Thinking About Relations Through Locke

Abstract This chapter and the next look to complement the emerging picture of the kind of relational beings we are that this account of mindful sociality depicts with the development of a view of the metaphysics and epistemology of relations. Philosophers and anthropologists typically have different starting points in their thinking about relations, caricatures of respective realist and anti-realist views. Chapters 3 and 4 move beyond these caricatural sketches to articulate a defensible view of relations that facilitates a particular aim: to extend an ongoing dialogue about the epistemic value and evaluation of ethnographically generated knowledge claims. While kin matters are not our primary focus, they are never far away. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins have both appealed to John Locke’s seventeenth-century thoughts about relations to pursue their own view here. This chapter explains why, focusing on Sahlins views of historical ethnography only in the chapter’s last sections.