Bruno Latour (1947 to 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist of science, best known for saying that “we have never been modern”, by which he meant that the modern West’s great division between nature on one side and human society on the other is a story it tells about itself, not the way it has ever actually lived. He gave non-human things a part to play as actors in their own right, and spent his last years writing about the Earth as Gaia and the climate crisis. His challenge to the split between people and nature sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on separation, though his is a philosophy of networks, not a lived relationship with the world as kin.
Who was Bruno Latour? #
He was born in Beaune, in Burgundy, in 1947, into a family of wine growers, and trained first as a philosopher and then as an anthropologist.1 Early on he did what was then an unusual thing. He took the anthropologist’s method of fieldwork into a scientific laboratory in California, watching how scientists actually turn messy work into accepted facts. The result was Laboratory Life (1979), written with the sociologist Steve Woolgar.
From 1982 to 2006 he worked at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at the École des Mines in Paris, and from 2006 to 2017 at Sciences Po, where he was vice president for research.2 With Michel Callon, John Law and others he developed what became known as actor-network theory. He received the Holberg Prize in 2013 and the Kyoto Prize in 2021, and died in Paris in October 2022.3
What did he mean by “we have never been modern”? #
That the modern West has believed something about itself that has never been true. The Moderns, as he called them, think they have cleanly separated nature from society, facts from values, objects from subjects, and that this separation is what makes them different from every other people. Yet in practice everything they make mixes the two. A gas pipeline is steel tubing and pumping stations, but also contracts, politicians and weather. In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) he put it in one line, “The Moderns have never been modern, but they have believed they were modern, and this belief too is crucial”.4
So he turned anthropology round. For a century and more anthropologists had studied ‘other cultures’ and measured them against a modern West that nobody had studied in the same way. Latour set out to do the fieldwork on the Moderns themselves, treating their science, law, religion and economics as customs to be described, like anyone else’s.
What is actor-network theory? #
A way of studying how things happen by following everything that takes part, human or not. A scientific discovery, on this view, is made by scientists, but also by microbes, instruments, funding bodies and the laboratory building, each of which pushes the outcome one way or another. Latour called all of them actors, and refused to decide in advance that only humans really act whilst everything else is passive stuff.
He was careful that this did not mean things are unreal because we come to know them through a long chain of instruments, maps and practices. “Without mediation, no access,” he wrote; and yet things are not locked away from us either, because they have their own lives and go their own way. As he put it, “Things are not ‘things in themselves,’ they belong ‘to themselves’”.5
What did he say about the Earth and the climate crisis? #
That the climate crisis ends the modern story. If nature is something passive, out there, waiting to be mastered, then the Earth reacting to what we do makes no sense. In his Gifford lectures, published as Facing Gaia, and in Down to Earth (2018), he took up James Lovelock’s name for the living Earth and wrote that people now have to choose which way to face. In his words, “Between modernizing and ecologizing, we have to choose.”6 He spoke of becoming ‘Terrestrials’, people who know they depend on a particular, living Earth, in place of Moderns who imagine they can escape it. See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
He also wrote against the idea that a healthy person is a self-contained individual. “If there is anything guaranteed to produce insanity, it is an autonomous ‘self,’ without attachments and without an owner”.7
How does Latour’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely on separation. In Therapeutic Shamanism, our troubles go back to the moment humans stopped seeing themselves as one species among many and began to see themselves as owners of the land. Hunter-gatherers saw themselves as part of an interconnected web of life, belonging to the land rather than owning it; with totalitarian agriculture came the idea that humans stand apart, deciding what lives and what dies.8 Latour reaches the same fault line from inside Western philosophy. For him the split between humans and nature is not a fact about the world but a story the modern West has told itself and never managed to live. See What is the Fall?
There is a second meeting point in how we come to know anything. Latour insists that all knowing passes through some medium and is still knowing of something real. Something similar holds for the shamanic realms. To experience them at all, we cannot help but give them shapes and forms we can relate to, which is why the details differ from culture to culture whilst the underlying themes are shared.9 And where Latour criticises modern psychology for lodging invisible beings “in our heads”, saying it “overplays the inside world”,10 the experience of journeying points the same way. The more people journey, the more they find that what they meet goes way beyond any personal imagination, and each person is invited to find out for themselves.11
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Latour’s actors are not persons, and his work is not animism. A microbe or a map can change the course of events in his account, but he does not say that it is conscious, that it has a soul, or that it can be spoken with. The shamanic view goes much further. Everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, even if most of us have lost the ability to notice it.12 The relationship it teaches is one of kinship, lived and experienced, not a better theory of how networks work.
He also distrusted the line between literal and figurative speech, which he saw as one of the Moderns’ own habits. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps a version of that line on purpose, as mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this. Shamanic journeys are mythos, true in the way a dream or a story is true, full of meaning but not a source of literal facts, and much harm comes from mixing the two up.13 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
And when Latour compares the Moderns with “other collectives”, he seldom says which peoples he means or how they lived. So his work cannot stand as evidence about hunter-gatherers in particular.
Was Latour against science? #
Some of his critics thought so. In the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s, science studies as a whole was accused of treating scientific facts as mere social inventions. The physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in Fashionable Nonsense (1998), gave a chapter to Latour’s 1988 essay “A Relativistic Account of Einstein’s Relativity” and argued that it showed a poor grasp of the physics.14 Others, including the physicist N. David Mermin, read the same essay more sympathetically.
Latour denied that he was against science. In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence he tells of a climate scientist who, challenged by sceptical industrialists, defended his findings by pointing to the whole institution of science, its researchers, reviews and data, and Latour sides with him, writing that it is “infinitely safer to rely on the institution of science than on indisputable certainty”.15 Later, in an essay of 2004, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”, he wrote that the habit of debunking facts had gone too far and was being turned against hard-won evidence.16
