Summary
An actant is anything that acts on the things around it, human or not. The word comes from the semiotician A. J. Greimas, who used it in the 1960s for the roles in a story (hero, helper, opponent). Bruno Latour and Michel Callon’s actor-network theory then took it into sociology, to describe how human and non-human things together make social reality.
This entry follows complexity thinker Dave Snowden, for whom an actant is “any entity that can act to influence a network”. He sorts them into three: actors (people, including the roles they hold), constraints, which “either connect or contain”, and constructors, which transform things while staying essentially unchanged themselves.
Rationale
Part 2 names ‘Built’ as one zone of culture: homes, public spaces and technologies act on us much as people do. ‘Actant’ is the word our interviewee Dave Snowden uses for anything that does.