BRUNO LATOUR

Is there an ANT at the beginning of ANThropology? A few responses to the subject matter of the collection
It is very kind of the editors of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale to have asked for my feedback on the conversation they started about the relevance of my work for anthropologists. Although it needs no exertion of mind to realise that I am an amateur in this eld, they had the generosity of assembling this symposium. The question is to decide whether the ANT, that is actor-network theory, creeping at the beginning of ANThropology, is a welcome novelty or another, slightly more trendy way to do what anthropologists have always done. There are two ways to answer this question: one is empirical, the other is methodological. Unfortunately, in the few lines that follow I will concentrate only on the latter, although I would have loved to get into Ugandan latrines, the Turkish tobacco trade, the shaman politics of the Maskoy people, or to discuss the Dutch view on colonial witchcraft and Danish pigs and piglets, without forgetting doors and windows this curious assemblage being itself a good sign that ANT is a sheer prolongation of the ethnologists love for inquiry. As a devoted pragmatist, the only way to test a concept is to decide whether it allows one to make a difference in the registration of experience or not. As a rule, the empirical ANT fares much better when compared with other theories or methods for solving the impossible conundrums of the deep questions of the epistemology of the social sciences. Still let me answer, if I can, a few of the worries the authors rightly have. An important critique, made by several contributors, bears on the very essence of anthropology, that is, on the relative balance every researcher has to strike between universality and particularities. The critique is that by pretending to do an anthropology of the Moderns (a terribly vague term, I agree), the old divide between Us and Them would be reinforced. And that this is especially true of the Inquiry on Modes of Existence (AIME) just launched. Although the authors recognise that by claiming that we have never been modern, the we is redistributed, they feel that there is something dangerous in essentialising again the Modern by pretending that an inquiry may dene them, maybe better than before, but still with the same programme (of keeping up the divide?). This critique is linked to two other themes, that of an ontological turn in anthropology and the shift from a scientic to a diplomatic denition of the discipline. All of this is summarised in the introduction: As eldworking ethnographers, we are uncomfortable with the way the ontological turn seems to side-track the notion of a shared humanity. My difculty with this critique is that it seems to me that the very contribution of ANT and Science Studies to the eld is to have opened up simultaneously the notion of shared humanity and of the universality of science. So the very denition of what it is
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to compare by using the notion of similarity the universality of science and of difference the multiplicity of the symbolic ways of relating to this stable bedrock is what has been reopened by the notion of networks and entanglement. The authors are right to say that this relational denition of cultures has always been present in anthropology (this is why, when I have to choose, I much prefer to be called an anthropologist than a philosopher or a sociologist). But I still believe that as long as this relational and network-like denition is not extended to the hard facts of science, the old dualism reconvenes at once. To sum up: there is no topic that is claried by using the notion of modern or modernity and the task of comparing encounters with others needs to move beyond such shibboleths. The point I insist upon is that the very way we think of what constitutes a similarity and a difference is modied once the base line used until now universal nature known by a scientic voice from nowhere has vanished. It is precisely because the base line of modernity has disappeared that I use the word diplomacy to reopen the task of comparing encounters with others without the usual standards. The complete transformation of that comparative game might not be felt as strongly in a social anthropology setting (where everyone might agree about what the social is made of) but my experience of forty years (since my rst studies in Abidjan all the way to the mapping of scientic controversies today) is that the dualism Nature/Society still organizes much of the way we document encounters with the others. So I see the task of ANT as having opened the scene where it was possible to de-exoticise simultaneously those who said they were modern and those who were thought not to be modern. I am delighted to learn that this move is now irreversible and in a way pass (and I see this of course in Descolas work), but every time I discuss these issues with a physical anthropologist or with a physical economist or a physical geographer, I see this dualism in place exactly as it was when I began. So I still believe that there is a long way to go before desocialising social anthropology to the point where it can associate freely with all sorts of other entities. Or, more perversely, people think the dualism has been overcome because it has been turned into a dialectic version, what Roger Sansi herein calls the hyphenated view of Nature/Culture, attributing this insistence on the hyphen to me This hyphenisation of nature-culture is a central example of the ambiguities of Latours work, in regards to the wider question of hybridity. The very notion of hybrid, as an ambiguous, sterile mixture of two radically different and irreducible, preexiting entities, ultimately runs against the very argument that Latour is making. Well indeed it runs against my argument! I have always done exactly the opposite, the ght against the dialectic having occupied much of my time. I agree that the word hybrid is a bad genetic metaphor and I have stopped using it. But if this was the limit of We have never been modern, where I made too much use of it, it had already disappeared from Politics of Nature for the reason underlined by Sansi. And of course, it makes no sense anymore in the framework of AIME: if hybrids connote the mixing up of two genealogies, where would we go with the genealogy of fteen (fteen being the provisional number of modes recognised as of now in our little inquiry). Just last week, after a lecture to anthropologists of health and medicine, where I had made again the point that ontological pluralism could shift us out of the Nature/Culture dualism, a member of the audience asked me how I articulated the subjective and the objective dimension of what I had said. After a sigh, I could only answer I dont. Articulation with two dimensions is not a way to do eld work. But this theoretical point has to be decided on empirical ground only: lets count how many dimensions people
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handle really when they say that of course they accept the multiplicity of I am in their description of eld work. My experience is that, when cornered, most observers, especially those trained to believe that phenomenology has done away with the old dichotomy, are still never going beyond two. And this is generous, since, most of the time, this two means actually one This is why the ontological turn seems to me so important for pushing anthropology out of the Us and Them paradigm (I am amused to see that people think that this is what I am doing). I cannot get into this fully (there has been a whole meeting on this in Cerisy la Salle in July of this year organised by Descolas laboratory), but the point can be made in the same way as for the question of universality and difference. There is of course a danger in using ontology, the danger of looking for substance instead of practice and philosophising instead of documenting, but ontological pluralism is the only way, right now, to move beyond two (or one) in registering the experience we have of the other (and the other is not the other human but otherness to the full). That is the AIME project. ANT was a great way to get rid of dualisms and of Us and Them, but as long as you cannot multiply the number of connectors that generate the networks (what could be called modes of extension as well as modes of existence), the danger is that, at the end of the day, youll be back to a monochrome description a network maybe, but one that looks much like a conceptual painting from the 1990s. To free anthropology from its obsession with the symbolic, my advice is that you need an extra dose of ontology. And of course we all know that concepts are drugs: they have to be dosed. Too much may kill the patient. A very nice way to prove that those who contradict me are not completely cured of that dualism is that they keep contrasting empirical accounts and imagination while worrying that the result of the ANT creeping into anthropology would be a focus on mere description. As stated in the introduction: Latour would probably dismiss this concern by pointing out the difference between scientic and literary/philosophical projects: the scientist should restrict herself to the task of nding ways to approach empirical realities as close as she can, not to celebrate her authorship. I love this idea of restriction! How would you approach empirical realities without all the unrestricted resources of imagination is beyond me. Jeremy Lecomte, raising the question of the closure of an ANT study (a source apparently of deep anguish), makes the opposing point that my answer to this question of closure is only textual. Even Brassier is brought in to make the point that my adhesion to textualism is a proof that I present the urbane face of post-Modern irrationalism. Irrationalism under the pen of someone who believes that science should be literally nowhere is hard to swallow. If the epistemology of the social sciences have to resort to Brassier (not an author known for his eld work abilities), this is another proof that the reign of the fact/value distinction (or its avatar mere description versus imagination and action) is not nished. One of the great advantages of science studies, I would have thought, is to have freed the social sciences, and anthropology especially, of their paralysing belief in a form of scientic discourse superior to theirs. And this freedom has nothing to do with a postmodern indifference to objectivity or with deconstruction. On the contrary. The virtue of eld work is to have immensely increased the constraints for objectivity not decreased them. Every ethnographer knows that in his or her bones (and so do those physical anthropologists who study bones!). To add the constraint of writing well; then that of ontological pluralism; then the harsh requirement of diplomacy (to address those we studied in their own language which is the goal of AIME) strikes me as the
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continuation of what are the most traditional virtues of anthropology. So to conclude, yes, I am more than happy to say nothing more than what anthropologists have always done. Then I could count as being one of them without the nasty feeling of being in the discipline under false pretences.

Bruno Latour Sciences Po 27 rue St Guillaume 75007 Paris, France bruno.latour@sciences-po.fr Assistant: biljana.jankovic@sciences-po.fr

2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.