Rethinking Digital Anthropology

Abstract

‘Digital anthropology’, once literally unthinkable, at best a contradiction in terms, is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged subdiscipline, alongside formations like legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and economic anthropology, or the anthropologies of migration, gender, and the environment. Undergraduate and graduate courses (indeed entire degree-granting programs) now exist, and a canon is in formation, albeit a canon deeply engaged with scholarship from communications, media studies, sociology, and other disciplines. We are at an opportune time for rethinking what digital anthropology might entail.

This text was originally published as Rethinking Digital Anthropology in the 2nd edition of Digital Anthropology, edited by Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox (2021) at Routledge. We want to thank Tom Boellstorff and the publisher for the kind permission to translate and publish the text for the KA Notizen 85. We also want to thank Timo Roßmann for the careful translation.