Another communication technology has been introduced, ChatGPT, drawing the attention of many pundits, occupying valuable space on every op-ed page, and inspiring a Hollywood writers’ strike and ...endless small talk, all steaming a bit with the intoxicating fumes of moral panic or outsized utopian enthusiasm. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, entering many people’s daily lives in dribs and drabs. ChatGPT and its siblings, however, have focused so many people’s attention on the potential changes that AI could bring to work lives, entertainment, and social relationships that it seems worthwhile to take a moment now in 2023 to discuss what light linguistic and media anthropologists can shed on what is to come. I say this as one of a handful of media anthropologists also familiar with linguistic anthropology who happened to study people’s use of Facebook (alongside other media) only a few years after its introduction to the US media ecology (Gershon 2010). For more than a decade, I have been thinking about how media ecologies change with each newly introduced medium. Here, I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years.My starting point is that it would be helpful tosuomen antropologi | volume 47, issue 3, 2023explore how people are responding to ChatGPTin terms of genre, that people’s reactions toChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it isa genre machine—that is, a machine intelligencethat reproduces and tweaks genres in just theright way for human consumption.
For every generic type of monster—ghost, demon, vampire, dragon—there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners ...of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically inclined introduction and afterword) presenting a playful, spirited, and engaging look at how people live with their respective monsters around the world. They focus on the nitty-gritty dos and don’ts of how to placate spirits in India; how to domesticate Georgian goblins, how to live with aliens, how to avoid being taken by Anito in Taiwan, while simultaneously illuminating the politics of monster–human relations. In this collection, anthropologists working in fieldsites as diverse as the urban Ghana, the rural US, remote Aboriginal Australia, and the internet present imaginative accounts that demonstrate how thinking with monsters encourages people to contemplate difference, to understand inequality, and to see the world from new angles. Combine monsters with experimental ethnography, and the result is a volume that crackles with creative energy, flouts traditions of ethnographic writing, and pushes anthropology into new terrains.
Living with Animals Natalie Porter, Ilana Gershon / Natalie Porter, Ilana Gershon
09/2018
eBook
Living with Animalsis a collection of imagined animal guides-a playful and accessible look at different human-animal relationships around the world. Anthropologists and their co-authors have written ...accounts of how humans and animals interact in labs, in farms, in zoos, and in African forests, among other places. Modeled after the classicA World of Babies, an edited collection of imagined Dr. Spock manuals from around the world-With Animals focuses on human-animal relationships in their myriad forms.
This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, soLiving with Animalsoffers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read.
If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity-what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject,Living with Animalssuggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.
Porous social orders GERSHON, ILANA
American ethnologist,
November 2019, 2019-11-00, 20191101, Volume:
46, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ABSTRACT
Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected ...and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social orders to be both durable (enough) to keep social orders distinct and porous (enough) to allow people, objects, forms, and ideas to circulate across them in appropriate ways. What counts as appropriate is, not surprisingly, often hotly contested. Despite contemporary ethnographers’ varied intellectual trajectories, a crosscutting set of theoretical assumptions unites their work and shapes how they approach familiar anthropological foci, such as circulation, ritual, scale, and power. porous boundaries, social orders, circulation, ritual, scale, power, fieldwork, ethnography, theory
Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense ...services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. InNo Family Is an Island, a comparative ethnography of Samoan migrants living in the United States and New Zealand, Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.
In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in what Gershon calls "reflexive engagement" with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their "Samoanness") into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the "cultural" is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries. Theoretically sophisticated yet highly readable,No Family Is an Islandcontributes significantly to our understanding of the modern immigrant experience of making homes abroad.
How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social ...interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control-in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.
ABSTRACT
Social practices and contingencies always exceed the neoliberal models by which people currently try to contain the inherent unpredictability of accomplishing social tasks with others, such ...as getting a job. Contradictions in neoliberal logics emerge when people try to live according to neoliberal precepts, engaging with other social entities as though all are corporate persons and all alliances are, metaphorically speaking, business‐to‐business alliances. Moments in US corporate hiring challenge scholarly critiques of neoliberal logics that have made neoliberalism seem too reductive and too prescriptive. At such moments, Americans find that one neoliberal principle is incompatible in practice with a different neoliberal principle—as when, for example, being a flexible worker is antithetical to being a legible job candidate.
This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed ...to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into practice. I analyze the self that personal branding assumes everyone should be able to present to others by deploying a set of semiotic practices meant to create the impression of a coherent authentic self. Personal branding is treated as a lens into some lived dilemmas that emerge when one tries to put a model of a neoliberal self into practice, with special attention drawn to the tension between flexibility and legibility.
What if performance is no longer the dominant trope for understanding the mediated self? What if animation is as or more important as a trope? This essay explores what questions scholars would ask if ...they were to begin with animation as the starting point.
Since 2007-2008, American undergraduates' media ecology has changed dramatically without an accompanying transformation in how they use media to end relationships. The similarities in people's ...breakup practices between 2008 and 2018 reveal that, regardless of what social media is used, American undergraduates turn to media in moments of breakup as ways to manage three complicated aspects of ending a relationship: untangling all the ways in which people signal intertwined lives, deciphering the quotidian unknowable of another person's mind, and trying to control who knows what when. This paper explores how rapid shifts in media ecologies may change the ways in which conventionalization around social practices emerges, leading to more norms oriented around what all media accomplish, rather than generating norms around the affordances of a specific medium.
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