The serendipity of the anthropologist in the age of social media

Abstract

The paper aims to initiate a reflection on the relationship between serendipity and the construction of anthropological knowledge in light of the transformations apported by digital media in the way anthropologists "think about," "understand," and "describe" cultural diversity. Recent critical literature highlights the fact that the rapid spread of digital media is producing a progressive reorganization of cognitive processes of attention, memory, learning, as well as reading and writing practices.  For anthropologists, ethnographic fields, the management of relations with interlocutors, but also the forms of textual restitution of ethnographic experience and the effects these generate in the public sphere are changing. Moreover, the academic teaching of anthropology is placed in increasingly heterogeneous and complex learning contexts that produce their own imaginaries and knowledge of difference, strongly linked to the discourses and representations proposed by the new media. These transformations produce important effects on the way anthropologists do research, position themselves in the field, and nurture their own and others' capacity and attitude to discover "by chance and by sagacity" (Fabietti 2012, p. 19).