Digitalia of Everyday Life.pdf (466.84 kB)
The digitalia of everyday life: multi-situated anthropology of a virtual letter by a ‘foreign hand'
The article considers the transmissions and effects of a digital letter, and its implications for multi-situated—as opposed to a multi-sited—anthropology. Multi-situated moves beyond multiple sites as supplementary contexts to the life flows of people, materials, and ideas, to consider multi-ontological, dynamic, and temporally contingent situations constitutive of such movements in the making, that are embedded and/or enfolded along several intersecting planes on- and offline. The public letter was written collaboratively in May 2012 by activists in Britain, agreed to and signed off by supportive British members of Parliament among others, and addressed to the then prime minister of India and the chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu. The letter’s contents pertained to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in south India, with concerns about mandatory procedures in the construction of a nuclear power station, and democratic and human rights abuses against nonviolent protestors. By focusing on the emergence, travels, and receptive trajectories of the letter, the article makes a case for the increasing need to encompass aspects of digital anthropology not as a discrete subdiscipline, but as an integral part of core anthropological focus and method for the study of “onlife” entanglements—what effectively has become the digitalia of everyday life.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic TheoryISSN
2049-1115Publisher
HAU Society for Ethnographic TheoryExternal DOI
Issue
2Volume
9Page range
299-319Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2018-11-02First Open Access (FOA) Date
2019-01-22First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-11-01Usage metrics
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