Examining the Social Philosophy of Opium History

An ANT-Based Approach

Abstract

This historiographical paper focuses on the social philosophy of opiate history to foreground the integration of Latour’s ANT in the analysis of drug memories as a methodological novelty. Specifically, this paper has three tasks to undertake. First, it is conveyed that a complete understanding of opium’s past requires a Latourian ontology orienting around the dissolution of nonhuman objects in human subjects. Second, through the accentuation of how factuality becomes the self-disappearing backbone of narcotic history by translation and inscription, this paper attempts to show an appropriate epistemology which intellectually corresponds to the said Latourian ontology of opium’s social recollections. Third, an ANT-based method is devised so that the drug’s sociohistorical realities can be reconstructed with the pharmaceutical and scientific information being textually invisible. Taken together, the take-home message is that social historiographers need to treat the narcotic’s past as an opportunity for broader interpretations of human souls.