Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology

Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology

Language: English

Pages: 264

ISBN: 1607321890

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Turning an anthropological eye toward cyberspace, Human No More explores how conditions of the online world shape identity, place, culture, and death within virtual communities.

Online worlds have recently thrown into question the traditional anthropological conception of place-based ethnography. They break definitions, blur distinctions, and force us to rethink the notion of the "subject." Human No More asks how digital cultures can be integrated and how the ethnography of both the "unhuman" and the "digital" could lead to possible reconfiguring the notion of the "human."

This provocative and groundbreaking work challenges fundamental assumptions about the entire field of anthropology. Cross-disciplinary research from well-respected contributors makes this volume vital to the understanding of contemporary human interaction. It will be of interest not only to anthropologists but also to students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, identity, and technology.

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understand and talk to anyone. He is the ultimate guide for the tours that are not in any tourist literature and a well-known character in the hippy world.4 For Dal, as for most Brazilian hippies, this lifestyle is a rejection of mainstream society. Many hippies refuse to vote, and thus they have no access to government social programs as voting is compulsory in Brazil. Dal is proud that he has never voted and that the Brazilian identification card that he possesses foi comprado (“was

length. For example, as I sit here writing on my laptop, I find myself instinctively responding to the “ding” that signifies a new e-mail, and in moments I am clicking on a link that sends me to my Facebook Profile. Drawn down this familiar pathway, I reflexively scan the News Feed, where the faces of my friends peer back at me, reminding me of their existence. Scarcely a day goes by without communication through this medium, which does not require the immediate presence of others, nor their

answer for some is yes; indeed, this is the world they have embraced and the kind of posthuman experience that typifies their daily world. Desires fuel motivations for entering virtual environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and imagination, aided by computer-mediated technology, transforms the body through disembodiment and re-embodiment into avatar form. All of this is not fictive, however, or even fictional fantasy, because the emotions, passions, and feelings that result from the

netnographer is to provide a context in which both online and offline worlds can exist as the actually do—simultaneously. The phenomenon of online Waiwai is new and somewhat unstable. There is no guarantee that they will be able to maintain their online presence in the face of having to pay for the satellite service that makes it possible, and there is little information to predict the direction they will go within their cyberworlds, nor the space here to discuss all the cyber places they go and

together in particular places and channels of communication—that applies equally online and onground. This understanding of colocation is informed by Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media “as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized colocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation”

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