ABSTRACT
‘Digital anthropology’, once literally unthinkable, at best a contradiction in terms, is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged subdiscipline, alongside formations like legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and economic anthropology, or the anthropologies of migration, gender, and the environment. The idea that the online and offline could fuse makes as much sense as a semiotics whose followers would anticipate the collapsing of the gap between sign and referent, imagining a day when words would be the same thing as that which they denote. Digital anthropology typically implies ‘doing ethnography’. A serious threat to the rigor and legitimacy of digital anthropology is when online researchers claim to have ‘done an ethnography’ when they conducted interviews in isolation, paired at most with the analysis of online texts, images, and video. The problem with elicitation methods in isolation is that this methodological choice surreptitiously encodes a theoretical presumption that culture is present to consciousness.
