Welcome to ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs: Technology and society. In ANTH 1001, you were becoming anthropologists, and learned how to learn what makes us human. Now, we consider that we, you, me, and everyone else is both more than and less than human. Anthropologists like to concern themselves with culture—a world of ideas—and leave nature to the scientists. But obviously culture and nature interact and each influences the other equally. What kind of anthropology do we need for a world in which nature crosses into the realm we think of as culture, ideas, and values, and cultural meanings and subjective experiences intervene in and act upon nature, facts, and objective reality?
This class is interested in science and technology. People make things. And then the things turn around and influence their makers. It’s a tale as told as time. AI bots. Cellphone addiction. Social media alogrithms. The automobile. The industrial revolution. Writing. Bread. Acheulean tool kits. Let’s call the whole thing off. People have always acquired and applied knowledge, and then dealt with the unintended consequences. Anthropology is interested in that, and in the nexus between scientific knowledge and social life where that happens. So are a lot of social scientists. Science and engineering is part of society and so social scientists want to understand what part.
But this class is more than that. When you start out studying the science–society nexus, you quickly come to question how you know what you know about society, culture, and nature. For that reason, I think the social study of science and technology has had a major influence on social science generally and anthropology particularly. Theories of the science–society nexus have informed new perspectives on lots of other topics.
That is the thesis of this class: Anthropology is undergoing a paradigm shift. We used to frame our questions in terms of social systems and the individual actors that participate in those systems. Now we are learning to think about society and nature together, as part of a network. And we are learning to think of everything in terms of networks. The first rule of the network paradigm is Networks aren’t systems.1 They are a collection of interconnected, interdependent elements. But unlike a classical conception of a social system, networks are characterized by heterogeneity, openness, distributedness, interdependence, and recursivity.2 Nothing exists on its own. Nothing has an essence or identity. Any one thing is defined by its relationships to other things. It exists only because it is plugged into and interacts with other things.
In a way, anthropology is well suited to thinking in terms of networks. For anthropologists, everything is relative. To understand one thing people do, we say you have to put it in a context. That means you have to trace the connections between your object of study and lots of other things around it. You have to set aside your preconceptions about what you’re seeing. That means we have to stop assuming that you’re looking at one tree at a time. People’s actions aren’t just practical, rational, or strategic; they only really make sense in a larger context or environment. These trees are a forest. Furthermore, the main way anthropologists think of difference—as culture, or acquired ways of seeing and thinking—relies on the idea that people think as part of a collective. Our subjective experiences are filtered through the collective representations or cultural constructs, much as grammar of a language makes it possible for us to express ideas to other people.
But in another way, anthropology has only taken up some parts of the idea of a network. When anthropologists trace the systems that create the context for people’s experiences, they usually only focus on ideas (social constructs). They assume that the objective, material world is a constant, and cultures represent and classify it in different ways. Even when anthropologists moved away from constructivist explanations in favor of historical approaches, they still fell back on other ideas of social systems (economics, power, politics) and these alternatives also assumed that they were confined to the world of ideas and separate from objective, material reality.
A real paradigm shift to a network perspective breaks down that distinction between nature and culture. In this perspective, society is not just a collective consciousness, but it is like the Borg from Star Trek. In a certain light, the Borg were not all that Durkheimian. The Durkheimian hive mind is a pure abstraction which we must imagine exists on an unconscious level in every single real individual. In this reading of the concept of a collective consciousness, society is a monolith (like the Monolith, from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Here’s another way to apply the Borg as a metaphor to social existence. We’re all plugged in to each other and a broader set of objects. The forest is more than just trees. There’s a whole mycelial network connecting tree to tree, and to mushrooms and… shrubs and plants.3 The tools we use to communicate with each other are just as important as the people with whom we have connections. We each think and act because we are part of, depend on, and contribute to an ecology of mind.4 We don’t think the same thoughts but we do think together. We are cybernetic organisms. Each person is a living organism, but its life is lived in and through an interconnected, self-regulating system.
The scope of this class and our main goals
We can take this perspective and apply it to anything that anthropology is interested in. Indeed, we can see this paradigm shift in many areas of anthropology today. Some of most important areas where it has had an influence are:
- Studies of the environment
- Medical anthropology and studies of health and illness
- Studies of the built environment and physical infrastructure
- Studies of science and technology, including and espcially communications systems
- Disability studies
Our class draws from theoretical and ethnographic work in all of these areas to help us build our own understanding of a network paradigm.
The assignments in this class serve several functions. Firstly, they help you to develop your own interpretation of the network paradigm in anthropology and to explain how you understand its influence in anthropology. Your final project will be the main place where you work this out for yourself. Secondly, assignments also give you an opportunity to share with each other what you are learning. Finally, the assignments all help you to develop a variety of skills relating to independent inquiry and participation in scholarly discourse. Anthropology is a conversation and we learn in the context of community. To be truly educated you should aim not only to listen and understand, but join in a conversation among peers who have the same questions as yourself, and learn to steer the conversation taking place in your community.
How this class will work
Like many classes at the upper undergraduate level, this class is organized as a seminar, and thus centers on an open discussion among students. I provide guidance to the discussion. I will not, however, give any lectures in this class.5 Each week we will come together to help make collective progress. What we do in class will be a little different each week. In many weeks, we will work together to understand a set of ideas in assigned readings better. In some weeks, the focus will be on discussing how anthropologists have applied the network paradigm in an ethnographic study. In other weeks, students will work in small groups on a task relating to one of the assignments that support your on work on the final project. And in at least one week, we will be pulling things together so we can move on to a new topic.
Every week, we will know if we have done a good job if:
- students have done most of the talking, and
- everyone in the class has had a chance to ask questions and contribute their ideas.
Your participation in discussion is, in that sense, something you do for your fellow students. By offering your views, especially to people who disagree with you, you help them to reflect critically on their own reasoning. Likewise, when you seek out the perspectives of other people, you are able to become aware of your own thought processes. This is ultimately what you will take away from this class: an understanding of your own perspective, rather than familiarity with the ideas of major theories.
Everyone has a first seminar. For some students, open participation in a class is totally new, and can be unfamiliar and even uncomfortable. Part of making a seminar successful is helping everyone feel like they can join in, even when its their first seminar class ever. Discussion is important to this class—and it is a part of your grade—but I am not assuming that it will come easy to everyone. What I expect is that each person try their best, and keep trying. What you can expect from me and from your fellow students is that we will all help make the class comfortable and welcoming to everyone’s participation.
Because an open seminar discussion can be hard at first, I want to build in various formats for class discussion and link them to assignments. So, for instance, on weeks where the main objective is to develop a purely abstract understanding of a complex system of thinking, the weekly writing assignment for that week ask you to interpret a passage from the assigned reading. Other class activities will be tied to work you are doing on your final project. I even have something like a scavenger hunt in mind for one week.
If your active verbal class participation is not possible, you can also talk to me about other ways you can participate in class.
References
This is a bit of an overstatement, but so was Fight Club.↩︎
So are some systems. You could argue that a “system” (a functionally integrated, internally differentiated whole, like a machine or an organism) is a species of a more general form, a network. The recursivity of networks can create the conditions for the integration and closure of the loops that hold a system together and allow it to reproduce itself. Certain kinds of networks lose their inherent openness when feedback across the network establishes a fixed pattern of, strengthen links among some parts, but cuts off other potential or actual links.↩︎
The concept of an invisible galactic network made of fungus was in fact a narrative premise for a season of Star Trek: Discovery a few years ago, and I assume it was based on recent theories of mycelial (mushroom) networks in forests. The collective consciousness of H. R. Geiger-drag aliens is tired; rhizomes are wired!↩︎
See Bateson (1972).↩︎
And since there are no lectures, there are also no lecture recordings for this class either.↩︎