Digital Anthropology

Haidy Geismar, Hannah Knox, Haidy Geismar, Hannah Knox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350078857
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182248
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of "the digital age" by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital experience, critically examining the intersection of the digital to new concepts and practices across a wide range of fields from design to politics.

In this fully revised edition, Digital Anthropology reveals how the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life around the world. Combining case studies with theoretical discussion in an engaging style that conveys a passion for new frontiers of enquiry within anthropological study, this will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in theory of anthropology, media and information studies, communication studies and sociology. With a brand-new Introduction from editors Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, as well as an abridged version of the original Introduction by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, in conjunction with new chapters on hacking and digitizing environments, amongst others, and fully revised chapters throughout, this will bring the field-defining overview of digital anthropology fully up to date.

1 Introduction 2.0

Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox

When the first edition of this book was published nearly ten years ago, it laid out the contours of the emerging subfield of digital anthropology. The original introduction to the book (included in this edition immediately after this chapter, in a shortened and edited form), written by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst, outlined six core themes that they identified as characterising digital anthropology, extending their earlier work on cell phones and the internet (e.g. Miller and Slater 2000; Horst and Miller 2006). Their vision for a nascent digital anthropology drew from broad principles established within material culture studies, outlining how particular digital objects and platforms produce dialectics of normativity within social worlds. Their essay was therefore also a manifesto for a particular kind of social or cultural anthropology, arguing for a holistic focus on the comparative and cross-cultural experience of digital media and celebrating the ways in which digital media could be seen to refract broader cultural and social worlds and identities, and indeed help us to better understand them (see Horst and Foster 2018; Miller et al. 2016).

This approach to both material culture and digital anthropology had a precedent in Miller’s influential book Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987), in which he developed a Hegelian understanding of the processes by which subjectivity or identity are produced through practices of consumption. Just as Miller’s initial emphasis on material culture moved beyond the prevailing interpretive frames for objects of semiotics, symbolism and signification, so his and Horst’s definition of digital technology aimed to move beyond dominant media theories, for instance writing back to detractors of digital media who presented the digital as a radical break with past media traditions (e.g. Turkle 2011) or who understood the digital to be ushering a brave, new and post-human world (Whitehead and Wesch 2012). Miller and Horst argued that digital technologies mediate no more or less than any other cultural expression or communication, noting, “one of the major contributions of a digital anthropology would be the degree to which it finally explodes the illusions we retain of a non-mediated, noncultural, predigital world” (this volume: 26).

Ten years on, debates and discussions within the field of digital anthropology have flourished both within and beyond material culture studies, and within and beyond anthropology. In part this has been the result of a coming of age of anthropological research on digital culture that builds on strong links to other traditions of thought within the discipline, including strands of political and economic anthropology, the anthropology of science and technology, the anthropology of knowledge, and heritage and museum anthropology. It is also a result of the emergence of anthropological questions within debates in associated disciplines such as science and technologies studies (STS), digital sociology, digital humanities, media studies, computer science (especially in human–computer interaction) and the emergent field of social data science. The primary anthropological method, ethnography, has also been picked up in a huge range of research contexts focused on the digital, both inside and outside of academia. These trajectories and histories play an important part in informing the variety of perspectives that exist today within the subfield of digital anthropology and within this edited collection.

The first edition of this book was divided into four sections that positioned digital anthropology through active practices: socialising, politicising and designing. The landscape of enquiry ranged from new media and geomedia, disability, personal communication, social networking, digital politics, free software, diversity and globalisation, development, design, museums, and games. In curating this second edition, we have kept the same structure of the first. This edition updates several of the chapters, bringing the material referenced up to date. Some contributors were unable to participate in this refresh, so we have also brought in new contributions that explore a broader range of digital objects and practices, some of which barely existed in 2012 – from blockchain to the quantified self, digital infrastructure to the notion of digital futures.

As in the case of the previous edition, we recognise that our introduction to these chapters cannot provide a comprehensive review of all work that might call itself digital anthropology (although the references cited the book as a whole provide an excellent representation of the state of the art of anthropological thinking about digital technologies). What we do instead is to provide a map of some of the key theoretical currents informing digital anthropology, a mapping that emerges in large part from our ongoing work, alongside other colleagues, of developing a curriculum in digital anthropology for graduate students at University College London.

Working on this curriculum for the past ten years, often directly with engagement and contribution from contributors to both editions, one thing that has become very clear is that as well as being prompted by theoretical discussions in a variety of anthropological traditions and in other disciplines, studies in digital anthropology have also emerged in response to the appearance of digital artefacts and infrastructures which have themselves become important drivers of new kinds of social theory. These emerging technological systems pose challenging empirical and conceptual questions to anthropologists such as what are the normative assumptions built into algorithms? and how can we make cultural knowledge- claims in a world in which some people are increasingly sceptical of expert knowledge? In the rest of this essay, we present five additional areas of enquiry to those outlined in the original introduction, which we believe characterise and inform digital anthropology today.

Our first concerns ‘the human’ as a central preoccupation of digital anthropology. Many of the anxieties and fears about digital technologies have hinged on their implications for what it means to be human – whether in terms of the capacity of virtual platforms to disrupt or reorganise the performativity of identity, or fears that robots and artificial intelligence will displace or replace humans. Whilst questions over what it means to be human have been core to the discipline of anthropology, these are inflected in specific ways by digital artefacts that often seem to challenge the conceptual grounds upon which anthropological understandings of humanness are based. Here, cyborg anthropology, the anthropology of robotics and studies of human/machine hybrids explore how anthropology might need to rethink the human in the face of digital developments.

The second area that we address broadly focuses on the global, networked, and infrastructural qualities of digital technologies. Here, anthropological studies emerge within an interdisciplinary conversation about the political economy, the ontology and philosophy of digital systems, and an attention to their structuring effects on social life. Studies of digital infrastructures work to highlight, like material culture studies, the mediating qualities of digital technologies, but extend the question of mediation from a study of situated interactions between people and digital artefacts to the question of how people shape and are shaped by infrastructural systems. These discussions have opened up new routes for anthropologists to engage with processes that exceed single fieldsites – for instance exploring the subjectivities generated by cloud computing, the sources and effects of algorithmic bias, shifting regimes and practices of expertise created by new disciplines like data science, and the cultural dimensions of computer code.

Our third area further expands on the specific relationship between culture and computing by outlining anthropological research on digital technologies that has taken as its focus the experiences of people in non-Western, non-literate, and non-industrialised societies, although we want to emphasise that this does not mean that these societies are non-modern – rather they present an alternative positionality within globalised digital culture to that implicitly embedded within most digital theory that emerges from and in the Global North. Compared to the large number of studies of computer design and use in Euro-American settings, attention to digital technology use outside the Global North remains disconcertingly small. Siting research in these sites of digital sociality, often overlooked in mainstream academia, signals an important and distinctive contribution that anthropology can make to the study of digital technologies. Here we outline how an attention to subaltern, indigenous, and postcolonial users and developers of digital technologies offers crucial insights that not only add to the ethnographic record but also provide an important comparative imaginary for all anthropological studies of digital culture no matter where they are located. An acknowledgement that alternative perspectives exist offers a constant reminder for anthropologists that even the most universalising claims about the benefits or drawbacks of digital systems are historically and culturally located.

Our fourth area of focus looks at how digital anthropology is making important contributions to ongoing discussions about digital methods. Methodologically, anthropology is strongly associated with ethnography, which offers a crucial grounding in digital anthropology that sheds light on people’s use of digital technologies in everyday life and practice. Ethnography provides digital anthropologists with a distinctive approach with which to contribute to interdisciplinary discussions about the social effects and cultural interpretations of digital artefacts. But digital anthropology is also creating innovations in method that rework the established methods which constitute ethnography – such as participant observation, interviewing and object biographies – so as to make them adequate to understanding the more virtual, data-saturated and temporally unstable qualities of digital interaction. Here, we sketch out some of the recent innovations in this area of anthropological method.

Finally, we describe a fifth dimension of digital anthropology, turning our attention to how digital anthropology has emerged from and continues to exist in the interstices between academic anthropology and research being conducted outside academic settings. Here we highlight how important traffic in concepts, methods and ideas between corporate ethnographers, policy makers, activists, data scientists and anthropologists has historically shaped digital anthropology and continues to orient its core preoccupations and concerns. In the rest of this introduction, we elaborate each of these five areas in turn, before laying out a renewed manifesto as to the implications of digital anthropology both within the broader discipline of anthropology and beyond.

1 The digital human

There are arguably two core questions that structure digital anthropology – ‘what do we mean by the digital?’ and ‘what do we mean by the human?’ Miller and Horst provide an answer to the first question in their original introduction (in the following chapter), defining the digital as anything that can be reduced to binary code. But if we take this definition for granted, how does that influence what we might mean by the human? The question of what digital technologies do to the concept and experience of human being lies in the background of most studies in digital anthropology. Outlining the theoretical resources that anthropologists draw on to tackle this question provides us with our first task and is picked up by Tom Boellstorff in his positioning chapter, in which he explores the underlying tensions between the virtual, real and indexical in digital anthropology. The question of the relationship between humans and machines can be traced back to long-running debates about the nature of technology (Latour 1991, 1996; Lemonnier and Lemonnier 1993; Pfaffenberger 1992). This discussion was reinvigorated in the early 1990s with the advent of home computing and early networked forms of digital communication under the umbrella of cyborg anthropology (Escobar 1996), much inspired by the framing of cybernetics by Gregory Bateson as systems of control between humans and machines and by the political interventions of Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (Bateson 1972; Haraway 1991; Downey, Dumit and Williams 1995).

Haraway’s essay in particular caused ripples through t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction 2.0
• Part I Positioning
• Part II Socializing digital anthropology
• Part III Politicizing digital anthropology
• Part IV Designing digital anthropology
• Index