Relationship returns: traditional ecological relationship, and the direction of its yield Knowledge is what can be carried away from a home; relationship is what stays — and the family that stays is the unit that can voice it
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: 1. Indigenous scholars hold that all knowledge is relational. I agree, and ask what follows for a field whose product is knowledge, yet where relationship and knowledge move in opposite directions? For knowledge accumulates like a ratchet, each increment locked behind the last, and is carried from the place that produced it to wherever it is used next. Relationship runs as a loop, each participant and pass altered by the last, and is never carried off, because it exists only between the parties who keep and continue it.2. I name the loop traditional ecological relationship (TER) and set it beside traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) — not to replace the term, but to name what TEK leaves behind when the interview is over: a family at home with the living beings of one place. Relationship, as I use the word, entails the valued currencies of regular recurring contact, caring connection, considerate contribution, and composition in community that includes return of the precious gifts of shared abundant health to their original source, rather than carried off as extracted wealth.3. I call the primary place reality is lived, that relationship occurs, and where the currencies of value are applied in the transacting relations in that space - home - the primary place and time the body, heart, mind and soul of a person and family invests itself the most. 4. Over fifty years of residence on one home ground — a wood turtle nesting bank raised from fewer than fifty hatchlings a year to several hundred, and deer whose avoidance of people, the most uniform value in a statewide record of 7.8 million detections, has reversed on this home ground upon the basis of quiet stewardship with electric conveyance— are offered not as results but as what a relationship looks like in numbers when its own residents measure and read it.5. Four proposals follow: treat lived and observed residence in a home with diverse co-inhabitants as a method with declared standards; read an animal’s response to people as one side of a two-way ledger; with respect make room for the voice of family-held record on its home ground; and design every partnership with a mechanism for return to its source. The positions that matter are not expert and informant, but family member, host, guest and visitor — and the home landscape is host to all four.
Source: SocArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Author: Damian A Vraniak
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225382760