Social Anthropology

This article draws on Latour's ethnography of science, analysis of the Great Divide and call for a symmetrical anthropology, to follow magic's emergence as a modern category. The focus is ethnology in colonial Indonesia. Tracing a practice initially known as , it analyses five successive Dutch texts. Early texts show that could affect Europeans but purify 's effects as either natural or cultural/psychological. In later texts, that translate as magic, references to Europeans, efficacy and substances vanish; is simply a culturally specific belief. Terming practices magic has ontological and political consequences; irreduction offers an alternative to analytic habits that yield magic.

This paper discusses the use of the concept of ‘event’ in Latour's work, in relation to how the term has been used in philosophy and anthropology. My contention is that ultimately, there is a tension between two strands of Latour's work: one more firmly based on history and the event, and another more focused on symmetry, hybridity and diplomacy.

This paper explores the internal architecture of actor‐network theory as much as it explores the way it understands the architecture and geography of the social universe. Moving back and forth between urban studies, sociology and metaphysics, it especially deals with Bruno Latour's problematic relationship with infinite regress.

In this article I aim at questioning the modalities through which international cooperation is promoting the creation of indigenous organisations in Paraguay by reinforcing specific notions of what is political and what is not, and in particular by abiding by the nature‐culture divide. In particular, I argue that it ends up ignoring a variety of indigenous political practices by labelling them as ‘religious’ or not recognising them at all.

Inspired by the studies of Bruno Latour, the article aims to illustrate the ways in which policymaking is being made within a ‘heterogeneous network’ of humans and non‐humans. Through an analysis of a controversy, it argues that the policymaking process is a more complicated and multidimensional process, which cannot be simply comprehended within the framework of predetermined roles and structures. Specifically, the article ethnographically investigates the policymaking practices of the Turkish tobacco regulatory agency, which was established in 2002 in return for a loan provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Anthropological theory has always shown a particular fascination for the subject of the house. However, Latour's work offers a significant challenge for previous theorising in this area. Latour challenges the very idea of what a house is, and encourages us to see ‘the house’ as not a coherent form at all, so much as a multitude of (more or less stable) assemblages. He also forces us to re‐examine the relationship between constructed dwellings and the social, encouraging us to see the former as having particular forms of agency within the latter. This article examines these ideas in relation to the ethnography of one particular house in rural south‐western Uganda.

Farm animals live and die as part of a food production system rich in paradoxes. One central paradox of modern farming revolves around the classic anthropological opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Inspired by Bruno Latour's diagnosis of the processes of purification and mediation that attend the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the modern constitution, we trace how this paradox plays itself out on Danish pig farms. The paper argues that, although they have to be consistently ignored, hybrids of various kinds are essential to the co‐production of meat and profit on industrial, debt‐ridden and highly effective farms in the Western world.