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- Convenors:
-
David Berliner
(Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Mattijs van de Port (University of Amsterdam)
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- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- Theatre S2
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
The impact of Bruno Latour is enormous across the contemporary social sciences. In this panel, we would like to invite anthropologists to write about their own intellectual engagement with Latourian theories.
Long Abstract:
The impact of Bruno Latour is enormous across the contemporary social sciences, at the intersection of anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Many see his work as innovative, stimulating and sometimes prophetic: often he has directed our attention toward new ways of dealing with society and reflecting on the constitution of modernity. In particular, Latour has de-centered social analysis from the thinking subject and called attention to the ways in which non-human agency interacts with human agency on the same ontological register, for instance the affective presence of material objects or scientific concepts in social interactions.
Anthropologists continue to use Latour's ideas and "tools". Although he initially contributed to the study of sciences and technologies, Latour has inspired many scholars dealing with material culture, religion, medical, virtual and environmental anthropology. Generally speaking, he has compelled scholars to rethink the question of universalité and, by the same token, he managed to provincialize Western cosmologies and their unconditional objects of belief, their "factishes". Latourian notions of "Great Divide", "actants", "collectives", "mediations" and "attachment" are nowadays part of the conceptual apparatus of many anthropologists, who draw on his approach to creatively pursue their own agendas.
In this panel, we invite scholars to write about their own engagement with Bruno Latour, either to oppose his work or to recognize his influence on their intellectual endeavour, by helping them to figure out new ways of dealing with their ethnographical material and to challenge their paradigmatic views.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
In the 1980s the Maskoy people of Paraguay fought against the government to recover part of their traditional lands back. Drawing on the emerging framework of political ontology, I will explain why the Maskoy leaders’ version of the events has been silenced by modern historiography.
Paper long abstract:
According to one of its commentators, the fight for land of the Maskoy in the 1980s stands as a monument to indigenous organization. Nevertheless, although different non-indigenous commentators have given a variety of reasons to account for the Maskoy's success in the fight, none of them endorsed the Maskoy leaders' version of the events. In particular, none of them have recognized the shamans' role in mediating the encounters between Mascoy representatives and politicians, even if these encounters are usually described as crucial moments of the fight by its indigenous commentators. Following Latour's analysis of the Nature-Society divide, I will argue that the shamans' role in the land-claim process was deemed to be too problematic to be included in a modern narrative of the events because it openly questioned a vision of the political sphere as constituted by purely human actors. I will thus propose a 'pluriversal' narrative of the fight in order to show how it is at the crossroad between different ontological dimensions that General Alfredo Stroessner signed the expropriation of land for the Maskoy on the 20th of August of 1987.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic attempt to investigate the policymaking process in a developing country, Turkey, with a focus on the interaction of human and non-human actors. Specifically, it examines the blurry line drawn between the political and the technical.
Paper long abstract:
This research examines the policymaking process of the Turkish tobacco regulatory board, which was established under the promises made to the IMF in 2002. Drawing from the studies of Bruno Latour, it explores the functioning of the regulatory board by focusing on a particular case, i.e. the controversy of the hard-box cigarette packing machines bought for the Turkish tobacco monopoly. The machines' status (whether they were new or used) opened a heated debate among different actors, such as regulatory board, the Ministry of Finance and multinational cigarette companies. The contenders of the dispute invoked several technical reports: the pictures of the machines were taken, the expertise accounts were written, and the different data were circulated but the goal of exposing the "facts" was not achieved. The evidence in the reports and pictures of the machines remained ambiguous, and the machines became the hub of technical as well as political debates.
In the end, the lingering dispute about the machines was concluded by the regulatory board with a final decision that was shaped in a process of speculation, interpellation, and expectation. Therefore, in opposition to the idea that policies are being formulated in a structure of rational and well thought-out ideas, I argue that the regulatory agency has developed an improvised version of policymaking hinging upon expectations and speculations. In other words, technocratic policies are formed in an environment of massive uncertainty and ambiguity, rather than coherent, stable, and straightforward systems of global policy and/or national governance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will deal with the philosophy and sociology of Latour in relation to space. Acknowledging the very spatiality of Actor-Network theory, we will see how Latour helps us to bring together architecture and (political) philosophy.
Paper long abstract:
Bruno Latour has shown a longstanding interest for architecture and for the city. Devoting many articles to questions of building process and design, he also manifested, in books such as Aramis or The Love of Technology (1992) and Paris, Invisible City (1998), a vivid interest for urban organisation at large. More deeply, one can very well see how his entire theoretical framework brought space and questions of spatiality to the fore of both sociology and philosophy. Giving much importance to concepts such as network, vector, trajectory, and putting a lot of energy in the fact of relocating the social, Actor-Network theory can be seen as being profoundly topological.
Along with Peter Sloterdijk's spatial ontology, with which he shares more than only theoretical affinity, Latour thus probably gave us one of the most fruitful theoretical frameworks for understanding the very spatiality of contemporary apparatuses of power, and for deciphering the way the complex landscapes of globalisation affect and transform our lives. Bringing our attention to the very role played by the many objects or non-human entities that constitute the (social) universe, Latour seems to be one of the best philosophers to help us exploring and deciphering what happens after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace - without falling in the immaterial or virtual traps.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss the use of the concept of " event" in Latour's work, in relation to how the term has been used in philosophy, and anthropology. . Although not as explicitly central as other terms such as "network" "actant" "mediation", etc., my contention is that the notion of the event is very important to understand Latour's research programme.
Paper long abstract:
Bruno Latour's narrative of his own work is often framed as the overcoming of critical sociology (essentially Bourdieu) by a new approach to the "social", lead by the emergence of Science and Technology Studies ( STS). The theoretical model brought forward by STS would be defined as "Actor-Network" theory (ANT) a tag that Latour has both adopted and rejected in different instances. In spite of Latour's warnings on reducing ANT to a method or a "tool", ANT's success as "normal science" has inevitably become a model to be applied in many different settings: in the last decade we have see the proliferation of "agents", "actants", "mediations" and "networks" in the literature of the social sciences. My contention in this paper is that there are other elements to Latours' work which cannot be reduced to the ANT model; in particular I am thinking about the place of history and the notion of the event. This paper will discuss the use of the concept of " Event" in Latour's work, in relation to how the term has been used in anthropology and philosophy.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation picks up Latour's conception of a symmetrical anthropology and examines its challenging consequences for thinking shamanism.
Paper long abstract:
Many people all over the world refer to practices labeled as shamanism when trying to cope the uncertainty and disquiet which often accompany unusual bodily experiences. The development of shamanism is decisively shaped by anthropology, not only in the way that anthropological theories serves as source of inspiration for religious practitioners but also in the way that anthropologists themselves become religious practitioners. Through the spreading of the anthropological term shamanism around the world, certain anthropological concepts and attitudes have also spread. These concepts are ordinarily based on an asymmetric anthropology through dividing modernism and a universal archaism and according to this, dividing shamanism and neoshamanism. This presentation shows how the anthropological concepts become bodily tangible actants and influence and irritate the shamanic practices. In doing so it explores how the adaptation of a symmetrical anthropology proposed by Latour challenge the way of thinking shamanism.