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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 致谢
This book has passed through many avatars. It began almost thirty years ago when I had the chance of being taught primate sociology by Shirley Strum and her baboons in Kenya. Although that project with Shirley has remained in limbo, it has been the staple of my teaching of sociology to young engineers at the School of Mines in Paris. When, in 1996, I was offered to give the Leclerc lectures in Louvain-la-Neuve, I decided it was about time to synthesize what I had learned from Michel Callon, John Law, Madeleine Akrich, Andy Barry, Annemarie Mol, Antoine Hennion, and many others in what had become known as ‘Actor-Network-Theory’. Time and again, I have found that readers were puzzled not so much by our views on scientific practice and various other topics, but rather by the unusual meaning we gave to the words ‘social’ and ‘social explanations’. And yet, this alternative social theory has never been the object of a systematic introduction. Instead of complaining that this small school of thought had become a monster that had escaped its Frankensteinian makers, I decided it might be fairer to present interested readers with its intellectual architecture.
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