MARILYN STRATHERN, 2020, Relations: An Anthropological Account, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 274 pp., ISBN  978-1-4780-0835-4

In Relations: An Anthropological Account, British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern offers up a genealogical treatise on the word-concept ‘relation.’ She probes into the particularities within and along the history of its evolution through the modern era of the English-speaking world. For the purposes of undertaking such an analysis, ‘relation’ is considered in two distinct ways. The first is as the familiar, seemingly inherently ever-evasive yet fundamental material to the construction of knowledge. The second is in the guise of kinship, that perhaps formerly trademark means and ends of the modern anthropological enterprise and its practice of ethnographic fieldwork.

In fact, relations, in their vastly myriad shapes and sizes, have figured significantly throughout Strathern’s body of work, whether the point of focus or adjacent to it, as gender relations, transactions, exchanges, connections – the in-betweenness of things, or, perhaps especially, as noted, kinship(s). While such relations were before considered in the context of a historical analysis of modern and contemporary Britain or on-site fieldwork in Melanesia, in the present investigation, the source word-concept is the very subject of attention, with implications abounding for all.

Strathern’s inquiry surveys the etymology of ‘relation’ from as far back as its incorporation into the English language from the Latin – ‘relatio’ – through the Middle Ages. Ultimately, however, attention given to this period is brief, as for the most part, the inquiry concerns itself with the course of relation’s changes in the formative modern period, as pertaining to the Western European, Anglo-American world’s history. Indeed, Strathern is careful to make a point of emphasizing that her inquiry has relevance exclusively for the English-speaking world, and more specifically, for the discipline of anthropology as practiced at least in the Anglophone tradition. Strathern writes, “there is a decided particularity to my inquiry. I turn to the use of ‘relation’ as it is configured in the English language. The emphasis of this phrase is on configuring and use. My concern in this work is with the relation as an expository device or tool and I refer to its ideational capacity for such work by the shorthand, concept” (pg. 2-3). Strathern’s explicit focus on anthropology as practiced in the English language has to do with an acknowledgment of limits. Her attention to use and configuration articulate how such an inquiry will be undertaken. She furthermore explains, “it is in paying attention to the way relation is used that we might come closest to something like an ethnographic account of it […] Relation is at once one of anthropology’s central tools of Inquiry and a prime target of anthropological knowledge, while at the same time its theoretical invention as a scaffolding device precipitates its discovery as something that seemingly slips out from under explicit theorizing” (pg. 2). After all, the British anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Melanesia, and theorizing on art, Alfred Gell, is cited as stating in the late 1990s that if anthropology had any specific subject-matter at all, it would be social relationships, a thought echoed by other practitioners of the discipline (pg. 1).

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 like Marisol de la Cadena, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Alb