ABSTRACT
Those Fortunate to Hear Professor Marilyn Strathern's inaugural lecture ‘The Relation: issues on complexity and scale’ in Cambridge on 14 October are likely to remember it. Inaugural lectures usually select a topic for an analysis which, given the ceremonial character of the occasion, then has to be studded with allusions to institutional ancestors, intellectual peers, other friendly disciplines, and the impressive programme of departmental work which is being inaugurated. Strathern's topic was relationship itself, so that there was no disjunction between medium and message. Her guiding metaphor was the hologram, that mysterious visual model for post-Einsteinian physics. When the lecture is published by the university, it will not be the same with the addition of footnotes and bibliography, for it was in the nature of a musical composition.
