The Shapes of Relations: Anthropology as Conceptual Morphology

Abstract

Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” the author of the 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 Marcel Mauss and Edward Evan EvansPritchard, as well as his own research, the author concludes that such a project is of morphological nature. Despite its similarity 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. The author prefers the term “shape” over “form” or “structure” because due to its simplicity and theoretical lightness the term “shape” better conveys the variety of conceptualization models. Terms such as “form” and “structure” are so saturated with debate in anthropology that they risk weighing this suggestion down with unnecessary theoretical baggage. The concern for concepts and their relationships as an anthropological sensibility — a kind of intellectual aesthetic that permeates anthropology even though it is not necessarily always recognized for what it is. This sensibility is of morphological nature as long as it puts ethnographic phenomena into particular conceptual shape. Therefore anthropology could be reasonably compared not with science or humanities nor even philosophy, but with an art practice instead depicting anthropology as a sort of painting by concepts.