The stuff of sociality: Alan Fiske’s Representing Relationships

This essay critically reviews Alan Fiske’s recent book Representing Relationships: Modes of Cognition and Connection (2026). The book presents a sustained argument for Fiske’s conformation systems theory of human sociality. In this essay, I first reconstruct the main ideas of conformation systems theory, and then move to a topical discussion. The discussion covers: (i) why conformations take the form they do; (ii) whether conformations are conceptual metaphors; (iii) the place of mindreading (“theory of mind”) in conformational practices; and finally, (iv) applications of conformational systems theory to ancient human (i.e., Pleistocene) symbolic behavior.