Anthropos and techne are inseparable when it comes to the study of humans and their societies. 

From its very origins as a discipline, anthropology has recorded and researched human-technology interfaces in efforts to account for and understand forms of social organisation and practice as well as systems of belief and meaning throughout the world. 

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the gradual formation of ‘anthropology of technology’ as a field of enquiry, from early evolutionary studies of technology via critiques of it by those who championed diffusionist understandings, to Maussian approaches to techniques as material actions, technology as skilled practice, and more contemporary understandings of technologies in terms of socio-technical systems and infrastructures. 

It is exactly such a multiplicity of approaches that has contributed to the thriving anthropologies of technology that make up this field of enquiry, allowing for analytical and methodological scaling on the part of the ethnographer, who can choose to focus on embodied skills, on practices/material actions, or on larger socio-technical systems which, together, make up technologies.

This chapter presents the chaîne opératoire (‘operational sequence’), an ethnographic method which aims at revealing the fundamental relationality of artefacts, practices, and networks, often black-boxed within the concept of ‘technology’, by making visible the fundamental material, social and cultural heterogeneity, of technical activities, their relational intricacy, the interweaving of human and non-human actors, causalities, choices, and contingencies. It gives empirical grounding to contemporary analytical concepts such as ‘agency’, ‘network’, and ‘materiality’, as well as revealing how and when technical processes are interlaced with questions of knowledge, kinship, economics, religion, or politics. After presenting the chaîne opératoire method, I examine the analytical purchase of the term ‘technical’, which not only emphasises the performative dimensions of practices but is also less loaded with contemporary associations with, and assumptions of, linear progress and determinism than ‘technology’. I then situate the study of technical activities within material culture studies, before clearing up some misconceptions about the method’s potentials and its limits. I end the chapter with an illustration of the analytical potential of the chaîne opératoire in two different ethnographic case settings: the first, laptop computer use in France; the second, yam cultivation in Papua New Guinea.

Taking a definition of technology that posits it as an aspect of skilled handwork and embodied practice, this chapter draws on Bunn’s recent research into basketry and mathematics, referencing thinkers such as Bryan Pfaffenberger, John Dewey, Tim Ingold, Trevor Marchand, Ricardo Nemirovsky, and Juhanii Pallasmaa. The chapter explores how technology cannot be separated from the skilful person who employs it. Exploring the boundaries between basket-weaving and loom-weaving technologies highlights that, as an unmechanisable technology, basketry reveals how humans and technology are part of a dynamic whole.

If we define technology as separate from hand skills, an approach quite common since the industrial revolution, this masks how skilful embodied learning has value for the development of human cognition. Through hand skills such as basketry, people develop dexterity, spatial awareness, and design and engineering skills. This impacts on more ‘abstract’ capacities, such as geometry, problem-solving, and mechanical understanding. If we lose sight of the value of hand skills for human cognition, we may, therefore, as Ingold argues, become the authors of our own dehumanisation.

Material culture studies have in recent decades taken a more central role in anthropological thinking, but not just in terms of an interest in exploring individual objects, material qualities, patterns, or symbols of things. The goal is also to understand how human lives fundamentally unfold through material culture. 

This chapter explores technology through the broad variety of approaches captured under the heading ‘material culture studies’, to see how things are entangled in the values, meanings, and practices of human lives. 

It briefly outlines discussions about objectification, agency, and materiality to highlight how even the most mundane aspects of human life, such as light, have central bearing on human worlds. 

Lighting and lighting are, on the one hand, intangible but, on the other, have a profound effect on how the world appears. As a technology, lighting has shaped human societies by extending the day and carrying strong symbolic values, but also through embracing other objects in its material qualities. 

Humans adjust and manipulate such qualities to present spaces in particular ways that make sense in local contexts. 

To understand technologies one also needs to understand how their material qualities constitute the self and society.

This chapter outlines the main ideas and concepts of feminist technoscience, a term that includes an epistemology of the interweaving of science, technology, and cultural processes. Thematically, feminist anthropologists have been at the forefront in studies of the biomedical sciences and emerging biotechnologies. 

In this chapter, assisted reproductive technologies represent an exemplary case of the intertwining of gender and technoscience, in the sense of resting on a basic gender difference in reproduction while at the same time challenging this very fact. 

This is followed by a study of medical imaging, whereby human cells reappear as autonomous, material entities. This transformation serves as one precondition for making gametes commodities for research laboratories and a global fertility industry, reproducing them as private property that one can freeze for later use or donate to a global market. 

The thread running through these sections is the scrutiny of the basic cultural distinction of nature and culture. 

Feminist anthropology of the biosciences has studied the implosion of nature and culture, uncovering the basic ideas that keep them apart, and revealing ways in which we are living in and with new naturecultures.

Understanding how human societies are organised has been at the very core of anthropology since its inception as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. While early twentieth-century social anthropologists set out to characterise the kinship, economic, and political systems that shaped the social life of ‘communal’ societies, by the end of the century, a new style of ethnography had emerged. 

This chapter provides a genealogy of ‘assemblage ethnography’, showing how it developed as a methodological response to the challenge of understanding social organisation across scales, sites, and practices in a ‘hypercomplex’ technologising and globalising world through three iterations: 

(1) governmentality-inspired ethnographies that take dispositifs as their object; (2) multi-sited ethnographic studies of how biomedicine is being harnessed to administer and enhance ‘life itself’; and (3) approaches that have deployed a more fluid understanding of assemblages to capture the rhizome-like ways that macro, meso, and micro scales are connected. 

Assemblage ethnography has become a key approach within anthropology generally, and the anthropology of technology specifically, because of its ability to locate sited ethnographies within the broader complexes that are characteristic of a world in which daily lives are constantly (re-)shaped by technoscience, laws, regulations, technocracies, institutions, and forms of expertise.

This chapter takes up the relation between humanism and posthumanism, and the significance of these concepts for anthropologists working with technology. 

The author argues that posthumanism confronts a humanism in anthropology which privileges the perspective on humans (instead of, e.g., plants, rivers, and animals), and she then goes on to dissolve the notion of ‘the human’ by pointing to, for instance, multi-species ethnographies. 

The author argues that the technologies created by humans are often overlooked as the means and enabling apparatuses behind these perspectives on humans. Furthermore, the development of posthumanism can be seen as an intermediate station on the way to a new and more comprehensive concept of humanism in anthropology, one which concerns ontogenesis rather than ontology. 

The arguments are illustrated by a project exploring children’s conceptions of humanoid robots and what these studies can tell us about the new kind of humanism. The robotic technologies become an ‘inverted mirror’ that shows us the boundaries of what we accept as human-like. 

This indicates the importance of including processes in the posthumanist turn, as well as opening the way to a ‘new humanism’ which understands ‘human’ as a process and a verb.

Genetics has been a fruitful area of study for anthropologists of technology since the late twentieth century. In all its wide range of applications—from reproduction to forensics —genetic technologies raise questions of identity, power, and justice. 

The discernment of different ethnoracial groups—different ‘races’—is an explicit or implicit feature of many genetic technologies, with sometimes devastating consequences for minorities. 

Scholars of genetic technologies, including Reardon, Fullwiley, TallBear, Kahn, Fujimura, Bliss, and Pollock, have critiqued the persistence of race-based genetic science, but were often reassured that the wide availability of gene sequencing would eventually end the use of race as a proxy for genetic difference.

 Once an individual’s whole gene sequence could be easily read, the argument went, their ethnoracial classification would become redundant. 

Yet, something very different has transpired. New technologies have been accompanied by the rise of ‘ethnicity-specific reference genomes’ that claim to be a better reference for short-read sequencing in specific ethnoracial groups. 

Ethnicity-specific reference genomes illustrate how race, ethnic, and national differences have remained embedded in the latest iteration of genome sequencing, despite earlier hopes that accurate and accessible full genome sequencing would see the end of the use of racial classifications.

Emerging technologies—such as autonomous driving (AD) cars, blockchain, robotics, and drones—are increasingly part of popular narratives and industry and policy agendas. 

They are commonly understood as new digital, data-driven, intelligent, or automated technological innovations in development, or at the cusp of being launched into a market. 

Thus, the anthropological question of how they might become part of everyday, experiential, possible worlds demands our attention. 

In this chapter we outline an approach to emerging technologies that is rooted in design anthropology and takes an interventional stance. 

In doing so we situated design anthropology of emerging technologies within an interdisciplinary field which has tended to be dominated by technologically determinist approaches. 

Through the example of the notion of trust in AD cars, we show how policy, industry, engineering, and social science approaches configure to provide different and critical understandings. Drawing on our own design ethnographic research, we show how design anthropological attention to people offers an alternative and viable mode of understanding how emerging technologies become part of emerging worlds.

Reflecting on a methodological experiment, we discuss the use of computational techniques in anthropology. The experiment was based on a collaborative effort by a team of ethnographers to produce an archive on the digitalisation of everyday life that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We describe how online ethnographic data collection took place using digitally mediated interviews, participant observation in virtual events, and mobile ethnography. 

We analyse the consequences of online ethnography for establishing rapport and present steps taken to create an infrastructure for navigating ethnographic material comprising more than 3000 pages of text generated by multiple ethnographers.

Knowing, Unknowing, and Re-knowing 

Technology, Environment, and the Ends of Knowledge 

Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital 

Data, Knowledge Practices, and Naturecultural Worlds: Vehicle Emissions in the Anthropocene 

Set, Setting, and Clinical Trials: Colonial Technologies and Psychedelics 

Assembling Population Data in the Field: The Labour, Technologies, and Materialities of Quantifcation 

Peopled By Data: Statistical Knowledge Practices, PopulationMaking, and the State 

Data Practices and Sustainable Development Goals: Organising Knowledge for Sustainable Futures 

Communities, Collectives, and Categories 

Un/Doing Race: On Technology, Individuals, and Collectives in Forensic Practice 

Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalisation of Critique 

Technology, Gender, and Nation: Building Modern Citizens in Maoist China 

Imagineerism: Technology, Robots, Kinship. Perspectives from Japan 

Collectivities and Technological Activism: Feminist Hacking 

Inside Technology Organisations: Imaginaries of Digitalisation at Work 

Ethics, Values, and Morality 

Moral Ambiguities: Fleshy and Digital Substitutes in the Life Sciences 

Enacting Authenticity: Changing Ontologies of Biological Entities 

Technologies of Beauty: The Materiality, Ethics, and Normativity of Cosmetic Citizenship 

The Optimised and Enhanced Self: Experiences of the Self and the Making of Societal Values 

Articulations of Ethics: Energy Worlds and Moral Selves 

Competing Responsibilities and the Ethics of Care in Young People’s Engagements with Digital Mental Health 

Committee Work: Stem Cell Governance in the United States 

Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods 

Accumulation: Exploring the Materiality of Energy Infrastructure 

Food Infrastructures and Technologies of Trust in Contemporary China 

Water Infrastructures: The Making and Maintenance of Material and Organisational Connections 

Electricity as a Field for Anthropological Theorising and Research 

Circuit Board Money: An Infrastructural Perspective on Digital Payments