Digital Initiation Rites

Joining Anonymous in Britain

Vita Peacock (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

234 Seiten

2025
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5017-8445-3 (ISBN)

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Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites - ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth - that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain, at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity, and privacy. She is cofounder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

Introduction
1. Body
2. Dream
3. Society
4. Mask
5. Knowledge
6. Symbol
7. Growth
8. Sacrifice
9. Conclusion

Erscheinungsdatum	05.11.2025
Reihe/Serie	Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
Zusatzinfo	11 b&w halftones, 3 charts - 11 Halftones, black and white - 3 Charts
Verlagsort	Ithaca
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
ISBN-10	1-5017-8445-5 / 1501784455
ISBN-13	978-1-5017-8445-3 / 9781501784453
Zustand	Neuware