Heather Horst: Difference between revisions
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[[File:heather-horst.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Title]] | [[File:heather-horst.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Title]] | ||
===Biography=== | ===Biography=== | ||
Heather A. Horst is an American sociocultural anthropologist and one of the founders of digital anthropology as a named subfield. She took her doctorate at the University of London and has held positions at University College London, the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Annenberg Center at USC, RMIT University in Melbourne — where she directed the Digital Ethnography Research Centre — and Western Sydney University's Institute for Culture and Society. | |||
Her research concerns mobile media, material culture, migration and the household, with long-term fieldwork in Jamaica, the Caribbean diaspora, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the United States. | |||
=== | ===The Cell Phone=== | ||
''The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication'' (Berg, 2006), written with Daniel Miller, is her best-known book and remains one of the few full ethnographies of mobile phone use in a low-income setting.<ref>Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller. ''The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication''. Oxford: Berg, 2006.</ref> | |||
The fieldwork is in two low-income Jamaican communities, and the findings run against most of what was being written about mobile phones at the time. Horst and Miller document '''link-up''': the practice of maintaining very large numbers of contacts through brief, frequent, low-cost communication — often a "please call me" or a few seconds of airtime — rather than through fewer, deeper conversations. This is not, they argue, a degraded form of relationship but a rational strategy under conditions of economic precarity, where a wide network of people who might help is the only available insurance. The phone becomes an instrument for keeping large numbers of weak obligations alive. | |||
The book also documents the phone's role in transnational family life, in remittance economies, in courtship and in the religious life of the communities studied, and it makes a methodological argument that runs through Horst's later work: that claims about "the mobile phone" made from wealthy contexts are claims about a particular economy, not about a technology. | |||
===Digital Anthropology=== | |||
''Digital Anthropology'' (Berg, 2012), co-edited with Daniel Miller, is the field's founding collection.<ref>Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller, eds. ''Digital Anthropology''. London: Berg, 2012.</ref> Its introduction, "The Digital and the Human," sets out six principles, of which the most consequential is a refusal: the digital is not less authentic, less real or less human than what preceded it, because all human life is already mediated by culture, and culture is already a technology. On this account there is no unmediated baseline against which the digital could count as a fall. | |||
Horst was also a lead author on ''Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out'' (MIT Press, 2010), the report of the MacArthur-funded Digital Youth Project, which established the now-standard typology of young people's participation in networked media. | |||
[[ | ===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology=== | ||
Horst supplies the empirical discipline that this field most often lacks. Her work is a standing correction to arguments built from the author's own device and social circle: the meaning of a phone is a function of the economy it operates in, and the same technology produces link-up in Jamaica and [[Ambient Intimacy|ambient intimacy]] in London. Her insistence that the digital is not a departure from the human is also the clearest available statement of the premise cyborg anthropology works from. | |||
===Related Reading=== | |||
* [[Digital Anthropology]] | |||
* [[Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance]] | |||
* [[Mobile technologies]] | |||
* [[Ambient Intimacy]] | |||
* [[Russ Bernard]] | |||
===References=== | |||
<references/> | |||
[[Category:People]] | |||
[[Category:Digital Anthropology]] | |||
[[Category:Mobile Computing]] | |||
Latest revision as of 13:56, 25 August 2026
Biography
Heather A. Horst is an American sociocultural anthropologist and one of the founders of digital anthropology as a named subfield. She took her doctorate at the University of London and has held positions at University College London, the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Annenberg Center at USC, RMIT University in Melbourne — where she directed the Digital Ethnography Research Centre — and Western Sydney University's Institute for Culture and Society.
Her research concerns mobile media, material culture, migration and the household, with long-term fieldwork in Jamaica, the Caribbean diaspora, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
The Cell Phone
The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg, 2006), written with Daniel Miller, is her best-known book and remains one of the few full ethnographies of mobile phone use in a low-income setting.[1]
The fieldwork is in two low-income Jamaican communities, and the findings run against most of what was being written about mobile phones at the time. Horst and Miller document link-up: the practice of maintaining very large numbers of contacts through brief, frequent, low-cost communication — often a "please call me" or a few seconds of airtime — rather than through fewer, deeper conversations. This is not, they argue, a degraded form of relationship but a rational strategy under conditions of economic precarity, where a wide network of people who might help is the only available insurance. The phone becomes an instrument for keeping large numbers of weak obligations alive.
The book also documents the phone's role in transnational family life, in remittance economies, in courtship and in the religious life of the communities studied, and it makes a methodological argument that runs through Horst's later work: that claims about "the mobile phone" made from wealthy contexts are claims about a particular economy, not about a technology.
Digital Anthropology
Digital Anthropology (Berg, 2012), co-edited with Daniel Miller, is the field's founding collection.[2] Its introduction, "The Digital and the Human," sets out six principles, of which the most consequential is a refusal: the digital is not less authentic, less real or less human than what preceded it, because all human life is already mediated by culture, and culture is already a technology. On this account there is no unmediated baseline against which the digital could count as a fall.
Horst was also a lead author on Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (MIT Press, 2010), the report of the MacArthur-funded Digital Youth Project, which established the now-standard typology of young people's participation in networked media.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Horst supplies the empirical discipline that this field most often lacks. Her work is a standing correction to arguments built from the author's own device and social circle: the meaning of a phone is a function of the economy it operates in, and the same technology produces link-up in Jamaica and ambient intimacy in London. Her insistence that the digital is not a departure from the human is also the clearest available statement of the premise cyborg anthropology works from.
Related Reading
- Digital Anthropology
- Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
- Mobile technologies
- Ambient Intimacy
- Russ Bernard
