Digital and Offline

Abstract

Partial processes of knowledge making, online and offline, demonstrate modes of experiential newness. Indicative of the ‘shocks’ and joined curations of field encounters, such experiences re-engage anthropological debates as being of the present. The extended field suggests vast change and unlimited spaces to engage participants and ‘invite’ new unrelatable publics. The reflections and encounters disturb an apparent mandate of digital anthropology as a sub-discipline to ‘upturn’ field and knowledge approaches. As these forum articles indicate, this vision of the field is not easily dissociated from continuities with participants as knowledge producers in and out of offline interactions. Notions of exit and entry or participants gaining seemingly unlimited new access to fieldworkers remain connected to performative/curated forms of field relations, while attuned to an ongoing ethnographic present.