Comments on: Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » 2006 Highlights

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:20:00 +0000

[...] Anthropology of the Spirit: “everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit.” What is good anthropological writing?: “Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical.” The Invention of the World: Islam in the West: “the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated” Found Mag meets Savage Minds: “Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship.” World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World: “In my last post, I described my ‘anti-teaching’ philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the ‘World Simulation.’” Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives: “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Reading circle: let’s do Friction: This page archives all of our posts from this summer’s discussion of Tsing’s popular experimental ethnography, Friction. The American Anthropological Association’s lobbying against open acess is so, so misguided: “In other words, in order for publishers to argue that it will become unprofitable for them to run a journal because of competition from open access repositories, they must argue that they provide very little value to a journal as a product.” 30 Days of Cinétrance: “Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences.” In the Flesh in the Museum: “From the first European contact with the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere onward, Indians had been exhibited in royal courts, traveling shows, circuses, and world fairs and expositions.” Junking the Nature/Culture Divide: “Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being.” Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday: “Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place.” Conspiracy Theory and Social Theory: “in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory” Is motherhood natural?: “Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is.” Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 1: “’Political society’ is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.” You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0: “an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.” [...]

By: Matt S

Matt S — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:22:05 +0000

To ckelty, Latour also has commented that his version of ANT is method not a theory, so you are not alone in your view.

To Doyle, You must read this book. In it you will find Latour points out that the networks you described in your comment have nothing to do with actor-network theory. One of his main motiviations for writing this particular volume is to clear up the mistaken view that he is talking about what we conventionally call a network. Indeed, ANT may cover ground that may be described using conventional ideas of network, but these kinds of network in no way define or circumscribe ANT.
Matt

By: ckelty

ckelty — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:35:10 +0000

I’m glad this book is appealing. Most of the time I find myself using the term “deeply troubling” to describe it… not in the sense of being wrong or unreadable, but in the sense that one says of the slightly psychotic actions of a teenager that they are deeply troubling. I’m not sure what he will do next.

I’ve only ever been able to read (and teach) latour as a methodological innovator–not as a theorist. Despite the name “actor-network theory” i’m adamant that it is a method, not a theory. Science in action was a handbook, in this sense, but a handbook that required its users be willing to give up some fairly sacred beliefs about the way science and epistemology are supposed to work–but if you do so, then the method can yield really creative and liberating fieldwork and follow connections. I’m not sure whether Re-Assembling the Social will have the same effect. It’s not quite as accessible and not quite as much fun–and there are a lot of straw men cluttering up the arguments–but in the end I think it reads best when read as a response to a lifetime of trying to teach students to do research in a novel way.

I wonder whether people find him troubling because the method doesn’t imply any theory. I wonder whether this is part of his appeal too… that the method is so open ended as to provide people with a liberating way to think and theorize.

By: Doyle Saylor

Doyle Saylor — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:21:57 +0000

One can understand this differently. Framing is a human perceptual consciousness mostly tied to a spot in which the human is active. So that the room, or street, or other places hold together in a consistent way.

Our tools of communication really don’t work so well around that premise stated above. One could see how say Google Earth allows a more substantial media representation of ‘context’ or the properties of being in a local space matters.

Let me say this in the context of a large state like the U.S., the economy runs on the efficiency of how communications allow people in the U.S. to interconnect. For example using GPS drivers are alerted to traffic snarls which makes office workers get to work on time and saves money.

Local information integrated into the large scale network properties of society such as what Google provides are likely to offer ‘context’ as an automated rather than a largely handicraft like local context now familiar to people in the city.
thanks,
Doyle