Consuming anthropology

Suchman, Lucy (2012) Consuming anthropology. In: Interdisciplinarity. Culture, economy and the social . Routledge, Abingdon. ISBN 9780415578929

Abstract

Contemporary theorizing regarding relations of production and consumption emphasises the contingent, appropriative processes by which commodities simultaneously inflect the lives of their purchasers and are remade within the particular practices of their use. This paper examines the implications of conceiving anthropology itself as an object of consumption within worlds of commercial research and development. My more specific focus is on anthropology’s place – both logically and practically – within sites of interdisciplinarity defined as foundational to the design of information and communications technologies (ICT); a nexus comprising computer science, engineering, and the behavioral sciences. Incorporated into this matrix over the past several decades, anthropological methods and imaginaries have been reconfigured at the same time that they have become instilled into the discourses and material practices of their users. I reflect on the messy politics of this interdisciplinary commerce, and their implications for more transformative practices of inventive collaboration.