Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ongoing research with German data activists, this paper explores what it would mean to enact a non-surveillant anthropology, that attends to potentials for growth and change that can arrive with the experience of not being recorded.

Paper long abstract:

It is a commonplace to assert the overlaps between anthropology and surveillance, both in its human and technological form. This arises both from the unfounded accusations that anthropologists frequently experience (Verdery 2016), as well as the actual forms of collaboration with state surveillance that some anthropologists have chosen to pursue since the discipline’s beginning (Boas 1919, Price 2011, 2016). Meanwhile the technologies of surveillance that continue to entrench the positions of power-holders: developing historically from photography, audio-recording, to filming and now smartphone tracking (Favero and Theunissen 2018), are intrinsic to a multi-modal anthropology.

This paper drills into the differences. What would it mean to enact an anthropology—both at the research and dissemination phases—that rejects modes of documentation that serve as a medium and method of control, and which instead amplifies suppressed discourses and prises open alternative futures? A renewed consideration of documentation is also impelled in the anthropology of Europe by legal changes introduced by GDPR, and the ethics protocols implemented by the European research councils.

Drawing on fieldwork with anti-surveillance activists in Germany, I begin to sketch what a non-surveillant anthropology could be, in modes of engagement that go beyond the use of pseudonyms (McGranahan 2021), and include reflections on materiality, non-recording, and the use of data in the public domain. Using excerpts from the field, the paper offers that there are dimensions of growth and change associated with the experience of not being recorded, and anthropology can equally pursue this kind of living engagement.