Reflecting back

This invitation presents an opportunity to bring together older and newer strands of work on relations. The first fell back on an analytical notion of aesthetics to convey certain kinds of persuasive appearances: Melanesian ethnography emphasized how much it mattered that relations took an appropriate form (recognizing the support of ancestors for example). The second is a recent critique of relations as an explicit Euro-American concept in one of its vernacular contexts, namely English usage.  Here, the kinds of Amerindianist interests engaged by the special issue of this journal – and as gleaned from certain translations into English – lead me to locate an aesthetic effect in the penumbra of connotations and associations that endow relations (English-speaking) with an aura or mood.  What anthropologists ordinarily dismiss when they construct their analytical vocabularies becomes interesting.