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Digital Subjectivities, Un-Human Subjects, and the End Of Human No More Human No More Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology EDITED BY NEIL L. WHITEHEAD AND MICHAEL WESCH University Press of Colorado Boulder © 2012 by University Press of Colorado Published by University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State Uni- versity of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University. This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Human no more : digital subjectivities, unhuman subjects, and the end of anthropology / edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Wesch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60732-169-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60732-189-7 (pbk. : alk. pa- per) — ISBN 978-1-60732-170-5 (ebook) 1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Cybernetics—Philosophy. 3. Online social networks. 4. Computers and civilization. 5. Virtual reality. I. Whitehead, Neil L. II. Wesch, Michael. GN33.H944 2012 303.48'34—dc23 2012025788 Designed by Daniel Pratt 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Neil Whitehead 1956–2012 Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. —SHAKESPEARE Neil’s soul substance burst from his tired body into the larger universe this morning. Those of you who know him well real- ize how significant it is that a packet of vital energy such as his has come forth with a fierceness. Please allow as much of his soul substance as you can stand to enter and live within you now, so that he will come to rest in dozens of bodies and continue to burst into the world through your mouth, through your eyes through your breath and through your tears. —STEPHANIE ALEMÁN (on Neil Whitehead’s Facebook wall, March 22, 2012) Of course this news isn’t believable. So in order to find out, I went to Facebook. And I’m sorry to discover confirmation that it is. Ah Facebook. Neil would have enjoyed this. —JANET MARION CHERNELA (on Neil Whitehead’s Facebook wall, March 23, 2012) Contents Introduction: Human No More 1 Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Wesch 1. The Mutual Co-Construction of Online and Onground in Cyborganic: Making an Ethnography of Networked Social Media Speak to Challenges of the Posthuman 11 Jennifer Cool 2. We Were Always Human 33 Zeynep Tufekci 3. Manufacturing and Encountering “Human” in the Age of Digital Reproduction 49 Matthew Bernius 4. The Digital Graveyard: Online Social Networking Sites as Vehicles of Remembrance 71 Jenny Ryan vii CONTENTS 5. Anonymous, Anonymity, and the End(s) of Identity and Groups Online: Lessons from the “First Internet-Based Superconsciousness” 89 Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Class of Spring 2009 6. Splitting and Layering at the Interface: Mediating Indian Diasporas across Generations 105 Radhika Gajjala and Sue Ellen McComas 7. Avatar: A Posthuman Perspective on Virtual Worlds 131 Gray Graffam 8. Technology, Representation, and the “E-thropologist”: The Shape- Shifting Field among Native Amazonians 147 Stephanie W. Alemán 9. The Adventures of Mark and Olly: The Pleasures and Horrors of Anthropology on TV 157 James Hoesterey 10. Invisible Caboclos and Vagabond Ethnographers: A Look at Ethnographic Engagement in Twenty-First-Century Amazonia 177 Kent Wisniewski 11. Marginal Bodies, Altered States, and Subhumans: (Dis)Articulations between Physical and Virtual Realities in Centro, São Paulo 199 Michael Heckenberger 12. Are We There Yet? The End of Anthropology Is Beyond the Human 217 Neil L. Whitehead Afterword 231 Anne Allison List of Contributors 235 Index 237 viii Human No More Introduction Human No More Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Wesch Over the last decade the growing possibilities of living in online worlds have continued to undermine and throw into question traditional anthropologi- cal conceptions of place-based ethnography. Such conceptions were already facing criticism for artificially bounding, limiting, and reifying “culture” in a world in which transnational cultural flows are commonplace. Online worlds add yet another dimension to this critique, providing examples of social forms that stretch and often break the definitions and boundaries of “commu- nities” and “groups” and blurring our taken-for-granted distinctions between the human, bestial, and mechanical, thereby forcing us to rethink our notions of what might constitute the “subjects” that we study. However, in this volume we also use the insight that the challenges of ethnography in online worlds presents to broaden our critique of ethnogra- phy. We do this by asking how the occluded worlds of digital culture, and also those of hidden and marginalized persons, can be better integrated into anthropological thinking and how the ethnography of both the “unhuman” DOI: 10.5876/9781607321705.c00 1 NEIL L. WHITEHEAD AND MICHAEL WESCH and the “digital” leads to exciting possibilities for reconfiguring the notion of what is human. But why would an academic discipline that is founded on the notion of the “human” (anthropos) saw off the very branch of the “tree of knowledge” on which it rests? How can anthropology properly acknowledge the cultural and historical contingency of the category “human” unless this entails the end of anthropology itself? Through the chapters that follow, we demonstrate that such questioning is not the end of anthropology but, to the contrary, a fruitful endeavor leading to the discovery of new ends and purposes for our enduring commitment to engage and interpret other lifeways. A critical examination of the “human” sheds light on how the anthropocentric presumptions of much anthropol- ogy ignore not just the “unhuman” but also the “animal” and the “not-quite- human” (transgendered, disabled, or psychologically impaired persons), inev- itably leading to a challenge, and perhaps an outright rejection, of the whole category of the human, at least as a core concept for anthropological theory. Anthropology is only one academic discipline currently engaged with the posthuman (Wolfe 2010), but arguably anthropology has the most to contrib- ute to such debates through ethnographic engagement with cultural worlds in which Western Enlightenment definitions and exclusions (Latour 1993) are not so prominent. In this regard, the essays here demonstrate that new forms of ethnographic engagement with “unhuman” populations (as in the chapters by Heckenberger, Whitehead, and Wisniewski) can inform and be informed by studies of online phenomena that also challenge and subvert traditional notions of the human. The chapters here illustrate emergent cultural contexts in which embod- ied, “rational” individuals are but one of the forms of agency present in virtual and socially occluded worlds. As Matt Bernius demonstrates, software pro- grams create chatbots, spambots, searchbots, and even ballot-stuffing bots, some of which are fully equipped to interact with “real humans” socially, sex- ually, and financially. Such bots appear alongside and engage with simulacra of our offline selves. Anthropologists such as Donna Haraway (1991) were pioneers in draw- ing out the possibilities and implications of the posthuman, but the challenges and questions that arise from such insights and observations are often ignored in mainstream anthropology, safely put aside while getting on with the “real” work of doing real ethnography “in the field.” Perhaps it is only now, amid a mass engagement and subjective incorporation of the reality of the online into everyday life and imperial ambitions of pharmaceutical and bioengineer- ing corporations to control Life itself, that such early critiques and insights become central to the prospects of anthropology in the twenty-first century. And as the Internet and other new media forms increasingly integrate with even the most mundane aspects of everyday life in even the most remote regions of the world, and the “virtual” blurs with and ultimately becomes the 2 INTRODUCTION: HUMAN NO MORE “real,” issues raised by an anthropology of the virtual necessarily become the issues for anthropology at large. HUMAN NO MORE? The theme of these chapters—human no more?—resonates as a question throughout. Although Whitehead answers firmly in the affirmative and eagerly embraces the posthuman as a potential liberation from the late capi- talist disciplines of the corporeal and the mental, others more cautiously question whether we are in fact posthuman at all and whether we should radically rethink anthropology. This is partly the reaction of Anne Allison (whose afterword was originally a response to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel at which these chapters were first presented), but her highly constructive and open-ended engagement with the question of “humanity” contrasts with other commentators (Boellstorff 2008) who find the prospect of the posthuman threatening, both subjectively and with regard to the preservation of the iconic founding figures of the discipline. Just as the idea of the “postmodern” provoked surprisingly conservative reactions among otherwise innovative thinkers such as Johannes Fabian, Marshall Sahlins, and Eric Wolf (Whitehead 2004), it is important to dis- tinguish the critique of anthropology’s intellectual frameworks, which the asking of questions about the “human” permits, from the assumption that “posthumanism” is a disguised political gambit aimed at taking over the profession. Attempting to avoid such pitfalls, and in a similar vein to Allison, Tufekci notes that the first symbols ever created allowed for a form of “disembodi- ment” by separating the thought from the human, arguing that “the essence of humanity is that we have always been both symbolic and embodied.” “We were always human,” she suggests.
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