It might come as a bit of a surprise that there is so much in the book about friendship. Perhaps because I know so little, I find some of the literature on early modern England fascinating in this regard. Perhaps what will pique the reader’s interest is to see the way in which friendship segues into kinship. I have surprised myself, at any rate, on this score.Historians have long been alive to the temptation to think one knows what friendship is. Intriguing for example are present-day misunderstandings of companionate relations as flourished across pre-modern Europe. So what else do we need to be alert to? As it turns out, the attributes of friends and relatives have over time diverged and converged in quite specific ways.At any rate all this made me think afresh about twentieth century anthropological accounts of kinship and friendship, and I found myself speculating on an old controversy: the glaringly diminished place of family and kin in modernity. Of course the controversy hardly belongs to anthropology alone. Political writers pondering long ago on an emergent sense of society and state began a conversation that has lasted three centuries. I join the conversation with some thoughts of my own about how English speakers link up different aspects of their social lives.Take seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages of ‘society’ and ‘association.’ These seemingly reflect back something of the positive tenor there is to making relations that has already been mentioned. At one place the book touches on David Hume’s eighteenth-century ruminations on human nature. He showed himself as enamored of the associational facility of linking thoughts as he was of the convivial nature of being in company. Indeed he connected them: resemblances between people are like connections between ideas. Incidentally, Hume was thinking of social circles in general, not of kin relations at this point—it is as though the latter had already been pushed to one side. Of course as with any literary piece one has to consider metaphor, and I could not resist a glance at some of the arguments of the time about decorating speech. An interesting juncture is when ‘family’ loses its power as a metaphor for ‘state’.The cover that Duke University Press designed for the book is taken from a painting frequently reproduced to evoke the Enlightenment, Wright’s An experiment on a bird in an air pump. The scientific revolution domesticated: at a private house an itinerant lecturer is demonstrating the effects of air by withdrawing it from a bell jar in which a bird flutters. Several people gathered to watch are held by the painter in various relations of power (the observer with his hand on a watch), concentration (on learning what will happen next), comfort (embracing the youngest watchers there), and indifference (between two who have eyes only for themselves). There have been many attempts at identifying the personages. Generically, we would recognize a circle of friends and relations.If the book hopes for anything, it is for a cultivation of alertness. It is no big news that, as they are articulated, concepts carry cultural baggage. When the concept at issue is relation, we need to scale up that alertness, to see its cosmological import. For it is not—even if we wished—alterable or discardable at will. This is especially true of knowledge relations, of the manner in which people go about description, explanation, exposition. Throughout, the book makes it its business to allude, however briefly, to non-English-speaking contexts that tweak the distinctiveness of English usage here. The positive tenor (‘friendliness’) of relations, to return to the example, which privileges similarity as ground for connection, becomes an impediment to expressing the value some cosmologies put on relating through difference. The impediment feeds bitter anthropological controversy over the possibility or impossibility of identifying radical alterity.A take-home message is that for all the important work that the relation does, we need to be wary of its limits and excesses. While the message springs from criticizing English usage, such usage both does and does not share elements with its European counterparts, and the book provides some navigation for the point. More significantly, apropos English, we are talking of an international language with the power to mold concepts in its wake.The relation’s important work is evident. There is huge pressure in today’s world to rediscover how interconnected everything is, to treat interdependence as equally a natural and a moral necessity, to appreciate the value of interpersonal relations suddenly thrown into relief by a pandemic for which—for those who can—self-isolation is mandated. English speakers in particular have to go on telling themselves about the significance of relations and the interrelationship of phenomena.And this is because they are at the same time construing the world otherwise. This is the relation’s excess. Too often the world appears first as an assemblage of discrete items, and only secondarily as a multitude of items intermeshed, linked up, connected (whether or not the items in question can imagine themselves this way). There has been a century of criticism, with anthropology but one among many voices, to try to dislodge the prioritizing of discreteness. But what if impediment is embedded in our very means of expression? Think of the preposition ‘between,’ for example, the construction that renders relations as somehow lying between entities. It allows the entities to be construed as pre-existing, as though they were otherwise independent individuals, while relations take on a substantial character of their own, as in emphasizing shared similarities. To re-think the individual also means re-thinking (the exposition of) relations.A final note. Nationalist or racist rhetorics, reinvented anew for global times, frequently rest on appeals to self-resemblance or similarity that exclude (make ‘other’) what or who is taken as intrinsically dissimilar. This is not restricted to English speakers; but one way users of English do it is through how they imagine relations.