Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation

Abstract

The publication of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (2005b) was a remarkable event, which capitalized on the steadily growing interest in the works of Latour, Callon, Law, Mol, and others assembled, willfully or not, under the label “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT). For those unfamiliar, Reassembling the Social charges that sociology’s over reliance on a particular metaphor of “the social” has blinded it from the much messier and heterogeneous practices of association that constantly make and remake what we have lazily come to think of as “society.” Turning towards its etymology, Latour defines “the social not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (7). Marshaling over two decades of research and theorizing—his own and that of his colleagues—Latour makes the call for carefully descriptive accounts of this movement. At times a polemic and sweeping broadside against what Latour dismissively calls “traditional” and “critical” sociology, at other times an accessible review of the ANT corpus, and still at others an elaboration of its “amodern” philosophical underpinnings, the book ends with what seems like false modesty: