Sociality in anthropology

Although the concept of sociality was championed in the late 1980s as an alternative to ‘culture’ or ‘social relations’ as the principal object of anthropological inquiry, confusion often surrounds the term due to a lack of consistency in the way it is deployed. Following recent attempts to rethink the nature of ‘the social,’ human sociality can be best understood as the dynamic matrix of relations through which persons come into being, and which is navigated by an ethically imaginative and affectively receptive human subject. The challenge facing the discipline is now not only to trace and explain the diverse forms of human sociality but to decide how to incorporate nonhuman socialities into anthropological research and to develop richer accounts of the developmental bases for human intersubjectivity and ethical imagination.