Reassembling The Social eBook

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist, known for his studies of science, technology, and society; he proposed a "symmetrical anthropology" of modernity in order to methodologically approximate ethnographies carried out in so-called traditional societies and those undertaken in places of scientific production, such as laboratories. Latour also proposed a symmetrical description of the modes of action of human and non-human beings in the composition of the world – which made him a recognized ecological thinker. We have never been modern. An essay on symmetrical anthropology. (1991) presents an ethnographic approach to scientific practices that allows the author to formulate critiques of the divisions between nature and culture, individual and society, subject and object, rationality and power, science and society – fundamental to official modern thought. However, ethnography within the context of scientific production reveals how these oppositions do not hold up in everyday practices, which Latour characterizes as "the unofficial character" of modernity. In his well-known manifesto, he argued that anthropology could dissolve the division between the "moderns" and the "others" by turning to the "center," to the places where authority, truth, and scientific facts are managed.