Relations: An Anthropological Account

Marilyn Strathern

Published by Duke University Press 2020

Relations

An Anthropological Account

Marilyn Strathern

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478009344

Overview
Contents

About this book

Marilyn 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.

Author / Editor information

Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and the author and editor of numerous books, including The Gender of the Gift; Partial Connections; and After Nature.

Reviews

“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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introductions: The Compulsion of Relations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I
1. Experimentations, English and Otherwise Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. Registers of Comparison Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Coda to Part I: Comparing Persons Again Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
PART II
3. Expansion and Contraction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
4. The Dissimilar and the Different Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Coda to Part II: Preparation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
PART III
5. Enlightenment Dramas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
6. Kinship Unbound Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
Coda to Part III: Visibility Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Conclusions: The Reinvention of Relation at Moments of Knowledge-Making Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Index of Names and Places Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Index of Subjects Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 288

eBook

Published: April 17, 2020
ISBN: 9781478009344