ABSTRACT
The growing use of digital media by political actors of all kinds has given rise to a thriving literature, albeit that is divided along disciplinary and technological lines. The scholarly literature on digital political campaigning has been dominated by the wide use of Internet and mobile technologies in United States presidential campaigns since 2000. Future anthropological studies of digital politics should avoid sterile debates about technological determinism and virtual versus real-life politics and concentrate instead on the careful analysis of political processes and their digital dimensions. The chapter exemplifies the application of an anthropological approach to the study of digital politics. The trap consists of reducing the plurality and flux of social and political formations that invariably finds in contemporary localities to a crude community-versus-network dichotomy. Political processes were, in fact, central to the collaborative work of the Manchester School, whose field theories predate Bourdieu’s by many years.
