Multi-humanism: Becoming human with machines in Japan
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Description
In this vein, anthropologists have characterized modern Japan as techno-animist, pointing to a tendency to see certain technologies as persons, rooted in Shintoism and Buddhism. Drawing on fieldwork in Japan, Grant pushes back against this concept, highlighting the form of its anthropocentrism and the limits it entails, to develop multi-humanism as an alternative. Using ideas from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Gilles Deleuze, but most importantly from his interlocutors, Grant sketches multi-humanism as a diagram that guides the material and epistemic practices of interface research that is structured by the idea that technologies can be engaged as though they were human, and can inform what the researchers know as the human, without collapsing the human into a single thing.
Speaker Bios
Grant Jun Otsuki is a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has a PhD in anthropology (Toronto), and an MS in STS (RPI). Previously, he was assistant professor of anthropology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His work is in the anthropology and history of technology. Grant has written about human-machine interfaces and the history of cybernetics in Japan, postcolonial anthropology, translation, and the anthropology of ethics in Japanese and English.