If one aspect of anthropology remained largely undisputed – and quite frankly there are not so many aspects left – then it’s the shared understanding that anthropology is concerned with the human. It’s even in the name: anthrōpos, meaning ‘human being’. There it is: a small but significant consensus in anthropology. At least this was my impression before entering the world of Ingold and Latour. Suddenly, I’m not so sure what to make of this idea. At least, the traditional idea of a subject (human) acting upon a lifeless and subordinated object (say a stone) seems to be an inaccurate portrait of reality. I’ll expand on this.
On the one hand we have Ingold. Ingold’s great idea aims at making things alive again, seeing things as embedded in the fluidity of materials in the world. He appeals to the vitality of materials and criticizes every attempt to divide the world into subjects and objects. Rather (by illustrating his point with the example of a catflap) he explains it so:
“[…] would it not make more sense to attribute the operation of the flap to the action into which it was recruited, of the cat’s making its way in or out of doors? Surely, neither the cat nor the flap possess agency; they are rather possessed by the action. Like everything else, as I shall now show, they are swept up in the generative currents of the world.”
The point here is that there can’t be a clear-cut distinction between the subject (the cat with its intentions) and the object (the flap) and neither can there be something like an agency because things are always in the making, entangled in the flow of materials and not some finished entities with intentions or agencies.
On the other hand we have Bruno Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Just like Ingold, the ANT moves beyond the subject/object dichotomy to seek a better understanding of the relationship between the ‘material’ and the ‘nonmaterial’ world. But it does so in a very different way than Ingold’s idea of vitality. The ANT gives importance to the agency and attributes that agency to every actor in the network– this can be a weapon or a person. And their respective actions effect other actors.
Of course this is simplifying a complex theory but my point is that in moving beyond the subject/object scheme – whether we end up with Ingold’s, Latour’s or someone else’s version of it – we have to start dealing with the question if anthropology’s research focus on humans can be maintained in its isolated form. Or whether it needs to be expanded to a broader scope including things that are understood as non-human.