Paper short abstract:

“Relationality” has been a dominant paradigm in Anthropology and the Arts in the last decades. But in the last few years, there are rising questionings of relationality in both fields. In this paper I will assess these recent criticisms from the perspective of Anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

"Relationality" has been a dominant paradigm in Anthropology and the Arts in the last decades. But in the last few years, there are rising questionings of relationality in both fields. In Contemporary Art one can notice a return to objects, beyond participatory art practices. This may not be simply a criticism of participatory art as such, a "return to order". On the opposite, this return to objects has been shaped by the ontological questions that relational approaches had formulated, opening the path to "new materialisms" in Philosophy, Anthropology, and Art. For example the philosopher Graham Harman advocates that the primacy of relations over things is no longer a liberating idea, since it reduces things to their pragmatic impact on humans and on each other (Harman 2:2014). In these terms, he has proposed a non-relational esthetics, an art without relations, concerned with objects deeper than their relation to humans. In this paper, I will investigate the consequences of this argument from the point of view of Anhtropology.