Sorcery, revenge, and anti-revenge Relational Excess and Individuation in the Gran Chaco

Abstract

Whether invented, discovered, implicit, directly addressed, or hiding in plainsight, relations remain the main focus of anthropological inquiry. Thecentrality of relations to the discipline was recognized early in its history, assoon as society came to be conceptualized as a system of consanguinity andaffinity. Later, during the heyday of structural functionalism, the notion ofrelations was recognized as the main ‘object’ of anthropological analysis,understood as “association between individual organisms” (Radcliffe-Brown1965: 189). Relations were relevant because they helped in the establishmentof social positions: individuals were more or less equivalent to units of abigger system (Strathern 2018). Structural functionalism was not alone inmaintaining an approach to relations as if they were self-evident. For muchof the history of the discipline, the ethnographic categorization of socialrelations remained a key goal. Yet despite the richness of empirical attentionto relations, the notion of relations itself remained largely unproblematizedas a device helpful to social analysis. With the advent of structuralism,however, came the first sense of dissatisfaction with the overly empiricalnature of relations in anthropological thinking. Lévi-Strauss ([1958] 1987:301–304) understood relations as operating necessarily upon a distinctionbetween ‘reality’ and a theoretical model employed to grasp that reality (seealso Leach [1954] 1970: 5). The gap between irreducible, constantlyfluctuating social phenomena and their theorization was thus made visible,highlighting that relations do not exist as empirically observed practices thatcan be transposed into self-contained relational systems.