0. Introduction to Anthropology

Before we get going with "Digital Anthropology", let's first focus on the "Anthropology" bit. Your reading for this section is Boellstorff's "Ludicrous Discipline". This short article introduces how anthropology apply to digital gaming. It gives a great introduction to Anthropology. But if that's not enough, this blog post attempts to give you more!

So if you're not familiar with Anthropology, this blog post will cover the following:

1. What anthropology isn't
2. The Four Branches of Anthropology
3. The Social Sciences
4. The Anthropological Approach
5. Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

Each discipline has a set of questions it pursues and ways of answer these. The questions and the method for answering them tend distinguish the disciplines. So if you're writing an essay for your anthropology subject, it generally won't to use research from a nursing, journalism, IT publication

1. What Anthropology isn't

 Futurologists, futurists, influencers, and so on sometimes brand themselves as "anthropologists". This is great, because it shows the appeal of anthropology. But this course is not concerned with what anthropology could be or should be, but rather with teaching anthropology as it is published in scholarly journals, by scholarly presses, and practised by people with degrees in the field. 

Going by that definition, some people who say they are anthropologists in fact are not. For instance, this on a website for the above man, who describes himself as :

a world-renowned digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist who has been called "one of the greatest digital analysts of our time.”

He describes 'the anthropology' of digital disruption in this blog. In terms of his own work, he sees the importance of understanding 'digital anthropology' for his career:

Doing  "digital anthropology" helps me better understand how disruptive technologies also affect society, behavior, norms, values, etc. Now, I consider myself a digital analyst and aspiring digital anthropologist and apply both approaches to my work today.

This man and others like him may provide great assistance to CEOs and industry leaders etc. However,  what these people do is not necessarily what professional anthropologists consider to be anthropology. Put another way, I think that what people like him do is not anthropology. Maybe my understanding of what constitutes anthropology needs to change to include this. But, in the meantime, what is anthropology, as we scholars think of it?

2. The Four Branches of Anthropology

Anthropology, we used to say, has four branches:

1. Biological/Physical Anthropology
2. Linguistic Anthropology
3. Archaeology
4. Cultural Anthropology

This image shows the four branches of Anthropology (Image from Norton)

This 'four branches' division is good enough to start with. This subject on digital anthropology is cultural anthropology. From now on, when I use the word "Anthropology", I will mean "cultural anthropology". 

Anthropologists ask different kinds of questions and have different ways of answering them. So if you're an engineer, a software analyst, a medical student, or an Anthropologist you have different questions about digital technologies and different ways of answering them.  For instance "Are violent video games bad for children?" is not a question anthropologists tend to ask. We might ask rather "Why do people worry that video games might be bad for children?". Or in response to the question "what do young women in Trinidad think about social media?" we don't conduct an online poll for Trinidadian youths. We use other research methods. So the questions and ways of answering them are different in anthropology.

To explain these let's first consider where Anthropology lies in the world of university.

3. The Social Sciences

Social Sciences

First of all, Anthropology is usually placed within the Social Sciences or Humanities. The social sciences 

 In the social sciences, we tend to use critical analysis. This can mean different things within the social sciences, so we'll just focus on critical analysis means to us as anthropologists.

Critical Analysis: Understanding not judging

Critical analysis means using theories and concepts to study/understand. The objective is not so much to scorn or praise, but to deeply understand.

The first example we will use for this drunkenness at sports clubs. Before trying to change a culture of excessive alcohol consumption in a sports club, a social scientist would first seek to understand it

Social scientists studying violent drunkenness in amateur sports clubs would try to put aside feelings of disgust. They try, in the first instance, to understand it before we judge it. They might analyze it in terms of a "culture of violence". They might turn to social factors of gender (expectations of 'manliness'); class (lower class); economy (underprivilege). They might also turn to psychological factors (patterns of abuse; depression; etc.). For all these explanations, the emphasis is not on blaming but rather describing and understanding. This is characteristic of the critical approach. This may or may not lead to 'outcomes' like policies, programs, etc. to address the issues.

It's the same if you're a psychiatrist, the second example we will use. If your patient is a mother who has urges to kill her child or other people, you don't say "something is very wrong with you; you're a psycho, you sick, sick human being!". Rather, in the first place, you seek to understand the causes of these urges without rushing to judge your patient. This is also typical of the critical approach.

Our third example is related to digital technologies. "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" is an excerpt from Eichhorn's book End of Forgetting. In this excerpt, Eichhorn argues that the problem with social media is not so much that it can spoil or ruin the innocence of childhood, but rather that children and adolescents can avoid growing up by living in online worlds.

Screengrab of "Social Media..." article

Eichhorn's approach to social media is not characteristic of the social sciences. Her analysis is interesting and intelligent, but the moralistic tone would not normally be considered intellectual or scholarly by social scientists. Social scientists are not particularly concerned to prescribe that children should use less (or more) social media. Rather, social scientists would be more interested in how and why children use social media.

Indeed, social scientists would not generally use a text like "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" to understand social media.  We would not use it to understand how social media works. Rather a historian might see it as a text produced in a historical context. A literary theorist might analyze the text as a form of crisis narrative. A linguist might analyze it for syntactical structures.  Anthropologists might analyze "Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up" as a kind of story that people in Western (and other) cultures tell themselves about Social Media.

Description vs Prescription

Another way to understand the approach in the social sciences is a commitment to describing the things we study rather than prescribing how things should be. For instance, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff first did research among gay people in Indonesia. He critically analyzed gay identities in Indonesia. Then he wrote the book, Coming of Age in Second Life, about a virtual world. He explains that his method of analysis of both Indonesian gay identities and Second Life is based:

descriptive analysis, rather than prescriptive modes of argumentation... When studying gay Indonesians, I do not ask "is it a good thing that gay identities have emerged in Indonesia?"; I take their emergence as given. Similarly in this book [on Second Life] I do not ask "is it a good thing that virtual worlds have emerged" or "is Second Life headed in the right direction?" While such questions are important to many persons in Second Life and beyond, in this book I take Second Life's emergence as given and work to analyze the cultural practices and beliefs take form within it.

So critical approach can be applied, whether we are studying gay identities or an online community.

Critical analysis also characterizes cultural anthropology. Let's consider this example from research by anthropologist, John Postill, on digital democracy:

the field of digital democracy has at its core the concept of ‘public sphere’, associated with the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas. A public sphere is ‘an arena, independent of government . . . which is dedicated to rational debate and which is both accessible to entry and open to inspection by the citizenry. It is here . . . that public opinion is formed’. Despite Habermas’s insistence that his concept of public sphere referred to a particular phase in European history, for many authors the public sphere has become a normative ideal.

Postill observes that the "public sphere" was a descriptive concept devised by Habermas. Habermas analyzed the public sphere 'arena' as the product of particular historical circumstances. Subsequent researchers, however, have treated as an ideal. For such researchers, an active, rigorous, un-censored, responsible public sphere is thought to be essential to a functioning democracy. So they have used "public sphere" as a prescriptive ideal rather than as a description. This preference for description over-prescription, at least in the early phases of research, characterizes Social Sciences and Anthropology.

4. The Anthropological Approach

The modern discipline of Anthropology emerged in the 1870s. Like other disciplines (e.g. History, Archaeology, Psychology, Politics, Political Science, the Studies of Literature, Music, Fine Arts, etc.), Anthropology also took a critical approach.  But one thing, in particular, came to distinguish it. From around the time of WWI (1914-1918), Anthropology was distinguished by a specific approach or method. So what is the anthropological method?

Anthropological Method

Anthropological research tends to be based on a researcher’s experience of living with a community. The word we use for living with a community is “fieldwork”. Typically, anthropologists use a special method when doing fieldwork. They don’t use questionnaires and they don’t use focus groups. Nor do they conduct controlled experiments on the local people or do they measure the size of their heads and other body parts. Rather anthropologists use a method called "ethnography". 

What is ethnography? See this blog for some answers.

Participant-observation

When doing ethnography, anthropologists usually conduct participant observation Participant-observation basically that you hang out with the people you are studying. You learn to interact with them by picking up their language and habits. You participate in and observe everyday life. For more, see this blog on participating and observing. While you are participating and observing and afterward, you reflect on or analyze this experience. How do we analyze or reflect on the experience? 

We use what is called the "anthropological approach".

Anthropological approach: holism, comparison, & relativism

The anthropological approach is basically the principles we use to analyze our fieldwork experience. You might say the approach boils down to 3 interrelated principles:

• Holism: this is slightly different from being 'holistic'; so be careful.
• Methodological relativism: means not judging cultural practices, at least before you understand them deeply
• Comparison: means applying in one cultural context, theoretical concepts which, we imagine, also apply in different cultural contexts.

These are described in this presentation:

So now once the anthropologist has completed participant observation and reflected on and analyzed this, the next step is then to produce a journal article, book, film or other product. These kinds of products are called “ethnographies.”

Methodological Relativism

The most challenging principle for may undergrads is "methodological relativism", so I'll provide a bit more detail here.

You may be concerned about cyberbullying and want to write about what can be done to stop it. However, anthropologists usually take a methodologically relativist position on the topic they are studying. We don't assume cyberbullying is true or false, good or bad. So we don't point out which measures have been successful at reducing cyberbullying (e.g. encouraging skills in digital citizenship, encouraging parents to take time with their children while they are on the Internet, etc.). Rather we take a step back and analyze what does it mean to live in a society which is pervaded by fears of cyberbullying. We might ask, under what social and cultural conditions did the fear of cyberbullying come to replace the fear of physical bullying in the classroom? Why is one of the things parents now worry about in our society? How does is it compare to fears parents express in other societies. Can you see the difference between the two approaches to cyberbullying? The second analysis adopts an approach of methodological relativism. 

I'll give you another example. Where I do fieldwork the greatest fear for the youth, not to mention everyone, is sorcery. Sorcery can kill children and adults alike. What makes it so pernicious is that it usually emanates from some you are intimately acquainted. The sorcerer could be your friend, neighbor, or even your family member. Now as an anthropologist, I don't assume that sorcery is true or false, good or bad. I don't provide solutions to the problem (e.g. you should hide amulets in your walls, avoid contact with the sorcerer; if possible, if you are affected go to the strongest shaman you can find for counter-magic). Rather as an anthropologist I ask a different set of questions like the following:

1. What does the fear of sorcery say about relationships between family, neighbors, and friends? 
2. How is the fear connected with both reciprocal and market economic relations? 
3. What does the killing of sorcerers in witch-hunts say about state violence in Indonesia?

 Can you see the difference in the two approaches to sorcery? If I say sorcery is false or bad, I'm immediately rushing to make a judgement about it. By contrast with the three question I adopt methodological relativism--I don't take a stance on whether it is real or bad but what the effects of the fear of sorcery are. 

So methodological relativism implies we don't, in the first instance at least, classify cyber-bullying as bad. For instance, some people would say that mean and derogatory tweets about public figures such as Donald Trump and  Jeremy Corbin is bullying, others might say it is not. Anthropologists try to avoid passing judgment and instead try to understand why there might a difference of opinion about what constitutes bullying; what does it say about social media, for example?

Here's the final example. Abidin uses methodological relativism to analyze influencers in Singapore. She states that they are not simply "Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online”, as the title of her article reads. On the other, hand though it is tempting to argue the contrary, that these women are improving and empowering themselves, Abidin shuns this too.  Abidin analyses "positive" self-improvement as merely a 'narrative'. So Abidin rejects saying that influencers are positive or negative. Rather she uses anthropological concepts to analyze these influencers.

 As anthropologists, we aren’t interested in making moral evaluations of whether social media are positive or negative. Rather we are interested in how our lives are changing as a result of social media and how are our lives are changing social media as well. To explain that ‘how’ we turn to theory.

Ethnocentrism & Reflexivity

Two more concepts are important. Ethnocentrism is something that anthropologists try to avoid. If an Englishman says "eating frogs is gross" or "eating horses is gross" he is looking at the world through the values of his own culture. Reflexivity is something that an anthropologist tries to apply. Imagine this same Englishman completes a degree in anthropology. He then says:

well for Indian Hindus, eating cows is offensive and for pious Muslims and Jews eating pigs is gross, so I guess there is nothing natural or normal about me eating beef and pork or nothing gross about French people eating frogs and horses.

Here the Englishman is being reflexive, not ethnocentric. Now he is beginning to apply to principles of critical analysis to thinking about his own culture; he is not taking it for granted that English ways are superior or correct. 

Reflexivity has a second, related, meaning in anthropology. This applies to when you are doing ethnography--participant-observation, say. You think critically about how your race, class, gender, ethnicity, wealth, and other aspects of power in relation to the people you research (this is called your "positionality"). You also think about how it impacts upon your research. Then you attempt to mitigate the effects fo this. You also acknowledge (when you present the results of your research) how you think your position in the world would affect that. By doing these things, you are being reflexive. You don't have to worry too much about this second meaning at the moment as you won't be conducting ethnography until you're a qualified anthropologist.

You might say these two concepts (i.e. ethnocentrism and reflexivity) are already implied in the 'trinity' of holism, methodological relativism, & comparison above. 

In summary, Anthropologists gather data through participation-observation and then analyze it using data using critical analysis, the 'trinity', and ethnocentrism and reflexivity, 

Small Places, Big Issues

Finally, Anthropology is devoted to the larger question of what is to be human. We study large issues (how has the growth of capitalism changed family structures? what are the effects of digital technologies on personal identity) in small places (in a rural town in Mexico; among digital nomads living in Bali).


These principles outlined above emerged over a century from the beginnings of the modern discipline in the 1870s probably crystallizing by around 1970. However, from the 1970s onwards, Anthropologists began to question anthropology itself.

Challenging early Anthropology

Applying the principle of reflexivity to earlier Anthropologists' work made some of the views seem ethnocentric. For instance, up to and including Malinowski's time, many anthropologists a treated the 'natives' whom they studied as being steeped in tradition, magic, and ritual. These early anthropologists apparently viewed natives as living in exotic, isolated, and thus 'timeless', cultures. It seems that for these early anthropologists,  'natives' to represent example (for these early anthropologists) of what 'we' (as in White, Western males) used to be, in prehistoric Europe, before 'we' became civilized. However, the early anthropologists ignored the contact with other societies, the historical forces, and the changes these societies had been through. Their way of seeing 'natives' also ignored the powerful forces of tradition, magic (yes!) and ritual in the Western experience. Finally, from the 1970s Anthropology has become more diverse; steadily the centrality of White, Western men has been decreasing.


Reflexivity, as described above, is associated with the 'reflexive turn'. This was a direction of research, beginning in the 1980s. Australian businessmen spend years in Indonesia and still think of Indonesia as an exotic and sensual place. Indonesian businessmen spend years in Australia and still think of Australia as a godless place of debauchery. In other words, it doesn't matter how long you spend in a location, the preconceived cultural notions you have will predominate. This principle also applies to anthropologists. So instead of spending their time trying to write about people in other places, they should spend time being reflexive, focusing on their own preconceived cultural notions. 

Decolonization

Given the connections between anthropology and colonization, a push towards what is now called the decolonization of anthropology has gained some ground. In a Deakin Uni podcast, Akhil Gupta explains the push towards decolonizing anthropology:

there was some political impetus towards decolonizing anthropology that came out of the fact that a postcolonial generation of scholars had entered the academy. For example,  African-American and Native American scholars entered the American academy. And that lead to a push towards decolonization (c.19:00). 

 In summary, later anthropologists came to see aspects of early anthropology as ethnocentric.

Exotic fieldsites

As a result, it no longer seemed preferable to go to an exotic fieldsite--a village in an isolated island, jungle, or desert--to study what it is to be human. Now it made just as much sense to study a motorcycle gang in Birmingham, England; homeless people in San Francisco;  educated, cosmopolitan, and super-rich elites in Cambodia; or avatars inhabiting the virtual world of Second Life. 

Second Life

Applied Anthropology

Another change has emerged since the 1970s. Instead of just merely explaining or observing communities, Anthropologists have increasingly become more self-conscious and systematic about helping communities to change. They might, for instance, help create a legal case for Indigenous to assert a form of control over lands. When anthropologists do this, it could be argued that they move from merely describing to prescribing change. On the other hand, it is expected that anthropologists will follow the lead of people in the community they might be studying. Ideally, Anthropologists ask, "how can I help you?" and then go about effecting change. Whatever the reality of this kind of work is, it has various names but in general, it's called "Applied Anthropology".

'Why' and 'how' not 'whether'

An abstract point is worth making. Often in Anthropology, 'whether' is not so much the question. Rather, anthropologists focus 'how', 'why', 'in what ways' and/or to 'what effect'. For example, Postill (2013, 167) writes that instead of asking whether digital media influence social movements, Anthropologists might ask how digital media influence social movements and, conversely, how social movements influence digital media. This abstract point works at a simple level, but the distinction may break down upon reflection (for instance, you might ask whether the accessibility of Facebook helps explain why it was a preferred tool in some social movements"). 

Qualitative, not quantitative

It's probably obvious already, but Anthropology mostly uses qualitative (experience) rather than quantitative data. 

Anthropology as a 'divergent discipline'

What we have written above represents a very rough outline of Anthropology. You won't two anthropologists who agree on all this. And that's part of the nature of Anthropology. Anthropology (and Digital Anthropology within it) could be called a 'divergent discipline'. Academics in the Disciplines of Physics, Biology, and Mathematics generally agree on the basic principles upon which to proceed with research and study. In Anthropology, academics do not seem to agree on the basic principles. So the principles we have outlined above are, in practice, frequently questioned. Even we three (Jo, Monika, and Nick) cannot agree on them. Notwithstanding, they will suffice for the purposes of this introductory course.

Why does Anthropology matter?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we Anthropologists believe that Anthropology might just save the world. You might be skeptical, so check out this blog by my colleague at Deakin Uni, David Giles, and see what you think.

5. Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

Digital and human relationships

As mentioned above, anthropology has four branches, one of which is socio-cultural anthropology. Socio-cultural anthropology itself is formed of various subdisciplines including:

• Economic Anthropology
• Kinship
• Political Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology
• Linguistic Anthropology (which is distinct from linguistics)
• Ethnomusicology (basically the anthropology of music and dance)
• Political Anthropology etc. 
• etc.

One of the newest subdisciplines in Socio-Cultural Anthropology is  Digital Anthropology.  So let's move on to the section "Digital Anthropology: Introduction & Overview".