In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445 ..read more

  Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics   Samuel Gerald Collins Towson University, USA scollins@towson.edu     The characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings, with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has ..read more

 My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects, each developing according to its own logic, but there have been cross-hatchings where they have met and influenced each other. The late Nineteenth century, for example, saw both an anthropology and a science fiction in service of colonialism and racism through unilinear evolutionary tropes. SF and anthropology in the twentieth century, on the other hand, explored different configurations of cultu ..read more

[From the SETI project, "A Sign in Space" (https://asignin.space/)]  “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation  In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has host ..read more

Here's a recent conference abstract submission, prompted in large part by Geoghegan's 2022 "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke, 2023). The characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings, with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has perpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as w ..read more

I published this review with "TheGeekAnthropologist" - such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety. Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. After taking a beating from video games, table-top games have made a startling come-back over the last twenty years, buoyed by a strong growth of Eurogames, imaginative indie titles and by a gaming world looking for variety. In acad ..read more

In 2011, we started a project entitled "Anthropology By the Wire" with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with neighborhood-based groups in Baltimore to make anthropologically informed representations of their communities that they could utilize for their own purposes. My co-PI for the project, and my co-author, Matt Durington, explains the whole process in this 2011 video on the YouTube channel for the project. We meant it as a critique of "The Wire"--or, at least, the way "the Wire" had come to stand in for documentary truths ..read more

In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology would revolve around a growing body of highly disputed evidence of life after death. While séances were one major site for the evidence of spirits, other technologies were also important to the new religion, including spirit photography, where ghostly figures or more amorphous, ectoplasmic emanations would appear in photographs next to (living) humans sitting for their portraits. Although these photogra ..read more

Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures By Samuel Gerald Collins In the face of climate disaster, a continuing pandemic, and endless global conflict, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the future. Researchers in psychology have marked a sharp upswing in “eco-anxiety” among young people. Surveys show that most people in the U.S. believe life will get worse over the next 30 years. None of this is surprising. The future isn’t shaping up to be something many people look forward to. When the status quo seems threatened—for example, by climate disaster—some turn to “technological salvation” in t ..read more

The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination of uneven face-to-face/online hybridity and a buggy app meant continued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the multiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source of ambiguity that I have chronicled on this blog over the years. This year, #AAA2021Baltimore was joined by numerous, other hashtags: #AAA2021, #AAABaltimore, #AmAnth2021. Here’s a sociograph of different hashtags: In the lowe ..read more