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Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris associated with the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) where heis also the vice-president for research of that school. In a series of books in French he has been exploring the consequences of science studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences: religion in « Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches », and « Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse », and social theory in « Paris ville invisible, a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects of the city of Paris ». After a long field work on one of the French supreme Courts, he has recently published a monograph « la Fabrique du droit-une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat » (to be published in English). A new presentation of the social theory which he has developped with his colleagues in Paris is available at Oxford University Press, under the title: « Reassembling the Social, an Introduction to Actor Network Theory ». After having curated a major international exhibition in Karlsruhe at the ZKM center, « Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion and art », he has curated another one also with Peter Weibel « Making Things Public The atmospheres of democracy » which has closed in October 2005 (both catalogues are with MIT Press).
Even though I am too far from day-to-day North American politics to comment usefully on the many suggestions given in this important book, I do have two vantage points that allow me ...