The relationships that human beings form with one another are woven together into the tapestry that is human sociality. In a Reference Enfield2009 journal article, Nick Enfield proposed that interpersonal relationships deserve concerted scholarly attention because they lie at the core of our social world. In Relationship thinking he returns both to argue that research on how social relationships are achieved in face-to-face interaction will provide fundamental insights into human sociality, and to provide an original, interdisciplinary conceptual framework within which to conduct that research.
In Enfield's terms, ‘relationship thinking’ acknowledges that ‘human social relations are a central locus of cause, condition, and consequence in human communicative behavior, including the consequences of such behavior, such as the grammatical structures of language’ (p. xv). Relationship thinking comprises a perspective or a heuristic stance that functions in two ways: it is a stance that ‘people adopt in social life as a way of interpreting and managing public behavior’, and it is also an analyst's ‘research strategy for understanding human social action and cognition’. Enfield develops his relationship thinking framework carefully and incrementally across the volume, grounding that development in analyses of everyday interaction among speakers of Lao and Kri with whom he has done extensive ethnolinguistic fieldwork.
Relationship thinking is intended for a wide disciplinary audience. Enfield specifically mentions cognitive anthropology, cognitive science, conversation analysis, descriptive linguistics, ethnography, ethology, linguistic anthropology, semiotics, and sociolinguistics. One might be wary of such a broad reach, but rather than simply picking the best fruits from each discipline and combining them in a compote, Enfield draws from each the concepts, principles, or positions relevant to his vision of relationship thinking, and deftly integrates them in a coherent interdisciplinary framework. Because this interdisciplinarity may well confront a reader with unfamiliar material, he lays out basic concepts and positions both clearly and carefully, without being pedantic.
Perhaps most clearly indicative of the breadth of Relationship thinking's heuristic stance are the seven positions Enfield characterizes at the outset. Relationship thinking is focused on actual, face-to-face, linguistic, multimodal social interaction as the key domain for studying human sociality. This focus is apparent across the entire volume, and is addressed specifically in the chapters on enchrony (as below), interactional moves, and social action. Enfield's stance is also both neo-Peircean in its underlying semiotic framework, and neo-Gricean with regard to meaning and amplicative inference, both most directly apparent in the chapters on semiosis and on action. Relationship thinking attends to culture as providing the assumptions and heuristics necessary to social life, as well as the diversity across human groups. The cultural grounding of relationships is apparent throughout the book, but is brought to the foreground in a specific chapter on culture. The stance is also ethological in that studying humans is studying a species with a distinct phylogeny and hence with potential commonalities across cultures, as seen for example in the chapter on relationships. Relationship thinking also has a grammatical focus, most clearly apparent in the chapter examining grammar with regard to social relations. Lastly, Enfield's heuristic stance is social-cognitive in that managing human social interaction, relationships, and institutions implies that individuals possess rather considerable and specialized cognitive capacities. Those capacities are considered explicitly in the chapter on cognition, but throughout the volume Enfield demonstrates that cognition and interaction must be studied as integral with one another, rather than as distinct phenomena, as has been the case in much prior theory and research.
Just how these various positions are integrated in a coherent conceptual framework is suggested in the volume's subtitle. Agency, enchrony, and human sociality are the core concepts in the relationship thinking stance. Very briefly, agency encompasses a human being's abilities to determine, shape, and anticipate a course of behavior, as well as his or her entitlements and obligations surrounding it. Agency is a relational phenomenon. It appears to be located in the individual if all its component parts align with one person, but Enfield shows clearly that agency is very often both joint and, importantly, socially distributed when multiple people act as if they were one person. ‘Enchrony’ is a term Enfield coins to capture insights from multiple disciplines that human interaction is an on-going, progressive sequence of interlocking and interdependent communicative moves, each comprised of an initiating action and its responsive action. Adopting an enchronic perspective focuses a researcher on human talk and conduct as it arises in conversational time in the joint production of courses of social action. Human sociality arises as human beings interact with one another ‘in real time, navigating the fission and fusion by which we exit and enter units of social agency with others’ (p. xvi). In other words, as persons utilize their cognitive capacities in engaging one another in interaction, their interdependent communicative moves bring them into various relationships of entitlement and obligation with one another. Those relationships are units of agency that are continually malleable as interaction shifts both in the moment and across time. Persons are thus continually navigating between being distinct from and bound to others in different social units, some temporary and some enduring. The continual interweaving of these relational units in human interaction constitutes human sociality.
Relationship thinking is an important book. It makes a compelling case for its underlying premise that the relationships that human beings create, maintain, and transform in everyday interaction with one another are the warp and weft of human sociality. It is also an ambitious book. Human relationships are highly complex phenomena, and their many dimensions and their diversity make them difficult to study using traditional theoretical perspectives and research orientations. Indeed, many such perspectives presume that the singular individual, rather than the relationship-as-a-unit, is the fundamental analytic unit of human sociality. Enfield (p. 217–18) argues that if one is addressing research questions regarding what social action and social relationships are made of—and how they relate to human interaction, language, culture, and cognition—there is no good reason to remain bound by traditional disciplinary thinking. In Relationship thinking he steps outside those boundaries to provide a fully worked-out interdisciplinary stance, the conceptual and analytic tools one might need, and exemplars of how one goes about addressing these important questions.
Enfield definitely breaks new ground, but it is useful to reflect on the fact that the stance he develops is not the only possibility. Human interaction is understood throughout the volume as a form of ‘communication’, but that concept is never directly examined. The neo-Gricean position adopted in Relationship thinking suggests Grice's (Reference Grice1989:286–87) transmission model of communication as the tacit conceptualization, but there are many other models with quite different and less problematic entailments (Craig Reference Craig1999). The neo-Peircean semiotic framework that Enfield adopts is central to his entire conceptual framework, but there are also well-developed nonsemiotic positions on language (Krippendorff Reference Krippendorff and Bermejo2009:173–90; Stewart Reference Stewart1995). Enfield argues that ‘an interaction constitutes a relationship’, where ‘a relationship is a set of rights and duties applying to interaction between members of a dyad’ (p. 8–9). That is certainly one definition, but sixty plus years of research on human relationships has produced critiques of such conceptualizations, as well as a large number of alternative understandings (Arundale Reference Arundale, Locher and Graham2010).
Even if one accepts Enfield's interactional, cultural, ethological, grammatical, and sociocognitive positions, adopting a different understanding of what comprises communication or a relationship, and/or a nonsemiotic perspective on meaning and language would result in a quite different stance with different entailments for conceptualization and research. It is to Enfield's considerable credit that he has laid out his rationale and his positions with sufficient care and clarity that one can see these other possibilities and can choose among them, should that prove necessary, in developing a stance that best addresses one's particular research questions.
