This Introduction explains Bruno Latour’s symmetric anthropology by analysing his main work We Have Never Been Modern, as all of Latour’s later work on actor network theory is based on the theory of modernity developed in that book.
Latour’s main thesis is that modernity rests on an artificial separation of the human and the nonhuman spheres, and that theories of human societies have excluded the realm of things and animals in their account of human life. Much of what humans do has nothing to do with social interaction, but is a handling of things, using them. Latour shows that these things inform our lives, while we give meaning to these things.
Latour’s main thesis is that modernity rests on an artificial separation of the human and the nonhuman spheres, and that theories of human societies have excluded the realm of things and animals in their account of human life. Much of what humans do has nothing to do with social interaction, but is a handling of things, using them. Latour shows that these things inform our lives, while we give meaning to these things.
