept of relation holds a privileged place in how anthropologists think and write about the social and cultural lives they study. In Relations, eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of this key concept and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world. Exploring relation's changing articulations and meanings over the past three centuries, Strathern shows how the historical idiosyncrasy of using an epistemological term for kinspersons ("relatives") was bound up with evolving ideas about knowledge-making and kin-making. She draws on philosophical debates about relation-such as Leibniz's reaction to Locke-and what became its definitive place in anthropological exposition, elucidating the underlying assumptions and conventions of its use. She also calls for scholars in anthropology and beyond to take up the limitations of Western relational thinking, especially against the background of present ecological crises and interest in multispecies relations. In weaving together analyses of kin-making and knowledge-making, Strathern opens up new ways of thinking about the contours of epistemic and relational possibilities while questioning the limits and potential of ethnographic methods.
Contents
Preface ix
Introductions: The Compulsion of Relations 1
Part I
1. Experimentation, English and Otherwise 25
2. Registers of Comparison 45
Coda to Part I: Comparing Persons Again 69
Part II
3. Expansion and Contradiction 73
4. The Dissimilar and the Different 97
Coda to Part II: Preparation 117
Part III.
5. Enlightenment Dramas 121
6. Kinship Unbound 143
Coda to Part III: Visibility 165
Conclusions: The Reinvention of Relations at Moments of Knowledge-Making 167
Notes 191
References 229
Index of Names 251
Index of Subjects 259
