Reading relations backwards

It would hazardous for an anthropologist to read back from the present to admonitions from nearly a century ago that the whole world is kin or that all forms of life are related. It would be even more hazardous to read back from the present to three centuries ago. None the less, a contemporary issue in social anthropology makes the risk conceivably worth taking. This is to do with the role that generic terms play in knowledge‐making, and specifically in what we know about kinship. Pondering on the adoption of a generic, ‘relation’, in the acknowledgement of kinspersons in E ngland around the time of the scientific revolution, this article points to a precise way in which the generic might have been useful for both kin‐makers and knowledge‐makers. Describing relations without having to specify the entities involved served both. This speculative exercise might be of interest in current contexts where appeals are made to the relational and relationality.