Because apparently I have a HUGE academic crush on my qual methods professor and could listen to or read him for hours. A snippet from one of his weekly elaborations on what we're talking about - this week, the case study:
In the actor-network take on pattern explanation, Latour (2005) contrasts this relational view of
explanation-as-description (which Latour just calls “description”) to the more familiar use of the term to refer to accounts meant to supercede and replace descriptions with statements consisting of abstract nouns, variables, psychological construct, or conceptual categories (a kind of explanation which Latour just calls ‘explanation’):
The opposition between description and explanation is another of these false dichotomies that
should be put to rest. Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully [described] . .. and then adding an explanation is superfluous – or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that is a bad description. (p. 137)
Latour is not rejecting the idea that we need general terms and phrases to describe theoretical
mechanisms – he certainly introduces many of them in his own writing. We need them in part because everyday vocabularies are often inadequate for characterizing connections and relations – indeed sometimes hide relations. As the anthropologist George Marcus (1998) argues, many key “relationships, connections, and indeed cultures of connection, association, and circulation . . . are completely missed through the use and naming of the object of study in terms of categories ‘natural’ to subjects’ preexisting discourses about them”
(Marcus, 1998, p. 17).
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