As promised, here’s a list of the anthropology and archaeology blogs that are still active from Jason Antrosio’s archive from 2017. I found one site that’s actually not active, so that brings us down to 76 blogs that are still running. But Lorena Gibson just posted a new piece on Anthropod, so that brings us right back up to our total of 77! Yay! In the first section of this post I’ll list all the sites from Jason’s list that are still active. Then at the bottom I’ll add some new sites, other sites, and places where people are writing/posting now. If you have or know about other sites/blogs that are not on here please post them in the comments below.

Before going forward, there are a couple things I noticed. The first, brought up by Lorenz in a recent comment on another post, is that many of us out there are definitely seeing and feeling the impacts of the loss of community that has come with the whole Twitter juggernaut and other issues such as the rise of paywalls (as Sarah Kendzior put it: Paywalls are a threat esp when disinformation is free). But again, a lot of folks are still out there writing. And this brings me to the second point: On his site, David Davies wrote something that really resonated and stood out to me: “Very few of the hundreds of hits on this site ever leave comments. Blogging is enjoyable, but feedback makes it even more interesting. I’d love to hear more from folks and perhaps even get a few conversations going.”

Blogging and writing are more fun when we get feedback and comments. This work also matters, in a broader sense, especially in our increasingly polarized and pay-walled world. We need spaces where we can share ideas (and not lose everything when some CEO decides to trash certain platforms), and we also need platforms where we can share, distribute, and archive perspectives coming from anthropology. Especially with all the paywalls out there. Rather than all that scrolling on those platforms that monetize our every click and ultimately control the content we post, maybe now is a good time to get back to blogging, posting, linking, and sharing our ideas…like things used to work in the earlier days of this internet thing. All the better if we shift back (or forward) to platforms that allow us to have greater control of the content we produce and the platforms we use.

Ok, here we go:

SITES FROM THE 2017 LIST THAT ARE STILL ACTIVE (77/188):

Aidnography. From the About page: “My name is Tobias Denskus and I am an Associate Professor in Development Studies in the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Sweden. I am co-coordinating our MA in Communication for Development, an online blended learning program that for more than 20 years has brought together hundreds of students from all over the world in our Glocal Classroom.”

All Tomorrow’s Cultures. A site run by Samuel G. Collins: “I’m a professor of anthropology at a mid-sized, state university in Maryland, USA. You can see my homepage here.”

Allegra Lab. From the About page: “Allegra began in 2013 as a small group of renegade anthropologists creating a voice for themselves in the margins of the neoliberal academy. Today, it has become a  veritable movement emboldening a large number of anthropologists and other academics to enliven the “dead space” between standard academic publication and fast moving public debates. Allegra maintains that this space is where intellectual innovation happens at its best. No great thinkers ever emerged from the quarantined space of academic disciplines where the polished aesthetic of writing for one’s colleagues (and national frameworks to evaluate excellency) takes priority over the viscerality of the issue at hand. Instead, from Rigoberta Menchù to Marx, bell hooks to Arendt, Fanon to Foucault and many others, intellectuals targeted their thinking directly at the conflicts and injustices they saw around them.”

Alma Gottlieb. From the bio page: “I’m a cultural anthropologist, researcher, author, and teacher impassioned by understanding all things human. As a scholar, I aim to use my research to promote tolerance and reduce injustice by analyzing relations among systems of power, thought, and experience in my publications; as a teacher, I aim to use scholarly research to promote tolerance and reduce injustice by training students to be both skilled seekers and critical analysts of information. I specialize in migration/diaspora; religion/ritual; the family/child-rearing; gender/sexuality; and issues of representation/ethnographic writing. My major research has taken me to West Africa and the contemporary African diaspora in Europe and the U.S.”

Animal Archaeology. From the about page: “Hi, my name is Dr. Alex Fitzpatrick. I’m a zooarchaeologist and interdisciplinary researcher in heritage & museum studies. I received my BA in Classical Archaeology, Anthropology, and Special Honours from CUNY Hunter College in 2015. In 2016, I received my MSc in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Bradford. My dissertation was titled Fishing, Diet, and Environment in the Iron Age of the Northern Isles. I remained at the University of Bradford until 2021, where I received my PhD in Archaeology. My dissertation was titled Ritual and Funerary Rites in Later Prehistoric Scotland: An Analysis of Faunal Assemblages from the Covesea Caves.”

Anthrodendum. You’re looking at it. But not for long. Insert sad face here.

Anthropod. From the about page: “Welcome! anthropod is a blog written by Lorena Gibson, an anthropologist and musician based in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research interests include education, culture and development, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), social justice, gender relations, music, and hope. Lorena is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.”

Anthropolitan. About page: “Welcome to Anthropolitan – UCL Anthropology’s student-run blog. We publish blog posts, articles, stories, poems, reviews and interviews relating to anthropology in all its diversity.”

Anthropology of Everyday Life. From the About page: “Meredith holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of California, Davis. She is trained as a primatologist and has spent much time in the field observing and documenting the behavior of our closest non-human relatives. Her research is cross-disciplinary and makes use of historical, anthropological, and biological methodologies to answer some of the biggest questions facing society today.”

Anthropology.net. From the About page: “Anthropology.net’s mission is to promote and facilitate discussion, review research, extend stewardship of resources, and disseminate knowledge. To serve the public interest, we seek the widest possible engagement with all segments of society, including professionals, students, and anyone who is interested in advancing knowledge and enhancing awareness of anthropology.”

Anthropo.scene. From the About page: “Jeremy Schmidt is Associate Professor of Geography at Durham University. In 2015, he received the SSHRC Impact Award for his work on water governance, ethics, and policy. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow in social anthropology at Dalhousie University and Harvard University. His PhD (Geography) was conferred by Western University, where he held a Trudeau Scholarship.”

Antropología Industrial. From the About page: “Este sitio trata de la utilización del análisis antropológico y etnográfico como técnica de conocimiento y gestión empresarial, asociada a una concepción estratégica, complementaria y simbiótica con el marketing.” [This site deals with the use of anthropological and ethnographic analysis as a knowledge and business management technique, associated with a strategic, complementary and symbiotic conception with marketing].

Antropologia: Una perspective multiple. Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s site: “La antropología es una disciplina académica, a la mitad entre la ciencia y el arte, que se ocupa de todo lo relacionado con los grupos de personas, con nuestras formas de vivir y de ver el mundo, así como con nuestras formas de organizarnos, comunicarnos, concebirnos a nosotros mismos y concebir al universo y nuestro lugar en él.” [Anthropology is an academic discipline, halfway between science and art, that deals with everything related to groups of people, our ways of living and seeing the world, as well as our ways of organizing ourselves, communicating, conceive ourselves, and conceive the universe and our place in it].

El Antropólogo Perplejo. J.A. Mansilla’s site: “Interesado en las interrelaciones entre clases y movimientos sociales, en la construcción institucional y mediática de retóricas y discursos legitimadores de procesos de reforma urbana, en la influencia de las prácticas turísticas en el tejido social de las ciudades y en la recuperación de la cultura popular como forma de reivindicación de las formas culturales propias de las clases subalternas.” [Interested in the interrelationships between classes and social movements, in the institutional and media construction of rhetoric and discourses that legitimize urban reform processes, in the influence of tourist practices on the social fabric of cities and in the recovery of popular culture as form of vindication of the cultural forms of the subaltern classes].

Archaeology Review. About page: “Carl Feagans is a professional archaeologist that earned a master’s degree in anthropology with a focus on archaeology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Among his academic interests are the religious and cult beliefs of prehistoric peoples, particularly in the Near East around the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. His current interests historic archaeology, particularly related to clandestine distilleries (moonshine stills!). He currently works for the United States Forest Service and records 19th and 20th century home sites that have a rural, agrarian focus.”

ArchaeoThoughts. Andre Costopoulos from the University of Alberta. I don’t see an about page, so here’s an excerpt from the most recent post: “The two hour opener of Season 11 heavily features the discovery of coins, both Roman and Medieval, on Lot 5, near and around the circular depression. As always, we can ask ourselves how surprising and how significant these finds are, and what they might mean. Do the coins indicate treasure?.”

Arctic Anthropology. About page: “Several Arctic anthropologists, mostly based in Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland, have decided that now is the right time to create a platform that allows us to communicate our ideas beyond some office table or informal chats. We have a shared enthusiasm for our discipline and an interest in the North as a space for living and doing research among its inhabitants. Our research and theoretical interests are diverse, but united by the conviction that we can contribute to general debates in our discipline ‘from the North’, i.e. by combining evidence from our fieldwork with theoretical interests. We hope that numerous comments and contributions on our topics here enrich all of our work, and in an ideal world maybe we can create new interest networks and contacts among colleagues to work jointly on promoting the study of Arctic residents in the discipline of social anthropology, and also in its relevance for improving the lives of those living in the North.”

Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa (ASSA). Association site with regular updates and posts. From the about page: “ASAA/NZ is a vibrant community of anthropologists who are from, work in, or are interested in issues related to Aotearoa/New Zealand and the wider Asia-Pacific region. The photos on this site, which have been taken by or of our members (see below), illustrate the diversity of regions in which we do fieldwork.”

Patrick Clarkin. About: “I am a biological anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. My research integrates the impact of social and evolutionary forces on growth, nutrition, and health. In particular, I have focused on the long-term impact of war,  refugee experiences, and poverty on growth and health of Southeast Asians (Hmong, Lao, Khmer).”

Brave New Words. About page: “Dr Piers Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at The University of England, Armidale, affiliated with the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne.” Also from the about page: “Communication is a foundational process underpinning all human activity. I am interested in one intriguing aspect of this bigger story: how the scope ordinary language is creatively extended through strategic interventions. This is why my research is concerned with topics such as graphic codes, language engineering and crosscultural literacy, and why I find the holism of linguistic anthropology to be an especially useful tool of enquiry.”

CaMP Anthropology. About: “Welcome to the CaMP Anthropology blog! This blog will feature posts, discussions, and links at the intersections of communication, media, and performance. Based in Rice University’s Anthropology Department, we welcome submissions exploring recently published books and dissertations in these emerging fields.”

Citizen Sociolinguistics. About: “I am Betsy Rymes, Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach about language and society and how they relate to educational projects, including schools and classrooms. My hopes and dreams for this blog:  That it becomes a place for sharing everyday encounters with language and engaging in dialog about different ways of speaking and attitudes about them–that is, a place for Citizen Sociolinguistics.”

Colleen Morgan. Colleen’s site used to be called ‘Middle Savagery,’ now it’s under her name. About: “Dr. Colleen Morgan (ORCID 0000-0001-6907-5535) is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She is the Director of the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab, the MSc in Digital Archaeology and the MSc in Digital Heritage. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, was Marie Curie Experienced Researcher for the EUROTAST project from 2013-2015 and a postdoctoral fellow for the Centre for Digital Heritage from 2015-2017. She has an established international reputation as a leading scholar in critical digital archaeology and heritage. Her research contributions fall in three main areas: 1) bringing digital archaeology into conversation with current theory drawn from feminist, queer, posthuman, and anarchist approaches 2) multisensorial interventions and digital embodiment, with a focus on avatars of past people created from bioarchaeological data 3) issues surrounding craft, enskillment and pedagogy in analog and digital methods in field archaeology, including photography, videography, and drawing.”

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Journal website that features regular posts with interviews. About: “Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry is an international, interdisciplinary forum publishing work at the intersections of medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities with a specific focus on human experiences of mind, mental distress, and mental health. Founded in 1977, the journal promotes more inclusive understandings of mental distress and illness, particularly by focusing on the role of culture and social context while also illuminating the lived experiences of clinicians, as well as users of mental health care and their families. For this journal, mental health “care” includes biomedical as well as alternative approaches, including (but not limited to): traditional healing, alternative medicine, mutual support, psychedelic treatment, and more.”

CultureBy.  Grant McCracken’s site. About: “Trained as an anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago), Grant has studied American culture for 25 years. He has worked for many organizations including Timberland, New York Historical Society, IKEA, Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Sony, Coca Cola, Sam Adams, Boston Book Festival, Delta, Oprah, Reddit, PBS, State Farm, NBC, Diageo, IBM, Nike, and the Obama White House. He was the founder and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he did the first museum exhibit on youth cultures. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, MIT, and the Harvard Business School.”

Decolonize All The Things (DATT). About: “Dr. Shay-Akil McLean, MA, MA, Ph.D. (Twitter & IG: @Hood_Biologist) is a Queer Trans man racialized as Black, on stolen Indigenous land, an educator, organizer, writer & public intellectual. Dr. Shay-Akil McLean is a Du Boisian & Darwinian Eco-Evolutionary Geneticist & Comparative Historical Sociologist, who develops leading expert commentary on biology, race/ism, health, science, technology & society. He is also the founder of the free political education website decolonizeallthethings.com & the free scientific ethics website decolonizeallthescience.com.”

Donna Lanclos. About: “I am an anthropologist and a folklorist and have been unapologetic about those two things for quite a while, now.  I found myself working in academic libraries starting in 2009, and since then have been thinking, writing, and talking a lot about the nature of information, digital and physical places, and higher education generally.  I see my work as relevant not just to libraries or universities, but to conversations about how we as a society make sure that people have opportunities to learn how to think critically, to practice those skills, and to find their voices.”

Engagement Blog. About: “Engagement is the official blog of the Anthropology and Environment Society (AES), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). It features first-hand accounts by anthropologists and other social scientists who bring an anthropological approach to understanding the pressing environmental issues of our time. The blog takes an expansive view of “engagement,” advancing discourse on topics including theory, ethnographic writing, activism, and collaboration. Engaging diverse publics, it aims to bring the latest scholarly research to audiences that might not otherwise read or access scholarly literature, including undergraduates, applied professionals, advocates, policy-makers, or others. Engagement seeks to create a space where scholars can publish provocative, serious, and experimental work without being burdened by jargon, conventional form and genre, or the excessive citation requirements of scientific journals.”

EPIC. About: “EPIC People are researchers, creators, innovators, and leaders doing ethnography for impact in business and organizations. EPIC is a nonprofit membership organization, global community, and annual conference that supports the professional development, learning, and leadership of people who practice and promote ethnography.”

Ethnographer/Ecographer. About: “A Practicing Anthropologist. My consulting and project work is motivated by socialist feminism and the strong belief that anthropology provides equitable methods for real world problems, that scholars’ interests and skills should benefit our research partners, and that anthropology is a community-oriented service that can make a difference.”

Everyday Anthropology. Formerly ‘Pedal-Powered Anthropology.’ Run by Joe LyonWurm and Angela Achorn. About Joe: “Joe is the founder of Everyday Anthropology. With a background in four fields anthropology, their primary focus was in biological anthropology and they have done field work in Kenya as well as morphological studies of modern primates as a model to understand variation in the human fossil record. Since then, cultural and linguistic anthropology has taken more of the center stage. Joe has filmed numerous documentaries, most notably Pedal for Pongo, and most recently completed a book on 19th century cast iron cookware.” About Angela: “Angie graduated from Rhode Island College in 2016 with a BA in Anthropology and a minor in Environmental Studies. She earned her MA in Anthropology from Texas A&M University in 2018, and her PhD in 2022. For her dissertation, she examined the function of meat sharing within a population of savanna-dwelling chimpanzees in Senegal.”

The Familiar Strange (TFS). About: “We want to familiarise you with the strange, after estranging you with the familiar. This is an anthropology social engagement project. Anthropology need not be so weird and difficult to comprehend. We pursue uncommon knowledge about what it means to be humans enmeshed in culture. At present, anthropological thinking mainly occurs within ‘field sites’ and the ivory tower, and there are plenty of misconceptions about what anthropologists even do. We wish to engage anthropologists (and other social and interdisciplinary scientists) in edgier, relevant and more accessible forms of communication. Whether this is considered public, engaged, popular or activist anthropology, The Familiar Strange project just wants to open up your thinking.”

Cultural Anthropology Fieldsites and Theorizing the Contemporary. About: “The Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, constitutes a continuing effort to think expansively about the anthropological endeavor. Founded in the 1980s to highlight a concern for culture and to foster interdisciplinary connections, the Society is dedicated to interrogating and challenging the boundaries of the discipline. We welcome new points of view and approaches to a world forever in a state of becoming.”

Gillian Tett on Financial Times. About: “Gillian Tett is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Financial Times. She writes a weekly column on Friday, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She also serves as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. Previously, she chaired the FT editorial board, ran Moral Money, the FT’s sustainability newsletter which she co-founded, and wrote two columns a week. Gillian’s earlier roles included US managing editor for the FT; assistant editor; capital markets editor; deputy editor of the Lex column; Tokyo bureau chief; reporter in Russia and Brussels.”

Focaal Blog. About: “The Blog seeks to serve as an intellectually vibrant, socially astute, and genuinely cosmopolitan platform for the discussion of anthropological research. In particular it seeks to strengthen a historical, relational, and world-anthropology of the big issues that confront humanity—in all of its situated differences and amid all of the interconnected inequalities and unevenness. FocaalBlog is now on Facebook! Follow the new page here.”

Food Anthropology. About: “The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN), formerly known as the Council on Nutritional Anthropology (CNA), was organized in 1974 in response to the increased interest in the interface between social sciences and human nutrition.”

The Geek Anthropologist.  About: “The Geek Anthropologist is a blog where geek culture and all things geek are analysed through the perspective of socio-cultural anthropology. We write about the intersections between social science, cultural analysis and practice of anthropology with geek culture, whether they be embodied, literary, cinematic or cybernetic.  In short, we’re interested in any culturally informed analysis of geek culture or things that geeks love.” Who are these Geeks? Check here.

Anthropogenesis. About: “At the time when both the old Out-of-Africa paradigm in human origins research and the Clovis-I paradigm in the study of the origin of American Indians (Native Americans, Amerindians) have failed to account for the rapidly growing body of data, this blog provides a unique and previously unrecognized solution to the puzzle of human origins and dispersals. Drawing on linguistics, kinship studies, ethnology, genetics, paleobiology and archaeology, it brings American Indian populations into the focus on modern human origins research, documents back-migrations of American Indians to the Old World and explores the possibility of modern human origins not in Africa but in America.”

Glossographia. About: “Welcome to Glossographia, a blog dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of language from a social scientific perspective. I am Stephen Chrisomalis, a linguistic anthropologist and cognitive anthropologist working at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.  The opinions and thoughts on this blog are mine alone, and should not be taken as representative of those of my employer. I write about the intersection of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, cognitive science, and evolution, with particular foci on epigraphy, literacy studies, writing systems, numeration, and the history of science and mathematics, among other things.  From time to time I also post about social issues in academia, particularly those relating to graduate education.  While my focus will be academic, I’m aiming to present material that will be accessible and interesting to non-specialists and specialists alike.”

Greg Laden’s Blog. About: “I am trained as an anthropologist, with a combined degree in archaeology and biological anthropology from a small east coast school. In the US, I’ve done fieldwork or consulting in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Oversees, I did work in Zaire and South Africa. I lived with the Efe Pygmies and Lese Horticulturalists of Zaire (now Congo), worked in the Semliki Valley (near the Rwenzori), and did extensive survey some excavation (including at Kroomdrai) and other work in South Africa, for a total of about four or five years. My main contributions that you would have come across anywhere have to do with the split between humans and chimps (as a result of a shift in diet) and the origin of the genus Homo (related to the invention of cooking). These days, I teach now and then, I write a lot, and I occasionally advise candidates on policy.”

Guava Anthropology. About: “GUAVA anthropology covers things that are Grotesque, Unabashed, Apostate, Virid, and Auspicious about anthropology! GUAVA anthropology was founded in November 2009. It is a collective blog featuring Taiwan’s young anthropologists. More than 50 writers of the writers have taught at universities and academic institutions. They explore daily life and cultural conditions from an anthropological perspective.”

HawgBlawg. About: “Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.”

The Human Evolution Blog. About: “Dr. Nathan H. Lents is a Professor of Molecular Biology at John Jay College of The City University of New York and author of “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals,” available in May 2016.”

ISS Archaeology. About: “Our project, initiated in 2015, is the first archaeological study of a space habitat — in this case, the International Space Station (ISS). We seek to understand evolving cultural, social, and material structures in the ISS’s unique context. Continuously occupied since 2 November 2000, this site is extraordinarily significant for the development of technology and science. It also serves as evidence for human adaptation to a completely new environment. The ISS project has involved five space agencies, 25 nations, countless private contractors, and at least 270 visitors from 19 countries (among them scientists, military officers, and even a few tourists). It is arguably the most complex and expensive building project ever undertaken by humans.”

John Hawks Weblog. One of the originals and still going strong! About: “I study human evolution and genetics. I’ve done research examining almost every part of our evolutionary story, from the very origin of the human lineage more than six million years ago up to the present day. My work on recent evolutionary changes has strong connections to global health, especially adaptations to agricultural and sedentary lifestyles and new diseases. For the past decade, I have been engaged with paleontological fieldwork in South Africa. I’ve been honored to work with the great team of researchers at the Rising Star cave system, where we discovered Homo naledi in 2013.”

Keywords. This site is run by fellow dendrite Kerim Friedman. Check out his last post here on Anthrodendum, which mentions Keywords and also has an archive of some of his favorite posts over the years. About: “P. Kerim Friedman (傅可恩) is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among Indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy.”

Language Log. About: “Language Log was started in the summer of 2003 by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. For nearly five years, it ran on the same elderly linux box, with the same 2003-era blogging software, sitting in a dusty corner of a group office at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Lawn Chair Anthropology. Zachary Cofran’s site. About: “I’m a biological anthropologist studying human evolution, growth, and development.  I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, and am now an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.  Views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own*, and in no way associated with my current department or institution.”

Leiden Anthropology Blog. About: “The Leiden Anthropology Blog is written by scholars at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. They blog about their research, and teaching in the Bachelor and Master program, and share anthropological perspectives on a wide range of social issues.”

Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Blog for the SLA. About: “The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) is a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). To join the SLA, please register via the AAA website. Membership entitles you to a complementary subscription to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. In addition to this website and blog, we also maintain several e-mail lists, organize academic meetings and awards for outstanding work in the discipline. See here for a list of officers and the by-laws of the SLA. If you’d like to contact the SLA, please use our contact form.”

Medizineethnologie. About: “Dieses Blog soll eine stärkere Sichtbarkeit für aktuelle Debatten und Forschungen in der Medizinethnologie schaffen – sowohl für Studierende und WissenschaftlerInnen aus dem akademischen Bereich, als auch für medizinethnologisch Interessierte aus der weiteren Öffentlichkeit (Medizin, Psychiatrie, Medien, Gesundheitsarbeit).” [This blog is run by the Work Group Medical Anthropology in the German Anthropological Association. It publishes texts (both in English and German) on the anthropology of transnational health interventions; migration, mobility and health; and the encounters between different medical and health-related ideas and practices in an interconnected world. More information about the text categories on this blog and the guidelines for submission can be found here: author guidelines. Specific guidelines in regard to the #WitnessingCorona series can be found here.]

Most Holy Death. From the ‘Who is La Santa Muerte?” page: “Read about who Santa Muerte is below, about her devotees, their traditions, stories and beliefs through the articles on this website, thanks to the fieldwork, research and writing of Oxford University trained anthropologist of religion Dr. Kate Kingsbury, Research Associate at University of British Columbia, the research and writing of historian Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of this book on Santa Muerte, in collaboration with David Metcalfe, as we present a multi-faceted exploration of the sanctification of death in the popular faith traditions of the Americas.”

MSU Campus Archaeology Program. Blog run by the campus archaeology program. About: “MSU Campus Archaeology is a program that works to mitigate and protect the archaeological resources on Michigan State University’s beautiful and historic campus. The premier Land-Grant College, Michigan State University (MSU) has a cultural heritage that exists not only in our rich traditions and academic values, but also underneath our feet, below the ground that we walk on every day.”

Museum Fatigue. David Davies’s site. From the about page: “Somewhere outside professionally published work and research and teaching I wanted a place to write and share some of my observations and interpretations of things that I observe in the world around me—a place to collect, comment and store things. Also a place to sometimes ‘get things out’ in an informal way. Just in case someone else finds something of interest or has an idea to share, I thought it would be fun to also make it public. I have been considering a blog for years, but never seemed to get around to setting one up. This spring, just before setting off on my annual trip to China, I decided to give it a go. When it came to naming a blog, I reflected on the curious feeling of excitement, awe, and frustration that I feel when I encounter new things. Social life entices me, but it is aggravating when when meaningful interpretation is elusive. Then, the memory of the trip to the video store came to mind. I’m hoping this blog might be part of the cure for museum fatigue.”

The Naked Anthropologist. Laura Agustín’s site. About: “Laura writes as a lifelong migrant and identifies with no nationality. Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration in Switzerland in 2010, she has danced with hustlers in Miami and strippers in San Francisco, learned safe-sex techniques from brothel workers in the Dominican Republic, roomed with an escort and her family in Melbourne and visited bar girls and jailed migrants in Bangkok.”

Notes from the Ethnoground. About: “As an ethnobotanist and photographer who has worked for over thirty years in the Amazon, I often travel in what Wade Davis calls “the ethnosphere.” I use this log for reflecting on journeys and explorations both outward and inward, recent and past.”

Pedes in Terra. About: “Pedro Maya Álvarez es antropólogo, empresario y consultor especializado en la gestión de proyectos de educación digital. Actualmente es Socio Fundador y Director Técnico de Divulgación Dinámica S. L. Ha desarrollado numerosos trabajos de colaboración empresas e instituciones en el marco de los programas e iniciativas europeas.” [Pedro Maya Álvarez is an anthropologist, businessman and consultant specialized in managing digital education projects. He is currently Founding Partner and Technical Director of Divulgación Dinámica S. L. He has developed numerous collaborative projects with companies and institutions within the framework of European programs and initiatives.]

Peregrination. Holly Waters’s site. About: “This blog is comprised of my thoughts and commentary regarding the interpretive traditions and ritual practices of the sacred ammonite fossils called Shaligram. Since 2012, I have been working with and learning from the wonderful Hindu, Buddhist, and Bonpo Shaligram practitioners of India, Nepal, and among the South Asian Diaspora in the US and the UK. While I continue my ethnographic fieldwork on the topic of Shaligrams, I invite any and all interested in the subject of Shaligrams to read, discuss, and participate here. I certainly do not claim to know everything but I am happy to share what I have learned so far!”

Perspectives in Anthropology. About: “Perspectives in Anthropology, is an online publication that launched in 2014. The series specializes in articles on Social, Cultural, Medical, Urban and Visual Anthropology which are available online as open-access and free-to-read. Some of the publications in the series are evaluated by an open-source, peer-review process.”

Philbu’s Blog. About: “This is Philipp Budka, a sociocultural anthropologist from Vienna, blogging about infrastructures, technologies & media, and his fieldwork and teaching experiences.”

Powered by Osteons. Kristina Killgrove’s site. From the About page: “I am trained as a classical bioarchaeologist, and therefore am one of the few scholars who has started to answer questions about the ancient Romans using their skeletons. My research has focused primarily on immigration to Rome, urban collapse at Gabii during the Imperial period (1st-4th centuries AD), and the lives of people killed by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. This work blends anthropological theory, biochemical analysis, and classical archaeology to find out more about people rarely represented in the historical record of the Roman world: immigrants, women, children, and slaves.”

Practicing Anthropology. Site for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA). About: “The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) was founded as a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1983 to represent practicing anthropology. Many NAPA members are established or are planning careers as practicing professionals linked into government, business, and other networks outside of the academy. Many in NAPA leadership work outside of academic settings.”

Raving Anthropology. Hilary Agro’s site. About: “Hi, I’m Hilary. I live in Toronto and I’m an anthropology PhD student at the University of British Columbia. My Master’s research, which was the inception for this blog, was on the subject of drug use, harm reduction and electronic dance music culture in Toronto. My PhD research is on drug policy, activism and the harms of drug prohibition, so I’ll be writing about that as well as rave and festival culture now. I have a lot of strong feelings about stuff and like to swear a lot when I write, and this is where I’m free to do that. Take that, performative academic professionalism.”

Sapiens. From the About page: “SAPIENS is a digital magazine about everything human, told through the stories of anthropologists. In January 2016, we launched SAPIENS with the aim of bringing together the voices of scholars who are eager to share the findings, ideas, and perspectives of anthropology with a broad global readership. As people who study other people, anthropologists look to the past, present, and future to assemble vital observations on what it means to be human. This work matters. Yet all too often their research remains inaccessible to public audiences. Our purpose is to amplify anthropological insights to make a difference in how people see themselves and those around them. We hope to make people more curious about—and empathetic toward—their fellow humans.”

The Archaeological Eye. Sara Perry’s site. About: “I am Senior Research Fellow at MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), and formerly its Director of Research & Engagement overseeing MOLA’s 100+ post-excavation specialists, engagement practitioners and research associates (2019-2023). Alongside MOLA, I work as an international consultant with clients and partners seeking to develop their public and research practice in archaeology and heritage to achieve transformative outcomes for people and planet. I am also Honorary Professor at the University of York, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and I sit on the Research Committees of both the Egypt Exploration Society and the Museum of London.”

Shreds and Patches. Jason Baird Jackson’s site. About: “Curious about the “Shreds and Patches” name? This post explains it. I am an ethnographer and ethnologist whose work is centered in the fields of folklore studies and cultural anthropology. I have collaborated with Native American communities in Oklahoma since 1993, when I began a lifelong personal and research relationship with the Euchee/Yuchi people. My experiences in the company of Euchee people in turn brought me into relationship with other Native communities in central and eastern Oklahoma. My studies concern, most centrally, the nature of customary arts, practices and beliefs and the role that these play in social life. In addition to the ethnography and ethnology of Eastern North America, I also pursue projects exploring emerging issues (often quite contested) in the areas of intellectual property, cultural property, and heritage policy. Lastly, most of my career has been spent working as a curator in museum contexts and I remain deeply engaged with research in, and teaching about, museums, especially museums of art and ethnography.”

Society for Visual Anthropology. News and updates from the SVA. About: “The Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) is a section of the American Anthropological Association. We promote the study of visual representation and media. Both research methods and teaching strategies fall within the scope of the society. SVA members are involved in all aspects of production, dissemination, and analysis of visual forms. Works in film, video, photography, and computer-based multimedia explore signification, perception, and communication-in-context, as well as a multitude of other anthropological and ethnographic themes.”

Somatosphere. About: “Somatosphere is a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, medical sociology, history of science and medicine, science and technology studies, and cultural psychiatry. Founded in 2008 by a small group of medical anthropologists, Somatosphere has grown to become a key online forum for debate and discussion in medical anthropology, as well as in the humanities and the social sciences of health and medicine more broadly. With well over 1,000 posts, an editorial board of rising and established scholars, over 500 total contributors, an average of between 20,000 and 30,000 unique site visits per month, and a robust social media presence, Somatosphere has a wide reach among social scientists and various non-specialist publics.”

Standplaats Wereld. About: “Standplaats Wereld is the weblog of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU Amsterdam. The authors write in their personal capacity. Standplaats Wereld is a platform for informative, stimulating, and surprising reflections with an anthropological touch. Anthropologists are interested in people living in a contemporary global society. They try to understand this from the viewpoint of the people themselves, but also from the comparative perspective that is part of the anthropological lens. Anthropological curiosity is nowadays focused on how people in the Global South and North are dealing with modernization and globalization. Anthropologists combine the unique with the universal; the viewpoint of the individual human being with a global perspective. This weblog is an invitation to enter the anthropological home base: Standplaats Wereld.”

Teaching Anthropology. About: “Teaching Anthropology (TA) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to the teaching of anthropology. It is a journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and promotes dialogue and reflection on anthropological pedagogies in schools, colleges, universities and beyond. We welcome content from cognate disciplines that explore the teaching of culture and difference, as well as ethnographic and alternative research methods. Collecting together a diverse range of submissions, TA provide an archaeological repository of how teaching has evolved in anthropology. It is intended to be a practical resource to inspire and stimulate current pedagogical practice. Teaching sharpens our research questions and pushes forward disciplinary knowledge, opening possibilities for personal and professional transformation.”

This Anthro Life. About: “Life is complicated, but we love simple answers. AI and robotics are changing the nature of work. Emojis change the way we write. Fossil Fuels were once the engine of progress, now we’re in a race to change how we power the planet. We’re constantly trying to save ourselves…from ourselves. This Anthro Life brings you smart conversations with humanity’s top makers and minds to make sense of it all. We dig into truth and hope in our creative potential through design, culture, and technology. Change your perspective. Crafted + Hosted by Dr. Adam Gamwell. From Missing Link Studios in Boston, MA.”

Trinketization. About: “John Hutnyk writes on culture, cities, diaspora, history, film, prisons, colonialism, education, Marxism. For 30 years he has worked in the area of Asian cultural studies, Asian history, diaspora and media, and is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam.”

Una Anthropológa en la Luna. About: “Noemí. Educadora social y antropóloga social y cultural” [Social educator and social and cultural anthropologist.].

Visual Anthropology of Japan. About the author: “Steven C. Fedorowicz is a cultural anthropologist, visual anthropologist, Associate Professor of Anthropology and reluctant blogger.” About the blog: “This blog is for educational purposes only; as such it is a capitalist-free zone. The views, images and opinions expressed here are those of the author only, unless otherwise noted. The author does not necessarily share or endorse any of the views or contents of linked sites. All responsibility for “Visual Anthropology of Japan” lies with the author and not any institution he may be affiliated with. Peace.”

Wenner Gren. News and updates from the WG. About: “The Wenner-Gren Foundation is a private operating foundation dedicated to providing leadership in support of anthropology and anthropologists worldwide.”

Wide Urban World. Michael E. Smith’s site. About the site: “Wide Urban World is a blog about cities as viewed from a broad historical and comparative perspective. As Winston Churchill said, ‘The farther back we look, the farther ahead we can see.’ About M.E. Smith: ” am an archaeologist who works on Aztec sites and Teotihuacan.I do comparative and transdisciplinary research on cities, and also households, empires, and city-states. I view my discipline, archaeology, as a Comparative Historical Social Science.”

Zachary Blair. About: “Zachary Blair is an anthropologist, researcher, writer,  community organizer, academic, and mass violence victims advocate. He received his PhD in anthropology with a concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago in December 2018. He has worked as a researcher, curriculum developer, university administrator, editor, visiting professor, and public health specialist. He also co-founded the nonprofit VictimsFirst, which helps victims directly and guides communities in their response to mass violence, including mass shootings.”

NEW SITES, OTHER SITES, and WHERE PEOPLE ARE WRITING/POSTING NOW:*

Carwil without Borders. About: “Carwil Bjork-James is an assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. His research, both ethnographic and historical, concerns disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Latin America, with a focus on Bolivia’s urban and indigenous movements. His 2020 book on Bolivian space-claiming protest, power, and race, The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia, is currently available from University of Arizona Press.”

The Exchange. New site via the Society for Economic Anthropology. From the opening post: “Welcome to The Exchange, the short-form, Open Access subsidiary of the SEA’s journal, Economic Anthropology. Short-form means less than about 2000 words. Open Access means you don’t have to leap over paywalls to read what we post here. Subsidiary technically refers to being supplementary to and supposedly less important than something (in this case THE JOURNAL), but we will be disputing the ‘less important’ part in the strongest possible terms at our next shareholder’s meeting.”

Keith Hart, who created the site ‘The Memory Bank’ and founded projects such as the Open Anthropology Cooperative, is now on substack here. Here’s a recent series of posts about Keith’s journey as an anthropologist and ‘trying to make a meaningful connection.’

Sara Kendzior is now on substack here. About: “I am the bestselling author of THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY (2018), HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT (2020), and THEY KNEW (2022). My next book, THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP, will come out in 2025. From 2018 until 2013, I was the co-host of Gaslit Nation, a weekly podcast which covers corruption in the United States and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I live in St. Louis, Missouri.”

Grant Jun Otsuki. About: “My name is Grant Jun Otsuki. Since 2017, I have been at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where I am a senior lecturer in cultural anthropology. From 2015 to 2017, I was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. I received my Ph.D. in social-cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto in 2015. I also have an M.S. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2007), and a B.Sc. Hons. in Science, Technology, and Society with a minor in physics from the University of Calgary.”

Platypus. Blog for CASTAC. About: “Platypus, the newly renamed CASTAC Blog, is a web log for discussion and exchange on anthropological studies of science and technology as social phenomena. It was originally launched in 2012 by Jenny Cool, Patricia G. Lange, and Jordan Kraemer, who are members of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. Platypus aims to promote dialogue on theories, tools, and social interactions that explore questions at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies. We seek to build a thriving discourse among a community of scholars concerned about the implications of techno-science, technologized products, and worldviews for human beings and other forms of life. Our approach is interdisciplinary and inclusive. We encourage both regular and occasional contributions from students, faculty, and researchers within and beyond academia.”

Ryan Anderson: I am blogging at my personal site for now, but have some ideas about creating a new general anthro blog to help fill in the void. One idea would be to revive the ‘anthropologies’ name and project, perhaps as anthropologies2.o or something along those lines. Or I might just create a new site altogether. More on that soon…

UPDATE: ADDING ANTHRO RSS FEEDS

A few of you have mentioned RSS feeds in the comments on this post and post #2 in this series. Thanks Lorenz and Lorena for these resources! I have added them below in this new section on RSS feeds. If you have more anthro RSS feeds, send them my way. Also, check out Grant Otsuki’s great post on ‘Reconstructing the Anthro Blogosphere with RSS.”

The Anthropology Newspaper via Lorenz at antropologi.info

Grant Jun Otsuki has created an OPML file that you can use (via NetNewsWire) to subscribe to more than 90 anthro blogs. Check out the instructions at the end of Grant’s post.

*I’ll try to keep updating this part until the lights on this site (so to speak) are finally shut off. Please use the comments below to share sites and tell us where and what YOU are writing.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

Source

Well, by now most of you have heard the news that this blog is closing down. That whole conversation was happening in the last couple of months, but really something that we’d been talking about for the past few years. Back in 2021 we all agreed to try to revive this blog, but things just didn’t take off. There was just so much going on at the time. This site, like many others, was a casualty of the mass exodus to Twitter, the decline of blogging, people moving on to other things in their careers, others getting slammed with kids and careers (that was me), and the global pandemic…among other things. So, we’re closing things down.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been back around here a bit more lately, right at the end. For the past year or so I’ve been thinking a lot about the kinds of spaces we once had, and what we have lost. Here’s what I wrote in December 2022:

About 10 years ago, the online anthropology community looked pretty different. I’m not saying it was some utopia—it wasn’t—but there were some aspects that I do miss. Back then there seemed to be a more connected and coherent online community. In some ways, it was great.

There were tons and tons of blogs, which included the former iteration of this site (SM), and others like Neuroanthropology (Daniel Lende and Greg Downey), Somatosphere, John Hawks’ Weblog, Powered by Osteons (Kristina Killgrove), Context and Variation (Kate Clancy), From the Annals of Anthroman (John L. Jackson), and of course Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically, among many others. 

And this is how I closed out that post:

All this has me thinking, once again, about the need for not just making new spaces, but also holding and using the spaces we already have. That includes this site, which has been somewhat…underutilized for the last few years (IMO). As Sarah Kendzior said recently: “Do not cede territory in an information war.” I’ll leave it there for now.

I still agree with Kendzior on that point. My initial plan was to try to revive this site so we didn’t cede this particular ground. But I think the larger point here is less about one particular site than it is about how we write, where we write, and what kinds of platforms we put our time and energy into. It’s also about how we share and interact with one another, and finding ways to keep those networks and connections intact.

So…I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs as things that still work, that are still reliable, and still around. I’m not the only one who has been thinking along these lines. And when Twitter just kept taking repeated turns for the worse, lots of people were talking about all the loss, yes, but also other options and possibilities. I think many folks were wondering, too, why we had gone all in on a private platform that could be dismantled so easily. I was, at least. 

This past July, Colleen Morgan, my pal from the old anthro-blogging days, posted this on Twitter and Mastodon:

Band together. Help each other out. Salvage what is good. In the spirit of her words, I posted ‘Salvaging what is good’ here on Anthrodendum. Colleen followed up on her site, in a bit of old-school one-blog-linking-to-another kind of back and forth. While you might think that ‘Salvaging’ post was just a bunch of sentimental ‘things used to be good and now they suck’ kind of lamentation, my aim was more pragmatic. I asked people to leave some breadcrumbs, so to speak:

Let’s use this space to share what we’re all thinking and were we’re going for some rest, repair, and reconciliation. I think many of us have already lost a lot of those little connections we once had on these platforms. Let’s see what we can save and maybe leave some breadcrumbs for where we’re all going. What are you thinking and where are you going next? Mastodon? Bluesky? Post? Staying offline and just going surfing, hiking, or walking more? Something else? Let me know in the comments below. 

A few people commented, and that’s a lot more than we’ve seen around here in a while. So it’s a start. As you can see, I have been on this retrospective kick–in the interests of thinking about what’s next–for a while now. That brings us to the anthro blog survey project, which is a continuation of all these conversations. I had assumed that the so-called anthroblogosphere was dead, but it turns out that’s not entirely the case. Rumors of its demise have been, well, somewhat exaggerated.

I went through all 188 blogs that Jason Antrosio listed in his roundup of 2017 anthro blogs. I modified my methods slightly and decided to count blogs that had a post as of June 2023 as ‘active.’ Of all 188 sites, 111 (59%) are no longer around, and 77 (41%) are still active. Now, granted, 59% gone is a big loss. But there’s actually quite a lot more still active than I’d expected. See what happens when you actually do the work, and look around, instead of just assuming?

A few thoughts. First, people are still out there writing and sharing ideas. But I’m not seeing a ton of comments on sites. Some more than others. What seems to be missing are all the links between these sites/projects.

Sure, this is partially a problem of the decline of platforms and all the changes that have happened. So it’s a tech/infrastructure issue in part. But I think it’s also partially about how people have changed their use of the internet and social media in more recent years. It’s an increasing reliance on feeds and algorithms, in which we scroll and tend to take what we get served…rather than having to actively go out and look for certain sites, people, conversations.

Maybe I’m off base here. But this is something I like about Mastodon so far. You have to dive in and search for subjects, conversations, etc. They aren’t just handed to you. Search hashtags and all that. It takes time.

Back in the day with blogs, people tended to link to other blogs and then check in on various sites fairly regularly. We’re missing that these days. And a lot of what’s happening–what folks are writing and thinking about–get skipped over or just lost in the shuffle. But it’s still out there. 

We can change this, you know. Using some old things, and by making some new ones. Hint, hint.

In the interest of salvaging what is good from the old anthroblogosphere, in the next post I am going to link to all the (77) blogs that are still active. It will be an old-fashioned blogroll of sorts, all in the name of preservation and possibilities. In the meantime, leave some comments, breadcrumbs, and thoughts of your own below. And thanks for stopping by.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

Source

So what does the anthro blog landscape look like these days? What’s left? Who is still around? Is it all totally gone?! Lately I have been assuming that it’s all gone, but that’s not really very scientific of me, is it? What’s the best way to find out? To get out there and look around, so to speak. It’s time for a little (digital) archaeology of our recent past.

Now, when it comes to doing survey work, it’s really nice if you have a baseline to work with. We do, thanks in part to Jason Antrosio’s list of anthro blogs from 2017 (which is also linked on the sidebar of our site). Let’s get to it.

I counted a total of 188 sites that Jason listed in his 2017 overview (although I need to double check that number). I went through the first 40 (about 21% of the total) to get things started seeing which sites are active and which are not. I set a pretty low bar for labeling a site ‘active’: All they needed was one post in 2023. Again, that’s a pretty low bar, but it gives us at least some insight into what sites are still around.

Of the 40 that I have looked at so far, 15 of them are still active, which is about 37%. So this means 63% are dormant, have moved, or are just plain dead. More to come as I finish looking through all the sites.

In the meantime, here’s a sampling of the anthropology sites that are still around, despite that great fragmentation:

Allegra Lab is still going strong. Here’s an excerpt from Lindsay Bell’s recent essay “Authorship in the Post Academic, Post-Human Age”:

As someone with a longstanding interest in publishing and conceptions of authorship, it strikes me that the question of how ideas travel and who, if anyone, owns them, usefully highlights areas of tension between academic, trade and media publishing that require further unpacking in the post-human era of authorship in which we suddenly find ourselves. In what follows, I want to raise a larger set of issues about the somewhat uneasy relationship between academic writing and journalism, based on the different kinds of credit economies in which they operate, and what this means in the context of their increasingly symbiotic relationship and the rise of AI-powered language-processing models such as ChatGPT.

Over on Anthropologia: una perspective multiple, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina writes about the things she learned while teaching her classes in 2023:

Cada año aprendo cosas nuevas durante mis clases, a veces porque usamos libros y artículos recientemente publicados, a veces porque las y los invitados a la clase nos cuentan nuevas cosas, a veces porque las y los estudiantes llegan con preocupaciones que no se me habían ocurrido al diseñar los temarios, y otras veces en realidad por casualidad [Translation: Every year I learn new things during my classes, sometimes because we use recently published books and articles, sometimes because the guests in the class tell us new things, sometimes because the students come with concerns that I had not thought of when designing the syllabi, and other times just by chance].

Finally, at All Tomorrow’s Cultures, Samuel Collins has a recent post about SETI:

In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has hosted a series of workshops (including one from anthropologist Willi Lempert) designed to help participants through the decoding process–including hints on avoiding ethnocentric (and anthropocentric) assumptions about what this communication could be and what the intentions of extraterrestrial intelligence might entail.

I am a very enthusiastic SETI advocate, but I wonder if “decoding” is really the best we can do here. I’m not entirely alone–the very lively Discord discussion around this project has included many, philosophical tangents that have questioned what exactly “interpretation” might mean in this context. On the one hand, semiotics (in that broader, Peircean sense) is something that all of us living creatures do. As Kohn writes, “All living beings sign. We humans are therefore at home with the multitude of semiotic life” (Kohn 2013: 42). All life as we know it is in communication with its environment–many of us living creatures along multiple semiotic levels. So it is certainly reasonable to assume that other life will also be involved in sign-making.

As it turns out, there are definitely signs of life in the old anthro blogosphere–we just have to look. So there you have a sample of three of the fifteen active sites I’ve surveyed so far. It will be interesting to see the overall live/dormant ratio once I get through all 188. To be continued…

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

Source

…

Hi there!

I am reaching out to whoever it is that receives these emails or runs Anthrodendum to ask for a possible favour. I was wondering whether or not you would find it worthwhile to write about doing ethnography from home – and by that, I do not mean ‘studying a place you call home’, but literally from our desks.

I, like the 9 other young women in the anthropology honours class at my university, find ourselves at a complete loss for how to restructure our already underway research projects in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. Having been issued a national lockdown for at least a few weeks, we’ve been told to shift our research to an entirely online form. It is unlikely that it will be safe to continue to conduct traditional participant observation even by mid-fall in the urban-centers of our country’s Coronavirus outbreak. While we have been given literature to pour over regarding ‘virtual ethnographies’ and doing anthropology online, I, and my fellow students, would definitely benefit from some pretty basic pointers.

I appreciate your time in advance!

Kind Regards,

Stephanie Cookson
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Bachelor of Social Science Honours

Dick Powis

This is a great question, particularly as you are definitely not alone right now. Nearly every anthropologist I know – student or otherwise – is in the same boat. And like you (and many of them), I have no experience in digital/virtual ethnography, so I’ll try to talk about how my research experience might translate into a digital/virtual world.

The first thing I would determine is the research site. In this context, that could be an actual website, or it might be a bigger community of people that operate across multiple websites, or perhaps it’s a community that occupies a small part of a website. What is it about the site or community that interests you or demands attention? Then, I would approach it the same way I approach my own ethnographic research: move in, live there, get to know people, lurk, make it a part of your daily activities, learn the language (or jargon). Become a community member, get involved, become a fixture. Journal about it!And then from there, you can reach out and interview individuals. See how they feel about the topic of conversation or ask them why they talk about things the way they do or hold certain attitudes.

Anyway, that’s a basic framework of my approach. I know you probably have plenty of literature to read, but I’d like to push Collins and Durington’s “Networked Anthropology” to the top of your stack if you’re not familiar with it. Thanks, good luck, and I think we’d all like to hear from you in a few months and see how everything turned out!

Maia Green

How can social scientists do research when the social assumes unprecedented forms? 

Dispersed communities of concern are emerging in response to the pandemic and using online collaboration platforms designed to allow groups of people to interact and see each other in real time. Established communities of practice — in business, the media, religion and  academia — are making massive efforts to carry out their ordinary activities online. These kinds of communities are probably quite different to the kinds of virtual communities anthropologists have studied, for example Tom Boellstorff’s engaging ethnography of how people make and manage virtual selves in the online environment of  Second Life. New virtual communities brought into being as a response to the pandemic are different. First because of scale and reach, and second in pace of expansion. Established communities which are moving online are different from wholly online communities because the practices they perform are distributed through the internet, but were developed independently of it. 

The differences between these kinds of online communities could suggest different strategies for fieldwork. As you are asking about projects you have already started researching, one option is to do what other established communities are doing and move your practice online. This would entail locating the online spaces where your chosen community now spends its time and exploring with them the  possibilities for some kind of participation (subject of course to having obtained relevant ethical permissions and requesting consent). You could then carry out your fieldwork through the usual steps- networking with key informants and organising interviews through Skype or other apps.  

A second strategy could be to focus on an already existing online community, either one which is engaged in the area you are researching or, perhaps, consider a new topic. Social media are great places to find members of different social worlds and begin to explore them. Once you have made some contacts, you can explore with them the possibilities for more structured interaction, again subject to consent and ethical review.  

Option three is to do something totally new in an emergent social field and explore some of the ways in which the pandemic is creating new forms of behaviour and sociality. You can do  this based on what you learn about how people are responding to the pandemic online, through news, social media and what you hear from friends and colleagues. If you are permitted to leave your home to get essential foods or take exercise you could observe people’s interactions. If staying inside you can reflect on your own changing practices. How are you structuring your days? How do you make boundaries between work and leisure? How are you socialising remotely with others outside the home?  

Responses to coronavirus in all countries raise important questions around inequality, health systems, care, and social solidarity. All aspects of life are affected by it in some way. Research conducted during this uncertain  time can shed light on the multiple creative ways that people in various situations respond to the ongoing changes brought about by the pandemic. 

Ryan Anderson

Most of my research focuses on traditional ethnographic sites: places and communities and the issues they need to deal with. I look at the politics of conservation and tourism development in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and conflicts/challenges of sea level rise adaptation along the California coast. Some of this work has led to an increasing interest in the intersections between these places/communities and media/online communities. I’m really interested in how ideas about places, as expressed through media (and online forums), shape those places. This piece on media depictions (link) is a step in that direction, and the next step is to examine the online component of this media. To give another example, some of my work on sea level rise, has led me to the whole issue of climate change denial/skepticism… which in turn has led to an interest in how mis- and disinformation spreads online. In both cases I am not just interested in studying the online component, but rather how it fits within larger processes and systems.

That’s one basic approach to doing digital or virtual ethnography that I have found helpful: keep it holistic and examine how something fits within a broader social picture. In your case, you may only be able to look at the online component for now, but even so you can develop some ideas and ask questions about where and how certain things may intersect with offline social behavior. Take notes, gather ideas… and study those offline intersections when it’s possible to do so. In all ethnographic work you have to do your best given the situation you are in.

A second tip is to look for ‘places’ where people come together, where they congregate. Think creatively about what this can look like. For example, in my work it’s useful to look at how people think about and talk about places in the comments sections on travel sites. Keep in mind though that there are ethical issues that you want to think through for anything you’re looking at online. But these kinds of spaces can provide fascinating insight into how people think about and interact with ideas, places, and events.

So overall, keep things holistic, look for connections, and find places where people come together. Be as creative as you can, and don’t forget to attend to ethical issues. Good luck!

Matt Thompson

I am not an academic anthropologist, I work for a city public library, but my professional practice is informed by my training in anthropology and ethnography. At the library our doors are closed to the public, but we are still at work urgently seeking ways to bring our services to the community. A lot of that, by necessity, will be online via mobile devices.

Recently, I attended a webinar hosted by StoryCorps, best known for their short, engaging, personal recordings of everyday people; stories of love and families and obstacles overcome, real make ’em laugh, make ’em cry kinda stuff (link). The webinar was to be about their digital oral history project. I was interested because my library has an already existing, albeit unloved, digital oral history project that’s just sitting there not doing anything. I think, maybe StoryCorps can give me some new ideas or inspire me to revive this moribund project? By the conclusion of the webinar, StoryCorps had not solved all my problems. There was no switch I could flick to make our oral history project vibrant and successful. But they have a very interesting model that you might be able to adapt to ethnography under quarantine.

Program participants download a StoryCorps app to their phones, allow permission to the mic, and create an account. Family members are then encouraged to interview each other using the app to record, there are plenty of tips on their website for recording a successful interview. The recorded interview can stay as a local file on the participant’s phone or it can be uploaded to the StoryCorps archive. Note: these are .wav files and can be quite large, especially if the interview is long. There is a code you can give participants that shares their recording on a community page, which can then be curated and enriched with text and photos.

Not a system without constraints, but take the brand name off of everything and we might find some ideas that could be put to work. A lot of people have phones, many of which can function as digital audio and video recorders. You cannot be in their physical space, but that space is shared with select others. They can interview, record, and photograph their family members and roommates. Essentially, participants use their phones to create digital ethnographic objects and then they share them with you. This has potential as an alternative to virtual or remote ethnography, particularly if pursed with diligence and compassion.

To make this model successful would require testing some thorny technical and ethical considerations, but they are not insurmountable. I would begin by partnering with a community organization and experimenting with the model inside just that group, focus on organizational history for example. Then once the researchers better understood the limits of the data collection method, no doubt incorporating feedback, steps could be taken to address the issues and the project could expand. But I think the basic idea of getting study participants to use their phones to collaborate with the researcher has a lot of potential.

Caio Coelho

Dealing with anthropological fieldwork is always something difficult to teach, it is an apprenticeship that heavily relies in the experience of the ethnographer and the group researched. The basics for fieldwork, in my view, is an exchange of affections, of information, of intelligence, of cultures. But it isn’t exactly implied anywhere that it has to be done physically.

We live in a society where speech became detached from the body when the telephone was invented, some 150 years ago. We live in a society where images can appear to move themselves for some 120 years now. We live in a society where it is possible to see wars, while they are happening from some other corner of the world for the past 60 years. And more recently, we can use computers to practically do anything: from virtually walking the streets of New Delhi on Google Maps, participating in academic events held on Twitter (Hi #ASEH2020tweets, it was great!), to communicate with someone in almost anyplace in the world via videochat through a device that is smaller than a hand. I’m not saying that technology is democratic in this 21st Century, there are problem of access to them, as there are problems of access with almost anything under Capitalist regimes. But I’m saying that there are possibilities.

One of the main dimensions of fieldwork, according to Jeanne Favret-Saada (1990), is to be able to affect and be affected by others [see Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “Être Affecté”. In: Gradhiva: Revue d’Histoire et d’Archives de l’Anthropologie, 8. pp. 3-9]. She vividly describes dewitchment in her fieldwork in the Western French Bocage, in which she only was able to enter the “native” network of conversations around magic when they started to see her as a person who had been bewitched. The question that I pose to you Stephanie and colleagues is: can we only be affected through the body? Through the corporeal experience? Or is affection a phenomenon that relates more to our minds? If it is so, our mind is able to visit places, through our imagination and technology, to get us in touch with others. Including myself in this example, I make part of Anthro{dendum} and am in touch with the conversations we do here, even though I never met anyone of the collective in person (I’m from Brazil). I can participate and observe, as the digital nature of what we do on the blog helps to trespass the geographical contingencies of where we live. I’m not saying every fieldwork is possible to be done at distance, but I’m saying that there are possibilities. I would like to take a moment to let you see another example of this in action, there is a street photographer that has agoraphobia. Her project confronts her own fears, and she found a way to explore the world using one technology to access what she had difficulty to access physically. Hope this helps.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

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The study of digital worlds is an emerging field in the social sciences and humanities. The concept of studying so-called “online” cultural activities poses difficulties for anthropology and the ethnographic tradition. But how might we imagine this young and controversial field beyond its institutional context and apparent methodological limitations? Drawing on media and technology studies both within and outside of anthropology, I offer ten provisional theses. The following list is a series of provocations. I do not intend it to be exhaustive. The list could be twice its length or half the size but are meant to summarize the theoretical contours of the field and inspire constructive thinking about digital anthropology. Although somewhat abstract in list form, these ten theses emerge out of around five years of ethnographic research among progressive religious communities in the American Midwest.

1. New media are never (entirely) new.

To assume or take for granted new media’s newness is to ignore the ways by which people create and circulate the discourse of newness. New media forms emerge within existing patterns of practice and are by no means immune to social protocol, cultural practices, or interpersonal standards of communication. Media ideologies for “new” technologies emerge out of and in interaction with older technologies and those technologies’ attendant social protocols.1

1. Technologies are both irrevocably plastic and intentionally structured.

If an axiom for the critical study of technology and media exists, this is it. Humans think up, design, create, and deploy tools for various purposes. Such tools then change the playing field of social, cultural, religious, technological, agricultural, economic, industrial, or environmental interactions. We make tools and then our tools make us. This cycle of causality encompasses even digital media. As a corollary point, the boldest and most unsophisticated versions of Big Data research—in as much as the perspective of Big Data flattens out sociocultural context and reduces human actions to mere numeric data—is the new scientific positivism.2

1. The Internet is paradoxical in its (re)configurations of social power and hierarchy.

To assume in either direction that the Internet either exclusively (a) reinforces existing structures of power or (b) champions democratic, populist, alternative, marginal, or grassroots reform, is a grave misstep. The Internet allows for action in both directions. The Internet is first and foremost a network, and networks behave strangely and sometimes unpredictably. Who are the gatekeepers of the Internet’s various nodes of power? Who controls access to information and expression in digital fields? And who is working to circumvent these nodes? In terms of power and hierarchy, media, indeed, are double-edged swords. Media are themselves technologies, which is to say they are devices for social order. The Internet is a platform for shoring up power. But as a communicative media, the Internet is also a hotbed of countercultural activism.3

1. Ideologies, predispositions, and agendas shape Internet mediations.

The Internet as a network of ideas, imageries, materials, texts, and resources, but it did not emerge into a cultural vacuum. Rather, the originators and gatekeepers of the Internet across the spectrums of technology, coding, artificial intelligence, and application design reflect particular dispositions and habitudes. Social media, likewise, echo in their structures the various agendas of their designers.4

1. The medium is (both always and never just) the message.

Marshall McLuhan was correct that the means by which people communicate are as important as the content being communicated. Digital anthropology partially confirms McLuhan’s hypothesis. The medium does shape, both enabling and constraining, the message contents being communicated. Such an axiomatic statement now borders on truism. But incorporating the second thesis above, with regard to the plasticity of media, we might push back against the McLuhanesque position from a social constructionist angle as well as from the perspective of cultural relativism. The intended form, structures, and affordances of different media may well be circumvented. Social media uptake varies across the globe. The rules and directives for a medium are not written in stone but are flexible and malleable. As a practical example, Twitter up until a short while ago allowed only a mere 140-character space for any single Tweet, underscoring the brevity and concision of Twitter’s affordances. But that didn’t stop some users from writing full-fledged novels using the platform.5

1. Terms like “real,” “fake,” “virtual,” “disembodied,” and “authentic” are first-hand, folk, and non-scholarly languages.

To employ such concepts is to fail to observe, identify, and scrutinize the quotidian valuations that our ethnographic collaborators deploy in their thoughts about communication. News articles bemoaning the addictiveness of mobile technologies and op-eds about how texting leads to the demise of coherent interpersonal communication are as interesting for the scholar of technology as internecine theological and ecclesial debates by religious authorities on the in/authenticity and un/orthodoxy of “online religion.” Media ideologies are everywhere. Scholars study such ideologies but should ideally refrain from producing them.6

1. The Internet inhabits and structures everyday life; as such, the new media era is the age of the domesticized cyborg meets surveillance capitalism.

The Internet cannot and should not be studied as some locatable, external thing—some separate, omniscient Cloud—that exists in an empirical sense out in the ether. Mobile, habitual media are increasingly altering the structure of everyday life. Fitbits, Echo, Glass, dataphones, fourth screen technologies, digital watches: Technologies are now wearable, habitual, and quotidian. The digital is an extension of the body. To engage with the Internet involves complex interactions with intelligent, nonhuman meaning machines, networks, algorithms, and commercial industries. The Internet engenders the illusion of freedom. Google searches do not produce raw, unfiltered data results. Amazon algorithms tailor the experience of the consumer. In this brave new neoliberal world, we have not one Internet—not a unitary, singular market—but a million markets curated and cultivated and individualized by the meaning machines. We live in a posthuman world of surveillance capitalism.7

1. The Internet scrambles social boundaries and blurs cherished dichotomies.

This is an important claim. But even more importantly, the development of the Internet (and the normative discourses surrounding its development) provides a venue for the study of the somewhat arbitrary construction of “public” versus “private” social registers. Front stage and back stage domains are not natural or given but must be constructed through performance. Are blogs private diaries or public media events? Are digital friends “friends” or something else entirely? Are social media more social or less social than pre-digital networks?8

1. The Internet and new media do not need scholarly approval or disapproval, but rather sustained, careful, critical study.

Bold, normative claims about what the Internet is—i.e., the end of civilization, the great leveler, the anti-Christ, the priesthood of all believers, the demise of civil discourse, democratic populism incarnate, Big Brother 2.0, etc.—are all data for study. Scholars should be suspicious of essentialist claims that mark the Internet or digital media with broad brush strokes.9

1. Digital anthropology is neither traditionally anthropological nor conventionally ethnographic; it’s an uncomfortable hybrid and amalgamation of mixed methods.

Digital ethnography eschews conceptions of ethnography as first-hand, immediate, empirical, emplaced, in-person, or as a form of direct study, participation, or observation. Sometimes digital anthropology looks more like corpus, discourse, and textual analysis. Sometimes digital anthropology involves hanging out with people as they thumb through their social feeds in so-called “real time,” or interviewing them ex post facto about their digital proclivities. Sometimes digital anthropology involves engaging with one’s informants on social media, separated by physical distance. The texture of interpersonal connections has increased in complexity. Digital anthropology requires a vast toolbelt of interdisciplinary methods that are robust and flexible enough to understand the growing complexity of social networks in the contemporary era.10

[1] Ilana Gershon, “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20/2 (2010): 283-293; Gershon, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001).

[2] Gerson, The Breakup 2.0, 20, 50, 53-65, 90, 108; Steve Matthewman, Technology and Social Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011).

[3] Lynn Schofield Clark, The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 45; Heidi A. Campbell and Stephen Garner, Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2016), 51; John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015); Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish, After the Internet (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017); Zynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

[4] Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998); José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Adam Fish, Technoliberalism and the End of Participatory Culture in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[5] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001); Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011); Daniel Miller, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang, How the World Changed Social Media (London: University College of London Press, 2016); Daniel Miller, “The Anthropology of Social Media” Scientific American (2018), https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ observations/the-anthropology-of-social-media/.

[6] Heidi Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013); Stewart Hoover, The Media and Religious Authority (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2016).

[7] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016); Adriana de Souza e Silva, “Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” In The Cell Phone Reader: Essays in Social Transformation, edited by Anandam Kavoori and Noah Arceneaux (New York: Peter Lang, 2006): 19-43; Ganaele Langlois, Meaning the Age of Social Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[8] Chun, Updating to Remain the Same.

[9] Although not an exhaustive list, I have in mind works including Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London and New York: Verso, 2017), Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), and James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London and New York: Verso, 2018).

[10] Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller, Digital Anthropology (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Roger Sanjek and Susan W. Tratner, eFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Crystal Abida, “Three Lies of Digital Ethnography,” anthro{dendum}, February 7, 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/02/07/three-lies-of-digital-ethnography/.

Bio: Travis Cooper teaches at Butler University and is currently working on a book project titled The Digital Evangelicals: Constructing Authority and Authenticity after the New Media Turn. He is a research fellow with the Henry Luce Foundation-funded initiative, Lived Religion in the Digital Age, and writes about the social architectures of everyday American lifeworlds, rituals, and traditions, systems ranging from digital and print media to the built environment. Find out more about his research and publications here.

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We Have Never Been Digital Anthropologists
by Rebekah Cupitt

Ethnography: A Chimera

Ethnography is the methodological chimera of Anthropology, composed of a snake (the researcher, who insinuates into other people’s lives), a lion (the fieldwork, the daunting practice through which we fall bodily into an ‘other’s’ world), and a goat (the task of writing, that has us consuming our fieldwork experiences, masticating and digesting them into the more palatable documents that we then publish and share). Ethnography is a multi-headed beast with mythical qualities – and I am of course paraphrasing John Law here, who writes that method in the social sciences is a multi-headed beast (Law 2004, p. 4). In this post, I want to foreground the chimeric nature of ethnography because it was only once I situated myself in an interdisciplinary research setting and a technologically saturated field site, that I realized how little the epistemological frameworks and methodological toolkits of digital anthropology had prepared me to make sense of the digital itself.

While all heads of the ethnographic chimera warrant examination, the primary focus of this short blog post is on the lion’s head: The fieldwork experience that roars loud enough to be heard even in other disciplines. How does ethnography shift, change and morph when it is carried out in digitally saturated settings? Here follow some reflections upon my own experiences of doing research at Swedish Television alongside the production team that creates and curates its programming in Swedish Sign Language (SVT Teckenspråk). Doing participant observation and becoming entangled with the people and other entities at SVT Teckenspråk left me considering how the very foundations of ethnography relate to the digital. As a result, I began to wonder whether the notion of ‘digital anthropology’ has not perhaps become inordinate.

The Lion: Fieldwork

Arguably, the fiercest head of the ethnographic chimera is the lion: The practice of fieldwork an ethnography is based upon. In my case, fieldwork included participant observation, interviews, photographs, films – you know, the regular devices of field research. Fieldwork is perhaps the one aspect of Anthropology that, through its sheer dogmatism, stands as the proud figurehead of the discipline. Since the Malinowskian cries about extended periods of “isolated study” in the Trobriand Islands, to the Geertzian occupation of the native’s point of view, and into contemporary debates on the form fieldwork should take (Marcus & Okely 2008), fieldwork has been Anthropology’s primary method of understanding ‘the other’, digital or otherwise. Each field site is distinct, and a first step on our roads to becoming professional anthropologists requires us to navigate our First Encounters and adapt our methodologies as a compulsory rite de passage.

Finding myself in a field site that stretched from technologically saturated editing suites, sound mixing rooms and film studios to equally technological filming locations, video meeting rooms, and the production team’s own computer-centered office spaces, my primary difficulty was fitting my own fieldwork practices and conceptualization of the digital with those of the employees at SVT Teckenspråk. In the daily lives of the Swedish Television’s production team that worked hard on programming in Swedish Sign Language, the digital was unremarkable and mundane.

At SVT Teckenspråk, technology is important in some settings but unimportant in others; it is new and old in a disconcerting mix. Brand new mixing equipment interfaces with archaic microphones; a top-of-the-line monitor is connected to a 7-year old video-meeting system; someone is running a brand new version of Microsoft Office on an outdated PC, and so on. The definition of new technology is not as fixed as we might assume, and what seems entirely new soon becomes thoroughly old. What we perhaps mean, as anthropologists, when we talk about ‘new technologies’, is that we are ourselves discovering new communication forms that are carried out via technologies that are as new to us as they are to our discipline. At SVT Teckenspråk, the entire workplace was rife with technologies of work – new, old, redundant, essential – all tangled up in one big mess of cables.

However, a conflict arises when a reference to the digital comes to signify a new disciplinary frontier on the researcher’s end: Emphasizing the digital as a way to contribute to the understanding of society at large, and to prove that Anthropology still matters. A scale of possible responses to this contradiction stretches across a spectrum including: The extreme decision to abandon the native’s point of view and depict a field site rife with objects of digital anthropological fascination; a choice to render the objects as conduits for novel human behavior while emphasizing their embeddedness in pre-existing patterns of everyday life; or an equally radical stance that gives up posturing the digital as a new frontier and instead recognizes that the field under study is a place filled with practices much like the one the researcher herself may come from – where technology is inextricably and unassumingly entangled in the everyday. Confronted with this dilemma, I chose the last option, but only after pondering on a critical question: How can fieldwork of the mundane be carried out when the researcher themselves is conceptualizing their fieldwork as discovering ‘new’ sociocultural territory? The implicit futurist and technocentric innovation and pioneering spirit I was surrounded by in my interdisciplinary setting colored the analysis and the tone of my ethnographic text.

We Are Beast

While it is certainly more common in digital anthropology today to side-line rhetorics of novelty, exotic digital practices, and fantastical democratic possibilities that open up new avenues for revolution, carrying out anthropological research in interdisciplinary and technocentric fields of research demands a more considered approach to an ethnography of the digital. At SVT Teckenspråk, everyday work was the production of digital television using digital tools, and communicating was often mediated by digital technologies such as video meeting technologies. I, the researcher, documented, analyzed and wrote about the everyday communication that took place as a part of television production in Swedish Sign Language using digital tools, and was as engulfed by digital technologies as the fellow researchers who studied, designed and developed in the offices and labs right next to my own. There was no end to the digital, and no moment in which it was absent. It was simply there, entangled with people and their everyday lives.

Rather than a new frontier or object of study, the so-called digital has become a companion to the non-digital in the sense that Haraway means when she talks about companion species (2010). The digitally driven cultural revolution seems to have been exaggerated, and we have instead undergone a kind of “symbiogenesis” of the digital and the human (Haraway 2010, p. 15ff). The digital and the human are bonded in “significant otherness”, and to focus on one as a driver of change and use it to explain the other is to miss their critical entanglements and to not take these posthuman relationships seriously enough. This intertwining of technology and the human is well-acknowledged by researchers in STS, techno-anthropology and certain strands of the digital humanities, and yet the continued use of the term ‘digital’ begs the apparently unanswerable questions: If technology is now mundane and its centrality to our ethnographies becomes an analytical artifice or, at worst, a strategy to secure funding, are we still digital anthropologists? Is there still meaning in this moniker? Or is it so that, not only have we never been modern (Latour 1993), but we have never been digital either?

Dr Rebekah Cupitt is an academic precariate currently navigating post-phd life and researching deaf culture, technology and deaf visuality on the sly. She has a doctorate in mediated communication from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and her research generally takes a critical and anti-normative approach to the socio-technical, questions the empowering capabilities and other design fictions that underlie human technologies.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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