Short Abstract

This roundtable explores how emerging computational and AI methods are influencing anthropology as a field. Bringing together a diverse set of perspectives, it asks how this development expands, challenges, or polarizes anthropological practice in an increasingly digital research landscape.

Long Abstract

Despite the growing use of digital tools and methods, qualitative and ethnographic methods remain the bread and butter of social and cultural anthropologists, with quantitative methods playing a marginal role in the discipline (Pretnar Žagar & Podjed 2024). Recently, however, the emergence and popularization of computational, data science, and artificial intelligence technologies has led scholars within anthropology and related disciplines to critically interrogate their role and potential (Albris et al. 2021; Astrupgaard et al. 2023; Munk and Withereik 2022), suggesting a new field of ‘computational anthropology’ (Breslin and Albris 2026, Pedersen 2023, Pretnar Žagar & Podjed 2024).

While we applaud these developments, we recognize that, as a still-emerging field, computational anthropology is characterized by a fragmented body of literature and a significant degree of disunity between scholars on fundamental questions, including what computational anthropology even is and how one should go about doing such an anthropology. A particularly salient expression of this disunity is the tension between the (quantitative) search for larger patterns and the (qualitative) sensitivity to the diversity of human experience. This roundtable aims to address this gap by asking: How do we avoid increasing reductionism without becoming particularistic? How can quantitative approaches support anthropology? And how do we guard against the rise of a computational methodological divide that risks greater methodological polarization (Maxwell 2010)? In asking these questions, the roundtable discusses the role of computation within anthropology and, by bringing together a diverse set of perspectives, builds towards a set of shared methodological guidelines for computational anthropology.

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