Today’s radar opens with Donna Haraway and her case for a “slow AI”, and from there it runs through five signals from the discipline’s major reference points. It is not a radar centred on artificial intelligence, but a window onto contemporary anthropology with AI as one of its threads: funding being cut, the restitution of archives, more-than-human ecologies and ethnographic repair.

Donna Haraway and the case for a slow AI

Direct link — Interview with Donna Haraway in El País

Donna Haraway appears once again as one of the great teachers for thinking about technology, ecology and life in common. In this interview in El País, the author of the Cyborg Manifesto speaks of AI neither from rejection nor from easy enthusiasm. She reads it as part of a material, energetic and political world. That is why her case for a “slow AI”, able to develop only where sustainable ecological, labour and social relations exist, is so suggestive.

The idea chimes fully with AIthropology Lab. AI is not a mind floating in the cloud, but an infrastructure that consumes water, energy, labour, attention and territory. Haraway helps us frame the question better. It is not only about what AI can do, but about what world it is helping to build.

The anthropology that never gets written

Direct link — Defunded special in Anthropology News · Anthropology’s Lost Library

The “Defunded” issue of Anthropology News focuses on a silent loss. When funding is cut, it is not only projects that disappear. So too do questions, archives, fieldwork and lines of research that may never come into being.

Within that context, Anthropology’s Lost Library stands out, a proposal to gather unfinished or unpublished anthropological writings. It is a powerful image for thinking about the discipline. The history of anthropology is made not only of published books and articles, but also of everything that was interrupted for lack of time, money or institutional support.

Restitution, archives and anthropological memory

Direct link — Histories of Anthropology and Restitutions, Lisbon

The international conference Histories of Anthropology and Restitutions, held in Lisbon, confirms that restitution can no longer be thought of only as the return of objects. It also affects photographs, sounds, films, words, classifications, archives and forms of authority.

The anthropological interest is there. To restitute is not only to move pieces from one museum to another place. It is to revise the historical relations that turned certain communities into objects of collection, study or exhibition. In that sense, restitution becomes a practice of memory, repair and dispute over who has the right to tell a story.

More-than-human ecologies and the climate crisis

Direct link — Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata

The Society for Cultural Anthropology has circulated the dossier Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata, dedicated to the histories of environmental anthropology. The interest lies not only in talking about the climate crisis, but in revising how the discipline has, over decades, thought about the relations between humans, environments, species, territories and power.

This line converses very well with Haraway. To think more-than-human worlds does not mean removing humans from the scene, but ceasing to imagine them as a self-sufficient centre. Social life has always been mixed up with plants, animals, bacteria, climates, soils, techniques and infrastructures.

Repair, evasion and belonging

Direct link — Current issue of Cultural Anthropology

The new issue of Cultural Anthropology brings together eleven articles with research on evasion, repair and belonging in African, Asian and European geographies. It is a less eye-catching signal than a major interview or an international conference, but very important for taking the pulse of the discipline.

After the grand concepts, ethnography returns to its most valuable work. It looks at how people sustain bonds, dodge harm, recompose belongings and make world in fragile situations. There are not always grand solutions. Sometimes there are small, persistent, situated practices.

Closing

Today’s five signals share a common ground. To think AI as Haraway proposes — slow, situated, material — is also the way anthropology looks at the rest: funding, archives, ecologies and bonds are not isolated objects, but relations that someone sustains, cuts or repairs. The question is not only what AI can do, but what world it is helping to build.

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