“Digital anthropology becomes a science”. Really?
Thursday, July 29th, 2010 | Author: Salina ChristmasYesterday, the participants of the EASA Media Anthropology Network email list, Medianthro, had a ‘lively’ discussion on an “interesting article in New Scientist about digital anthropology providing the sort of data that will allow it to become a science”.
One poster saw this table of content in this generic ‘journal’ template laid out by ScienceDirect (or the publisher, Reed Business Information), and thought the New Scientist is a proper journal. Seriously. Other posters went on to discuss the origin of the term “digital anthropology”. Lane, our tutor, pointed out that New Scientist article said nothing about “digital anthropology”, but Alan Patrick, the blogger who quoted Mark Buchanan’s article, wrote the headline “Digital Anthropology becomes a science”.
A young Steve Job, a former Atari game designer, introducing the Apple. He never calls himself an anthropologist, but he sure knows visual and digital anthropology
He also commented about “the heightened fascination with ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnography’ as suffixes in commercial technology and marketing/communications circles”. Which prompted one poster to comment that “on Twitter, a lot of people identifying themselves in their bios as ‘digital anthropologists, ‘cyberAnthropologists’, ‘ethnographers, etc. although they have no academic training in social sciences… Some people think of anthropology as just involving observation of human behavior and using your own intuition to determine why people do what they do.”
Anthros, get over it
My response to John Postill, the moderator of the EASA Media Anthropology Network email list:
1. Why do anthropologists have this hang-up about ‘not being hard science’? Why this desire to align anthropology with physics, computer science, chemistry, biology and such? What advantage does anthropology have in gaining entry into the ‘hard science club’?
The famous Alessi kettle. Alessi influences Phillipe Starcke and many other product designers. Many designers – digital, graphic, industry and otherwise – have a good grasp of visual anthropology
2. The New Scientist is not a journal, despite what this web interface shows you. The layout might be “journal’ in flavour, but it is a magazine. That is, it is “journalism”. Subbed, but not peer-reviewed. See that story about the breakthrough of the HIV vagina gel in the table of content? That is “news” and has been out in major life science trade rags. Not journal material.
3. What is known as digital anthropology has been done by digital practitioners from various fields, commercial ones included. Don’t diss the commercial lot, especially the Marketing and PR types, just yet – the digital marketers can tell you a good story about page bounces, backed up with stats.
4. Many trained ‘designers’ – digital, graphic, industry and otherwise – have a good grasp of visual anthropology. That branch of anthro is part of the arts polytechnic syllabus. Not only do they have the social science skills to identify who they are designing for, they actually can ‘make’ those aesthetic things. They are known as ‘creatives’.
Ladislav Biro, a journalist, invented the Biro pen. No doubt, some 'ethnography' went into the product development, although he wouldn't have called it ethnography. He changed the way we write
5. If I want to be a ‘hard scientist’, I would have chosen to do an MSc in Web Science, or Web Design and Development – because that’s what I do for a living. My tutor would probably agree I excel at that better than at anthropology. I chose to do (digital) anthropology because I want anthropology to inform my art (or ’science’, if you think science is all about numbers and computation).
But you know what? Web development can be so DULL. Which is why I don’t want to do an MSc in that field. Can we not accept anthropology for what it is, interdisciplinary?
Anthropology is not hard science (pull your socks up, anthros). But that doesn’t make it useless.
The hang-up with many anthropologists is indeed ‘not being a hard science’ but in the sense that they decry the notion that anthropology should in any way be one – it is interdisiplinary, but does not include the anathema of science. Fortunately this is a declining trend since we emerged from the debris of the Postmodern Cultural Revolution in 2000. Anthropology includes in its mix of approaches plenty of science, such as molecular anthropology, most physical anthropology, and some approaches to archaeology, linguistic, social and cultural anthropology. About 20% of the professional practitioners of anthropology have significant training in scientific approaches. Looking over the full archives of the publications of the American Anthropology association since its inception, around 10% of all its journal articles are jointly written by a team of anthropologists including at least one ‘scientific’ author and one ‘humanist’ author.
I suspect a lot of the present conceptions are a result of younger anthropologists who have not quite recovered from the dark ages of anthropology between 1985 and 2000 when serious efforts were mounted by some to suppress scientific input in anthropology programmes.
As to point 4 above…many anthropologists also have a good grasp of design but that does not make them designers. Many architecture enthusiasts also have a good grasp of bridge design, but I wouldn’t cross that bridge.
Economists are forever having this utterly pointless debate. If anyone tries to draw me in to it, I ask them to define “science” as precisely as possible, and then to decide whether economics fits that definition or not. Its an ambiguous term, and there is no one “true” definition.
In my humble opinion, human systems are qualitatively (phenomenologically, in fact) different to the systems that scientists analyse because they exist at a different level of Complexity (as in complex systems) – they require different ways of thinking, so what people normally think of as science is largely irrelevant to anthros, economists, sociologists, etc.
Stuart Kaufman wrote a brilliant exposition on related material in “Reinventing the Sacred”.
*gets off high horse*