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Bruno Latour (1947)

Ilana Gershon

Introduction Bruno Latour is one of the leading gures in an approach ambivalently called Actor-Network Theory (ANT).1 Actor-Network Theory originally was developed by sociologists of science in response to methodological and theoretical dilemmas these scholars encountered as they explored how scientists produced and circulated scientic facts. ANT has transcended its science and technology studies origins and is now deployed by scholars in anthropology, geography, economics, organisational studies, history, literature, media studies and other disciplines. Other theorists who have played a signicant role in the development of ANT are Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon, Donna Haraway, John Law, Anne Marie Mol, Michel Serres and Susan Leigh Star. In Latours words: I am from the typical French provincial bourgeoisie, from Burgundy where my family has produced wine for generations, and my only ambition is that people would say I read a Latour 1992, with the same pleasure as they would say, I drank a Latour 1992!2 He was trained as a philosopher at the University of Tours, but began to be interested in science studies during his military service in Cote dIvoire. There, he was encouraged to pursue a sociological project on how the French export their industrial education to their former colony, Cote dIvoire, by ORSTOM (Institut franais de recherche scientique pour le dveloppement en coopration). He was asked to focus on why African executives appeared to have such difculties adapting to modern industrial 161

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life. The only form of explanation available at that time in the sociological and anthropological literature would have compelled Latour to argue that Africans simply had a different mentality, that their mental capacities were fundamentally different from that of Europeans. Latour rejected this style of explanation, especially when he turned to the education system in place in Cote dIvoire. He noticed that the French teachers often required African students to diagram engines before they were ever shown an actual engine. They were, understandably, not terribly adept at imagining engines based only on these black-and-white diagrams, which led French educators to suspect that African students lacked the capacity to visualise objects in three dimensions.3 Latour argued that it was the schools techniques for circulating knowledge, not the African students mental capacities, that was causing the problems. Even in his rst post-doctoral research, Latour focused on how one creates and relates to an elite form of knowledge, a concern that he has pursued since. Early Ethnographies of Science Studies While Latour was strongly inuenced by anthropology during his time in Cote dIvoire, and in particular his conversations with anthropologist Marc Aug (then director of ORSTROM), when he returned to France he did not continue studying non-Western cultures. Instead, in 1973, he met Roger Guillemin, a neuroendocrinologist working at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, who granted Latour complete access to his laboratory. Latour spent two years at the Salk Institute, participating in and observing the daily routines of Guillemins laboratory. At the time, he thought he might be observing what is often described as normal science, the day-to-day operations of a scientic laboratory. Yet what he was in fact observing was Guillemin and Schallys competition to isolate the peptide TRF(H), which occurred during his stay. They jointly received the Nobel Prize in medicine two years later, in 1977, for this discovery. Latour wrote an account of this discovery with Steve Woolgar, a sociologist of science, in Laboratory Life, which was the rst ethnographic study of a laboratory. In this account, Latour and Woolgar focus on how TRF(H) is produced as a scientic fact, focusing on citation practices, and, in particular, how experimental actions are transformed into various forms of inscriptions that circulate in patterned ways. 162

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This study was Latours rst venture into science studies. Upon returning to France, Latour began to carve out a space for science and technology studies, which had no institutional backing in the French academic system at the time. Along with Michel Callon and John Law, he began to develop the methodological and philosophical armature of ANT, summarised below. In addition to various theoretical books on the contours of ANT,4 he has written The Pasteurization of France, a historical exploration of how Pasteurs success was fashioned by reguring various networks. He has also authored Aramis, an account of the failure of a personal rapid transit system in Paris, and Politics of Nature, a treatise on how environmental movements could, but are not, transforming assumptions about the connections between nature and society. Actor-Network Theory When Latour gives an account of his theoretical perspective he often starts by explaining the dichotomies he rejects, in part because of his unease about his work being turned into a theoretical movement. To clear an analytical space, he rejects dichotomies between self/other, material/semiotic, nature/culture, agency/structure, knowledge/power, active/passive, human/non-human, and truth/ falsehood. By rejecting these dualisms, Latour presumes that everything and everyone is profoundly relational that entities only have qualities, attributes or form as a result of their relationships with other entities. This is a familiar claim for people who analyse how words acquire meanings. One can not attribute meaning to the word hat without presuming distinctions in sound (hat versus cat, sat and mat), as well as distinctions in reference (hat versus cap, shirt; hair and wool). Hat exists as a word with meaning because it exists in a web of oppositional relationships to other words and other referents. Latour takes this a couple of steps further, and suggests that a hat condenses historical relationships of manufacture (How was the material made? How did someone learn the necessary skills to operate the tools to make the hat? From when did the tools for hat-making come?), relationships of exchange (what money, trucks, roads, stores, traders had to exist to move the hat from hat-maker to hat-purchaser?), relationships of use (What other hats are possible? When does one wear this particular hat? What signs of wear will this hat have over time because of how the shape of the head and this hat interact?) and so on. 163

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Hats, people, trains, everything in the world condenses a specic set of heterogeneous relationships, and then interacts with other condensations of different sets of heterogeneous relationships. Actors are condensed bits of a network; networks are fashioned through the interactions of actors. The hyphen in Actor-Network Theory is a trickster placeholder, separating what really can only be spoken in the same breath, representing the constant ow between these two nouns. Actor-Network Theory is fundamentally a theory of relationality, with the analytical task of guring how these relationships condense in various people and objects. This radical commitment to relationality has four major conceptual consequences. First, everyone and everything contributes to how interactions take place in this sense, microbes are participants, or actants, as much as people. Latour coined the term actant to describe anything that has agency (and for Latour, everything does). ANT scholars are unwilling to attribute agency only to humans. Rather, every node in the network, or web of relationships, shapes the ways in which interactions in the network will occur, be the node a microbe, a sheep, a test tube or a biologist. In Pasteurization of France, Latour describes how Louis Pasteurs success hinged on his ability to turn microbes into a very particular type of ally. Microbes were invisible until Pasteurs techniques of isolating and growing bacteria made them visible. Outside of the laboratory, microbes mixed with other beings willy-nilly, not only invisible to the human eye but so intricately entangled with other life that they were difcult to isolate. Pasteur, however, removed them from their concealing context. He took them into isolated spaces petri dishes where he provided them with a feast that encouraged them to multiply until they betrayed their existence and became visible to the human eye (and hence potentially destructible). For Pasteur to turn microbes into allies that helped build his reputation, he had to have some knowledge of how the microbes act on the world. He had to nd some way to isolate them as agents, and doing so required complicity with what is peculiar to the microbes appetites and ways of navigating the world. Because Latour wants to distribute agency as broadly as possible as an initial premise, he must then address the question: what labour goes in to allocating responsibility and agency only to some actants and not to others? Part of the work of being an Actor-Network theorist is to gure out why people in a particular context will attribute responsibility and agency to certain actants in a context 164

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and not others. When do mobile phones actively seem to thwart what one attempts to do, and when do these mobile phones appear to be seamless extensions of ones body? When are the microbes understood to act, and when Pasteur? The analyst uses variants of this question to map out the power relationships enacted in a given context. In practice, this means that the ANT analyst refuses to determine who the relevant actors are before beginning analysis. Instead, one pays careful attention to how people and objects interact, and how their interactions unfold. By doing so, Latour is able to explore what social practices contribute to the labours of division that produce the aforementioned dualisms, dualisms that often seem to dominate scientic and other contexts. The second consequence is that not all actants are the same, and it is important to pay attention to the historical and material bases for these differences. In part, the differences are a result of the unique social and historical trajectories that shape the people and objects that comprise a network. Yet as importantly, the differences lie in the forms that the actants have the microbe is a different actant than the sheep because of the differences in each actants physicality. The form in which someone or something exists in the world matters that is, matter really matters. Ones material form helps determine connections to others in a network: the physical simultaneously shapes and limits the ways in which interactions can occur and unfold. Latour describes how European hotel keys are designed to affect how their customers will store them. Hotel managers want their customers to leave room keys at the hotel lobby to prevent their hotel keys from wandering through the city in neglectful and forgetful hotel guests pockets. Simply posting a sign encouraging guests to leave their keys turns out not to be effective. So an innovator encouraged hotel managers to tie a heavy weight to the key. Customers suddenly become only too happy to rid themselves of this annoying object which makes their pockets bulge and weighs down their handbags: they go to the front desk on their own accord to get rid of it. Where the sign, the inscription, the imperative, discipline, or moral obligation all failed, the hotel manager, the innovator, and the metal weight succeeded.5 Where a hotel key should be placed is a social assumption; hotels in other countries have taken to creating disposable and recodable keys as those hotel managers anticipate careless and forgetful hotel guests. Matter condenses social assumptions, and thus the material limitations shaping how networks form are also always social. It is in this 165

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sense that Latour rejects the dualisms of the material/semiotic or technology/society. Third, actor-network theory insists that performance creates the relations and the objects/people/actants constituted by these relationships. Networks and actors do not exist prior to performance but are constituted by performance. Sometimes particular actants become visible only when others can observe them clearly contributing to a network. As I mentioned, Latour talks about how important it became for Pasteur to be able to isolate microbes. He removed them from one network lled with farmers, soil and animals. He then put the microbes into sterilised dishes, into contexts that Pasteur could control to a relatively high degree. When Pasteur isolated microbes, making them visible to the human eye, he also made visible that microbes were in a relationship with other objects. Only when the agency of the microbe became visible could one say that the microbe exists. After Pasteur made the microbes visible, they existed in a form that people could interpret in retrospect as timeless; only after 1864 did the microbe always exist. If all relationships fundamentally emerge out of performance, then for Latour everything and everyone is uncertain. Relations and qualities are in principle reversible. In this sense, performance is key to actor-network theory, in that durability only exists because something is repeatedly performed in familiar, patterned ways. In science, this takes on a peculiar form, since what scientists seek to do is create stable referents to objects that can be moved from context to context (from test tube to graph) and back again. No matter the medium in which something is represented, it is always supposed to be traceable; one is always supposed to be able to trace precisely the labour that went into producing a graph. In Pandoras Hope, Latour describes how scientists collect and circulate soil samples from the Brazilian rainforest. Latour is interested in how the meaning of soil samples is made stable. He explores how certain signs keep their referents the same as they move from context to context. To understand this process, Latour follows a team of scientists as they take soil samples in the Brazilian forest. He explores in great detail how they remove bits of soil, recording each location with enough markers so that ideally anyone could return to that site and locate from where the soil was removed. The information on the soil is then transformed into numerical data, again through techniques that should allow anyone to read the information back into the soil samples. As the scientists bring the soil 166

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and its descriptions into each new context, they attempt to ensure that the referents can be traced through each context back to the original location in the Brazilian forest. In analysing this example, Latour argues that scientists construct reversible indexicalities, dening indexicalities as Pericean signs that point to aspects of a context or state of affairs. According to Latour, for signs to be able to represent truth in a scientic network, the referents must exist as a stable chain that point in both directions as the referents move between contexts. He argues: For this network to begin to lie for it to cease to refer it is sufcient to interrupt its expansion at either end, to stop providing for it, to suspend its funding, or to break it at any other point.6 To keep a scientic network from producing scientic facts, all one must do is nd a way to keep the scientic inscriptions from referring backwards through all the previous contexts, or pointing forwards to other recontextualised referents. In short, what is important for Latour is recognising the labour that goes into constructing reversible indexicalities. If instability is the given condition, one must labour to create consistency and coherence. For Latour, durability is always an achievement and needs to be analysed as such. One of his primary analytical questions is: how are actants performed and how do they perform themselves into relations that are relatively stable? This focus on durability shapes his theoretical lens for understanding power relationships, which from this perspective become indistinguishable from sustaining relations that last. Fourth, not all actants are equal. Every actant is heterogeneous, condensing disparate relationships. As a result, not all heterogeneous actants have the same abilities to navigate networks or to move between different networks. In his study of Pasteur, Latour points out that Pasteur was able to use the laboratory to cross many networks. Farmers and sheep were not so privileged. Pasteur affected the network between farmers, sheep and microbes to such a degree that if farmers wanted to change the ways the anthrax microbe was affecting their sheep they had to interact with Pasteur and his laboratory. Farmers were restricted to their network in a way that Pasteur, as a scientist interacting with politicians, public hygienists and military physicians, was not. Some actants are privileged in particular networks, and able to cross networks, others are not. This is another way in which ANT can make power relations visible, by addressing the costs of particular networks for the actants navigating them. 167

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Ilana Gershon

Towards a Typology of Actants Focusing on how actants circulate within a network draws attention to the ways certain actants move within and between networks. In the course of his work, Latour has called attention to three ways actants can engage with networks that reveal how they circulate as intermediaries or mediators, immutable mobiles and black boxes. In Re-Assembling the Social, Latour discusses the distinction between intermediaries and mediators in terms of how actants can have a network circulate through them. Intermediaries are actants who do not recongure the network at all as it ows through them. They are transparent, able to transmit without leaving traces of their presence. While Latour suggests that many people in different networks believe intermediaries exist, Latour himself is sceptical. Instead, he argues that every node in a network is a mediator, contributing and shaping the networks as networks ow through each node. Mediators always affect whatever ows through them or whatever network to which they contribute. For Latour, networks are chains of mediators, in which knowledge and networks alter a little through every node through which they ow. As Latour began to specify precisely how mediators circulate and affect circulation, he came up with two other types of actants: immutable mobiles and black boxes. Immutable mobiles are, for Latour, actants that remain stable enough to retain their shape or conguration as they circulate through and across networks. Or, put another way, these are actants that can be reproduced throughout a network without being altered (examples include maps, photographs and graphs). Many actants as they circulate seem unstable. Farmers saw anthrax as a dangerous disease with unpredictable causes. Pasteur saw anthrax as a puzzle, potentially but not necessarily isolatable. Sheep experienced anthrax as death, swift and painful. It was not until Pasteurs successful laboratory trials that anthrax could be described through various techniques of inscription. Only after Pasteur found ways to inscribe anthraxs form and circulate these inscriptions did anthrax become an immutable mobile as a deadly bacteria. Through depictions which were reproducible, anthrax stabilised, not only in the context of the lab. Its form stabilised initially throughout Pasteurs network, then across other networks as well. Immutable mobiles circulate with a high degree of stability, being resistant to many (not all) of the transformations with which networks regure the actants that condense them. 168

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A different type of actant, a black box stands for and condenses an actively engaged and complex network. This is a particularly useful concept for analysing how scientic practices move through a network. I turn to how proofs circulate in mathematics as an example. First, a relatively famous mathematician, a geometer, suggests a conjecture something that the geometer thinks is likely to be true and may lead to further interesting mathematics. Because this mathematician is relatively well known, other geometers pay attention to this conjecture, which has perhaps been introduced to a group of her closest mathematical colleagues at a conferences problem session (a session where people propose mathematical problems for others to solve) funded by the US National Science Foundation. Several mathematicians try on and off to prove this conjecture to no avail. Seventeen years go by, proving that this conjecture is widely understood to be difcult skilled people have tried and failed. Certain mathematics could be done, if only this conjecture were proven. This conjecture is very much an active part of a lively network. Then a young geometer, with a penchant for talking to scholars in many branches of mathematics, notices in conversation that a technique some topologists have known about for years could be used to prove this conjecture. After the illuminating chat, he goes to a nearby coffee shop and outlines the proof, vindicating yet again the saying that mathematicians are machines for turning caffeine into theorems. He spends the next six months writing the proof and giving talks about it in conferences and at various mathematics departments his theorems have begun to circulate. He posts the paper on the ArXiv, a website for distributing pre-reviewed scientic articles, then submits the paper to a journal. Once the paper is reviewed by a fellow geometer and accepted to the journal, the most signicant theorem in the paper gains the authors name, in part because it solved a seventeen-year-old conjecture Fishers theorem. People stop reading the paper with the theorem, and Fisher stops speaking about the proof at conferences. Fishers theorem has become black boxed. The name Fishers theorem is now a dense node and a shorthand that stands for and conceals all the complex networks that contributed to the theorems existence and circulation. Latours initial theoretical intervention was to provide the armature for thinking about how truths and facts are constructed, both through scientic practice and elsewhere. The ANT perspective turns to knowledge circulation as the process through which the social construction of truths takes place. Information becomes facts 169

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by travelling through networks in patterned ways that imbue the piece of knowledge with authority and relevance. Latour and other ANT scholars discuss how scientists have used public demonstrations, citations, styles of publication, among other strategies, to circulate information as facts.7 The methodological question is to determine how a particular network circulates information as fact or truth, which requires analysing the structures of a network as well as how a network allocates authority and certainty. The ANT perspective insists that circulation is at the heart of how the network functions. As a consequence, to understand how information comes to be interpreted as facts entails understanding the processes of circulation underpinning how facts are made. Latour argues that all beings and objects, whether constructed as volitional or not, are actants that actively contribute to the network. This involves refusing to take people, animals and objects as simply standing for particular symbolic meanings or information, but rather viewing all as structuring engagements in their own right. The Usefulness of Rejecting Dualisms While rejecting dualisms such as subject/object opens the door to new perspectives on how actants inuence ows of knowledge, Latour has also explored what other analytical possibilities are enabled, by refusing to adopt dualisms. Latours accounts of how to analyse the ways people produce dualisms from a theoretical standpoint that rejects dualisms has proven especially inuential in other elds. In this section, as an example, I discuss Latours take on a particular dualism the local/global divide and then turn to Latours approach to interpreting people who are prone to incorporating dualisms in their visions of the world. Latour points out that accepting the local/global dichotomy involves taking rather too seriously the effects of an actor-network, especially when the local is taken to be a specic bounded place often lled with face-to-face interactions and the global is the unlocatable sum of all these bounded contexts. From an ANTs perspective, it is perhaps easier to dismiss quickly the illusion of the global. After all, the global evokes precisely the type of generalisation that Latour argues against, a generality devoid of materiality and specic actants producing the global. The minute one begins to turn to those actants who produce the global all that goes into the World Bank or the United Nations the particularities of the ways that 170

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specic actor-networks create the effect of globality undercuts any claims to truly being global. It is precisely these particularities to which Latour recommends ANT scholars pay attention. Thus ANTs methodology is useful for revealing that the global is always already the effect of how a specic and locatable actor-network functions. Yet Latour points out that the local too vanishes when examined through an ANT lens. When one begins to investigate those scenes labelled local, all of a sudden other places, other times and other actants become crucial for this local moment to exist. As Latour points out about a lecture hall, which may seem like a quotidian local site:
If we wanted to project on a standard geographical map the connections established between a lecture hall and all the places that are acting in it at the same time, we would have to draw bushy arrows in order to include, for instance, the forest out of which the desk is coming, the management ofce in charge of classroom planning, the workshop that printed the schedule that helped us nd the room, the janitor that tends the place, and so on. And this would not be some idle exercise, since each of these faraway sites has, in some indispensable way, anticipated and preformatted this hall by transporting, through many different sorts of media, the mass of templates that have made it a suitable local and that are still propping it up.8

Latour continues by discussing how diachronic the local is in fact composed by materials and designs fashioned not only in other places but also at other times. The local is always composed of the results of actions that took place elsewhere and elsewhen, undercutting it as local. Latour explains:
In most situations, actions will already be interfered with by heterogeneous entities that dont have the same local presence, dont come from the same time, are not visible at once, and dont press upon them with the same weight . . . Stretch any given inter-action and, sure enough, it becomes an actor-network.9

For Latour, the local is as much an effect of an actor-network as the global, both sides of the dualisms being misrepresentations or misrecognitions of the historical trajectories that lead to the local or global interactions. While dualisms may distort, many people still invoke them with conviction and dedication when interpreting the world. This raises an interesting question for ANT scholars how best to engage with 171

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all these actants whose interactions in various networks depend upon assuming precisely the dualisms that actor-network theory rejects. Latour tackles this issue in We Have Never Been Modern, where he explores the effects of certain dualisms on how those in the West carve up the world. He argues that people in the West often invoke dualisms to create an analytical tension that they nd particularly compelling. Westerners will distinguish terms from each other traditional/modern, nature/culture, terms that point to actants that have articially been puried and separated from each other. Once this dichotomy has been successfully imposed, Westerners analysis entails the surprise of uncovering this dualism, followed by the additional surprise of its inadequacy. Western thinkers will then try to combine precisely what they themselves distinguished in the rst place.10 A good example of this is Latours slightly ironic use of the term hybrid in We Have Never Been Modern. For Latour, hybridity points to an illusion of combination. The term hybrid as a referent claims to combine two already pure entities, as though there were actants who were not hybrid, precisely the illusion that Latour writes against. In rejecting these analytical moves, Latour advocates that one should embrace every actants mixtures instead of trying continually to purify and recombine. Criticism While some critics of Latour will take on board ANT characterisations that all actors are condensed networks, they still have much to say about how Latour depicts networks. For example, Donna Haraway points out that Latour invokes only a few narrow and suspiciously agonistic narratives to account for how networks emerge. She explains:
The action in science-in-the-making is all trials and feats of strength, amassing of allies, forging of worlds in the strength and numbers of forced allies. All action is agonistic; the creative abstraction is both breathtaking and numbingly conventional. Trials of strength decide whether a representation holds or not. Period. To compete, one must either have a counter laboratory capable of winning in this high-stakes trials of force or give up dreams of making worlds.11

As Haraway argues, this is an impoverished set of narratives to draw upon for understanding alliances and their persuasiveness. Latour does not offer multiple ways of understanding how networks 172

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interact; in his accounts it all revolves around competing shows of strength, with clear-cut and (for Latour) easily discernible successes and failures. Latours simplied set of narratives opens the door to another critique by Susan Leigh Star. In her article, Power Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions, Star delineates how much ones perspective as an advantaged or disadvantaged actant in a network shapes ones understandings of how networks function. She begins by using her own allergy to onions as a point of departure for revealing the exclusion and inequities in some standardised networks. Different networks emerge out of these varied patterned sets of interactions. Some networks privileged actants who were actively excluded or isolated in other networks. Star encourages people to move beyond Latours centre-of-the-network perspective and ask about the exclusions and their prices. Marilyn Strathern, in her article Cutting the Network suggests that Latours focus on how networks expand does not take into account an equally important aspect of networks how they are cut. She argues that networks are often cut or stopped for reasons that have little to do with the intrinsic techniques the network deploys to incorporate others and expand. Instead, networks are often curtailed for external reasons that reveal how power is distributed and enacted, by forces such as law or putative property rights. She discusses how culturally specic concepts of ownership cut networks differently. She suggests that to understand more fully how actants are linked or disconnected from each other, one has to pay attention to two issues. First, one should take into account the epistemological assumptions embedded in network exchanges about how relationships are formed. Second, one must pay attention to the techniques for cutting networks as much as the techniques for expanding networks, especially since disconnections often reveal the relationships of power shaping the network. Lastly, Haraway also criticises Latours focus on those the networks favour. She argues that identity categories are all networkeffects, that class, race, gender are not a priori to but created by networks.12 In Latours analysis, these categories appear as given, as qualities that actants appear to bring to their interactions, rather than emerging from these encounters. Donna Haraway urges Latour and other ANT scholars to be sensitive to how the networks they study have social effects beyond those effects most apparent when one focuses on the production of scientic facts. 173

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Conclusion Latour and Actor-Network Theory in general have become popular outside of the original disciplinary connes of science and technology studies as scholars are increasingly committed to moving beyond the dichotomies of the material versus the social, or agency versus structure. Actor-Network Theory offers a new methodological and theoretical approach to studying how ideas and objects travel, which scholars of democracy, organisations, markets and media have found helpful. In addition, it provides techniques for analyzing the social construction of facts and truth which go beyond studying the discourses shaping what counts as truth. Latour has cleared a space so that scholars can begin asking new questions of topics that have become perhaps a little too familiar. Notes
1. Latour renounced actor-network theory in his article, On Recalling Actor-Network Theory. He has since retracted his rejection in ReAssembling the Social, p. 9. 2. T. Hugh Crawford, An Interview with Bruno Latour, Congurations, 1, 1990, p. 248. 3. Laboratory Life. 4. Science in Action; We Have Never Been Modern; Pandoras Hope; ReAssembling the Social. 5. Bruno Latour, Technology Is Society Made Durable, in John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 104. 6. Pandoras Hope, p. 76. 7. Laboratory Life; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 355407. 8. Re-Assembling the Social, p. 200. 9. Ibid. p. 202. 10. We Have Never Been Modern, p. 78. 11. Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 34. 12. Ibid. pp. 2348.

Major Works by Latour

Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientic Facts, with Steve Woolgar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986 [1979]).

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Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Re-Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Suggestions for Further Reading

Akrich, Madeline, The De-scription of a Technical Object, in W. A. J. L. Bijker (ed.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 20524. This article discusses the tension between the implied user and actual user in a designed object, which becomes most visible when the object travels across cultural contexts. Callon, Michel, Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 196-229. An early ANT discussion of how even scallops have agency. Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_ OncoMouse (London: Routledge 1997). Chapter 1 offers a good summary of critiques of Latour. Latour, Bruno, On Recalling Actor-Network Theory, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network and After, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 1525. In this article Latour renounces ANT, claiming that all elements of the name, from actor, network to hyphen, are nonsensical. Law John, and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). A collection of articles by ANT scholars. The introduction is a cogent overview of Actor-Network Theory. Leigh Star, Susan, Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions, in John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Power, Technology and the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 2656. Star points out that networks privilege some actants and disadvantage others, even along unlikely lines such as allergies to onions. Leigh Star, Susan and Grieseri James Griesemer, Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in

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Berkeleys Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 19071939, Social Studies of Science, 19, 1989, pp. 387420. This article adds to Bruno Latours various discussions of different kinds of actants, such as the immutable mobile or black boxes. This article suggests that actants can also be boundary objects, which are objects that are underdetermined enough to move easily across networks. Strathern, Marilyn, Cutting the Network, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 1996, pp. 51735. This article offers an engaging critique of Latours focus on network expansion and recruitment using ethnographic examples from the Solomon Islands and US patent history.

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