Bruno Latour
The Specific Regime of Enunciation
of Religious Talk
Friday May 10 2002, 7:00 - 9:00 PM, Corwin Pavilion, University Center
Discussant: Mary Hancock, Department
of Anthropology
Discussant: Mayfair Yang, Department of Anthropology
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Abstract
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The argument of the lecture is that religion
is not about a domain of reality, some specific entities, a certain
type of morality, or a belief system but literally a way of talking,
a Verb, as the tradition says, or in a more technical vocabulary:
a specific regime of enunciation. The contrast is especially striking
with two other regimes of enunciation: first, the referential one
with which we are so familiar in science; and second, the communication
one, which has become the standard for understanding the movement
of messages from one locutor to the next. The aim of the argument
is to extricate the peculiarities of religious talk from the judgment
of the other regimes which, by necessity, transform religion into
belief. Once freed from the judgment of those other regimes and
allowed to develop its own conditions of felicity, religion may
become again understandable in its peculiar work of forming the
very locutor that it addresses: this locutor is "put into presence"
and thus transformed.
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Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune,
Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher
and then an anthropologist. After field studies in Africa and California
he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work.
In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology
of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science policy
and research management. He has written Laboratory Life the construction
of scientific facts (Princeton University Press), Science in Action,
and The Pasteurization of France (both at Harvard University Press).
He also published a field study on an automatic subway system Aramis
or the love of technology and an essay on symmetric anthropology We
have never been modern (both with Harvard and now translated in 15
languages). With the same publisher, he also published a series of
essays, Pandora¦s Hope, Essays in the Reality of Science Studies.
In a series of new books in French he is exploring the consequences
of science studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences
(Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, and Paris ville invisible,
a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects of the
city of Paris. He recently published a book on the political philosophy
of the environment, Politiques de la nature (being translated at Harvard).
He is presently doing field work on one of the French supreme Courts,
which is soon to be published in a book called Dire le droit-une ethnographie
du Conseil d'Etat. He is professor at the Centre de sociologie de
l¦Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in
Paris and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. |
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