2. A false dichotomy

The concept of social relationships has a long history in the social sciences and was used to describe the realm of human experience long before it was applied to social behavior in animals (Sahlins Reference Sahlins1976, 6–7). Within the realm of human sociality, discussions around the ontological status of relationships have often led to a misleading dichotomy between the social and natural sciences, asserting that social relationships are inherently subjective and/or dependent on the human mind (falling outside of the scope of the natural sciences).

In the introduction of her recent ethnographic account of relations, Strathern (Reference Strathern2020) claims that there is an active effort in the social sciences not to strictly define the concept of a relationship, even if this concept is fundamental not only to the characterization of social systems but to social sciences in general. By maintaining the generality of the concept, social scientists allow it to be a powerful tool in the field that adds quality to analyses and makes possible comparisons among different cultures:

However, the generality of the term does not prevent social scientists and philosophers from discussing the ontological standing of social relationships delineated through specific criteria. Strathern herself is an example. In Relations: An Anthropological Account, she argues that the term relations, used to describe interpersonal connections, derives from epistemic relations, which are rooted in our ideas about the world (Strathern Reference Strathern2020). As a derivative concept, social relations share similar characteristics; they are made of our ideas about the social world.

As already outlined in The Relation, Strathern (Reference Strathern1995) delineates two key properties of relations: They are complex and holographic. Relations are complex, inherently involving entities beyond themselves, be they the persons who are being related or other relations. More importantly, relations are holographic, as they emerge from activities such as classification, analysis, and comparisons, encapsulating information about the connections (of any order or scale) they represent—akin to holograms. And they can only be “produced through the very activity of understanding when that understanding has to be produced from within” (Strathern Reference Strathern1995, 18). So, although the individuals involved in relations are part of the world, relations themselves, as Holbraad and Pedersen (Reference Holbraad and Axel Pedersen2017, 154) assert in their discussion of Strathern’s work, are not; instead, “‘relations’ … are rather something that ‘we’ cannot help doing as anthropologists using the English language when conducting our analyses of ‘them.’”

This description of relations does not exclude interpersonal connections with beings other than humans (“unhumans”) and acknowledges their interconnectedness, a point Strathern mentions frequently in her discussions. However, rather surprisingly, she suggests that the human person is the only one who has the skills to enact those relating practices, stating that “the specific capacity of persons to relate to one another is … a fundamental truth of human existence. Social life is what goes on between them” (Strathern Reference Strathern2020, 4).

A more extreme view can be found in the social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s constitutive sense of relationships. Ingold ([Reference Ingold1986] 2016, 207) is adamant in asserting that the intersubjective nature of human relationships cannot be compared to the interactions of objectively defined individuals like nonhuman animals, as these individuals have no capacity for intentional or flexible behavior:

There are various ways to interpret the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. However, according to Ingold’s view, what seems to be important for the study of sociality and social relationships is an active engagement in social life, a form of agency that is not purely reflexive and preprogrammed but subjective. According to Ingold, consciousness, plus representation and intentionality, enables this engagement to happen in humans, and only in humans. Furthermore, this active engagement in social life means that relationships are a constitutive part of social individuals; part of who they are depends on their social experience. This contrasts with the idea of “objectively defined individuals” (Ingold [Reference Ingold1986] 2016, 206), whose interactions are purely reflexive and external and whose individuality does not rely on the social sphere.

Descriptions of human social relationships like these frequently rely on what Wilson (Reference Wilson2016, forthcoming) calls a subjectivist or antirealist view of relations. This view denies that relations are part of a mind-independent reality. They are only ideas, representations—products of our mental activity and, from there, projected into the world. Consequently, social relations are regarded through the same lens, perceived as subjective interpretations that transcend any physical, natural structure—any mind-independent, objective fact.

Wilson contrasts this view of relations as subjective ideas with an alternative position, which he refers to as the “face-value” or naïve realist view of relations. In contrast to the subjectivist viewpoint, this perspective asserts that relations are real parts of the world as much as physical substances are. Accordingly, statements concerning relations are objectively true, as these relations can be observed and identified within the real world. As a result, not only are social relations identifiable entities, but they can also serve as objects of explanation.

As a consequence, the nature of social relationships directly determines their mode of explanation. If relations are considered part of the objective fabric of the world, they can be described, compared, generalized, and potentially reduced to other entities independently of the individuals involved. These relations can be explored through the lens of the natural sciences. However, if social relationships are not part of the objective fabric of the world, then they cannot be studied in the same way. In this case, we need to rely on the social sciences, which are better equipped to understand—rather than to generalize over or reduce—the subjective nature of social relationships. Strathern (Reference Strathern2016) highlights an insightful quote from John Heil (Reference Heil, Le Poidevin, Peter, Andrew and Ross2009) that captures what Strathern terms the “objection to the pursuit of mind-independent objectivity,” which revolves around the risk of relationships being, in extreme cases, excluded or eliminated from explanations of social phenomena. Heil states, “If you start with language … you will want to find a place for relations in your ontology. If you start with ontology, you will want to explain relations away” (319).

This separation between an objective and a subjective social reality and the sciences that can explore each of them is characteristic of hermeneutic approaches in the social sciences, which are openly antinaturalistic. Within anthropology, these include approaches like interpretationism, symbolic anthropology, and the philosophical movement called the “linguistic turn.” These perspectives advocate shifting the focus from physical and material phenomena to the understanding of the subjective experiences of individuals and the meanings they assign to social actions, including the study of language and discourse. They argue that human social life is considered essentially symbolic, and language is taken as constitutive of historical events and human consciousness. Two prominent examples of approaches in cultural anthropology that follow this paradigm are the new kinship studies pioneered by David Schneider (Reference Schneider and Reining1972, Reference Schneider1984) and Clifford Geertz’s (Reference Geertz1973) interpretationist view of the human sciences. As Geertz says,

Such views align with a long-standing tradition within the social sciences that assumes an inherent divide between the natural and social sciences (Roth Reference Roth, Stephen and Paul2003). In this tradition, the natural sciences seek to explain the natural world by uncovering general and universal laws that dictate its regularities, whereas the goal of the social sciences is to understand the meaning of human action by grasping the lived experience that lies beneath it. The social sciences can thereby make sense of the unique world occupied by human actions.

We are then left with a dichotomy concerning the nature of social relations, the different sciences allegedly suited to study them, and the entities that can be social. On one side, social relations are considered subjective, mind-dependent constructs; they are objects of the social sciences alone, and humans are taken to be the only entities that are truly social. On the other side, social relations are considered objective and part of a mind-independent reality, can legitimately be studied by the natural sciences, and characterize animal interactions. In Ingold’s ([Reference Ingold1986] 2016, 208) words,

This dichotomy is rooted in several misconceptions, including a fictitious division between the two groups of sciences and their methodologies, an argument effectively countered by Roth (Reference Roth, Stephen and Paul2003). Here I will challenge another flawed separation: the notion that there exists a clear distinction between objective (physical, material) and subjective (mind-dependent) dimensions of social reality. As a consequence, the concept of social relationships overcomes the simplicity of the separation between subjective and objective aspects of relations. While I believe we have strong reasons to claim that this is true not only for humans but also for many other living entities, I focus on supporting the first part of this claim—concerning humans—in this article.

3. Human nonreductive objectivity

As we have seen, assigning human social relationships a special status presupposes a separation between human, subjective or mind-dependent social relationships and nonhuman, objective or physical interactions. Nonetheless, considering that humans are material, objective entities—they have a physical body responsible for these relationships that is part of the natural fabric of the world—their relationships would then seem to be bizarrely detached from this objectivity.

The challenge here lies in the fact that incorporating objectivity (in this sense) into the study of human social behavior has failed on various occasions. Early efforts to establish sociology and psychology as rigorous sciences led to many attempts at describing human behavior using methods from the natural sciences (Burge Reference Burge1992). In the twentieth century, this approach resulted in behaviorism emerging as a dominant paradigm within the human sciences, followed by the rise of sociobiology later in the same century. These approaches often omitted any discussion of mental states in behavior descriptions, including those concerning humans; tended to be overly deterministic; and adhered to adaptationist frameworks that overprioritize explanations based on fitness. Ultimately, they failed to provide comprehensive explanations for human behavior, exactly because they try to “explain social relationships away.”

However, adopting a reductionist view of relationships is not the only option to try to make sense of interactions that are inherently linked to a physical body (or multiple), sometimes constrained but also made possible by it. We can avoid the extremes that have permeated the study of human social behavior, especially in anthropology since the second half of the twentieth century (Kuper Reference Kuper2019), and look for approaches that acknowledge the role of both objective factors and subjective experiences in understanding human behavior.

The first step is acknowledging that social relationships are not composed solely of abstract concepts or ideas but necessarily involve actions and agents who enact them. Human intersubjectivity requires individuals who can interact, communicate, and respond to one another—all of that requires some form of materiality and objectivity in the world. Consequently, studying social relationships means studying the patterns that emerge from human social action—patterns of interactions that vary in type, frequency, and timing and are sensitive to the identities and behavior of the individuals involved (Neco Reference Neco2023).

This contrasts with Strathern’s conception, which appears to separate the actual interactions (connections) individuals perform—with their bodies in the world—from the relationships anthropologists describe. In fact, this materiality distinguishes social relationships, such as kinship, friendship, or work relations, from other types of relationships, such as knowing that unicorns have horns or understanding that the word bachelor denotes an unmarried man.

Moreover, reducing social relationships to ideas detached from the world undermines the concept’s utility in understanding the very phenomena it addresses. This reduction, rooted in a tradition that separates social from natural sciences methodologically, limits valuable contributions and risks falling into ethnocentrism or pure relativism, as Wilson and Neco (Reference Wilson and Neco2023) have argued in the context of ethnobiology. Neglecting insights from other sciences overlooks the natural dimensions of human relationships, which are as integral to social relations and social persons as their subjective dimensions.

This realization is beautifully exposed in the preface of the 2016 edition of Evolution and Social Life, where Ingold describes a change in his understanding of ontogenesis—“the growth and becoming of persons”:

The notion of a person as a “whole being in the world” supports the idea that the social relationships that they are part of also transcend the separation between subjectivity and objectivity. So, the second step in building a nonreductive approach to social relationships involves recognizing their mind dependency—but in a way that cannot disregard the physical body and the environment that make them possible.

What is missing from Ingold’s proposal, which still hinges on the special status of human social relationships, is a commitment to the claim that agency is embodied (and extended). Embodied cognition emphasizes the close relationship between the physical body, the environment, and cognitive processes (Shapiro and Spaulding Reference Shapiro, Spaulding and Edward2021), and, because of that, it avoids the extremes we have been discussing. Unlike traditional cognitive science, which relies heavily on computationalism—a perspective also mentioned in arguments against using natural sciences to explain human behavior (e.g., Taylor Reference Taylor1985)—embodied cognition posits that individuals’ bodies, and their properties, along with external elements of the environment, not only causally contribute to cognitive processes but also play a constitutive role in cognition itself.

This framework emphasizes how the physical body shapes individuals’ perceptions and understandings of the world around them. But beyond this, it incorporates external resources—reliably accessed or controlled—as part of individuals’ cognitive systems: their minds. And that includes not only other interacting individuals (e.g., in collective memory; Sutton et al. Reference Sutton, Harris, Keil and Barnier2010) but also cultural elements like symbols and physical tools (Menary and Gillett Reference Menary and Gillett2022). So, because social relationships are mind-dependent and our minds are constituted by these elements, their subjective component is an equal part of the natural fabric of the world.

However, this does not mean that they do not have the high-level features that we ascribe to them, for example, that they feel a certain way, have a certain meaning, and so on. This interdependence does not reduce relationships to lifeless, inflexible interactions—as is frequently argued in the case of social animals. On the contrary, it retains a role for psychology and representations in the study of dynamic relationships while recognizing their essential materiality.

To better understand these representations, and the relationships associated with them, an interdisciplinary approach is crucial. Such an approach should encompass human experience, flexibility, and creativity (subjective component) while also recognizing the effect of our modes of perception and action (objective component) in allowing this subjectivity to take place as well as the ultimate and proximate causal mechanisms that they partake in. Such an approach not only bridges the subjective and objective dimensions of social relationships but also overcomes the divide between the natural and the social sciences in understanding human social behavior.

Developing this idea further, and focusing specifically on the study of folk biology, the anthropologist Scott Atran and the psychologist Douglas Medin (Reference Atran and Medin2008) claim that anthropology and cognitive psychology need each other to understand human action in the world (which includes their relationships). They describe, for example, how cognitive psychology can be important in the development of models and theories that foster inferences about human cognition and how anthropology contributes by offering methodological tools that highlight cultural differences and provide the right connection between human concepts and their referents. Atran and Medin (Reference Atran and Medin2008) conceive of human relations as part of the natural world but do not reduce them to inclinations or chemical responses. Instead, they bridge seemingly conflicting approaches and thereby gain an improved understanding of the social phenomenon.

As we can see, an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges the interdependence of subjective and objective components shows that the objective aspects of human beings, such as their chemical-physical processes and perception modes, have a nontrivial influence on social relationships. However, it is not because they can be studied and described by naturalistic methodologies that they always have the front seat in the explanations of social phenomena. Social relationships that are heavily shaped by institutions like work relations may be more readily explained through highly mind-dependent conventions. However, they do not encompass the entirety of human social relationships.

A more comprehensive view of social relationships should focus on the actual connections individuals forge within social contexts, along with the processes that affect their development and maintenance. Defining social relationships by the different patterns of interactions that take place among cognitive individuals within a social system over time also highlights their dynamicity. Just as social systems develop and change, so too do the relationships that underlie their structures. This temporal aspect guarantees that relationships cannot be reduced to isolated interactions, physical processes, or emotions, even though these elements are integral to them. The separation between objective and subjective components is, in fact, artificial.

4. An example: Kinship relations

A prime example of the dichotomy discussed here and the benefits of applying an interdisciplinary approach in enhancing our understanding of social relationships lies in the study of kinship relations. Throughout much of twentieth-century anthropology, kinship occupied a prominent position in ethnographic studies and was central to the methodological debates I previously mentioned. A pivotal challenge to the conventional notion of kinship—thought to be distinctly biological, and reproductive—came from the anthropologist David Schneider, particularly in his work A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Schneider Reference Schneider1984). Schneider rejected the genealogical perspective of kinship, questioning the centrality of procreation in defining kinship ties. His contributions gave rise to what is now known as new kinship studies, a paradigm in cultural anthropology that highlights the interpretive or performative aspects of kinship relations and the role of conscious human effort while diminishing the significance of biological properties in generating these bonds (e.g., Bamford Reference Bamford and Sandra2019).

Many authors have argued that this dichotomous characterization of kinship fails to capture its development and maintenance in human societies effectively and overlooks decades of literature (e.g., Read and El Guindi Reference Read and El Guindi2022), including nonreductive naturalistic approaches that bridge the natural and social sciences. For instance, recent scholarship on the evolution of kinship, such as Bernard Chapais’s (Reference Chapais2008) Primeval Kinship and the discussion of bioessentialism in kinship by Robert Wilson (Reference Wilson2016, Reference Wilson2022, forthcoming), acknowledges a biological component to kin relations—whether in their origins or in their development—without disregarding historical and cultural factors that maintain their diversity.

Chapais (Reference Chapais2008) claims that the study of behavioral regularities in our closest primate relatives can inform the study of human kinship. The structure of reciprocal exogamy (which includes institutionalization and normativity) that we see in human societies remains unique, but it does not exist in “an evolutionary vacuum” (13). It draws from features already present in nonhuman societies, such as mechanisms of incest avoidance and kin recognition.

Wilson (Reference Wilson2016, Reference Wilson2022) draws on similar evidence from primate evolution but goes further and integrates recent innovations in the philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science in understanding kinship. Wilson (Reference Wilson2016) argues that kinship has an undeniable cultural aspect. However, we cannot understand this aspect without considering its biological dimension, which can “play more or less a role, depending on the context, in explaining and understanding it” (344).

The biological dimension of kinship includes the role of cognitive processes in binding people together and the reliance of those processes on progenerative facts that are available for recognition in every human culture. Progenerative facts include, for example, that “females are pregnant prior to giving birth” and that “the newly born and young are not self-sufficient and are relatively vulnerable and so require nurturance and protection for an extended period of time” (Wilson Reference Wilson2022, 10):

The works of Chapais and Wilson are only two very recent examples of scholarship that show great potential for overcoming the false subjectivity/objectivity, social/natural sciences dichotomy that seems to overshadow the study of human social relationships (and kinship, especially). They highlight a third way to understand relationships, especially social relationships, that aligns with the discussions we have explored in this article. This view does not reduce relationships to more fundamental entities and instead asserts that they are an integral part of the natural reality. Instead, it recognizes relations as explanatorily legitimate sources in our efforts to understand social systems.

The approach I am advocating also broadens the scope of studies on social relationships. While kinship has traditionally been the central focus of anthropological research, other types of relationships, such as friendships, also play a crucial role in human societies, yet have often been overlooked or seen as peripheral (Beer and Gardner Reference Beer, Gardner and James2015). By identifying the unique components of relationships within an interdisciplinary framework—such as the generational ties that distinguish kinship from other forms of relations—we can gain more productive insights into their roles across different cultural contexts. This includes enhancing our ability to identify and explain empirical differences in these relations and the interactions between them.