Digging Around in the Roots of Anthropology: Some Reflections on ‘Relations’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/2179-0892.ra.2016.116918Keywords:
Relations, Raymond Firth, Scottish Enlightenment, AbstractionAbstract
Some sixty years ago Raymond Firth thought it was necessary to point out that social relations could not be seen by the ethnographer, they could only be inferred from people’s interactions. Abstraction was necessary. – Others have thought making concrete was the problem, and resorted instead to personification. – At the same time Firth unproblematically talked of relations in the abstract when he was comparing (for example) economic and moral standards. The issues would not have been unfamiliar to Hume, and other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, who dwelt on the power of relations in (human) understanding and (scholarly) narrative, as well as interpersonal empathy. At this early stage of the article, it seems appropriate to evoke an antecedent period in the European Enlightenment at large, among other things for its interest in narratives of the ‘unknown’. We also find in this epoch some peculiarities in the English language that many Scots were making their own. These usages thicken the plot as far as ‘relations’ in the eighteenth century go, with implications that still tease usDownloads
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