Culture and Cyborg anthropology

Bidita Rahman :
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. – Clifford Geertz
Culture and society is not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behaviour patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.
While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such human cultural traits include: Communicating with a verbal or non verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences, using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man), having a sexual division of labour (e.g., men’s work versus women’s work), having a concept of privacy, distinguishing between good and bad behaviour, having some sort of body ornamentation, having art, having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions, making jokes and playing games etc.
While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.
Like culture there are some relations with anthropological status around the world. Like cyborg Anthropology takes the view that most of modern human life is a product of both human and non-human objects. Cyborg anthropology is the discipline that studies the interaction between humanity and technology from an anthropological perspective. The discipline is relatively new, but offers novel insights on new technological advances and their effect on culture and society. Humans are surrounded by built objects and networks. So profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, “We are all cyborgs now.”
Another way to think about cyborgs is through the discipline of cybernetics. Originally the study of control, communication, and information, cybernetics has mutated into a host of other disciplines that fall under the general label of informatics which include the disciplines of robotics, intelligence, bionics, nanotechnology, genetics, artificial life, science, neuroscience, and the variety of sub-disciplines within these fields.
Cyborg anthropology is particularly concerned with advances in the informatics disciplines and their implications for culture and humanity.
Technology has always been implicated in the question of what it means to be human, but since World War II and the proliferation of informatics disciplines this question has gained whole new dimensions and horizons. Technology is radically changing the way we interact-faster than any other point in history. Traditionally, the central unit of analysis in social and cultural anthropology is the ethnography, a synchronic snapshot of how a culture functions as a whole (often with some recourse to the notion of the ‘structure’ of a culture, a metaphor that is steeped in connotations of unchanging stability). In this sense anthropology often leaves the diachronic analysis to historians, and instead tries to understand how the culture functions as a whole. Cyborg anthropology seems different in this respect. Because technology and interfaces are changing so fast, cyborg anthropology is much more likely to note the changes over time in culture and use this diachronic analysis to understand the ramifications of our cybernetic condition. The rhizome (a cybernetic, feedback-looping, adaptive, decentralised network) is the metaphor that replaces static structure. Insofar as cyborg anthropology is the study of phenomena that have little cultural precedence, it seems to be inextricably tied to diachronic analysis and theories of interface evolution.
Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto could be considered the founding text of cyborg anthropology. Haraway celebrates the cyborg as the ultimate postmodern boundary-defying chimaera. She specifically uses the example of sex and gender to show how the cyborg can be utilised to break down our conceptions of gender/sex as physically determined and instead offers a wonderfully grotesque utopia whose technologies (virtual avatars, artificial insemination, sex change, AI, etc.) break down the notion of gender to the point of irrelevance. Haraway’s uses gender as her central example, but also writes extensively on the many other dichotomies that will collapse in our postmodern cyborg condition.
Insofar as gender is concerned with identity, body-politics, collapsing gender/sex distinctions, post-feminist theory seems to find a natural compliment in cyborg anthropology.
This has also been a historical trend in the discipline, with Donna Harawayand Katherine Hayles, two of the best scholars in the field, using gender as an example to ground their analysis. However, cyborg anthropology is primarily concerned with the cyborg, which collapses all distinctions it encounters (life/death, artificial/natural, virtual/real, male/female, space/place, human/animal/computer, and the like). This includes distinctions that are very relevant for gender studies as well, but the discipline extends well beyond these particular approaches.
The same dynamic exists in cyborg anthropology. Haraway’s idealism for our postmodern cyborg future is admirable, but does not address the fact that the some of the most advanced cyborgs are in the US military.
Cyborg themselves are morally neutral, but specific applications of cyborgs can cause great harm or good. Cyborg anthropologists are always in danger of writing an analysis that is implemented by forces that they disagree with. Again, this is a danger inherent to all of anthropology, but given that technology is specifically concerned with implementing ideas in material form, this dynamic is all the more prevalent. n