Anthropology and Latour's Theory of Space: A Theoretical Reflection on the Local and the Global

Since the 1990s,anthropology has sought to move beyond an exclusive focus on the “local” and to attend to broader questions of routes and networks.This shift revealed how a Euclidean conception of space has shaped traditional anthropological understandings of the relationship between the local and the global.Actor-network theory helps to extend this line of inquiry.It proposes that analysis should begin with local interactions in order to trace how influence circulates,and then link these sites into accounts of the global.At the same time,each node in the network,as a site where local interactions take place,is also a node within other actor-networks oriented in different directions.For Latour,the relationship between the local and the global must be traced on a flat plane,rather than understood as a nested structure characteristic of Euclidean spatial thinking.By placing Latour's spatial conception in comparison with other anthropological approaches to space,this article shows how actor-network theory unsettles some of anthropology's most deeply ingrained spatial assumptions.Drawing on recent award-winning ethnographies,it argues that Latour's reconfiguration of space constitutes one of the most significant shifts in contemporary anthropology.