Abstract
Technologies challenge us to explore openly what the human and the social is and what it might be, because the social and the technological are always imbricated. Through the lens of technology, we become aware of new dimensions of perennial concepts of importance for anthropology, like community, collective, and social categories. This section of the handbook is dedicated to the diversity of communities, collectivities, and social categories that emerge together with technologies. The role of technology is neither neutral nor innocent and we must remain alert to its powerful effects on human life. The chapters show that although new technologies, like robots or digitalisation, give rise to new imaginaries and fantasies about the social, ‘society’, or different kinds of ‘community’, we are reminded that these imaginaries and fantasies are not necessarily progressive, liberating, or utopian. The challenge for anthropologists is to study and show how technology connects people in different social worlds who share specific interests, and how these interests are communicated. We also need to address the kind of new boundaries that are created over the course of this communication, and to explore how technological interactions can disrupt as well as reinvent communities, collectivities, and social categories.
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Notes
- 1.
It must be noted here that technologies disturb and extend our conceptions of what ‘actual social interaction’ is, both in respect to what is ‘actual’, what is ‘social’, and what is ‘interaction’.
- 2.
This Handbook section could also have included other categories like age (e.g. Lock 1993), sexuality (e.g. Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Karkazis 2008) or ‘disability/disabledness’ (Moser 2006; Galis 2011; Ginsburg and Rapp 2019) and how they are shaped by technology and vice versa. What we present with race, class, gender, kinship, activists, and organisations are just examples.
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We would like to thank the chapter authors, reviewers and our Handbook co-editors for comments and suggestions that have greatly improved this introduction.
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Bruun, M.H., Hasse, C. (2022). Communities, Collectives, and Categories. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_19
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