Abstract
In a few recent decades, interesting shifts within social sciences can be observed with old explanatory concepts having been altered or even displaced by new, more ambiguous ones. Thus "social" has been largely displaced by "culture" in what is now understood as cultural turn and others such as human, environment, society and even culture as such have been transformed significantly, their boundaries expanded, their content problematized.
Dichotomies such as nature-culture, nature-society, subject-object, human-animal upon which explanations and understanding used to be based and which used to delimit scientific disciplines have become blurred and more complex, ambiguous and hybrid metaphors and concepts have come to the fore. Understanding is not to be sought at the poles of the dichotomies any more but rather in the space between them.
Hybridity has been embraced and the figures of cyborg, vampire or ghost have left shadows in order to enter scientific thought, research and writing. The non-human and the ways it is intertwined with and incorporated in the human (and vice versa) as in the figures of cyborg or vampire have become key to comprehending humans and the world they live in.
By acknowledging the importance of the non-human by social scientists while emphasizing hybridity allows for expanding the scope of social science and for pushing its limits and re-determining its boundaries. But what is the position and role of social science in a world in which "nature" and "society" have merged into one another, the act of transgressing disciplinary boundaries has become a disciplinary necessity and scientific representation might be seen as creative as artistic one? What are the outermost topics social scientists should engage with and what, if anything, should be left solely to philosophy, natural sciences or art? And are these distinctions still useful?