Digital Anthropology- Period 4

The scope and depth of the digitalization of modern lives can hardly be overestimated. From 3D printing to alternative online identities; from smartphone communications to new forms of digital story-telling; from Facebook to gaming; from web-based confession boots to internet porn; from digital artforms to Netflix; from digital passports to new medical technologies: digital technologies are everywhere, transforming human consciousness, entering human bodies, changing social lives to the core. Digital Anthropology explores how this development is picked up, fought off, sought to be controlled and explored in different cultural settings around the world. It registers the anxieties around the digitalization of our lives as well as the utopic visions the digital engenders. And it does so in the classical anthropological sense of looking at grass-root level what new practices have emerged due to digital technologies, how these practices change the existing social fabric and produce new notions of self and community. Aware that anthropology itself is fully encapsulated in these developments, digital anthropologists also ask how digitalization changes current research practices.

The course is an introduction to this emergent field of study. In the first part of the course it will seek to sketch the enormous scope of this field by visiting a rich variety of domains where the digital is making its presence felt. The main question is: how does the digital enter contemporary modes of worldmaking, and to what effect? In the second part of the course, we will narrow the focus by looking into the way digital technologies impact on (1) social relations and (2) notions of self. In tandem with the readings and discussions, the course will constantly highlight how much research itself -- in the social sciences, and more particularly in anthropology -- is being digitalized, and will assess both the pitfalls and promises of that development. To deepen their understanding, students will experiment with digital forms of storytelling.

Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.