1,721,095 research outputs found
Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods
No full textThis section presents infrastructures as a matter of anthropological concern and argues that attention to infrastructuring—that is, the processes through which infrastructures shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and political life—is a key element for the anthropology of technology. The inherent relationality of infrastructures and infrastructuring, this section shows, is an occasion for anthropologists to attend to infrastructures as both ‘product’ and process without necessarily having to do a study of ‘an infrastructure’. In contemporary social life, thinking in terms of infrastructuring is exactly what allows ethnographers to study, for example, global interconnectedness across multiple scales, sites, and practices, including digitalisation practices and politics, the climate crisis, pandemic governance, multinational corporations, financial systems, deforestation, biodiversity, welfare, and much more that happens on a more-than-human scale. By paying close attention to the methods and effects of infrastructuring, anthropologists will be better equipped to analyse the role of infrastructure in social life and politics
Bruun Maja Hoejer, Hasse Catherine, Hoeyer Klaus, Wahlberg Ayo, Douglas-Jones Rachel, Kristensen Dorthe Brogaard and Winthereik Brit Ross (eds) (2022) Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
No full textKnowing, unknowing and reknowing
No full textMost technologies are knowledge-intensive, and contemporary knowledge production is often technology-intensive. Hence, knowledge practices are a central theme for a handbook for the anthropology of technology. Knowledge about knowing has mostly been considered a branch of philosophy or alternatively of theology. In this section we argue that the study of knowledge practices is part of both the foundation of the anthropological discipline and its future as we attend to technology-mediated forms of knowing, unknowing, and re-knowing. The section highlights the variations and multiplicities of knowing. It shows that studying knowledge and forms of knowing implies exploring forms of unknowing and ignorance. The seven contributions to this section present research on processes through which knowledge is made, what becomes silenced in the process, and how anthropology often holds a special role in bringing such lost insights or alternative forms of knowing back into the light. Each of the chapters presents a unique take on human engagement with knowledge and technologies of knowing, thereby continuing a long tradition of studying the production of knowledge as socially embedded and materially ingrained
Computational Ethnography: A Case of COVID-19’s Methodological Consequences
No full textReflecting on a methodological experiment, we discuss the use of computational techniques in anthropology. The experiment was based on a collaborative effort by a team of ethnographers to produce an archive on the digitalisation of everyday life that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe how online ethnographic data collection took place using digitally mediated interviews, participant observation in virtual events, and mobile ethnography. We analyse the consequences of online ethnography for establishing rapport and present steps taken to create an infrastructure for navigating ethnographic material comprising more than 3000 pages of text generated by multiple ethnographers
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