From Religions and Believers to Circulating Entities : ANT and the Study of Religions
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) is a theoretic-methodological approach developed in the Sociology of Science and Technology. The fail to provide „social explanation“ of science lead ANT scholars reinterpret the meaning of both „social“ and „science“ in „social sciences“. ANT is based on the critique of the concept of social fact, but tries to built on principal intuitions behind it. It follows Durkheim's aim to grasp the social order which, however, is not seen as something stable; just sometimes temporarily stabilised by the work of actors. In this reference ANT is a „sociology of associations“, but these associations comprise people as well as material and another types of objects. Its fundamental (ethnomethodological) presumption is that the aim of social scientist is not to stabilise this order ahead of the actors, but to follow the actors in their work and learn how they are doing it. ANT however refuses to take part in the debate of „local interaction“ vs. „social context/structure“. It bypasses it through the concept of Actor-Network. In it „network“ does not mean anything like „structure“, but „association“, „connection“, „translation“. Society then is above all circulation. In my view the contemporary crisis of identity in the Study of Religions and the accompanying hopeless belief in the redemptive power of the cognitive study of religion is in many ways a result of the lose of contact with its kin social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. The presentation aims to show how the ANT can be exploited within Academic Study of Religion and how the ANT-based study in this discipline might look-like. |
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