For the last 40 years, anthropotechnology has concentrated its efforts on the study and improvement of the working and living conditions of populations throughout the world. It guides the actors of the design processes by paying attention to the “human factor”: its social, cultural and environmental components. It therefore values a conception of techniques that respect people and their ways of thinking and acting in specific contexts. This book introduces the reader to design dynamics that combine often conflicting sets of competencies, but that are always anxious to respond to the contexts of the field.
It may seem obvious that the human being has always been present in anthropology. This book, however, reveals that he has never really been a part of it. Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being establishes the foundations and conditions, both theoretical and methodological, which make it possible to consider the human being as a topic of observation and analysis, for himself as an entity, and not in the perspective of understanding social and cultural phenomena. In debate with both anthropologists and philosophers, this book describes and analyzes the human being as a “volume”. To this end, a specific lexicon is built around the notions of volume, volumography and volumology. These notions are further illustrated and enriched by several drawings.
The relationship between technicity and scientificity is often overlooked or avoided despite being a determining factor for establishing interdisciplinarity. By focusing on this relationship and highlighting a number of its ramifications, this book sheds light on the hidden or skewed stakes that condition a wide array of scientific projects. The authors present different approaches based on their own professional experience, focusing on the technique–science relationship in domains as diverse as brain mapping, the decipherment of Mycenaean writing and the design process. Each chapter presents varying and often opposing epistemological conclusions to provide the reader with a wide breadth of examples in different fields. Although the scope of this book is far from exhaustive, it serves as a starting point for the necessary and long-overdue clarification of the relationship between these neighboring, yet disjointed, sectors.
Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out—an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?
Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work who pioneered the field of the anthropology of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997. It is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done.
With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being increasingly appears to be just a product of data and algorithms. That is, we conceive ourselves “in the image of our machines”, and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, this book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses these new technologies only as a means, instead of letting them rule us. In Defence of the Human Being offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism or transhumanism in various areas of science and society. As alternative it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. Fuchs applied this concept to issues such as artificial intelligence, transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday conduct of life. Cutting across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychiatry, this important new book applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to the current scientific, technological and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the 21st century.
