Description
Book SynopsisMarilyn Strathern provides a critical account of anthropology's key concept of relation and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world, showing how its evolving use over the last three centuries reflects changing thinking about knowledge-making and kin-making.
Trade Review“Drawing on a wonderfully diverse array of sources, and in a dazzling display of analytic brilliance, Marilyn Strathern traces the parallel trajectories of ‘relation’—as comparison and as kinship—from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. Relations of both kinds, and the connections and knowledge that bind them, will be apprehended differently after reading this extraordinary work.” -- Janet Carsten, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
“An extraordinary work by one of today's preeminent scholars in the field of anthropology,
Relations radically transforms our understanding of both kin-making and knowledge-making as well as the depths and productivity of their entwinement. It does so not only in the epistemic and relational cosmology of the English-speaking world but also, by the light of comparison, in those of other cultural worlds. A profoundly illuminating book.” -- Susan McKinnon, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Virginia
“
Relations unfolds as a tour-de-force in the history, philosophy, and anthropology of social descriptors, bedazzling its readers as it charts how relations have sneaked between the limits of every account of (more-than-)human affairs, at every turn rekindling the magic and the challenge of anthropological analysis.” -- Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Reader in Social Anthropology, Spanish National Research Council
"
Relations is an event in Strathern's own sense: fresh evidence of the capacity to relate, which gains and adds dimensions in time.… Please read
Relations…: it holds the promise that
you and
I—
we—will never be the same." -- Ashley Lebner * American Ethnologist *
"
Relations is a conceptual page-turner narrated through an arc of mystery. . . .
Relations synthesizes its author’s ferocious curiosity about who puts worlds together and how they do so through concepts. The consequences are, she argues, all around us. By arranging precisely selected descriptions, Strathern offers us a glimpse of what is normally occluded, her deployment of analytical subtlety and narrative wit making the force in and to exposition demonstrable." -- Rachel Douglas-Jones * American Anthropologist *
"The breadth and depth of sources Strathern employs in her inquiry is exacting, particular, yet formidable still. She draws from fields as disparate as the philosophy of science, biology, art, and literary criticism, and the work of other anthropologists. . . . There is much food for thought on offer in thinking about relations from Strathern’s relatively short yet dense inquiry." -- Arthur Ivan Bravo * Anthropology Book Forum *
Table of ContentsPreface 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
