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On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Bruno Latour

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Description for On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods Paperback. Building on his earlier book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour develops his argument about the Modern fetishization of facts, or the creation of factishes. Series: Science & Cultural Theory. Num Pages: 168 pages, 11 illustrations. BIC Classification: JHMC; PDA. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. Dimension: 235 x 155 x 11. Weight in Grams: 254. Series: Science & Cultural Theory. 168 pages, 4 illustrations. One of the leading figures in science studies offers a provocative look at the way science shatters the "fetishes" of magic and religion only to recreate other sorts of fetishes (factishes) in their place. Cateogry: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. BIC Classification: JHMC; PDA. Dimension: 235 x 155 x 11. Weight: 254.
On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the “belief in naive belief,” the suggestion that fetishes—objects invested with mythical powers—are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of “factishes” to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of ... Read more

Product Details

Publisher

Duke University Press

Number of pages

168

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2010

Series

Science & Cultural Theory

Condition

New

Number of Pages

168

Place of Publication

North Carolina, United States

ISBN

9780822348252

SKU

V9780822348252

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days

Ref

99-1

About Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour is Professor and Dean for Research at Sciences Po in Paris. His many books include Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory; Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy; Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies; Aramis, Or, The Love of Technology; and We Have Never Been Modern.

Reviews for On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

“Latour is the best scholar in the field with a huge range and fine grasp of the literature. . . . Latour can also be a sparkling writer, exploiting his licence as a foreigner to write English with flair and adventure. . . . I admire [Chapter 3] not only because of its brilliance and fresh insights but also because ... Read moreof the courage it must have taken to write it.” - Harry Collins, Metascience “. . . [B]oth thought provoking and potentially transformative. Latour lulls the reader into accompanying him on a quest to rethink objects as acting independently of our belief in them, and through this same belief. He also exemplifies this wonderful goal, proper to anthropology at its best: to displace common sense understanding and its objects, not deconstruct them.” - Julie Kleinman, Anthropological Quarterly “Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies.... witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour’s style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use.” - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, London Review of Books "Eloquent, amusing and fabulously well-informed, Bruno Latour is one of the superstars of French intellectual life…. His recent book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods shows that Latour remains a great star." - Jonathan Rée, New Humanist “Bruno Latour’s is a joyous and generous science, not a warmongering, invidious one. His unique intellectual trajectory beautifully replicates those strange objects he was the first to fully discern. For his work is eminently suitable to an actor-network treatment; it thrives on associations; it deals in mediations; it articulates heterogeneous modes of existence; it modulates its own regime of enunciation as the truth it describes changes its own conditions of production. What started as a ‘social description of scientific practice’ morphed into a radical redescription of the social at least as much as of science itself, and it bloomed as a daring project of a general anthropology of truth, within which facts and fetishes, divine forces and material forms, art and science, religion and law, all are made to inhabit a virtual plane of coexistence, which we are challengingly invited to bring into actuality as our common world.”—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro) “What immense spiritual and intellectual relaxation! With what vivacity and cunning Bruno Latour gets us out of the cage holding us hostage to the mumbo-jumbo of Subjects and Objects all these long years of Western Civ. Out-fetishizing these fetishes, nudging us toward the mastery of non-mastery, he invites us thereby to the sort of thinking needed to remake a failing world.”—Michael Taussig, Columbia University “[B]oth thought provoking and potentially transformative. Latour lulls the reader into accompanying him on a quest to rethink objects as acting independently of our belief in them, and through this same belief. He also exemplifies this wonderful goal, proper to anthropology at its best: to displace common sense understanding and its objects, not deconstruct them.”
Julie Kleinman
Anthropological Quarterly
“Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies.... witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour’s style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use.”
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
London Review of Books
“Latour is the best scholar in the field with a huge range and fine grasp of the literature. . . . Latour can also be a sparkling writer, exploiting his licence as a foreigner to write English with flair and adventure. . . . I admire [Chapter 3] not only because of its brilliance and fresh insights but also because of the courage it must have taken to write it.”
Harry Collins
Metascience
"Eloquent, amusing and fabulously well-informed, Bruno Latour is one of the superstars of French intellectual life…. His recent book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods shows that Latour remains a great star."
Jonathan Rée
New Humanist
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On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Bruno Latour

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