ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cybernetic Anthropologies: Midcentury Redesigns of a Technomodern Field

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Post-War US social sciences took modern shapes in a political and funding matrix rife with cybernetic, systems, and information theories. These theories both responded to military-industrial interests and shaped the epistemic cultures of fields such as anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, and linguistics. This session orients our attention to how circuitous forms of “feedback” – and new currents of patronage – lent anthropological constructions of national character, social change, linguistic patterning, and “culture” itself with cybernetic qualities. By the 1950s, para-state think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation, came to fund and help direct anthropologists’ cultural and linguistic studies. They recruited prominent public intellectuals into their field of patronage. They quietly funded the early computerization of data analysis in major fieldwork projects. And they helped propel the informaticization of biology itself, yielding a repertoire of semiotic resources as models for reconstructing social scientific concepts.

Contributors to this session consider the motivations and consequences of mid-century cultural and linguistic anthropologists’ adoption of cybernetic epistemologies and methods. Anthropology’s disciplinary histories either treat mid-century scientific endeavors as ill-considered effects of Cold War ideology or occlude them altogether. But our panel demonstrates how efforts to render anthropology’s organizing concepts and methods scientifically rigorous propelled the work of influential scholarly personae such as Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz as well as highly-consequential research expeditions led by Cornell University in Vicos, Peru and by Harvard University and the University of Chicago in Chiapas, Mexico. We contend that a state-aligned cybernetics formatively shaped modern anthropology, and we ask how the cybernetic social sciences reshaped politics in turn.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Matthew Watson, Mount Holyoke College

Individual Presentations

• Beyond High-Level Linguistic Abstractions: Margaret Mead, Language, and the Affordances of Cybernetics - Bethany Anderson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• How to Interpret a Control-Mechanism: Metaphors, Cybernetics, and Clifford Geertz - Matteo Bortolini, University of Padova

• RAND's Linguistic Drive: Computerizing Anthropology in 1960s Chiapas - Matthew Watson, Mount Holyoke College