Orin Starn is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of
Time, Camera, and the (Digital) Pen: Writing Culture Operating Systems 1.0-3.0
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Published:March 2015
Since Writing Culture, writing culture has gone through at least three time warps, psychodynamics, and writing technologies: pen, camera, digitization. Cultural anthropology has gone through shifts in building porosities first with the humanities, then the media, and lately emergent biological and ecological sensibilities. This chapter attempts to capture with “pen” (or laptop), for a sedimented print world, the magic pad or 4-d triangulations of historical discourses, operating systems, and sociocultural con-texts. The chapter also draws on films, theater, photos, and digital media from Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and American parallel worlds. Anthropological voices are evoked to help articulate refractions of everyday life that can often upset the echo-chamber master narratives of politicians, political scientists, economists, and the mass media, reframing memory and anticipation.
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