ABSTRACT
Social anthropology has been very slow to take up computer-based methods, although there has been an increase in recent years. There are many possible reasons for this, but there are some we can dismiss out of hand. Some anthropologists attribute this attitude to the posture of anthropology between the humanities and the biological sciences. However, our closest relatives in both camps have been active users of computers for nearly forty years. There has been an active list of journals for computing in the humanities since the mid-1950s, pre-dating active dialogue by mainstream biologists. It cannot be due to complacency with our methods, as these have been in crisis since the early 1970s.
