Relatively Speaking

Abstract Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences represents a selective foray into the philosophy of anthropology organized around three chief themes: relations, incest, and kinship. It attends both to these three phenomena and to how they have been studied in the fragile sciences of sociality. These are kin matters in the humanities and social sciences and our explorations of them are informed by broad and diverse methodological issues—reductionism, ethnocentrism, relativism, universalism—that arise across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, the fragile sciences. Chapter 1 starts by noting that we are relational beings. That is, we are creatures whose various physical, biological, psychological, and social relations, and the relations between those relations, are at the heart of what we are. One aspect of our relational nature is the mundane-sounding fact that we are, and are born(e) as, relatives. This chapter provides an overview of our standing as relatives.