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Humanism, Posthumanism, and New Humanism: How Robots Challenge the Anthropological Object

Posthumanism

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

Abstract

This chapter takes up the relation between humanism and posthumanism, and the significance of these concepts for anthropologists working with technology. The author argues that posthumanism confronts a humanism in anthropology which privileges the perspective on humans (instead of, e.g., plants, rivers, and animals), and she then goes on to dissolve the notion of ‘the human’ by pointing to, for instance, multi-species ethnographies. The author argues that the technologies created by humans are often overlooked as the means and enabling apparatuses behind these perspectives on humans. Furthermore, the development of posthumanism can be seen as an intermediate station on the way to a new and more comprehensive concept of humanism in anthropology, one which concerns ontogenesis rather than ontology. The arguments are illustrated by a project exploring children’s conceptions of humanoid robots and what these studies can tell us about the new kind of humanism. The robotic technologies become an ‘inverted mirror’ that shows us the boundaries of what we accept as human-like. This indicates the importance of including processes in the posthumanist turn, as well as opening the way to a ‘new humanism’ which understands ‘human’ as a process and a verb.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Humanistic anthropology involves the recognition that professional inquiry takes places in a context of human value. The humanistic orientation is particularly concerned with the personal, ethical, and political choices facing humans’ (Wulff 2019, p. 1).

  2. 2.

    The four ontologies differ in terms of similar and dissimilar interiorities versus physicality. They are found in different parts of the world, and apart from animism and naturalism we also find totemism and analogism (Descola 2013). Ingold and Descola have had a hot debate on whether Descola sees these ontologies as framed within a naturalist framework or not (Ingold 2016a, 2016b; Descola 2016).

  3. 3.

    Singularity is a term from physics which Ray Kurzweil uses to explain what happens when our merging with machines make us so intelligent that we are no longer humans. This point is singular and changes everything (Kurzweil 2005).

  4. 4.

    There are also a few anti-humanists calls for ‘doing away’ with the human race altogether because we destroy life on planet Earth.

  5. 5.

    Francesca Ferrando does a good job in explaining the differences between various theoretical positions and the different meanings of these terms in ‘Posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahumanism, and new materialisms’ (Ferrando 2013).

  6. 6.

    Moreover, ‘mediation’ is a contested term. Here it refers to the man-made instruments which transform perceptions when we have learned to use them (Aagaard et al. 2018).

  7. 7.

    The children participated in the project ‘The Robot is Present’ conducted with the help of Danish schools and a Danish local museum, ‘Muserum’, in the town of Skive in 2015 (see Hasse 2020a, pp. 167–199 and Hasse 2020c).

  8. 8.

    For examples of rights granted to a river considered human-like, rights for trees attributed with human-like characteristics, and rights for animals considered to be like humans. However, some also emphasise that animals, trees, and rivers should have rights of their own (if modelled on human rights), for example Alley 2019 and Kopnina 2012.

  9. 9.

    Barad talks of ethics, ontology, and epistemology as inseparable, coining the term ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad 2007, p. 90).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Cathrine Hasse

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  1. Cathrine Hasse
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Correspondence to Cathrine Hasse .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Maja Hojer Bruun

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ayo Wahlberg

  3. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Rachel Douglas-Jones

  4. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Cathrine Hasse

  5. Center for Medical Science & Technology Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Klaus Hoeyer

  6. Department of Business and Management, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Dorthe Brogård Kristensen

  7. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Brit Ross Winthereik

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Hasse, C. (2022). Humanism, Posthumanism, and New Humanism: How Robots Challenge the Anthropological Object. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_7

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