Digital anthropology is not ethnography: Cybernetic explanation and transdisciplinarity

Abstract

The article transposes to digital anthropology Tim Ingold’s polemical argument that “anthropology is not ethnography,” reclaiming the discipline’s transdisciplinary, four fields vocation from the perspective Gregory Bateson called cybernetic explanation. It illustrates the potential of this approach by exploring how notions from classical anthropological theory may shed productive light on some of the anti-structural – unintended yet systemic – effects of platformization.