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(1993:151)—discussing the desires of conservationists to increase chimpanzee
numbers in Sierra Leone—points to how Mende people recognise chimpanzees as
their ancestors who still live in the woods, while also fearing that increasing numbers of
chimpanzees will encourage some humans to revert to, or be tempted to copy, these
excessively strong, violent and cannibalistic beings.
22
Outline accounts of the potential for deploying ANT in human geography have been
fairly extensive in recent years: see Bingham (1996), Braun and Castree (1998),
Demeritt (1994), Hinchliffe (1996), Murdoch (1997a, 1997b) and Thrift (1996).
23
We wish to emphasise that Latour and other ANT writers
do
see important differences
between humans and animals, here in the specific sense of distinguishing human
societies from simian societies, so as to underline that the broader conceptual
manoeuvres attempted by ANT—ones which
do
scramble conventional notions of
agency—are designed to collapse the distinctions between humans and non-humans,
animals included, in certain respects
but not necessarily
in others. These are extremely
complicated and controversial questions, however, and we recognise the diversity of
claims and counterclaims currently entering the relevant literature (as hinted at in
outline by Laurier and Philo 1999: see also Hinchliffe 1999; Whatmore 1997, 1999).
We also acknowledge our own ambivalence about many of these claims and counter-
claims.
24
Conventionally, these effects also take the form of
attributions
which localise agency as
singularity, most often as humans with intentions and languages, thus endowing one
part of a configuration as a prime mover or strategic speaker. As Callon and Law
(1995:503) argue, such attributions 'efface the other entities and relations in the
collectif,
or consign these to a supporting and infrastructural role'. The focus on strategic
speakers, or spokespersons, has also been a criticism of ANT.
25
Latour's outline of enduring sets of heterogeneous relations runs into Marxism in
some ways, for these proliferating objects are not simply neutral; rather, they embody
delegations, and 'they contain and reproduce the “congealed labour”' (Murdoch
1997b: 329), the knowledges, skills and capacities of other humans and non-humans.
It is increasingly through such objects that social order, power, scale or hierarchy are
consolidated and preserved. This begins to sound much like Marx's description of
objectified (or dead) labour, indeed objectified social relations, and its appropriation
of living labour (see Marx 1973:693ff). Latour, of course, will not accept the kinds of
dualisms or explanatory powers that Marx developed.
26
We could think here of differing forms of anthropomorphism along the same lines as
Fisher (1996), where the above example of Glenwood Clark would probably be classed
as 'imaginative' anthropomorphism. This is the same kind of anthropomorphism that
we see when animals, or representatives of them, are used to 'people' situations in such
things as cartoons or adverts. But there are other kinds according to Fisher, forms
which we engage in all of the time, where we try to make sense of others, both human
and non-human others. See next endnote.
27
In effect we are splitting apart anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism as two
different, even opposed, movements. Anthropomorphism, on our understanding,
allows the human to 'explode' into many different registers of the real, so that fragments
of what we normally deem 'human' can be traced throughout the animal and 'thing'
world. Anthropocentrism, meanwhile, wishes to close its gates around the existing figure
of the human, referencing everything back to the human, and not paying much
attention to anything that does not directly pertain to the conventional human and its
