RELATED TERMS: Sociology; Ethnomethodology; Agency; Actor Network Theory; Cyborg Anthropology
Anthropological research may provide some methodological guidance in the understanding of design practices as complex socio-cultural, techno-economic practices. For example, Anusas and Harkness (2014) suggest that, “in both anthropology and design … there is and perhaps always should be a concern with that other which is possible. Work in both realms can possess this critical orientation towards the possibility of difference.” Thus, both anthropology and design can be seen as practices that share a concern with alternative and possible others: “the others of contemporary cultures; the other and multiple histories revealed in reinterpretations; the other ways of living that might emerge with alternative shapings of the future” (Anusas and Harkness, 2014). Such others, Anusas and Harkness (2014) continue, are intertwined: reinterpretations of the past influence formations of the future; and vice versa.
Much like the discipline of anthropology since the 1980s, design practices are concerned to engage with two sets of closely interrelated terms. As listed by Ortner (1984), they are practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience, performance, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the doer of all that doing, agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject. It is in the context of the relationship or, more properly, the entanglement, of the doer and the doing that the notions of actant and actantiality have arisen, for example in the context of actor-network theory.
The use of terms such as actantiality seeks to de-centre the subject as the sole source and origin of meaning-production, knowledge production and action. The aim is to understand how meaning-production, knowledge-production and agency are distributed among human, non-human and more-than-human actants. All such actants may be said to be non-originary or, in other words, equally originary. This is a situation for which the Derridean term différance or the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising, dependent co-arising or interdependent co-arising may be appropriate. The notions of actant-network and actant-rhizome also seek to engage with such distributed non-originary agency.
Ortner further comments that even though she has taken practice to be the key symbol of the anthropology of the 1980s, another key symbol might equally have been chosen: history. The set of terms clustered around history includes time, process, duration, reproduction, change, development, evolution and transformation. Taking history as the key term, the theoretical shift in anthropology, rather than being seen as a move from structures and systems to persons and practices, might instead be seen as a shift from static, synchronic analyses to diachronic, processual ones. Seen in this light, the shift to practice becomes one wing in the move to diachrony, one which emphasises micro-developmental processes-transactions, projects, careers, developmental cycles, and so on.
The other wing of the move to diachrony, the macro-processual or macro-historical. itself has at least two trends, Ortner argues. The first, the political economy school, seeks to understand change in the small-scale societies typically studied by anthropologists by relating that change to large-scale historical developments, especially colonialism and capitalist expansion, external to the societies in question. The second is a more ethnographic kind of historical investigation, paying greater attention to the internal developmental dynamics of particular societies over time.
Design practices are attentive to the concepts clustered around practice and agency; to the concepts clustered around history and change; to the practices of ordinary living; and to the intertwining of the local and small scale with the more global and large scale.
Design practices seek to take into account all three aspects of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967:61) epigraph: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product”. In other words, design practices acknowledge that society is a system, the system is powerfully constraining, yet the system can be made and unmade through human action and interaction. In addition, however, design practices further recognise that human action and interaction is thoroughly mediated by designs of different kinds and dimensions. Design practices are also aware of the paradox that although the human world is pervaded by designs of different ages, kinds and scales, the world as a whole is not ‘designed’ as such; or, rather, does not adhere to a single, homogeneous design.
A further paradox is that although actors’ intentions are accorded central place, major social change does not for the most part come about as an intended consequence of such actions. Change is largely a by-product, an unintended consequence of action, however rational action may have been (Ortner, 1984). Thus, to say that society and history are products of human action is true only in a certain paradoxical sense. They are rarely the outcomes the actors themselves set out to achieve. As Michel Foucault puts it: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does”. (Personal communication, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983, 187).
Design practices thoroughly engage with these paradoxes, inherent in design processes: design outcomes diverge from design intention; and design practices are most often engaged with situations that are themselves the unintended consequences of prior design intentions and actions. They are in that sense re-designs in a process of continual re-designing.
Digital ethnography is the exploration of the impact of digital technologies on cultures and the constraints of cultures on the development of digital technologies.
Physical Anthropology
Physical anthropology has re-positioned itself in recent decades within the larger field of evolutionary biology. Along with this repositioning, it has developed and incorporated new techniques as well as the recognition of broader responsibilities in the modern world. Many programmes formerly known as ‘physical anthropology’ have changed their names, most commonly to biological anthropology. A more accurate name might be ‘evolutionary anthropology’, reflecting the fact that the core of the discipline is the study of human evolution and that the guiding theoretical framework is evolutionary theory (Ellison, 2018).
References
Anusas, M. and Harkness, R. (2014) Things Could Be Different: Design Anthropology as Hopeful, Critical, Ecological, in Ethnographies of the Possible Seminar, April 10th, 2014, Aarhus, DK, The Research Network for Design Anthropology. Available at: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/48850/ (Accessed: 23 August 2022).
Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (1983) Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ellison, P. T. (2018) The evolution of physical anthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165, 615–625. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23408
Ortner, S. B. (1984) Theory in anthropology since the sixties, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), pp. 126–166. doi: 10.1017/S0010417500010811
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