In his theoretical and methodological work Reassembling the Social (2015), French science and technology studies pioneer Bruno Latour argues for a new, or at least renewed, approach to sociological analysis. He urges researchers to resist taking for granted the existence and seeming explanatory power of pre-defined groups of people. For the purposes of this study, we might name congregations, denominations, and perhaps even religions writ large as designations that should be held loosely and not treated as holding, at the aggregate level, significant explanatory power.
Thus, he proposes eliminating the discontinuous shifting of an analyst’s attention between aggregated statistical characteristics of a group (macro analysis) and individual group member behavior (micro analysis). Instead, he calls for tracing the associations between the human and non-human actors in a system. He trusts that such an approach will identify groups of interest precisely inasmuch as those groups engage in describable practices of interrelation that function to continuously form the group by holding it together in time (“no group, only group formation”). He names the resultant entity an actor-network.
In actor-network-theory (ANT), describing such networks in something approaching their full connective density is the purpose of the researcher’s account. Though he proposes that researchers write (appropriately branched) narrative descriptions of the actor-network—privileging the human actors’ self-understanding and the prevailing logic and terminology in circulation throughout the network—he also makes frequent use of visualizations of such networks. He notes that such representations are especially valuable when they allow us to “see” patterns of group connection cohesion in the structure of the network itself.
I chose actor-network analysis as a fitting practice of inquiry in this dissertation for a number of interconnected reasons. Most obviously, Tapestry itself exhibits the characteristics of a network, even using network diagrams to describe the intended relationships within mentor teams and between the teams and the larger organization. In this sense, my activity of constructing a network model of (part of) the Tapestry community was a descriptive rather than analytical activity—though my ethnographic presence within the organization gave me plenty of opportunity to thicken, as it were, that description well beyond the simple schematics future mentors and facilitators first encounter at the volunteer training.
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Also significantly, Latour’s resistance to accepting various groups’ familiar sociological givenness is a powerful tool for suspending judgement about the character of unconventionally religious groups like Tapestry. Whether or not one agrees with Latour’s rejection the “sociology of the social” (with its discontinuous jumps between macro and micro), the ambiguous and perhaps contested ways in which Tapestry both is and isn’t a church invites this inquiry to embrace “no group, only group formation” as a kind of mantra. With the lens of “church as interpersonal practice” balancing our more familiar concept of “church as a congregation based in a building sharing beliefs and rituals,” we can develop a nuanced picture that avoids either/or thinking and preserves diverse actors’ self-understandings of their role(s) within the group and any broader interrelatedness through shared practices and values.
Finally, I believe ANT’s balanced attention [human nonhuman and connection to multimodality]
The principal vehicle for my actor-network analysis is the visualization tool Thortspace, a three-dimensional . I chose this tool over more cartographic software both because the spatial theorists
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Analysis at a Glance
- Data: Field notes, interview transcripts, correspondence,
- Purpose: Understanding the group and its practices
- Accounts: Podcast (link to specific sections), website