Have you ever been curious about the original question that set in motion the disciplines that still take many thousands of students across the globe at university level: the social sciences? Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory is, in my opinion, an excellent attempt at understanding the history, epistemology and ontology of the social from the times of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to date.
Latour first tries to correct two main problems when the social is approached as a science. First, there is still a general tendency to look at the social sciences as the missing explanation of the natural sciences in order for us to have wholesome knowledge of humanity and life at large. He reminds us that how humans connect is a whole legitimate science that should not be treated as a residual discipline of the natural sciences.
Another issue Latour points us to is that more often than not, social scientists tend to hurriedly want to confront the political questions of their times. They end up compromising the original question of how humans forge relations.
Latour’s attempt, therefore, is at reassembling the social: looking for actors and networks that make human connections. We tend to think of human connections as made by and through humans. We forget how non-human actors determine how humans link up. After living through 2020, we all saw the power of a microscopic organism change the way we greet, gather even work in less than a year.
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The idea of networks that Latour wants us to think about is that there is a moving network of actors that change in importance over time. I like to imagine the best example is the general elections and the shenanigans around them. If we mention US President Donald Trump, he is an obvious and typical example of the end of the empire.
But in a country like Tanzania, all the migrations, alliances, allegations, victimisation/victimhood that have thus far preceded the October 2025 elections can be a good case of how unstable networks are. This is how I understand Latour to mean when he says we should study the social through Actor-Network-Theory, which helps us understand how people, ideas, technologies, and nature form networks.
This book offers a fresh look at things so familiar, new suggestions for how to approach the social. I appreciate Latour for demystifying what the social is without complicated vocabulary and convoluted presentation. My mechanism of knowing whether a book is targeting the general public readership is if I try and explain it in Kiswahili I do not struggle with the flow.
Political conditions
I have unease, though, with how one would remain committed to the question of the social without being constrained by the political conditions of the day. Fundamentally, I agree with his critique that the social sciences should not be just about solving problems but understanding how the social operates. Yet only political configurations determine and even undermine the study of the social.
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At the university, at least at the two I have been at, there are different reasons for studying the social sciences. For undergraduate students, it is important to finish and look for jobs. Graduate students get exhausted and pressured for the number of times they can extend their studies.
Academic staff is a mix of three things: the ones who are teachers and publish to not perish; people who struggled for PhDs, but they are now manoeuvring for a political office, either through presidential appointment or parliamentary seat; and the exceptional few who work towards bridging theory and practice by being part of a grassroots organisations. Who among these has the time and resources to pursue the study of the social for its own sake? Therefore, take Latour’s initiative as something that should be at the back of your head, not literally.
Who is a human?
When Latour calls for the reassembling of the social, it is inevitable to ask who is a human? When Europeans developed military and marine power, they decided all other people were lesser humans. They devised sciences, literature and actual military rituals of dehumanising us.
Anthropology is the bastard child of the study of the social and imperialism. Ever since Malinowski gave it official status as a discipline early in the 20th century, anthropologists have been fighting each other and fighting for the discipline to survive by updating its methodologies and critiquing its racist origins. To use Ashis Nandy’s term, we ‘Histories Forgotten Doubles’ are still here outside the social fighting to count as human.
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Even when it is written in a straightforward language, the author takes more than a paragraph to deliver a point. I would advise one to read it at a slow pace. You can choose human relations that you are curious about to accompany you through the book. Remember, non-humans and objects are actors too: smartphones, khanga, December holidays in Zanzibar, and what else?
Diana Kamara identifies herself as the daughter of Adria Kokulengya. She can be reached at dianakkamara@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
