Proposing the motion: Morten Axel Pedersen

The proposition that 'the task of anthropology is to invent relations' has a certain in-built recursivity. Does the motion we are proposing today mean that anthropologists make (invent) new social relations as they engage with people in the field? Or should the motion be understood in the stronger sense -- that what anthropologists do amounts to the invention of relations out of non-relational things? As far as I am concerned, the second version is the most interesting of the two. For to say that the task of anthropology is to make the non-relational relational flies in the face of one of the most dogged truisms of our discipline, namely that societies, cultures and human beings come into being through networks of connections. It is therefore this version of today's motion I shall concentrate on. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]