The Shapes of Relations: Anthropology as Conceptual Morphology

Abstract

Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization (as distinct from explanation and interpretation) as a core concern for anthropological thinking: anthropology as the activity of transfiguring the contingency of ethnographic materials in the formal language of conceptual relations and distinctions. Focusing on works by Mauss and Evans-Pritchard, as well as my own research, the article articulates the morphological character of such a project. While akin also to philosophy, such attention to the “shapes” of conceptual relations is analogous to the practice of art in its concern for the expressive potentials of these acts of conceptual transfiguration.