Engaging with archival texts: Performing disciplinary transgressions between Actor-Network Theory and History of Science

Disciplinary transgressions are necessary to generate newer understandings. However, such incursions are not always encouraged or acknowledged. As part of the special issue on post-structural perspectives on fisheries, this paper represents an engagement with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) while attempting to study scientific practices on fisheries in British India. Following Michel Callon’s processes of translation to examine the effect of power in scientific practices of the past, I show not just the transformative promise of ANT for a study of history, but also how the act of doing history, rather, the engagement with texts as archives of actor-networks, could translate ANT.