Anthropology = empirical metaphysics

From Reassembling the Social:

What ANT does is that it keeps asking the following question: Since every sociologist loads things into social ties to give them enough weight to account for their durability and extension, why not do this explicitly instead of doing it on the sly? Its slogan, ‘Follow the actors’, becomes, ‘Follow the actors in their weaving through things they have added to social skills so as to render more durable the constantly shifting interactions.’

It’s at this point that the real contrast between sociology of associations and sociology of the social will be most clearly visible. So far, I might have exaggerated the differences between the two viewpoints. After all, many schools of social science might accept the two first uncertainties as their departure point (especially anthropology, which is another name for empirical metaphysics)…

Leave a Reply