Handbook on anthropology and artificial intelligence / edited by Sahana Udupa (professor of media anthropology, LMU Munich, Germany, and BKC Faculty Associate, Harvard University, USA) and Peter Hervik (independent scholar and former professor of anthropology, Aalborg University, Denmark).

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Udupa, Sahana, editor.

Hervik, Peter, editor.

Edward Elgar Publishing, publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artificial intelligence--Social aspects--Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Artificial intelligence.

Anthropology--Methodology--Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Anthropology.

Technology and civilization--Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Technology and civilization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (516 pages)

Place of Publication:

Northampton : Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026.

Summary:

"This timely Handbook provides a groundbreaking collection of anthropological research on Artificial Intelligence (AI), examining how anthropology can help to comprehend and critique its development. Evaluating the limits, hopes and fears of AI, leading experts explore its influence as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than a discrete technological system. Through an ethnographic lens, the Handbook analyses human-machine entanglements as they have emerged in AI companions, healthcare, automated policing, warfare, conversational chatbots and fact checking. Chapters assume theoretical perspectives to scrutinize AI power and how AI evolves on the ground in ethnographic locations and case studies from across the globe. Assessing the current state of AI, the collection examines its implications for the future, in areas ranging from climate change to politics. The Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence is a valuable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology, innovation, media and communication and sociology. It will also be prime reading for journalists, policymakers and practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of the impact of AI on the world"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Contents: Introduction: Anthropology of artificial intelligence / Sahana Udupa and Peter Hervik

Part I: Futures, futurities, critique

1. Artificial intelligence futures: Anticipatory infrastructures for engaged scholarship / Sarah Pink, Melisa Duque, Robert Lundberg and Zane Pinyon

2. Nascence and AI futurities / Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta

3. Perspectivism and purposiveness toward an ancestral future: Cutting ai's guts open / Beatrice Bonami

4. The depeche mode principle: Communicational antimatter as the anthropological frontier of ai / Gabriel A. Medina-Aguilar, Jair E. Rivera-Tovar and Miguel H. De la Vega Espinosa

Part II: Anthropology of artificial intelligence: Methodological frames

5. Anthropology of artificial intelligence: Agency, powerful knowledge, and the algorithmic other / Michael D. Fischer and Sally A. Applin

6. Prompt ethnography: Critical methodology for generative ai / Sahana Udupa

7. AI as participant observer / Kevin Walker

8. Artificial fieldwork? Speculating about the opportunities and challenges of vr-assisted ethnographic fieldwork in AI-generated virtual worlds / Rafael Verbuyst

9. Understanding the effects of childhood trauma through ai-assisted ethnography / Gabriele Carmelo Rosato

Part III: AI in practice: Making and tweaking ai

10. AI as user: Imagined futures in games user research / Joshua D. Rubin

11. Localizing the AI: An ethnography of balancing acts between the stakeholders in the periphery / Erkan Saka

12. The language of ai: On the work of metaphor and metapragmatics in making artificial intelligence / Tariq Adely

13. Generative AI and discourses of design mark allen peterson and thea peterson

14. Early generative technologies and the western aristocracy of labor / Javier Ruiz del Ro̕ and Xin Zhan

15. Dapping to the end of love: Algorithms and food delivery riders / Montserrat Cañedo-Rodríguez and Diego Allen-Perkins

Part IV: Living with AI

16. Presencing the past with AI: Virtual survivor testimonies and the holocaust memory assemblage christoph bareither and berit zimmerling

17. The interplay between doctors and AI: The case of norway and China / Zongtian Guo and Roanne van Voorst

18. Navigating ambivalences: Chronic living with "AI" / Sophie Wagner

19. Therapeutic ideology and AI personhood: An anthropological inquiry into ai companionship / Fartein Hauan Nilsen

20. The anthropology of genai and the question about digital violence / Veronica Barassi

21. Celebrity face-swaps and bikini beauties: The circulation of synthetic pornography in China / Gabriele de Seta

Part V: The AI weapon

22. Israel, AI, and the military / Sophia Goodfriend

23. Militarizing AI: The risks of algorithmic warfare / Roberto J. González

24. Discourse on technological sovereignty and disciplining practices in contemporary Russia / Aleksandr Manuilov

25. Sociotechnical imaginaries of AI and datafication of migration / Kaarina Nikunen, Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg and Sanna Valtonen

26. AI in policing: Reflections of police practices / Lucien Schönenberg

27. Entanglements in the process of adopting, developing, and regulating ai: Mapping guidelines, disputes, and imaginaries from brazil carolina parreiras and cilmara veiga

Part VI: Coloniality, bias, disinformation

28. Towards a decolonial AI? (re)visiting contentious artificial intelligence issues in Africa / Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam and Roseline Chioma Muonanu

29. Narrative frames and re-framing narratives: From AI as labor futures and regulation to ai as precarities and problematics / Sareeta Amrute

30. AI and the climate crisis: Power, ideology, and the politics of collapse / Paul Schtze

31. Under the skin: Ai, technology, and race in China / Christina Kefala

32. Does AI contribute to ignorance and foster indifference, nihilism, and violent identity politics? / Peter Hervik

33. AI and the fact-checking movement: Facts, fakes, and the battle for visual trust / Mihai Andrei Leaha and Roger Canals.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 cc https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Description based on print record.

ISBN:

9781035342204