ABSTRACT
Known to historians as relazione relazioni, from the prototype, Venetian diplomatic reports, a relation in this sense became increasingly common across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most famously for anthropologists including reports sent back by Jesuit missionaries from New France. There is some interest in the English-speaking corner of Europe at this particular time, in that the intellectual alliances encouraged by natural philosophy—the seventeenth-century scientific revolution so-called—was arguably England’s counterpart to the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth, which seemingly yielded nothing comparable to the Scottish ‘movement’. David Hume’s narrative has an interesting effect. While examples drawn from kinship may make concrete otherwise abstract notions of relations, thinking of kinship simply in terms of a close or distant connection surely flattens or generalizes the connotations that summoning blood ties might otherwise carry.
