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Anthropological accounts struggle to incorporate both subjectivity and supra-personal structures. Focus on the shape and type of relations neglects giving attention to the transformations that emerge as a result of relationships. This article proposes a toolbox of concepts that re-specify the notion of relations in a way that takes into account the transformative effect of relationships. The concepts are force fields, vectors, directionof-attention and unprotected backs. These notions incorporate directionality and transformation into the notion of relations and provide three key understandings of i) shifts in personal effectiveness; ii) the limitations of personal power without undermining the subject; and iii) intentionality without undermining the effectiveness of structures. Each of these understandings is illustrated by means of the strivings of environmental activists members of a transnational environmentalist federation. Vectors make it possible to take seriously the subject and inter-subjective sociality and, simultaneously, the effects of history and impersonal structures. Subjects and structuresThe structure and agency debate, far from being happily resolved, continues to dog anthropological accounts that cross different scales of sociality. Currently the question is being debated within the anthropology of ethics (Laidlaw

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Recent anthropological literature on NGOs has focused on the agency and creativity of activists. The focus on the subjects of NGOs and agency in this work is an explicit response to scholarship in which actors are eclipsed by formal and technical analyses of organizational structures. This article revisits the concept of organizational structure by att ending to it through the experience of activists of a transnational federation of environmental NGOs, namely Friends of the Earth International (FoEI). On a daily basis FoEI activists encounter and engage with various institutions. In certain situations, such institutions as well as the activists' own organizations are experienced as agentive entities. This article argues that from certain positioned perspectives such entities have material eff ects as supra-personal actors. Informed by Ingold, Latour and Haraway, but also by the FoEI activists themselves, I present the interdependent concepts of vectors, direction of att ention and 'unprotected backs'. This conceptual toolbox is presented as a shared puzzle (Marcus and Fischer 1999), and as such is activism itself, that engages in conversation with environmental activists.