Against Relationalism and the Tyranny of Context

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Anthropological Ideas and the Volume of Being

This book deals with anthropological ideas, which it confronts with what seems to be a difficulty in anthropology: the human being, each singular human being, taken in themselves. Following this line of reading, the authors take us from Benedict to Radcliffe-Brown or Strathern. They focus particularly on contemporary theories of ecological, psychological, phenomenological and existential anthropology. It is this last direction that the authors wish to emphasise, devoting a final chapter to what would be an anthropology of the human being. Radically critical of the relationalism and the tyranny of context in anthropological theories, this book combining text and drawings is a necessary document for researchers and students, as well as for all those interested in understanding the singularity of each being. Perhaps, after this book, readers will no longer consider anthropology in the same manner…

Albert Piette is Professor of anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre, researcher at the Centre of ethnology and comparative sociology (CNRS).

Catherine Beaugrand is a visual artist and art theorist, particularly interested in the heuristicity of art in anthropology.

Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1 – Understanding culturesCulturalism
  • Anthropology and psychology 24
  • ‘Local theories’: a reversal? 30
• Chapter 2 – The tenacity of social relations
  • Sociological themes 39
  • The subjectivity argument and portraits 44
  • What about ethnography? 55
• Chapter 3 – Being, existents, existence
  • Did you say “existent and existence”? 61
  • Anthropology and phenomenology 67
  • Anthropology and cognition 74
  • Life, lifeworlds and the individual 77
• Chapter 4 – But what is an individual singularity?
  • From institutional anthropology to absolute anthropology 105
  • Extraction, volume of being and ligatures 118
• Points of conclusion 183
• References 197
• Index 213