Farewell ethnography and welcome relanegraphy? Insights from researching the Russia-Ukraine war

Noting the recent relational turn in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, this paper draws on insights from the Russia-Ukraine war, also named special military operation, to postulate what it calls relanegraphy to theorize relations and their modular negations. In other words, relanegraphy offers a research design and theoretical position attuned to the recent ontological turn in technoscientific scholarship interested in a world that is increasingly being populated by sentient nonhuman objects which were historically ignored in research driven by designs rooted in humanist Enlightenment modernity. Arguing that life is irreducible to relations and entanglements, relanegraphy theorizes both the presence as well as the absence of human and nonhuman relations which challenge and decenter Enlightenment modernist ethnography and anthropos. The paper contends that as much as human and nonhuman actors establish relations, they are also engaged in pushbacks, expulsions and repulsions of relations such that the world is not reducible to relations. Relanegraphy recognizes that entanglements are not always desirable for actors which is why they are modulated by pushbacks, expulsions and even wars such as is happening between Russia and Ukraine.