Reading List
An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology The field's working vocabulary in short entries. It names phenomena that most readers have experienced but never had terms for, from prosthetic culture to the second self.
Cyborgs and Citadels Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit's edited volume is the book that established cyborg anthropology as a research program rather than a metaphor. The essays apply standard ethnographic method to laboratories, medical imaging, and engineering practice.
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature Contains Donna Haraway's 1985 "A Cyborg Manifesto," the essay that gave the field its central figure. Read it for the argument that the boundaries between organism and machine, and between human and animal, are political constructions rather than natural facts.
The Cyborg Handbook Chris Hables Gray's collection reprints primary sources, including Clynes and Kline's 1960 paper that coined the word cyborg for space travel research. It shows that the concept began as an engineering proposal for adapting bodies to environments.
Cyborgs@Cyberspace?: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future David Hakken addresses the methodological problem directly. How do you do fieldwork when the field site is distributed, partly virtual, and changing faster than the publication cycle?
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics N. Katherine Hayles traces how information came to be understood as separable from material substrate, following the Macy Conferences on cybernetics through later science fiction. Her counterargument is that embodiment never actually went away.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McLuhan's premise is that media are extensions of the human sensory and nervous system, and that every extension involves a corresponding numbness. The framework predates the term cyborg but describes the same relationship.
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet Sherry Turkle's interviews with early networked users document identity as something people assemble and test across multiple contexts. The specific technologies are dated, and the behavior she recorded is now ordinary.
Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer Steve Mann wore his own computing systems for decades and wrote from inside the experiment. The book covers what continuous mediation of vision and memory does to a person, along with the social friction of being visibly augmented.
We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour argues that the modern separation of nature from culture was never accurate, and that hybrids of the two have been multiplying the whole time. This supplies the theoretical grounding for treating people and their devices as a single unit of analysis.
Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects for the ready-to-hand lineage, Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches for method, and The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit for Turkle's earlier and more psychological treatment.
