Visions of the future: technology and imagination in

Anthropology Matters, 1970

The question of ‘new’ methods in the anthropology of science and technology is perhaps better phrased as the need to improve our understanding of experiences—as both participants and observers—of these fields of enquiry. This paper is based on ethnographic research on the role of computers in Hungarian civil society at the Hungarian Telecottage Association (HTA), a movement seeking to promote locally-oriented technological development with the aim of empowering and improving the lives of local people. The members of this movement are geographically dispersed, each representing a telecottage in their own village community. They are united organizationally through a mixture of face-to-face and internet-based interaction.

Communications of the ACM, 2006

2011

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, 2022

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies.

There is something that must be made clear about technology studies right from the outset. Technology does not exist in a vacuum, and social values are not static. Together, the technical and the social can be excellent grounds for cultural research once one accepts that neither dominates the other. Technology affects its users in different personal ways, and in turn its user in turn affects the technology. The cycle repeats over time generating the radical differences in technology and society that we see today. The seemingly sudden acceleration of technical advances in recent history is unparalleled, creating an opportunity for technological studies to become relevant within the field of anthropology once more. The following paper is an attempt to combine theoretical approaches of the field with my own experience of technology.

In putting together this collection of papers we have become aware of two things. First, each of the cases is historically unique and interesting; they can all stand on their own without need for further interpretation. Second, these cases contain important clues and guidelines which point to a more general theory of technology and sociocultural change. They do not go far enough to allow us to frame up such a theory, but they provide the inductive impetus for relating these examples to the wider system of theory building in anthropology. In the first edition of this book we were not yet ready to elaborate even the outlines of such a theory, but the ensuing 15 years have given us plenty of new materials, as well as general growth in various aspects of theoretical social science. We can now offer a theoretical synthesis, and show how this synthesis can lead directly to the testing of specific hypotheses.

Social Anthropology, 1999

Cameras and other gadgets. Reflections on fieldwork experiences in socialist and post-socialist Hungarian communities My purpose in this paper is to provide a retrospective analysis of anthropological fieldwork in Hungarian communities in Hungary and Romania by discussing how fieldwork possibilities have changed in these two countries. 1 My concluding discussion will suggest some of the important research and theoretical questions facing former state socialist societies to which we, as anthropologists and fieldworkers, should pay closer attention as we embark upon constructing them, both in reality and into texts (Atkinson 1990; Wolcott 1995). By establishing the similarities and differences of conducting fieldwork in socialist and post-socialist Hungarian communities, I argue that the socio-cultural context of the transition in East-Central Europe needs to be problematised differently than hitherto; more open systems call now for renewed ethnographic 'practice'. Clearly, earlier theories and fieldwork methods under state socialism are no longer adequate for studying the post-socialist era (

Frontiers in Sociology, 2023

The ethnographic method has been a feature of the social sciences since its inception, and for some disciplines, it is markedly characterized by a strong aptitude for physical field research over extended periods in circumscribed communities. However, with the advent of the digital age, this process has undergone further acceleration, upsetting and partly undermining the solid assumptions on which the ethnographic method had been formed, precisely because in the digital scenario, the assumptions of boundaries of contexts, the agency of scenario, and the need for a long-term field investigation change radically. This conceptual analysis aims at providing an overview of the trajectory of the evolution of ethnographic studies in social sciences by trying to trace the main pillars of change and the future direction of the method. KEYWORDS ethnography in social sciences, digital era, typological schema, ethnographic evolutionary trajectory, pillars of change, role of the researcher. Introduction. Ethnography to the evidence of a digital turn The rise of the digital issue has been guaranteed in the last 20 years as a not insignificant frame for social science because of its power of identity building, information, and knowledge sharing in the architectures of relations and networks made by users via computer-mediated communication (CMC). Beyond this, the standardization of Internet, blogs, social media, and other web-sphere use, is similar considering the offline ways to access information and what concerns the observation of social phenomena (Airoldi, 2017). In-person or web-mediated situations can in fact equally be considered "information systems" (Meyrowitz, 1985) that ≪affect the kind of knowledge we can produce as researchers/observers≫ (Airoldi, 2017, p. 9). Starting from the idea of the innovation intended as a cultural object composed both as an instrumental repertoire and as well as a set of practices applied by the tools contained in this repertoire, "the various identities, practices, values, rituals, hierarchies, and other sources and structures of meaning that are influenced, created by, or expressed through technology consumption" (Kozinets, 2019, p. 621) have changed over time. Consequently, social research methods are also continuously challenged (and rightly so) with discussions and reflections about the changes related to current innovations tied to the social context in which we live. In light of this, following Lupton (2018), we cannot agree with the idea that old-fashioned methods, such as ethnography, must be ≪left aside to give more space to those new methods that differently are featured by the current evolution of technologies≫ (p. 41).