Digital Anthropology

This entry examines how the internet has shaped the development of an important subdiscipline occasionally termed “online anthropology,” “cyber-anthropology,” or “anthropology 2.0” and now broadly known as “digital anthropology.” This subdiscipline considers the presence of the internet to be an organic part of culture and society. Transformations in everyday media and communication, such as the absence of physical proximity in virtual space, have changed our understanding of how time, place, and community are theoretically analyzed. The conceptual alterations have also called into question anthropology's close association with offline fieldwork and long-term participant observation. The debates about these transformations did not emerge in a vacuum. This entry positions the emergence of internet-related debates within intellectual antecedents in globalization studies. Closely related inquiries concern the limits of “online ethnography” and the changing meaning of “embeddedness,” which are assumed to affect methodological conditions. The second half of this entry offers insights into the ways in which non-Western contexts can provide broader frameworks. The final part notes how the market-oriented adoption of “digital skills” has implicated anthropology