The Repatriation of Anthropology
By Bruno Latour Harvard University Press, 1993 From outside the discipline comes a call for a repatriated anthropology from the scholarly enclaves of the history and sociology of science and philosophy. Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern invites such an anthropology, and Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis places the discipline in the center along with history in his summons for the recovery of practical philosophy. Toulmin's agenda for practice, calling as it does for a rediscovery of the thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, requires a return to the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely, reset in the present with a selection of the values of Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne. Toulmin offers a critique of modernity and seeks to replace its program by moving forward an inquiry into the immediate and sensuous; it is to the Northern Renaissance that he turns, and he can be read alongside Latour, who also makes a kindred critique of the modern. Latour goes so far as to subvert our dependence on the notions of premodern, modern, and postmodern and their intellectual justifications. For Latour, the project of a repatriated anthropology derives from his criticism of the modern agenda-on which more below. Joined by calls and studies from within the field by Robert Desjarlais, Richard Handler, Catherine Lutz, and George Marcus, for example, he urges that anthropologists come home from the tropics, become less enamored of the exotic, and study here with the same holistic intent that they once lavished on the "natives" out there. An anthropology that confronts the complexities of the West must study both the powerful and the powerless and examine the scientific laboratory in which are fabricated the