ABSTRACT
As a sociologist of childhood I am most concerned with the one side of this childhood/body correspondence. This chapter, however, suggests that objects of sociological enquiry (such as the body or childhood) can be apprehended as both material and representational entities when placed in a theoretical perspective which renders the character of the social (as in ‘social constructionism’) problematic. For this purpose I draw on Latour’s notion that social life takes place in and through networks of (that is mediated or translated connections between) heterogeneous elements. These networks are, as he puts it: ‘simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse and collective, like society’ (Latour, 1993:6).
