Inscriptions apparatus according Latour and Woolgar: working with materiality in documents

Abstract

In this essay, we seek out a way to work in documents using the interface of “inscriptors” concept, which was developed by the anthropologist Bruno Latour and the sociologist Steve Woolgar when both were starting their studies within the so called Actor-Network Theory. The “inscriptors” have the responsibility to “fabricate” things that are being investigated (maps, graphs, photos, etc.). As an example of documents seen in this framework we point out the dictionaries that express and construct language, which we understand as a practice. Thus, documents as the dictionary propagate ways of daily life that goes beyond the compilation of vocabulary once it creates possibilities of interpretation and visibility that express practices of power. Therefore, documents must be analyzed as “tools of inscription” built in shared articulation, networks. Documents are materialized as much as by the agencies that grant them existence, as by the agencies that produce them.