RELATED TERMS: Anthropology; Actor-Network Theory; Ethnomethodology; Avatar
A cyborg anthropologist looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture.
Another aspect of cyborg anthropology concerns how the self can be extended, doubled or multiplied, online, through identification with an avatar. This, in turn, opens to the study of how people interact with each other through such techno-social interactions, in addition to the ways in which they interact in embodied social situations.
Actor Network Theory has been applied in cyborg anthropology in order to analyse the fluid exchange between technological actors and human actors. This is especially valuable since the technologies being studied actively dismantle our ontological pre-suppositions as to what constitutes a ‘human’ or a ‘technology’.
Cyborg anthropology is a subspecialty, launched in 1993, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Within the AAA, cyborg anthropology is associated with the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC).
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