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Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Wesch , eds., Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology . Boulder : University Press of Colorado , 2012, pp. viii + 243.
CSSH Notes
Human No More joins a growing scholarly conversation regarding digital culture. Its wide-ranging contributions will be of interest to designers and participants of online social environments, as well as to scholars in fields including but not limited to anthropology, informatics, media studies, and game studies.
Before turning to its twelve chapters, I address Whitehead and Wesch's flawed introduction, which contradicts most of the chapters (many of which are not by anthropologists or based on ethnographic methods) and misrepresents the relationship between anthropology and technology. For two reasons this might seem difficult. First, the argument is partially framed in disagreement with my own work (Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton University Press, 2008). Second, I not only respect the broader oeuvre of these scholars, but am also saddened that Whitehead passed away five months before Human No More was published. Yet neither of these realities is insurmountable. A review provides the opportunity to extend an important debate, hopefully doing justice to the memory of Whitehead's intellectual and collegial passion.
In their introduction, Whitehead and Wesch discuss using "the challenges of ethnography in online worlds ... to broaden our critique of ethnography" (p. 1). They then incorrectly conclude that I "find the prospect of the posthuman threatening, both subjectively and with regard to...
