Essays
Essays
Essays that explore questions of anthropology and artificial intelligence in depth, with rigour, argument and academic references.
Economic anthropologyWhy doesn’t Abya Yala have its Accra?
Unthinkable history, extraction and the obligation to repair
EssayCortés and Pizarro: conquest, thanatopolitics and imperial memory. From Abya Yala to contemporary Spain
An essay on the conquest of Abya Yala, colonial thanatopolitics and contemporary forms of imperial memory in Spain.
NotesWhen prediction is not explanation
From protein language models to the person as data
Territory, extractivism and AIThe cloud has a geography
From a private refuge in the Andes to a new oil frontier around the Malvinas, the Southern Cone is once again gaining value as a reserve territory. Land, water, copper, lithium, cellulose, gas and oil sustain global economies and a digital future that is often represented as immaterial. Behind the cloud, soil, energy, minerals and the power relations that determine their uses come back into view.
Economic anthropologyThe Agonistic Economy of Digital Capital
Extractive institutions, the technological potlatch and the struggle for pro-worker artificial intelligence
Political ecology and artificial intelligenceWhen the forest enters the model
Artificial intelligence can improve wildfire detection and response, but it cannot replace the climatic, territorial and social transformation required by an increasingly flammable Europe.
NotesDigital violence is not a design flaw
From synthetic images created in a school to the automatic reuse of photographs on Instagram. An anthropological account of how platforms and institutions distribute harm and the work of repair.
Anthropology of developmentFrom Truman to Pax Silica
How development returned as technological security
Political anthropologyThe Besieged People
How populism turns distrust into an infrastructure of power across platforms, AI, and democratic life.
Anthropology and artificial intelligenceAI Does Not Evolve Alone
Anthropological approaches to reading artificial intelligence as progress, classification, labour, infrastructure and a struggle over power.
Economic anthropologyThe Third Obligation: Accra and the Debt the West Refuses to Repay
The Accra summit turns resolution A/RES/80/250 into an institutional agenda. This note asks whether recognising historical harm also entails restitution and examines how that question reappears in the political economy of AI.
Political anthropologyWar Does Not End Where the Bomb Falls
Ukraine, Iran and an anthropology of peace in the age of algorithmic war.
Indigenous thought and decolonisationFour ways of remapping Abya Yala
A note on Ollantay Itzamná, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Gladys Tzul Tzul, read from Abya Yala and against the colonial map, including the one now learned by artificial intelligence.
Political anthropologyWhat once destroyed presidents now elects them
From Watergate to AI, an anthropological reading of how visible transgression went from scandal to an infrastructure of power.
Anthropology and digital cultureFabricated persons
Synthetic figures are not false persons, but fabricated persons. An anthropological reading of how an image comes to act as a person, a moral subject and a bearer of value, through the cases of Lil Miquela, Shudu and Lu do Magalu.
Language and anthropologyIt is not enough that it speaks
Linguistics, anthropology and artificial intelligence. Why AI is not an isolated mind but an assemblage of signs, infrastructure and social experience that we would do well to de-fetishise.
Ethics and subjectivityArtificial intelligence and the exacerbation of desire: towards an ethical reflection
A critical reflection on AI-generated pornography, objectification, desire, consumption and the representation of sexuality.