From Digital to Computational to AI Anthropology

This article distinguishes AI anthropology from its two closest neighbors, digital anthropology and computational anthropology. The claim is that each field names a different relationship between the anthropologist and the machine, one defined by what the machine is taken to be. Digital anthropology treats digital technology as an object of study, a fieldwork tool, and the medium of contemporary life. Computational anthropology treats the machine as an indispensable instrument for reaching cultural material, at a scale ordinary fieldwork cannot, using tools drawn from data science. AI anthropology treats the machine as an interlocutor, a collaborator steered through natural language in real time, so that researcher and system reshape each other as the exchange unfolds. Drawing on Pickering’s “dance of agency” and on cybernetic feedback, the article argues that what separates the three fields is not a new instrument but a new relation, from acting on technology to acting with it. Rather than a succession, the three overlap, with AI anthropology folding the other two into a single practice organized around anthropology of, by, and for AI, unified by a recursive, co-becoming relationship with the machine.