Week 3: How the nature gets made
ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2,
2025)
August 22, 2025
Main reading: Latour (1987a); Latour (1994)
Other reading: Latour (1996); Latour (1987b); Latour (2004); Latour (2005)
Notes
Among the philosophers and the historians and the sociologists of science, there were always also the ethnographers of scientific practice. They were happy to simply do what ethnographers do. They went to the places where the people whose lives they wanted to understand were. They went to laboratories and they immersed themselves in these places to simply watch, as if they were aliens from outer space who just landed and could not apply any of their preconceived ideas. They counted, described, sorted and noted all the little things laboratory scientists did in the day. Because they wanted to create an ethnographic account of scientists at work, they largely sidestepped the debates about universalism and relativism, paradigm shifts, and social constructions of facts. They also occupied a niche that allowed them to make a new kind of argument about how scientific knowledge is formulated.
Years after his first laboratory ethnographies, Latour ([1991] 1993) proposes a new way for one to intervene in scientific knowledge production beyond optimism and cynicism. The impulse of laboratory ethnographers was right. Even the biggest ideas are nothing more than lots of little steps one can observe at a local level. Anthropologists have long wanted to come “home,” to study their own cultures the way they study other people’s ways of life, but their mistake is to think that they should be limited to one minor part of the whole system. Instead they should treat their own societies’ organization as no different than any other society. When a classical anthropologist goes to a foreign environment, they frame the differences they encounter as beliefs, symbols, or rituals—false ideas that obscure reality. When they come “home,” they also tend to gravitate toward the stuff that stands out as deviant from the norm, which they assume to be based on rational ideas. But they suspend their judgment of other people’s mediation or representation of experience. In an ethnographic description, magic is real and ancestors live. To really understand the so-called modern society, a society based on scientific rationality, ethnographers need to suspend their assumption that this knowledge is objective and factual and deviant practices are mere figments of a cultural imagination. Instead, write the ethnography of science as one would an ethnography of magic. One must follow where these ideas lead when they are translated into experimental data, communicated as new theories, or encoded as technical systems that can drive other processes. This is not to say, as strong-program advocates might say, that science is nothing more than scientists’ social construction of reality. Rather like sorcery and animism, scientific knowledge also makes the world we live in by making connections.
Latour’s bypass of the dilemmas of earlier paradigms in the sociology of science draws on an alternative, pragmatist epistemology: Truth is what works. Imagine that you’re walking in the woods and you see a bear. What happens? You run in fear. But what comes first? Do you run because you feel fear, or do you feel fear because you are running? It could be either and on some level the feeling and the running are one and the same (James 1890, II:451). We want to assume that there is an objective reality that we can know by observing it. We want to assume that there are real, natural causes which exist independently of their effects. So after you escape from the bear, you might say “I saw a bear and got scared, so I ran. I ran from the bear because I was afraid.” An alternative theory of truth would say that knowledge claims are true because they have practical impact. It is just as true to say “I saw a bear and I ran. It was scary running away from that bear.” You don’t need to posit an objective fact—people have emotional minds that can experience fear—to explain why you ran. (For similar reasons, James also argues that “God is real since he produces real effects” (James [1902] 1985, 517). We don’t need to prove the existence of God; God exists in religious experience.) Sorcery is real because it animates social life. Science is real because it can be part of a larger network that makes the world go round. If Kuhn is right, then everything proven in a lab experiment will eventually be disproven by new experiments designed in new paradigms. But, for now, they are true enough; they work. This doesn’t mean that scientific progress is cumulative or that magical thinking is a feeble effort to be a scientist. It just means that knowledge is in the doing, specifically the chains of inscription, mediation, translation, and blackboxing that build larger networks. To understand the science–society nexus we need to follow scientists into and out of the lab.
Keywords
black box, inscription, translation, Janus-face, network, agency, following
Learning outcomes
- Understand why following is a fundamental shift in orientation toward sociological explanation.
- Be familiar with the central ideas underlying the concept of an actor-network and understand their roots in ethnographic studies of laboratory science.
- Be aware of the main differences between actor-networks and social systems as alternative analytic frames for understanding science as a social activity.