Bridging Worlds: The Role of Digital Anthropology in Shaping Fair Tech Futures
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In mid-November 2024 , I attended the World Anthropological Union Congress in Johannesburg - appropriately set in the cradle of humankind. Wearing several hats at the event, the experience made one thing abundantly evident to me: there is an urgent need for spaces and patiently facilitated conversations around the value of digital anthropology in shaping the future of technology.
I was invited to speak in my role as a senior researcher and digital anthropologist at the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG) during a roundtable on AI. I also co-led a double-panel alongside Katrien Pype titled: Reimagining digital anthropology: towards decolonial perspectives and practices.
For context, GCG is Africa's first dedicated research and policy thinktank on AI and promotes equitable AI governance through knowledge production and exchange. We also strengthen qualitative work from Africa, which provides essential detail and context-specific nuance to AI decision-making.
Beyond this, I attended the congress as the chair of the global International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Commission on Digital Anthropology, which I founded last year and, for the first time, met some of the social media interns in person, whose programme I’m supporting. Finally, I was there as editor of Anthropology Southern Africa, a journal crucial for supporting regional scholarship and emerging voices, whose scholarly work remains highly underrepresented in global knowledge-making practices.
The importance of connecting diverse perspectives
Given these different roles, I found myself in a whole spectrum of conversations around digitisation and AI – responding to questions of how scared we as anthropologists should be of AI, whether our work may become less valued with tech advances, what impact new technologies may have on publishing and knowledge-making, what even qualifies as “digital anthropology”, and how we might overcome imposter syndrome in tech spaces.
In my work at GCG, I have developed a deep appreciation for digital anthropology as a force for good. Through engagement with various stakeholders, , I have noticed a significant gap: too few anthropologists are included in critical discussions on fair and responsible AI and AI governance, despite our ability to add valuable depth to existing perspectives. As a researcher at GCG, I have been fortunate enough to speak to these gaps and the need for broader changes they signal.
Anthropological Intelligence - the other AI
As Gillian Tett, a well-known applied anthropologist, points out, many of the tools we use to understand and navigate the world - such as economic forecasts, technology assessments, political polls and consumer surveys - have a fundamental flaw. The reason they often fail to identify problematic trajectories is not that they are inherently inappropriate, but that they are incomplete.
What they tend to assume is a static, orderly reality that simply doesn't exist. Anthropologists, by contrast, take a different approach:
Observe first before establishing a hypothesis
Seek out hidden dynamics that aren’t immediately visible
Ground research in empathy, even when observed behaviors seem utterly counterintuitive
This approach, grounded in some level of ethnography, provides detailed insights into social phenomena we take as a given through participant observation and an in-depth engagement with communities. Insights might be small in scale, but they offer crucial context and illuminate the complexity and diversity of human understanding and experiences of life.
The challenge, however, lies in effectively communicating the value of what Tett calls the "other AI" to non-anthropologists, to whom anthropology may seem either too slow or too open-ended to be considered strategic. Yet, it is precisely this exploratory approach - and the ability to find familiarity in the unfamiliar and to question the assumed normalcy of what we take for granted - that makes for an invaluable addition to existing toolkits used to better understand the rapidly evolving worlds of human-technology interactions. Despite this, tech spaces often remain inaccessible to anthropologists, either due to a misunderstanding of our skillset or our own hesitation to claim a place within them.
Finding common ground
There is a real need to create more avenues that facilitate communication between anthropologists , who are accustomed to more open-ended, long-term research and academic discourse - and the fast-moving world of technology, where speed and competition are considered fundamental to innovation.
To bridge conceptual gaps, we must foster new ways of conducting in-depth research that align with the rapid pace of the tech industry, without compromising the core values of anthropology.
This requires two key changes:
Anthropologists need a clearer understanding of what working in the tech industry could look like. Tech professionals recognise the value of anthropological approaches in shaping and regulating human-centric technologies.
Focused on the interplay between communities, cultures, and digital technologies, digital anthropologists explore questions like:
How are technologies developed and adopted in different cultural contexts?
How do digital labor, virtual identities, and online communities shape our lives?
What can we learn from observing how people interact with technologies in unexpected ways?
