Please note, I am not saying that “vulnerability” is wrong. I am trying to figure out what it brings to the table when we discuss these kinds of issues. I am treating this as an ethnographic problem, like trying to sort out the differences as well as the overlaps between shen (Chinese) and kami(Japanese) and the multiple senses of the English “God.”

I find myself musing around the various suggestions found in such phrases as “vulnerable position,” “vulnerable population,” “vulnerable city,” and “vulnerable self and thinking about vulnerability to external factors relates to vulnerability to internal factors, which are seen as weakness or betrayal. Don’t know where this is going yet, but I’d like to hear more of what you are thinking.

@eddie thanks for talking about lu hsun. let me know about some of your work on language and biodiversity in sichuan; i’m more or less swimming with problems of both right now (literally, because one of the current problems talked about most in a’tolan is the decline of the ocean fishery). you can always email me

@john i suspect that ethnographers might have something to learn from social workers and psychologists on this score

vulnerability also in terms of how we pull experience into the framework of conversations in the discipline. why this conversation and not some other one? does it / should it just give me the willies a little when i’ve created a piece of “data” which i can transpose into different arguments–something very different than my experience because it is relatively stable and can be moved from context to context? for all of the ink that’s been spilled about the fieldworker’s biography we actually see very little about these sorts of critical choices and constructions. what would making that visible mean?

vulnerability, as well in terms of our choice of audience. one of my recent projects has been thinking about some combination of concerts and songwriting workshops as a form–somewhat like ethnographic film, but of course a bit distant from recognized conventions of anthropology. working on this project has me asking more about how we might make our work more available, which is also a question of vulnerability.

those are just a few of my hunches. (and @al) what i’m really advocating by opening the latour box is a painstaking reflexive attention to how we actually _work_ and not just to _texts_. i think that we can agree that the way we compose the networks that we call “a world” does differ according to specific social practices. that sounds like a basic anthropological position to me. as for our own vulnerability, i also would argue that these practices of composition deserve our attention, both “in the field” and “in the office”

You present yourself as someone who knows what is real and describes any other view as insane.

Not any other view – just the view that in order to explain human social activity we have to abandon the idea that there is a single real world outside of our heads, as Latour proposes. When did that become a realistic possibility for anyone to accept? How did that become so mainstream that it is represented at one of the best universities in the world? Again, if it’s because I’m missing something, I really want to know, but everyone seems to know already that the idea isn’t defensible. Does no one have the courage of their convictions?

I’m aware that I argue vehemently, but that’s because if I believe something, I make sure I have a good reason for it. And it seems to me as if it’s a peculiarity of anthropology to avoid confrontation, to always try to reconcile ideas, even the worst of them, with one another, and to privilege the feelings of others over attempts to find out the truth, even when the feelings are petty and the truth of considerable importance. I just like to hope that the people with whom I am talking don’t have excessively fragile egos. It isn’t as if I spend my time insulting other people – I haven’t even insulted Latour, in fact. Is everyone so afraid of accusations of dogmatism that they won’t even defend the ideas that they have turned into their livelihoods? And does no one else find this bizarre?

DJ, please extend this thought. What interesting vulnerabilities do you see in this moment of translation?

Now, I can almost hear you roaring, “I am not here to make friends and influence people. I am looking for the truth.” Given the interactions in which we have participated here, I would certainly believe that. The trouble is, in my case, it sounds too much like my dad, a deeply religious man for whom the world was black and white and he knew absolutely which side he was on. That may not be a factual description of you. It is absolutely a factual description of the way you come across to me—and I, too, see myself as a defender of science in an age of unreason.

My apologies for the way the comments have gone, by the way. On this site you can never assume that the discussion will continue around you, for whatever reason, so I’m sorry for the diversion.

i have no desire for “defending” latour against dogmatists; however, i should give my reason for making a reference to him (albeit a reference that unfolded into a very uninteresting, and from the standpoint of my post, irrelevant, argument ). my reference was very limited: latour, say what one will about his programmatic arguments, describes in great detail the particular vulnerability of technologies intended to make us act rightly (such as certain kinds of keys, speed bumps, or automatic seat belts) and the vulnerability of data as transferred and translated into the world of arguments about facts. i merely intended to say, “what if we focused on the moment of translation / mediation of my experience, with its own set of vulnerabilities, from ethnographic experience into the terms of anthropological knowledge? we might see a different set of vulnerabilities, and indeed very interesting ones, at that moment.” this sort of question, i think, is better than rather obvious critiques of ethnographic authority or anthropological writing. these vulnerabilities may not, as it turns out, require an autobiographical fixation–even if our posing the question is reflexive. so what the post was asking was how we might explore ethnographic vulnerability

So it’s not so much that I want a defense of Latour, because that is probably impossible. It’s that I want a defense of the ideas that have gained currency in social science, and especially the ideas in Reassembling the Social that have become commonly cited by academics and commonly found on course reading lists. And the reason I want a defense is because these ideas are really dumb.

But of course these same considerations apply to those who say that they “apply” Latour, which too often means a cookie cutter approach to anecdotes filled with cherry-picked {mis}information instead of pursuing the questions he raises with rigorous, independent thought. The later Latour appears’ at least on the basis of that Wikipedia article, to be as disturbed as you are about use of ideas about social construction and the impossibility of definitive proof to deny validity to science and reducing scientific thinking to a par with magical thinking in religion, politics, etc.

So, I ask again, which Latour would you like to see defended? And what is the point of demanding a defense?l