Relations

Abstract

thE compulsion of rElAtionsRelations are ubiquitous in the accounts people give of their world, and no less in the observations or theories by which any kind of knowledge is made.Indeed, attempts to address the relation as a concept get quickly lost in the diffuseness of this highly abstract term.Seemingly, it has to be qualified to be useful, as when we speak of social relations or logical relations.Yet the term slips out of such restrictions in the kind of confident surmise, as frequently voiced, that there is something profound in pointing to a relational exercise or in uncovering relationality at the heart of people's concerns.To anyone interested in the way ideas are propagated, there is no point in wishing the ambiguities away.So while the subject of this book is all around, there might be something to be learned from bringing it, in part at least, into focus.The exercise might be particularly interesting to undertake for the kind of knowledgemaking that does not simply seek out associations and dissociations across phenomena but imagines and describes them as relations, and indeed may use the epithet "relational" to claim a distinctive quality of analysis.This is especially true of the practices of (sociocultural) anthropology, and of what some would consider its principal means of existence."Now I see what anthropology is all about: it is about relations!"Lawrence Kalinoe's words spoken in Cambridge in 2000 rang with the clarity of a discovery.Only a short time into a joint research project with anthropologists and this lawyer from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea had pretty effectively summed things up.1 It was about then that the Melanesianist Gell asked what an anthropological approach to art might consist of, and he answered himself through a type of relation: if "anthropology has a specific subject-matter at all, that subject-matter is 'social relationships'" (1998: 4).However, this book is

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