ABSTRACT
Anthropology’s critical examination of its own founding conception of the human—as a being that, by its own nature, transcends nature—inevitably entailed a parallel critique of the cognitivist underpinnings of design science, according to which the very mechanisms of thought render thought capable of the intelligent design of mechanisms. In this spirit, Lucy Suchman urges us not to reinvent anthropology as design but rather to adopt a critical anthropology of design as part of a wider anthropology of the contemporary. Such an anthropology, she argues, would require “ethnographic projects that articulate the cultural imaginaries and micropolitics that delineate design’s promises and practices”. Anthropology, in our view, is a generous, open-ended, holistic, comparative, and yet critical inquiry into the conditions and potentials for human life in the one world we all inhabit. Anthropologists have long been alert to the implications of their presence in the situations in which they carry out fieldwork.
