merographic

is the way ideas write or describe one another. Description makes what is being described a part of something else, e.g. Description.

Combining Greek 'meros' (part or share) and 'graphic' to bring to light 'the way ideas write or describe one another... the very act of description makes what is being described a part of something else, e.g. description (Strathern 1992: 204 n21). 'merographic analogies and the connections on which they are predicated are partial in the sense that they presuppose 'that one thing differs from another insofar as it belongs to or is part of something else (ibid 73). . .

is a term useful in thinking about the nature of relations. It refers to the fact that nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may re-describe it as part of something else.

Here too lies the force of imagining ‘merographic connections’ (Strathern 1992), a phrase that formalises what is commonplace in English usage: the fact that nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may redescribe it as part of something else. Religion and state, for example, may be shown to relate to each other in this or that respect, while the analytical discreteness of each is retained by the fact that either may also be related to quite other segments of social life, as when mystical beliefs (or population statistics) are regarded as part of the one but not of the other. 

is the phenomenological theory of part-whole relations (mereology) brought to bear on a consideration of the relationship between ethnographic writing and ethnological projects.

merographic, n.Definitions

merographic