ABSTRACT
Novelists, dramatists, filmmakers and songwriters, amongst others, share an interest in human relationships. And, of course, Western society as a whole is obsessed by ‘relationships’ as a quick glance at any glossy magazine will show. As Dorinne Kondo’s account of a Japanese grandmother’s recollections of marriage reminds us, the subtleties of relations between people are also the raw material out of which ethnography is woven:
He was a real ‘Meiji man’, a tyrant, she claims. . . . Still she fulfilled her duties as a wife beautifully. . . . ‘Every morning’, she said, ‘I would see him off at the door, help him on with his shoes, and bow down to him to say, “Itte Irrasshaimase” [God speed]’. In other words, she was the exemplary housewife. But as soon as he stepped out of the door, she would hiss, sotto voce, ‘Kuso jiji!’ (Shitty old man!)
(Kondo 1990: 133)
And yet, despite engaging examples such as this, students quite often express frustration with the cold and distant way in which professional anthropologists write about human relations. ‘How can something as interesting as other peoples’ lives become so uninteresting when anthropologists write about it?’ is a commonly voiced complaint. This stems from the fact that anthropologists frequently discuss relationships in a highly abstract way. Consider the following description of some key relationships in the BaSotho social world:
[W]hen the sister’s son wishes to obtain a wife, he must go to his mother’s brother to help him to find the necessary cattle and his uncle may give him some of the ditsoa cattle received at the marriage of his sister, or may even give him some of the ditsoa cattle from his own herd, trusting to being repaid from the ditsoa cattle to be received in the future from the marriage of a niece.
