Dr Grant Otsuki - Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology

In this talk, I discuss “multihumanism,” a conceptual framework for making sense of the work of human-machine interface researchers in Japan. In studies of religion, “animist”has a long history as a description of cultures in which people ascribe human qualities such as spirit or intention to non-humans. In this vein, anthropologists have characterized modern Japan as techno-animist, pointing to a tendency to see certain technologies as persons, rooted in Shintoism and Buddhism. Drawing on fieldwork in Japan, I push back against this concept, highlighting the form of its anthropocentrism and the limits it entails, to develop multihumanism as an alternative. Using ideas from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Gilles Deleuze, but most importantly from my interlocutors, I sketch multihumanism as a diagram that guides the material and epistemic practices of interface research that is structured by the idea that technologies can be engaged as though they were human, and can inform what the researchers know as the human, without collapsing the human into a single thing.

Grant Jun Otsuki is a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has a PhD in anthropology (Toronto), and an MS in STS (RPI). Previously, he was assistant professor of anthropology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His work is in the anthropology and history of technology. Grant has written about human-machine interfaces and the history of cybernetics in Japan, postcolonial anthropology, translation, and the anthropology of ethics in Japanese and English.