From Cyber to Digital Anthropology to an Anthropology of the Contemporary Philipp Budka (University of Vienna) www.philbu.net Paper at the DGV (German Anthropological Association) Workshop “Cyberculture” 15 September 2011, University of Vienna Introduction This paper is first taking a brief look back on the “anthropology of cyberculture”, formulated as anthropological research area, concept and issue by Arturo Escobar in 1994. Inspired by science and technology studies, he painted a very vivid picture how anthropology and ethnography could contribute to the understanding of new bio and communication technologies as society's transforming driving forces. Pushed by powerful digital media technologies, such as internet applications and services, a “digital anthropology” recently developed, particularly under the influence of material culture theory. What is the legacy of the anthropology of cyberculture when dealing with new digital practices? And is it actually necessary to construct branches of anthropology that deal with contemporary sociocultural developments? Or should we just open the discipline to an “anthropology of the contemporary”, as Rabinow and Marcus (2008) propose. Cyber anthropology – the anthropology of cyberculture The term “cyberanthropology” derives from the notion of “cyberspace”, which was for the first time mentioned in the science fiction novel Neuromancer by William Gibson in 1984. The prefix “cyber” was established by the mathematician Norbert Wiener at the end of the 1940s by using the notion “cybernetics” to describe the science of human-machine interaction. Wiener had in mind the Greek word for “steersman” or “pilot” – kybernetes – to describe a steering or controlling device for machines. It was after the Second World War and at the beginning of the Cold War when cybernetics as discipline was established and popularized, mainly by the work of Wiener (1948). Wiener defines cybernetics in its basic form as a theory of messages with the goal “to develop a technique for producing and refining a message form that is recognizable and efficient as both a mobile value- bearing container of meaning and a sensory prosthesis” (Axel 2006: 359). The interdisciplinary work of the cyberneticians had an important effect on anthropologists by bringing communication and technology into the focus of their projects. Among those anthropologists were Claude Lévi- Strauss, Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz and Gregory Bateson (Axel 2006). Bateson worked in different scientific fields, from doing ethnographic fieldwork in New Guinea to research among schizophrenics and alcoholics in California (e.g. Bateson 1936, 1972). He always worked in an highly innovative and interdisciplinary way, deploying concepts and methods from a whole range of disciplines. What was of particular interest to him was how organisms, humans and animals, relate to each other and their environment through communication. He was searching for a way to structure and analyze what he called the “ecology of ideas” or the “ecology of mind”. In cybernetics he found a newly developed discipline that he expected to contribute decisively to the answering of his questions. Questions about difference, holism, context, meaning, system and the “self” in human and non-human interaction were in the center of his research, creating an epistemology of cybernetics. For Bateson (1972: 483) cybernetics is “at any rate, a contribution to 1