Six principles for a digital anthropology

This chapter proposes six basic principles as the foundation for a new subdiscipline: digital anthropology. The term digital will be defined as all that which can be ultimately reduced to binary code but which produces a further proliferation of particularity and difference. The dialectic refers to the relationship between this growth in universality and particularity and the intrinsic connections between their positive and negative effects. The commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a third principle. The alternative argument is that most people are not particularly involved in or concerned with issues involved in coding or digital production. Australian aboriginal tribes may not have much material culture, but instead they use their landscape to create extraordinary and complex cosmologies that then become the order of society and the structures guiding social engagement.